"The best way to avoid harmful games is to promote good ones," or so Peppino Ortoleva, professor at the University of Turin (Italy), stated within the framework of a lecture that the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra organized.

This researcher currently develops a project on games in which "those who bet see themselves as their families see them, and families see themselves from the point of view of the player," he explained.

During his presentation, Ortoleva developed the idea that bets, along with competitions, were the only games considered acceptable for adults in the industrial age. But he argued that this has been changing and we are now in a process of transformation.

"In the last 30 or 40 years," he said, "a variety of playful activities have invaded what we call the serious part of life. Now it is common to use games to get employees to learn to work in teams, and they are used in museums and art, for example."

He also recalled other more extreme cases, such as the use of games in war. In particular, he reported that in the conflict in Afghanistan "US soldiers used remote drones controlled from New Mexico; the platform they used was a video game with a joystick. But the weapons and the territory were real."

Technology and games

Regarding the growing use of new technologies in children's games, he explained that, "Although it is problematic when children use technology to watch pornography or put themselves at risk, technology itself does not have to be bad." In fact, he emphasized that children make imaginative use of it in many cases like using the phone for creative purposes, such as pretending to talk to a ghost or a king.

"However," the professor noted, "gamification is not produced by the web or technology. It existed before as a trend; we played Dungeons and Dragons with a board and a pen." What has changed, in his opinion, is that the internet has given a technological form to this gamification trend.

The expert gave the V ICS Humanities and Social Sciences Lecture, which is an annual event with an invited researcher of international prestige. It aims to present to the University and society some of the topics that the humanities and social sciences research center at the University of Navarra studies.