AES034 Baileo Passion Exploration: Traditional Games

"Traditional" seems like a very unique word to me. According to the Cambridge dictionary, traditional means: "following or belonging to the customs or ways of behaving that have continued in a group of people or society for a long time without changing." The interesting point for me "traditional" is an adjective which means most of the time will be followed by another word after it. I will propose a statement that could be controversial: video games are traditional games in the future.

When I was a kid people always argue that video games will ruin kids. I'm a casual gamer myself and mostly I played games with narrative stories in it such as Cyberpunk 2077, RDR 2, or Undertale. In my opinion, the proposed idea that video games will badly affect kids' brains is not completely wrong but also not completely true. I played a lot of war-themed FPS shooting games, and what I can learn from them is mostly that these games carry anti-war messages that show us the cruelty of warfare. However, I can't also put aside the fact that some terrorism and shooting acts by students were (could be partly or fully) influenced by video games.

I've been trying to manage a mini-program near my house to introduce Indonesian traditional games to the kids (engklek, congklak, etc.). In promoting traditional games I reckon some people have different ideas about it, some doing it as an action to reject modern games such as video games, while others try to balance between kids' cyber and the real world. I like to agree with the latest idea but never curse the first one cause I truly understand why some people despise video games so much.

I personally believe a game is a noun, where a noun or thing can't be accused as positive or negative. A knife will be a bad thing if we used it to hurt people and will be a good thing if we used it in the food-making process. Games whether it's traditional or modern will be bad if people use them as justification to do violence, on the other side will be good if people use them to connect with each other and promote peace. The tradition is to connect with each other and promote peace. Thus it's never been about the "thing", but always been about "us" the people.