Videogames and education under a cibercultural view.

Abstract

The leisure culture, built in games, playing and customs, that is, the general culture, have been part of the educational content since the early twentieth century. Authors who have created the Study of Games, such as Hesse and Benjamin, were the first to examine the relationship between games and the customs and culture. In the book "The Art of Idleness" there's a small collection of texts about what Hesse understood as idle time activities, in which the author already envisioned some fundamental questioning and issues arising from recreational activities (games and playing) in spare time. In his work "Reflections on children, toys, and education", a collection of texts by Benjamin, focused on the game and the toy, which follows the chain of Historical Dialectic Materialism, the author is concerned with playing in the lower classes / working class, and investigates the cultural history of toys. Later, the work of two more authors becomes essential to the understanding of games as cultural elements, Huizinga and Caillois. The first brings in his main work "Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture", the idea that playing is an original reality, which corresponds to one of the most primitive and deeply rooted notions throughout all the human reality and from it, culture is born, under the form of rituals and the sacred, of language and poetry, remaining in all types of expression arts and competitions, including the arts of thought and speech, as well as on the court, the prosecution and the defense, therefore, also in fight and warfare in general. Game and its concept, according to Huizinga (1990), are older than culture itself, because it is a part of animals' behavior