When I think about effectively using video games to teach, I start thinking about RPGs (role playing games). This framing partially comes from personal bias — I play RPGs more than anything else these days — and partially from half-conscious thought about what RPGs have to offer compared to other types of games.
RPGs offer a number of advantages over other game models, for teaching. First, as Jess pointed out to me the other day, they require minimal dexterity with controllers to play. It’s not like, say, Super Mario Brothers (to name one even people who don’t play video games should know), fighting games like Tekken, or shooters like Doom, in which hand-eye coordination is required to win. RPGs generally offer a long time in which you can consider and prepare for your next move.
Gee notes that in general, good games work on this kind of an “amplification of input principle,” “designed so that they adjust to different levels of play and reward each sort of player, if the player is putting in effort, with some appropriate degree of success.” (Gee p 64) This encourages rather than discourages beginning players. Gee also suggests that “in the real world, science often operates by the amplification of input principle;” he sees the very visible reward one gets for tinkering in a lab (new strains of fruit fly with weird characteristics, explosions if chemicals are mixed the right way) as motivating in itself. (Gee p 64) I think current RPGs, with their extensive, diverse opportunities for trial-and-error tinkering with equipment and strategies, suggest possibilities for particularly good amplification of input.
RPGs also allow for gameplay within a narrative, which not only can be compelling in and of itself but also makes for more opportunities for putting knowledge in context, which all of the books I’m reading say is important for recalling knowledge and keeping it from becoming inert (look for the topic to come up repeatedly in both Bransford and Gee.)
Of course, game type is increasingly fluid. RPGs in particular tend to offer a range of games-within-a-game these days. The Final Fantasy series, for example, has added animal raising, animal racing, treasure hunts, puzzles, card games and other games of chance, dexterity side-games, and army battle tactics simulations to the small-party battle simulations of a traditional RPG. RPGs could easily be used to frame simulations (let me know if they have already), offering more opportunities for the player to identify with the characters onscreen than a simulation alone would.
This could be an excellent way to develop the identification with academic communities that Gee wants to see among students. (Whether we all agree that encouraging students to identify with academic communities is a good idea, or not practical, or displays a bourgeois bias — or whether Gee is even correct that a student in an ideal science class takes on the identity of a scientist — is a question for the flamers in the peanut gallery ;)) Imagine a game, for example, in which you role play as a scientist, studying microbial development in a lab simulation, and then put what you know to practical use in healing a community (or heck, germ warfare if you prefer) in an RPG scenario.
The limitation of RPGs that I keep bumping up against, however, is that in them, “skills” are only metaphors for code. Gee talks briefly about how one’s skills contribute to one’s identity (p 52-53). The identity a character builds up in an RPG can be comprised of a range of physical skills (lockpicking, swordsmanship, martial arts, the ability to tame animals, knowledge of how to raise particular plants, and so forth), socially relevant skills (charisma, orientation towards “good” and “evil”), and personal attributes (dexterity, ability to heal). I think in general this is a promising model for encouraging kids to think about themselves and their abilities along multiple dimensions and at multiple levels. I’ve also been messing with the idea that one could, say, create a game in which players would gain the ability to “see” like a historian, an anthropologist, an architect, a physicist, etc, and use those “lenses” to demonstrate how one might notice and interpret things differently as those different kinds of experts. (See Bransford, Brown, and Cocking’s How People Learn, Chapter 2 for more on why an understanding of expertise is important to teaching.)
But the problem is, like I said: skills in RPGs are no more than code. If your character gains skill in lockpicking — to use one of Gee’s examples — in a game, doors simply open for her when she approaches, rather than remaining impassable. There’s no manipulation with the controller, even; no presenting of a lock model on the screen. The player doesn’t learn anything about the mechanical principles behind a lock, or about categories of locks, which she can apply to locks she encounters in real life. Game-specific strategies and hand-eye coordination are still the only skills that an RPG really develops in the player,, as far as I can tell.
What a player might even develop in a game model like this is a superficial appreciation for the benefits of lockpicking — or knowledge of plants, or charisma — without ever trying the skills out herself. Games continuing to work in this model could end up developing attitudes in students which are profoundly unhealthy for future learning, rather than encouraging positive attitudes towards learning, testing hypotheses, and other benefits which Gee suggests games foster. (I should note that Gee generally does not seem to be suggesting ways in which games can be used for educational purposes. Rather, he is talking about the learning that goes on in games, as they stand, to point up the ways in which contemporary schools fail to present good learning opportunities. It’s my own interests which are leading me to apply his ideas to the possibility of developing better educational games.)
There have got to be ways around this problem. One of them is probably incorporating simulations into games, as I suggested earlier. I’m pretty much finding it tricky, though, to come up with ways in which a game might reward or even assess academic ways of thinking. Getting students to transfer skills used in games to real life is a whole ‘nother can of worms…
Cited in this essay:
Bransford, John, Ann Brown, and Rodney Cocking. How People Learn.
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
