Jane Mcgonigal's Essay Becoming Part Of Something Bigger

Jane McGonigal describes the positive impacts that video games have on individuals in her essay “Becoming Part of Something Bigger.” McGonigal’s purpose is to argue that video games are beneficial and help people find meaning in their life. Her attempt to reveal this is rather weak as a result of a saturation of an appeal to pathos and a lack of an appeal to logos. She induces an emotional tone and backs up her claims with quotes from experts in order to reveal to her readers that video games serve a greater purpose than most people believe. McGonigal begins her essay with news about the latest milestone that Halo players have achieved, which is ten billion Covenant kills. She explains the meaning of this achievement and why gamers are so proud of it. She deconstructs the reasoning behind a gamer’s fascination of video games into three “epic” categories including: scale, context, and environment. These categories are the foundation for the benefits that can be achieved from playing video games, which Jane aims to reveal. She concludes her essay with research on how playing video games results in positive actions and a call to action for readers to start applying the lessons of video games to everyday life. All throughout her essay, Jane
Unfortunately, she uses pathos heavily instead of relying on logos or perhaps ethos more often. She conveys her argument that video games have a positive impact on gamers very well but the evidence that she uses to back this up should rely less on emotion because of the audience that she is aiming towards. Her audience doesn’t understand the purpose of video games so they will be unfamiliar with and confused by the emotions that are associated with video games. Jane should instead focus on the research aspect of her argument such as the studies that she cites towards the conclusion of her