Epic Rant File #1: Goals in Gaming

     Say one thing for video games, say that at least they engage the player in a meaningful way. Were I to ever have children, I would definitely more often plop them down with a video game than allow their brains to rot away in front of the 90% of absolute shit that television produces. In this American society that fervently encourages "goal oriented thinking", one would rationalize that gaming would not be demonized to the extent that it currently is. The reason for this is mostly due to that other, all-too-American trait: Ignorance.
    

     I believe that one of the most satisfying feelings one can experience is that of completion; having a clearly defined goal and actually achieving it, no matter how small. Most people conquer many goals every day, without even really taking notice; doing chores, running errands, hell, even having an especially significant bowel movement can be an achievement for some. It is pounded into our heads throughout childhood: "set yourself a goal and if you work hard enough and want it enough, you can achieve it!". I find it simultaneously amusing and sad that instead of crying out against the horrors of video game violence and the sort of idle laziness that they supposedly support, that our educators and parents (for the most part) don't attempt to embrace and utilize them as a tool to help implement that goal oriented thinking (so prevalent in video games) into children's everyday lives. Shit, they might as well, the kids are going to play them regardless.
   
  Now, I'm not talking about "edutainment" here, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I'm instead proposing that our children be helped to understand how their goal reaching tendencies they already harbor in their gaming can be applied to their real lives. We do so in grade school sports, why don't we extend that knowledge to sickly, pasty faced, socially awkward kids who would rather embark on a journey in World of Warcraft than pick up a football any day.
   
   If more adults were not so painfully ignorant of the culture, they would realize that this goal-reaching format is present in nearly every game out there, from Grand Theft Auto, to Super Mario Brothers. I believe anyone would be hard pressed to extol the virtues of a child spending an hour watching Jersey Shore over an hour attempting to gain "trophies" in Call of Duty.
   
   Speaking of trophies, this brings up another (admittedly recent) aspect of gaming. Since the debut of the XBox360 and the Playstation 3, almost all games are required to supply the player with optional "Achievements"(360) or "Trophies"(PS3). These extraneous goals reward the player with greater points or trophies (bronze, silver, gold or platinum) depending upon the difficulty or dedication that it takes the player to achieve them. Isn't that the most perfectly simple example of what real goals are? The loftier the ambition, the harder it is to gain it.
    
   Without any guidance, however, these trophies and achievements are meaningless outside of the virtual world. Let's face it: kids are stupid, I mean, they're kids. I was stupid as a kid, your kids are stupid, all kids are simply stupid, it just kind of comes with the territory. Children (as much as they might like to think to the contrary) really only know little more about the world than what adults tell them. With most parents really only knowing about video games from what their kids tell them (hi, mom!), there is a great disconnect between the two. Wasting away behind all the polygons and avatars of video games, now lies a plethora of real-life goal-reaching application, which is going almost completely ignored.
    
   The procuring of PSN trophies has become, for many gamers, almost as important as the games which grant them. At first, I bemoaned their existence and all those gamers that became nearly obsessive over them. For the past several months, however, I became increasingly aware that I was actively seeking game trophies, trying tirelessly to achieve as many trophies as I could (even to the detriment of actual fun I was having playing any given game).
     One evening, after a fair amount of whiskey and introspection, I realized the appeal, why I was so focused on what are essentially useless achievements. The real world is complicated, hard to manage and real, worthwhile goals generally take a great deal of time and effort to see through to completion. The virtual world, on the other hand, is easily manageable (even when it is difficult). There are clear cut rules and easily defined boundaries in video games. You know exactly what to do in that world, exactly what the goals are and exactly how to achieve them.
    
    The content of the game is not important, only the manner in which goals are reached and the desire to complete them, holds significance. Say a certain gold trophy in Grand Theft Auto IV requires the player to kill 1,000 prostitutes (note: not an actual trophy in that game, to my knowledge). The goal has absolutely nothing to with progressing the story or finishing the game, yet many people will grind away endlessly in the pursuit of that trophy. The point being that many of these trophies are not even fun to attempt to accomplish. Sure, shooting a couple dozen hookers is diverting for anyone, but after the first hundred, it becomes just as tedious as homework. Yet, people do it all the same (probably in many cases, in lieu of doing actual homework).
   
    One way (and perhaps the most important) to use such a goal as an educational tool, is to attempt to get the child to understand exactly why they are spending so much time in pursuit of it. Yes, they will end up with a virtual trophy to show off, yes they will feel that momentary satisfaction when the trophy pops up on the screen, but otherwise it's utterly useless. If children are better made to understand that, while trying to reach a real life goal can be even more difficult and tedious, the achievement in the end is so much greater. If they can be made to look at the process of achieving those real life goals as they would at their virtual ones, they might chase after them with a greater zeal than they otherwise would.
   
    Here we have, at our disposal, a tool to essentially trick children into working hard and enduring countless hours of boredom to reach a goal, all with a big, fat smile on their faces and we simply don't use that opportunity at all. Instead, we vilify video games and talk about how they are making children dumb and lazy and violent (none of which are true, as it happens: http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html). Why don't we take all that negative energy towards virtual worlds and turn it into something salubrious?
    
   The game designers already give us all the tools we need, all the parents need to do is sit down and try to understand it for themselves. Calling kids lazy for playing video games is simply lazy in and of itself. The true laziness is apparent in decrying something you know nothing about and doing nothing to educate yourself about it. So, instead of being lazy dipshits, spewing forth ignorance, how about we sit down with our kids, kill 1,000 prostitutes and then have a discussion about reaching our goals? I mean, we can't let all those whores die in vain.