What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

"This book, you could argue, is the book that launched – at least in the US – the tremendous interest in games for learning. Gee was a professor who had nothing to do with video games, who just dove into the subject and ended up realising what an incredible potential resource they were for learning. “He ended up realising what an incredible potential resource they were for learning.” In this book, he takes what I would say is a sort of ethnographic style approach, where he is trying to understand games as a participant observer, and then extracting these learning principles for games. He translates for the reader what he sees as specific learning techniques that are embedded in different styles of games. I think it was a really valuable account for educators who otherwise maybe didn’t play. I mean, at some level, we have a bit of a generational issue with video games, that people who are older maybe they played early arcade games, but they didn’t necessarily grow up playing complex games, and so they have all kinds of preconceived notions. I think that James Gee did a really good job in this book of unpacking games for educators and parents. One example is that he points out how games offer ‘psychosocial moratorium’, basically that gamers can take risks in a space where real world consequences are lowered. What it means is that one reason games can help with learning is that game play happens in a magic circle, a play space outside real-world consequence, so you can take a risk in a game and you know you can just go back and replay. In typical learning situations, you take a test and there are stakes, you are being graded, right? Or you are in a classroom situation, someone asks you a question, and then suddenly the social stakes are high, if you answer correctly or not. Whereas if a kid is playing a game, you know, they have this feeling [of safety]. I guess you have to be careful about putting metrics into these educational games, because then they will start to have real world stakes too. But his point being it actually encourages a sense of risk taking and experimentation for kids because they learn, ‘Oh, it is not so bad. My character died in this level, but I’ll just play it again, and I’ll learn from it. I’ll take a different strategy.’ Absolutely. Sometimes I come across students at the university level who are afraid to run forward and take risks. They are waiting for the metrics to be handed to them so they know how they can succeed. So one of the points Gee starts to make, in contrast to the views people had early on about video games taking away motivation, is they are actually training a certain kind of risk taking and engagement that is valuable to you as an adult."