What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition

by James Paul Gee

Overview

Cognitive Development in a Digital Age

James Paul Gee begins his classic book with "I want to talk about video games–yes, even violent video games–and say some positive things about them." With this simple but explosive statement, one of America's most well-respected educators looks seriously at the good that can come from playing video games.

This revised edition expands beyond mere gaming, introducing readers to fresh perspectives based on games like World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2. It delves deeper into cognitive development, discussing how video games can shape our understanding of the world.

An undisputed must-read for those interested in the intersection of education, technology, and pop culture, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy challenges traditional norms, examines the educational potential of video games, and opens up a discussion on the far-reaching impacts of this ubiquitous aspect of modern life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466886421
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	12/02/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	254,725
File size:	406 KB

About the Author

James Paul Gee has been featured in a variety of publications including Redbook, Child, Teacher, USA Today, Education Week, The Chicago Tribune, and more. He was formerly the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He is a founder of the Center for Games and Impact at ASU which orchestrated a national conversation on games and learning for the White House Office of Science and Technology. Described by The Chronicle of Higher Education as "a serious scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field," he is the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and The Anti-Education Era.
James Paul Gee has been featured in a variety of publications including Redbook, Child, Teacher, USA Today, Education Week, The Chicago Tribune, and more. He was formerly the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University.  He is a founder of the Center for Games and Impact at ASU which orchestrated a national conversation on games and learning for the White House Office of Science and Technology. Described by The Chronicle of Higher Education as "a serious scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field," he is the author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

Read an Excerpt

What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

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By James Paul Gee

Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © 2003 James Paul Gee
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8642-1

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: 36 WAYS TO LEARN A VIDEO GAME

I want to talk about video games—yes, even violent video games—and say some positive things about them. By "video games" I mean both games played on game platforms (such as the Sony PlayStation 2, the Nintendo GameCube, or Microsoft's XBox) and games played on computers. So as not to keep saying "video and computer games" all the time, I will just say "video games." I am mainly concerned with the sorts of video games in which the player takes on the role of a fantasy character moving through an elaborate world, solving various problems (violently or not), or in which the player builds and maintains some complex entity, like an army, a city, or even a whole civilization. There are, of course, lots of other types of video games.

But, first, I need to say something about my previous work and how and why I arrived here to discuss video games. In two earlier books, Social Linguistics and Literacies and The Social Mind, I argued that two things that, at first sight, look to be "mental" achievements, namely literacy and thinking, are, in reality, also and primarily social achievements. (See the Bibliographic Note at the end of this chapter for references to the literature relevant to this chapter.) When you read, you are always reading something in some way. You are never just reading "in general" but not reading anything in particular. For example, you can read the Bible as history or literature or as a self-help guide or in many other ways. So, too, with any other text, whether legal tract, comic book, essay, or novel. Different people can interpret each type of text differently.

When you think, you must think about something in some way. You are never just thinking "in general" but not thinking anything in particular. The argument about thinking is, in fact, the same as the argument about reading. For example, you can think about people who kill themselves to set off a bomb, in pursuit of some cause they believe in, as suicide bombers, murderers, terrorists, freedom fighters, heroes, psychotics, or in many other different ways. Different people can read the world differently just as they can read different types of texts differently.

So, then, what determines how you read or think about some particular thing? Certainly not random chemicals or electrical events in your brain, although you do most certainly need a brain to read or think. Rather, what determines this is your own experiences in interacting with other people who are members of various sorts of social groups, whether these are biblical scholars, radical lawyers, peace activists, family members, fellow ethnic group or church members, or whatever. These groups work, through their various social practices, to encourage people to read and think in certain ways, and not others, about certain sorts of texts and things.

Does this mean you are not "free" to read and think as you like? No—you can always align yourself with new people and new groups—there is no shortage. But it does mean you cannot read or think outside of any group whatsoever. You cannot assign asocial and private meanings to texts and things, meanings that only you are privy to and that you cannot even be sure you remember correctly from occasion to occasion as you read or think about the same thing, since as a social isolate (at least in regard to meaning) you cannot, in fact, check your memory with anyone else. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made this case long ago in his famous argument against the possibility of "private languages." There are no "private minds" either.

Does all this mean that "anything goes" and "nothing is true"? Of course not. We humans have goals and purposes, and for some goals and purposes some groups' ways of reading and thinking work better than do others. But it does mean that things are not "true" apart from any purpose or goal whatsoever. In the world of physics, as an academic area, if you have pushed your stalled car until you are dripping with sweat but the car has not budged, you have done no "work" (given how physicists use this word), but in the world of "everyday" people, people not attempting at the moment to be physicists or do physics, you have worked very hard indeed. Neither meaning is right or wrong. Each belongs to a different social world. However, if you want to do physics—for good or ill—it's best to use the word "work" the way physicists do. In that case, they are "right."

These viewpoints seem obvious to me. They will seem so to some readers as well. Nonetheless, they occasion great controversy. Furthermore, they are not the views about reading and thinking on which most of our schools today operate. Take reading, for instance. We know a great deal about the psycholinguistics of reading—that is, about reading as a mental act taking part in an individual's head. These views strongly inform how reading is taught in school. And there is nothing wrong with this, save that psycholinguistics is only part—in my view the smaller part—of the reading picture. We know much less about reading as a social achievement and as part and parcel of a great many different social practices connected to a great many different social groups that contest how things should be read and thought about.

The same is true of thinking. Cognitive science has taught us a great deal about thinking as a mental act taking part in an individual's head. For various reasons, however, these views less strongly inform how teaching and learning work in today's schools than they used to. This is so, in part, because the views about thinking current in cognitive science stress the importance of active inquiry and deep conceptual understanding, things that are not politically popular any longer in schools, driven as they are today by standardized tests and skill-and-drill curricula devoted to "the basics."

Nonetheless, it is true that we know much less about thinking as a social achievement and as part and parcel of a great many different social practices connected to a great many different social groups that contest how things should be read and thought about. For example, it turns out that botanists and landscape architects classify and think about trees quite differently. Their different contexts, social practices, and purposes shape their thinking (and reading) in different ways. Neither way is "right" or "wrong" in general. We know little about how social groups, social practices, and institutions shape and norm thinking as a social achievement, that is, about how they shape human minds when those minds are being botanists or landscape architects, though not when these same people are being other things.

And this last point is crucial. Since reading and thinking are social achievements connected to social groups, we can all read and think in different ways when we read and think as members (or as if we are members) of different groups. I, for one, know well what it is like to read the Bible differently as theology, as literature, and as a religious skeptic, thanks to different experiences and affiliations in my life thus far. Any specific way of reading and thinking is, in fact, a way of being in the world, a way of being a certain "kind of person," a way of taking on a certain sort of identity. In that sense, each of us has multiple identities. Even a priest can read the Bible "as a priest," "as a literary critic," "as a historian," even "as a male" or "as an African American" (priest, literary critic, historian, or ethnic group member), even if he chooses to privilege one way of reading—one identity—over another.

This does not mean we all have multiple personality disorder. We each have a core identity that relates to all our other identities (as a woman, feminist, wife, ethnic of a certain sort, biologist, Catholic, etc.). We have this core identity thanks to being in one and the same body over time and thanks to being able to tell ourselves a reasonably (but only reasonably) coherent life story in which we are the "hero" (or, at least, central character). But as we take on new identities or transform old ones, this core identity changes and transforms as well. We are fluid creatures in the making, since we make ourselves socially through participation with others in various groups. Social practices and social groups are always changing, some slowly, some at a faster pace (and the pace of change, for many social practices and groups, gets faster and faster in our contemporary high-tech global world).

Although the viewpoints I have sketched above may (or may not) seem obvious, they have taken me a lot of time to work on and, in the act, I have become if not "old," then "older," what we might call a late-middle-age "baby boomer." I was born in 1948. So, for heaven's sake, what I am doing playing video games and, worse yet, writing about it? The short answer, but not really the whole answer, since I came to this desire after playing the games, was that I wanted to say about learning just what I have said above about reading and thinking.

The longer answer is this: When my six-year-old was four, I used to sit next to him as he played video games, starting with Winnie the Pooh and moving on to Freddy Fish, Pajama Sam, and Spy Fox. I was intrigued. One day I decided I wanted to help my child play Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside. This is a game where the player (as the comic book superhero "Pajama Sam"—a character who is "just" the small boy Sam pretending to be a superhero in order to increase his courage) must solve problems in the "Land of Darkness" to meet "Darkness" and tame him, so that the player (Sam) need no longer be afraid of the dark. A typical problem in the game is deciding how to convince a talking wooden boat that wood floats, so that the boat, which is afraid of water, can feel free to go "boating" on the water and take Pajama Sam where he needs to go. I decided to play through the game by myself so I could "coach" my child as he played. (Now he charges me a dollar any time I attempt to "coach" him when he is playing a video game—he calls it "bossing him around" and "telling him what to do when he can figure it out for himself.")

When I played the game I was quite surprised to find out it was fairly long and pretty challenging, even for an adult. Yet a four-year-old was willing to put in this time and face this challenge—and enjoy it, to boot. I thought, as someone who has worked in the second half of his career in education (the first half was devoted to theoretical linguistics), "Wouldn't it be great if kids were willing to put in this much time on task on such challenging material in school and enjoy it so much?"

So I decided to buy and play an adult game ("adult" here means the game is played by teenagers on up; video-game players tend to be anywhere between 3 years old and 39). I somewhat arbitrarily picked the game The New Adventures of the Time Machine, a game involving adventure, problem solving, and shooting (based loosely on H. G. Wells), knowing nearly nothing about video games. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. This game, like nearly all such games, takes a great many hours to play. Many good video games can take 50 to 100 hours to win, even for good players. Furthermore, it was—for me—profoundly difficult.

In fact, this was my first revelation. This game—and this turned out to be true of video games more generally—requires the player to learn and think in ways in which I am not adept. Suddenly all my baby-boomer ways of learning and thinking, for which I had heretofore received ample rewards, did not work.

My second realization came soon after, when at the end of a day in which I had played Time Machine for eight straight hours, I found myself at a party, with a splitting headache from too much video motion, sitting next to a 300-pound plasma physicist. I heard myself telling the physicist that I found playing Time Machine a "life-enhancing experience," without even knowing what I meant by that. Fortunately, plasma physicists are extremely tolerant of human variation. (The plasma that physicists deal with is not, as he told me, a product from blood but a state of matter; when I asked him why he had not brought any to the party, he explained to me that plasma is so unstable and dangerous that if he had brought any, there would have been no party.)

Oddly enough, then, confronting what was, for me, a new form of learning and thinking was both frustrating and life enhancing. This was a state that I could remember from my days in graduate school and earlier in my career (and when I changed careers midstream). Having long routinized my ways of learning and thinking, however, I had forgotten this state. It brought back home to me, forcefully, that learning is or should be both frustrating and life enhancing. The key is finding ways to make hard things life enhancing so that people keep going and don't fall back on learning and thinking only what is simple and easy.

My third realization followed from these other two. I eventually finished The New Adventures of the Time Machine and moved onto Deus Ex, a game I chose because it had won Game of the Year on many Internet game sites. Deus Ex is yet longer and harder than Time Machine. I found myself asking the following question: "How, in heaven's name, do they sell many of these games when they are so long and hard?" I soon discovered, of course, that good video games (like Deus Ex) sell millions of copies. Indeed, the video-game industry makes as much or more money each year than the film industry.

So here we have something that is long, hard, and challenging. However, you cannot play a game if you cannot learn it. If no one plays a game, it does not sell, and the company that makes it goes broke. Of course, designers could keep making the games shorter and simpler to facilitate learning. That's often what schools do. But no, in this case, game designers keep making the games longer and more challenging (and introduce new things in new ones), and still manage to get them learned. How?

If you think about it, you see a Darwinian sort of thing going on here. If a game, for whatever reason, has good principles of learning built into its design—that is, if it facilitates learning in good ways—then it gets played and can sell a lot of copies, if it is otherwise good as well. Other games can build on these principles and, perhaps, do them one step better. If a game has poor learning principles built into its design, then it won't get learned or played and won't sell well. Its designers will seek work elsewhere. In the end, then, video games represent a process, thanks to what Marx called the "creativity of capitalism," that leads to better and better designs for good learning and, indeed, good learning of hard and challenging things.

It would seem intriguing, then, to investigate what these principles of learning are. How are good video games designed to enhance getting themselves learned—learned well and quickly so people can play and enjoy them even when they are long and hard? What we are really looking for here is this: the theory of human learning built into good video games.

Of course, there is an academic field devoted to studying how human beings learn best and well, namely the field of cognitive science. So we can, then, compare the theory of learning in good video games to theories of learning in cognitive science. Who's got the best theory? Well, it turns out that the theory of learning in good video games is close to what I believe are the best theories of learning in cognitive science. And this is not because game designers read academic texts on learning. Most of them don't. They spent too much of their time in high school and beyond playing with computers and playing games.

And, too, there is a key place—though hardly the only one—where learning takes place: school. So, we also can ask how the theory of learning in good video games compares to how teaching and learning work in school. Here we face a mixed bag, indeed. On one hand, the theory of learning in good video games fits well with what are I believe to be the best sorts of science instruction in school. On the other hand, this sort of science instruction is rare and getting yet rarer as testing and skill-and-drill retake our schools. In turn, the theories of learning one would infer from looking at schools today comport very poorly with the theory of learning in good video games.

If the principles of learning in good video games are good, then better theories of learning are embedded in the video games many children in elementary and particularly in high school play than in the schools they attend. Furthermore, the theory of learning in good video games fits better with the modern, high-tech, global world today's children and teenagers live in than do the theories (and practices) of learning that they see in school. Today's world is very different from the world baby boomers like me grew up in and on which we have based many of our theories. Is it a wonder, then, that by high school, very often both good students and bad ones, rich ones and poor ones, don't much like school?

This book discusses 36 principles of learning (individually in each chapter and listed together in the appendix) that I argue are built into good video games. From the way I opened this introduction, you already know that, while this book deals with learning, it will most certainly deal with learners (players) embedded in a material and social world. How could it be otherwise? After all, they are playing a game. Video games—like many other games—are inherently social, though, in video games, sometimes the other players are fantasy creatures endowed, by the computer, with artificial intelligence and sometimes they are real people playing out fantasy roles.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. Copyright © 2003 James Paul Gee. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents

Introduction: 36 Ways to Learn a Video Game * Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a "Waste of Time"? * Learning and Identity: What Does It Mean to Be a Half-Elf? * Situated Meaning and Learning: What Should You Do after You Have Destroyed the Global Conspiracy? * Telling and Doing: Why Doesn't Lara Croft Obey Professor Von Croy? * Cultural Models: Do You Want to Be the Blue Sonic or the Dark Sonic? * The Social Mind: How Do You Get Your Corpse Back after You've Died? * Conclusion: Duped or Not? * Appendix: The 36 Learning Principles