The Future of Creativity and Innovation is Gamification

For this quarter’s identification of rhetoric, I chose a Ted talk by Gabe Zichermann called, “Gamification”. His argument is that games make children smarter. In the beginning of his speech he goes back in time telling the audience his experience with games as a kid. He also gets the crowd interested by making a quick joke as well. Zichermann owns a company that has to deal with games heavily and he even has his own business going for it. In his argument he mentions these things in which you could arguably say he established some kind of ethos. He then goes on to mention the facts and statistics from different scientist and doctors from colleges. This says that he has done his research on his topic and he must be trustworthy. The use of facts and statistics better established logos more than any other thing in his speech. As a listener you can also tell by the structure he uses logos. He has his opening, body, and conclusion. After doing his own studies, he came to a question. “Is the world too slow for our children?”  In his era of video games all he had to do was tap a few buttons to operate a video game. Today’s game systems are so up to date, it requires us to touch multiple buttons at one time and we can now communicate with people across the globe. Now we are able to operate a character, follow long and short term objectives, and deal with parents and their interruptions. These features allow the mind to open up and requires more intelligence to play these games. Zichermann says that this “makes kids uninterested in the real world”, only because it’s behind on technology. Our kids will grow up playing these games which gives them a good way of multitasking, which most of today's work requires. Due to Zichermann research, things like that do “make a person smarter”. His hand motions and movements weren’t that obvious but at a point he made a gesture that helped the audience understand his frustration, and even get a laugh out of it. This ted talk was very persuasive in my opinion. The facts included only made the audience question themselves and their comments on video games.