“In The Beginning….When The Blog Attacked/The Sequel: Blog Harder” JD Richgels

 

“My god…Just when I thought it was over…the blog pulled me back in”

WHY HELLO EVERYONE (AGAIN)!!!

My name is Jonathan Richgels, but I go by JD for reasons. Anyways, I come from a ‘small town’ called Roseville. I’m a massive lover of video games, comics, movies, books, and more. Currently I wait for the release of “Metal Gear Solid V” by watching VODs and streams of PAX, or Penny Arcade Expo, until MGSV’s release September 1^st. I also look forward to other games that are coming in the fall. I, of course, also like books and reading in general if not entirely, but mostly, because of the book “As I Lay Dying”. William Faulkner and his stories are ultimately what lead me to become an English major, and so far it’s pretty great.

Now you may be wondering why I was talking about video games earlier and that is mostly because video games have been a part of my life for an extremely long time. Video games are also the things that I enjoy writing about the most. I do this because I have a deep love and admiration to video games and what they can bring. Not only do video games provide the best form of story-telling potential, but they also provide some remarkable potential when it comes to Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

Video games also have created a massive community and within that community multiple micro-communities surrounded by similar interests from specific games. People who are brought together to learn and build around a central pull, for example “World of Warcraft” which has five million players.

This leads to one of the points from our reading. One specific area discussed the idea of a co-participant learning system,

“Learning is a process that takes place in a participation framework,
not in an individual mind. This means, among other things, that it is
mediated by the differences of perspective among the co-participants.
It is the community, or at least those participating in the learning context,
who ‘learn’ under this definition. Learning is, as it were, distributed among
co-participants, not a one person act.”
(15 Hanks)

In other words the process of co-participant learning creates communities. People who are brought together by a central ‘topic’ that they build around. Ultimately people learn far more efficiently under a community system. It’s far more effective, and common or at least should be, because of people’s desire to be a part of a base. Humans naturally desire a community who share, and are united, by a passion for a specific thing. It’s similar to how millions are united under a common love for “Harry Potter”. These individuals are now, essentially, apart of the ‘Rowling Club’.

This is why video games are becoming such a powerful force with young people. Currently right now a video game called “Minecraft”, which once started out as an individual developer project, has sold seventy million copies. “Minecraft” has unintentionally united, essentially, an entire generation of gamers under one common interest. They are now united in a co-participant relationship of learning and understanding the game and actually influencing them to try other communities, like for example the modification community, or a higher interest in computers and coding in general. There is great power in uniting individuals, who otherwise would never meet each other, under common desires.

-JD Richgels