Games affecting people

Raph Koster · 30 Jun 2015

Raph Koster did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Designing a game imprints behaviour on the people who play it, including behaviour the designer never intended to teach.

Their wordsknow in your bones that game design is a powerful way of imprinting behaviors on people, and that it is entirely possible to imprint behaviors you didn’t want.
Our reading
Denying that games can affect the people who play them is a way of calling games a lesser medium.

Their wordsSaying games can’t affect people is to denigrate them.

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