The Gaming Video

Dr. Jane McGonigal had made several valid points in her speech that support he overall argument that the world needs more gamers in order to “save the world”. McGonigal utilizes ethos, pathos, and logos in order to gain the attention of her audience. By using as much logos as she does she was able to bring to light many statistics that a person that does not play video games would not know. By using these statistics she was able to put actual numbers in the minds of her audience and potential gamers. Her credibility or ethos of her speech was very lacking. I only found that she had two credible sources: Economists Edward Castronava and Carnegie University. Although, she as the speaker a\was a very credible source due to the fact that she received her PhD for doing studies on this topic of gaming. Jan's argument is filled with much emotion and appeals to her audiences' pathos side. By giving the gamer qualities such as being optimistic, building a social fabric, and being productive she brings this figure to life. I believe she does this in order to give the audience a sense of confidence and connection, which would help her persuade the audience to believe in her cause. The actual picture of the gamer also strengthens her argument. It strengthens her argument because this face shows concentration, during her speech she uses this as leverage to show that videogames build concentration and the hunt to win which would entail world problems to decrease due to this characteristic. McGonigal's speech was filled with a majority of these statistics. Although, statistics are very helpful, these statistics are purely stats in an imaginary world and could not relate to the real world. I completely disagree with her speech. The real world is set up for successes and failure, without failure one cannot learn anything. Through trial and error humans learn and develop skills they would not have possessed if they did not try and fail. In the game world, one cannot fail, it is nearly impossible to fail at anything in a fictional world. I leave you with this thought about failure, and how without failure no problems of the world can ever be fixed " Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success ." -Dale Carnegie