James Paul Gee on games and learning

[David Carlton]

(I put this up as a blog post originally, but it makes more sense as a forum post, so I'm moving it here; sorry for the confusion...)

I just ran across the following video by James Paul Gee (via HackerChick and Dan Pink), and thought that some people here might find it interesting. It's all about how games are a very effective learning platform, and what changes that might suggest in our schools.

[Roger Travis]

I'm a big fan of this video, as you might imagine! Above all, I think it makes it really clear just how big a threat games pose to traditional educational models. I think he's a bit too narrowly focused on assessment here, but the basic idea is the same as the insight I had that's led to Operation KTHMA--game design and instructional design can, and perhaps should, be the same thing.

The question of course is the same one Mike Young asked in another post--how do we harness this power, and is the video game technology we have now up to the task? The reason I've made KTHMA a tabletop game along the lines of Corvus Elrod's HoneyComb Engine is that as I came to realize more of games' real potential for teaching, I saw that to harness the potential we needed games that we design from the tabletop up as courses. So who wants to help me make KTHMA into a video game? :D

[David Carlton]

Some thoughts after watching it a second time:

One quote that struck me was this: "If you think about it, in some weird way, a video game is just an assessment, all you do is get assessed, every moment, as you try to solve a problem, and if you don't solve it, the game says 'you failed, try again', and then you solve it, and then you have a boss, which is a test, and you pass the test. I mean, games essentially are a form of assessment, the thing that is probably the most painful, ludicrous part of schooling." I could probably rant for a while about things I don't like about assessments, but that's a wonderfully positive way to think about them.

I really liked his discussion of his experiences with the Deus Ex manual: it was so impenetrable as to discourage him from playing the game when he first looked at it, but a couple of hours into the game, he looked at it again, and it all made perfect sense. That reminds me of an experience I'd had in grad school: I wanted to learn about an aspect of modular forms, because I knew that they were an important technique in the field I was studying. I was very good at learning math from books, I had a well-regarded book, I had a friend to read it with, but somehow it really wasn't sticking. Then, a few months later, I heard something in a lecture which gave me an idea as to how I could apply those specific techniques to an aspect of my thesis; I went back to the book, it was a completely different experience, everything was crystal clear to me.

He talked about games gives you language just in time: a game tells you how to do something right before you're going to need to use it. My first reaction was that that's a great idea, but it's a lot like traditional schooling: you learn something, then you need to use it in your homework. And that's true as far as it goes, but there's a difference between needing to know something to jump through a hoop that has been imposed on you and needing to know something to jump through a hoop that you've encountered on your own volition.

The bit near the end about deprofessionalizing teachers was scary / depressing.