Mundos imaginarios, mundos virtualesla construcción de la identidad con "Los Sims 2" y "Harry Potter"

Abstract

It is indisputable that there is something about video games which get people really excited and which makes children, teen and adults play for hours on end: the fantasy, the graphics, the gaming possibilities, the challenges and the complexity, but above all, the continuous decisions the player must make as part of his strategy and t meet goals or get past levels (Prensky, 2005). We can find various types of video games that offer multiple posibiliies projecting patterns and social referents through their characters. This presentation is comparing two video games we used in two workshops ("The Sims 2 Pets" and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix") from the perspective of those internal and externals elements of the game, which facilitate learning. The mail goal of the project is to analyze that a social simulation game such as The Sims offers multiple chances to compare the imaginary world and the real world, whereas in adventure game such as Harry Potter the game introduces the player in an un real world created by the author of the novels. In this chapter we focus on discovering the identification process generates in the classroom when students played these two games.