There was a good deal of focus in this regarding graphics and audio quality. These are major parts of the gaming industry, and well worth paying attention to. The important thing, however, is what is brought out by the student video.
Good graphics and sound are useless next to a game with a story that grabs you. The ability to be flashy and sound great is meaningless if you cannot create an addictive pathos in a player. The student video strikes this point deep into the heart of the matter.
A couple of games I have played in the past really illustrate the point. One was a small scale Multiply Massive Online Role Play Game that came out right around the turn of the millennium. The graphics were merely average even for that day (and are downright antiquated now). But the people who came in, and the stories that were told, created a sense of belonging and passion that brought us back again and again. I played for seven years, and learned many lessons from that play. The other was a Japanese Sound Novel style of game. Decision points were few, and the graphics were nothing but cartoonish stills. But the story about an older brother caring for his dying little sister, with you being able to occasionally step in to determine what meaning making acts would occur, this created such a powerful experience it is still, in my opinion, both the greatest and worst game I have ever played. I'll always remember how well I was pulled into caring, the lessons I learned, and I will never play it again.
These extremely strong emotions, this impact we can create in a world that seemingly should not matter becomes an extremely powerful tool. Like any other tool, if used carefully and well they can bring people to engage in their own progress. A powerful connection to a place where valuable lessons are learned and skills picked up can lead to an accelerated learning that will produce entire generations of geniuses early and often. If used badly, it can create an easily manipulated generation that can be guided into truly dark corners of our existence. The audio and video quality may make it easier to immerse, but it is the pathos that will ultimately teach, for right or wrong.
Pathos - do you suppose it creates or merely taps empathy? The reason I'm wondering is your position concerning "if used badly." What I'm wondering is if a single media has that much power, or if the media as a whole (all film, ads, cartoons, news myths, movies, Facebook) is a culture's mutually constructed artifacts and as an environs, does shape empathy via pathos, but couldn't really be singly manipulated to be bad. On the whole, it certainly can be bad. For example, in the NY Times today is a review of True Grit versus The Social Network - which says that the young girl in True Grit believed in law suits to protect and advance justice where the boys of Facebook used law suits to grab a hold of assets. Is the law in this case just a form of media, but it is the intentions of the users (and perhaps something of the context) that makes us call one bad and the other good?
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