Good Games/Good Learning
What makes a good game? I found myself asking this question over and over again as I read through the weekly readings by Gee these past four weeks. Hints were dropped in the text every so often and annotations filled in some of the missing pieces, but I still wanted to know more. After searching the interwebs for a while, I came across the article “Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines” written by James Paul Gee himself. The start of the article starts with a foreword introducing the characteristics of a good game and briefly summarizes what they are and how they contribute to good learning. This intro was exactly what I was looking for: a laundry list of good things that make up good games.
After a quick scan of the various traits, I continued on to see more detailed descriptions and the traits in action in game versus in education. The more I read the more I realized that the traits, which fell under the three main categories of empowering learners, problem solving, and understanding, were also tools that can be harnessed by teachers and learners to increase the power of learning. The reading invoked an interesting debate about how under the right conditions learning is biologically motivating and pleasurable, and video games have been able to invoke this love for learning through the interactivity of gaming. Where the debate gets interesting is that while the author considers gaming to be an effective tool for providing the traits for good learning, they also consider that these traits can be found outside of the realm of gaming; in order to allow participants to practice the traits a game is not always necessary.
Out of all of the traits that were listed, the one that stuck out to me the most was “manipulation and distributed knowledge.” Gee states that, “more generally, humans feel expanded and empowered when then can manipulate powerful tools in intricate ways that extend their area of effectiveness.” The thing that holds a lot of students back in school is feeling like they have little control over what they are learning, how they want to learn it, and what skills they are allowed to use while building their knowledge. To compound on this problem, oftentimes in traditional schooling there is the limitation that students must master skills before being allowed to apply them. In good games and learning environments this just isn’t so. The author talks about games giving the player “smart tools,” which are things that the game/character/setting already can do or know and the player can then take those skills and apply them to in the moment situations along with the player’s own prior knowledge and problem-solving. In essence, the smart tools are like resources for the learner to draw from in order to give them a safe start into the learning journey. This safe start then allows players to feel like they have control over their situation and frees up their ability to then think through how to properly use the tools that are already known to help with unknown situations. This is both an individual and collective contribution to learning as they learner/player is using smart tools that were designed by someone else (drawing off of someone else’s knowledge), and then the learner is expected to interpret the use of these tools on their own terms.
The idea of manipulation and distributed knowledge was expanded upon later in the article, calling upon the power of choice and identity under the trait of “co-designing.” A good game, and therefore, good learning continues to give power to the player/learner through opportunities to contribute to the design and content of the game/learning. This trait draws upon the more social aspects of play, asking the person to collaborate with the makers of the learning space to incorporate their interests and choices. This collaboration can also extend to multiple players wishing to be a part of and contributor to the same space building up and distributing knowledge among players for the use of collective learning.
There were many traits to be mulled over and analyzed, but manipulation and distributed knowledge was profoundly impactful on my understanding of this reading as it seemed inherent in all of the other traits found in good games and learning. Not only does it provide powerful tools for applying learning or opportunities for social pedagogy, but it also draws on identity and its impact on learning, too. The article addresses how choice of character design or the assuming of a well laid out character role can bring meaning to the skills necessary in completing tasks. A paragraph that stuck out to me states, “ionically, when learners adopt and practice...an identity and engage in the forms of talk and action connected to it, facts come free—they are learned as part and parcel of being a certain sort of person needing to do certain sorts of things for one’s own purposes and goals (Shaffer 2004). Out of the context of identity and activity, facts are hard to learn and last in the learner’s mind a very short time, indeed.” Learners have the power to shape their identity and in shaping their identity they have purpose and goals that drive their learning experience, therefore creating more meaning and higher levels of learning.
Overall, this article was a fantastic read. In setting out on my own learning journey to find out what makes a good game, I also found best practices for learning in general. While some of the traits had me shaking my head in agreement and leaving me wondering why I hadn’t thought about that before, others had me confirming some of the things that I already held to be true in good gaming and learning.