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Video Games Rhetorical Analysis

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McGonigal theorized that if humans want to survive in the next century on this planet, everyone on this planet has to dramatically increase the amount of time on playing video games. She specifically states that playing video games will solve the world’s biggest problems like poverty, hunger, climate change, global conflict, and obesity. She believes that gamers are “super-empowered hopeful individuals” meaning that they are individually capable of changing the world. However, they are only capable of changing the virtual world but not the real world. Solving first world problems require people to actually go out into the real world, engaging with other people, trying to encourage politicians to raise awareness, and putting a lot valuable time and effort to solve the …show more content…
McGonigal gives a great example of how in World of Warcraft, there are world-saving missions that inspire every gamer, so much, that gamers are willing to work collaboratively with complete strangers. Furthermore, McGonigal explains that by spending all this time playing video games, humans are evolving to be more collaborative and resilient species. The next part of her speech, McGonigal gives four principles of gaming. First, gamers have urgent optimism, meaning that gamers are extremely self-motivated to solve the game with the belief that there is hope of success. Second, there is a social fabric, which states that even if gamers lose, gamers will feel better playing video games with other gamers because they build up strong bonds. Third, there is blissful productivity, the idea that gamers enjoy working harder than they are relaxing because they feel optimized as human beings. Finally, there is an epic meaning, which states that every video game has an epic story and an epic knowledge of resources. McGonigal main job is to take these four elements of video gaming and apply it to the real

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