New Video Games Teach Caring And Compassion

New Video Games Teach Caring And Compassion Shovel Knight is hard to stop playing. It is a super stylized tribute to the epic platformers of the video game industry’s early days. My kids and I have been playing the game together for the last few weeks. We sit on the sofa together handing off the WiiU controller and navigating our way past witty characters and imaginative obstacles. The thing about platformer games is that they are all about style. After all, they are all essentially the same. The avatar just keeps moving to the right. Sometimes there's a ladder up. Other times the passage leads down. All along, you avoid rifts and chasms. You hop over obstacles. You avoid projectiles. You stay cautious lest something falls from the sky or rises from beneath the platform. The difference between one platformer and the next comes down to storytelling and style. What story is laid atop the essential mechanics? How well are the elements introduced? How do the aesthetics align with the mechanics? And do all the components organize into a unified and consistent system? Platformers often have a quest theme. They tend to borrow many of their dynamic narrative elements from the archetypal hero's journey--the "monomyth" laid out so well in Joseph Campbell's famous book, Hero With A Thousand Faces. Whether they are set in the future, in space, on pirate ships, or in an urban wasteland, platformers usually include some sort of heroic objective. The protagonist is always ambitiously seeking an object. This, of course, is precisely why gender-conscious folks object to the damsel in distress narrative trope: it turns the "princess" into an object. No matter how often misogynists make the argument that the women must be respected because the whole point of the game is reach them, nothing changes. The damsel is still a prize, a treasure, a kind of property.