2018_03_26_ICS_ortoleva

"The best way to avoid harmful games is to promote good games". This was stated by Peppino Ortoleva, professor at the University of Turin (Italy), in the framework of a lecture that he gave at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra.

Precisely, one of the projects currently being developed by researcher is a game in which "those who gamble see themselves as their families see them, and these are seen from the point of view of the gambler," he explained.

During his discussion paper, Ortoleva has developed the idea that gambling, along with competitions, were the only games that were considered acceptable for adults in the industrial age. But she has argued that this has been changing and we are currently in a process of transformation.

In the last 30 or 40 years," he said, "some recreational activities have invaded what we call the serious part of life. Now it is common to use games to get employees to learn to work in teams, or its extension in museums and art, for example".

He also recalled other more extreme cases, such as the use of games in war. Specifically, he said that in the Afghanistan conflict "U.S. soldiers used remote drones that they controlled from New Mexico, and the platforms they used were video games, with joysticks. But the weapons and the territory were real".

Technologies and gaming

With respect to the growing use of new technologies in children's play, he explained that "although it is a problem when a child uses it to watch pornography or puts himself at risk, technology in itself does not have to be bad". In fact, he emphasized that children make imaginative use of it in many cases and use the phone for creative purposes, such as pretending to talk to a ghost or a king.

"However," said the professor, "gamification does not happen because of the web or technology. It was a trend that existed before; we played 'Dragons and dungeons' with a board and a pen". What has changed, in his opinion, is that the Internet has given a technological form to this trend of gamification.

The expert has offered the V ICS Lecture on Humanities and Social Sciences, a lecture given each year by an internationally renowned researcher . The goal of this event is to present to the University and to the society some of the topics that are dealt with in the projects of the ICS, the research center in Humanities and social sciences of the University of Navarra.