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.

[Jonathan Herrick]

I agree with a lot of the topics that James makes but I feel as though he neglects a few issues.

School is intended to teach you the skills to succeed at what you want to do in the future (whether it does so or not is another issue), whereas education is a continual process. There was a lot of emphasis of education in video games from a school child's perspective, but he neglects that the largest demographic of the video game market is adult, specifically the 18-30 male category (again just statistics, whether relevant is another matter).

I have learnt more from history (raw facts, politics, economics, military strategy, leadership skills etc. etc.) as an adult from video games and media that I choose to consume than I ever did at school.

I think this is an obvious point, but one that I feel is worth making and the video fails to address.

Either that or he's using the word 'kid' to refer to anyone younger than himself.

[Roger Travis]

Either that or he's using the word 'kid' to refer to anyone younger than himself.

LOL!

You make an incredibly good point, Jonathan--and one I've been thinking about a great deal recently as I start a new semester in which every one of my courses will have a "practomimetic" (i.e. game) element. (For the big myth course it's only a sort of debate tournament on such pressing questions as "What's the more perfect example of a modern myth, Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings?", but I'm planning on trying to push the students in an RP direction.) Now that we have the knowledge in fields like educational psychology that can allow us to separate "school" from "education," and we have this amazing new game-related toolbox, what is a humanities teacher supposed to do?

My own answer is that I need to embrace exactly what you're calling "education," and help to enhance the learning that comes through games by organizing them in ways that my academic training has taught me to do--that is, if there's a game that almost gets Ancient Greece right, I present that game to my students and say, "Alright, do the course-reading, then play this game--what do they get right and what do they get wrong?"

Even better if I can incorporate that activity into an overarching game structure, in which the students are playing themselves on a mission to learn the classics and save the world from, well, lack of classical learning. :D