Argumentative Essay

Bonnie Woods

Professor Lynn Burgess

ENC1102

September 23, 2015

Just one more game: Angry Birds, Farmville, and other hyperaddictive stupid games

My husband must be having his own man period, his mood swings on a roll this week. These times I have no complaints of his gaming, so long as he directs his crabbiness elsewhere. Sam Anderson uses, with slight resentment, a timeline of numerous games created and a detailed visual description of times in which they were made. Though Anderson characterizes them as “stupid games”, his use of logos, analogies, comparison and contrast, figurative language, and extended definitions among many in his piece gives a visualization that the games he describes have been more than stupid games for the times but a world away from reality that we’re not always aware of.

Anderson spells out for us his first honest opinion and feelings of video games in his third paragraph by being forthcoming of his characterization of these games, ‘a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games”’ (Anderson, para 3). Anderson continues his spiteful tone by giving a description of how such an industry as evolved but also, how these games have affected the consumer.

“Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played (Anderson, para 4).” Anderson explains further with one example, Monopoly, which gave the consumer the chance to be rich in times that most were poor giving us a compelling exemplification and a visual of what it was like in the middle of the Depression. The 1950s game Risk was the next example for Anderson in that he referred to as a true political realism. Risk is a strategy board game where players control armies used to capture territories from other players. Anderson lastly used the example Twister, created in the mid 1960s “sexual revolution...