Entertainment and Education Platforms

Abstract

Video games enthrall: there is no doubt about it. Someone with a console can easily ignore everything going on around him or her. Maybe we can say the same about someone reading a book or about someone who is highly passionate about his/her job and this is especially true of elite sportspeople. Sometime ago, while I was walking along a street my attention was caught by a billboard. It said, “Passion is the key to a job. The key to everything, in fact” next to an image of someone who seemed familiar. When I took a closer look, I realized it was Pep Guardiola, the famous Barcelona FC trainer. The billboard spoke of passion and a job well done. Several days later, I saw it again in the papers with the message now spread over two pages and from the complete text I extracted this message: “Let’s not conform. Not wait to see what others do, let’s be provocative. Be a little better than we were yesterday.”¹ The reader may be wondering about the context of these texts. It was an advertising campaign that could be considered an example of what, possibly, at least a part of our society holds true. I am trying to insist, then, that sports, video games, reading, etc. can be passionately driven and this usually occurs outside the classroom. In this chapter we will see how video games, among many other cultural objects present in our everyday lives, can be entertainment and also educational platforms: the building blocks for learning to think passionately, as stated in the previous chapter.