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November/December 2005
What video games can teach us about making
students want to learn
by James Paul Gee
Why is it that many children can’t
sit still long enough to finish their homework and yet will spend
hours playing games on the computer? Video games are spectacularly
successful at engaging young learners. It’s not because they
are easy. Good video games are long, complex, and difficult. They
have to be; if they were dumbed down, no one would want to play.
But if children couldn’t figure out how to play them—and
have fun doing so—game designers would soon go out of business.
To succeed, game designers incorporate principles
of learning that are well supported by current research. Put simply,
they recruit learning as a form of pleasure. Games like Rise
of Nations, Age
of Mythology, Deus Ex,
The Elder Scrolls
III: Morrowind,
and Tony
Hawk’s Underground teach children not only how to play
but how to learn, and to keep on learning.
Children have to learn long, complex, and difficult
things in school, too. They need to be able to learn in deep ways:
to improvise, innovate, and challenge themselves; to develop concepts,
skills, and relationships that will allow them to explore new worlds;
to experience learning as a source of enjoyment and as a way to
explore and discover who they are. Let’s look at how this
kind of learning works in cutting-edge video games. We might learn
something ourselves.
Producers, Not Consumers
To start with, good video games offer players
strong identities. In some games, players learn to view the virtual
world through the eyes of a distinctive personality, like the solitary
Special Forces operative Solid Snake in the espionage action game
Metal
Gear Solid. In others, like the epic role-playing game The Elder
Scrolls III: Morrowind, each player builds a character from the
ground up and explores the game from that character’s point
of view. Game designers recognize that learning and identity are
interrelated. Learning a new domain, whether physics or furniture-making,
requires students to see the world in new ways—in the ways
physicists or furniture-makers do.
Game designers let players be producers, not
just consumers. Players codesign a game through their unique actions
and decisions. Many games come with software that allows players
to modify (“mod”) them to produce new scenarios or whole
new games. For instance, in the Tony Hawk skateboarding games, players
can design their own skate parks. At another level, an open-ended
game like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, in which each character
undertakes his or her own journey, ultimately becomes a different
experience for each player.
Players can also customize games to fit their
learning and playing styles, since well-designed games allow problems
to be solved in multiple ways. For example, in the two Deus Ex games,
many of the problems a player faces can be solved in at least three
ways: using stealth, confrontation, or persuasion. Many games also
offer levels of play for beginning, experienced, or advanced players,
letting players choose the degree of challenge they are comfortable
with. In some games, players can test their own skills. For example,
the real-time strategy game Rise of Nations asks, “How fast
can you get to the Gunpowder Age? Find out if your resource-management
skills are good enough.”
Features like these encourage players to take
risks, explore, and try new things. If they fail, the consequences
are minimal—they can start over from their last saved game.
All these factors give players a real sense of agency, ownership,
and control. It’s their game.
A Cycle of Mastery
But learning goes yet deeper in well-designed
games. Research has shown that when learners are left completely
free to solve a complex problem, they may hit on creative solutions.
But these solutions may not necessarily help them generate good
hypotheses for solving later problems, even easier ones. A simple
classroom example is the case of the young child who comes to think
that reading means memorizing words. This may work perfectly well—until
the child is swamped by the marked increase in vocabulary in more
complex books.
In good video games problems are well ordered,
so that early ones lead the player to formulate hypotheses that
work well for solving later, harder problems. For example, if stealth
is important in a game, the first levels will clearly show the player
why confrontation is a less effective option, so as not to reinforce
skills that will later undermine the player’s success.
This well-ordered sequence creates an ongoing
cycle of consolidation and challenge that enables players to confront
an initial set of problems, and then practice solving them until
they have routinized their mastery. The game then throws out a new
class of problem, requiring players to come up with new solutions.
This phase of mastery is consolidated through repetition, only to
be challenged again. In this way, good games stay within, but at
the outer edge of, the player’s competence. They feel doable,
but challenging. This makes them pleasantly frustrating, putting
players in what psychologists call a “flow” state.
Video games operate on the principle of “performance
before competence.” That is, players can learn as they play,
rather than having to master an entire body of knowledge before
being able to put it to use. Research shows that students learn
best when they learn in context—that is, when they can relate
words, concepts, skills, or strategies to prior experience. In fact,
many students are alienated from what they learn in school because
those connections and experiences are absent. Video games are simulations
of new experiences and new worlds, yet they are able to engage players
with languages and ways of thinking with which they have no prior
experience. Players encounter new words and techniques in the context
of play, not as abstract definitions or sets of rules. This holds
their interest and spurs them on to develop new skills, vocabularies,
relationships, and attitudes—irrespective of factors like
race and class.
One way players can increase their competence
is to seek advice from other players. There are websites and Internet
chat rooms for almost any game, where players trade tips and stories,
and where questions can be posted. Experts can help novices and
peers can pool information. New knowledge is available just in time—when
players need it—or on demand—when players ask for it.
Preparation for a Complex World
Finally, good video games nurture higher-order
thinking skills. They encourage players to think in terms of relationships,
not isolated events or facts. In a game like Rise of Nations, for
example, players need to think about how each step they take might
affect their future actions and the actions of their opponents as
they try to advance their civilizations through the ages. These
kinds of games encourage players to explore their options thoroughly
rather than taking the straightest and swiftest path, and to reconceive
their goals from time to time—good skills in a world full
of complex, high-risk systems.
Video games teach players to capitalize on “smart
tools,” distributed knowledge, and cross-functional teams.
The virtual characters one manipulates in a game are smart tools.
They have skills and knowledge of their own, which they lend to
the player. For example, the citizens in Rise of Nations know how
to build cities, but the player needs to know where to build them.
In multiplayer games like World
of WarCraft, players form teams in which each player contributes
a different set of skills. Each player must master a specialty,
since a Mage plays differently than a Warrior, but the players must
understand each other’s specializations well enough to coordinate
with one another. Thus, the knowledge needed to play the games is
distributed among a set of real people and their smart tools, much
as in a modern science lab or high-tech workplace.
In his bestselling book The
World Is Flat, Thomas
Friedman argues that the United States is facing a looming educational
crisis. Even highly skilled jobs in radiology, computer science,
or engineering are being outsourced to low-cost centers. Any job
that involves standardized skills can be exported. To maintain their
competitive advantage, workers in industrialized countries will
need to go beyond a mastery of standardized skills to become flexible,
adaptive, lifelong learners of new skills. Yet U.S. schools are
focused more than ever on the “basics,” measuring their
success with standard-ized tests that assess standardized skills.
It is ironic that young people today are often
exposed to more creative and challenging learning experiences in
popular culture than they are in school. The principles on which
video-game design is based are foundational to the kind of learning
that enables children to become innovators and lifelong learners.
Yet how many of today’s classrooms actually incorporate these
principles as thoroughly and deeply as these games do? Let’s
ask ourselves how we can make learning in or out of school more
“game-like”—not in the sense of playing games
in class, but by making the experience of learning as motivating,
stimulating, collaborative, and rewarding as the experience of playing
a well-designed video game.
James
Paul Gee is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of numerous
articles in sociolinguistics, literacy studies, cognitive science,
and discourse analysis. His most recent book is Situated
Language and Learning (2004).
For Further Information
J.C. Beck and M. Wade. Got Game: How the Gamer
Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 2005.
J.P. Gee. What
Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New
York: Palgrave/Macmillian, 2003.
R. Koster. Theory
of Fun for Game Design. Phoenix: Paraglyph, 2004
Go to www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html
for many other papers related to games and learning. |
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