Professor James Paul Gee
shows the world the importance of video games
Think violent games
are harmful? Think again. James Paul Gee, a professor at the University of
Wisconsin, proves that we all need games in his new book, “What Video Games
Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.”
6am. The sun is
coming over the horizon. Five cops are on my tail, and a drug dealer just ran
away with my money. Life isn’t being kind to me right now, but in the next
five minutes, I’m going to make the boys in blue wish they had picked on
somebody else.
Then I’m going to track down
that drug dealer and get my money back, and take whatever drugs he happens to
be carrying.
And then, after all that,
I’m going to go online, visit a public message board and tell the world all
about it.
This is all possible – in a
legal, sane manner – because I am not actually doing these horrible things,
but playing the deep, intriguing, and surprisingly educating Grand Theft Auto:
Vice City. Any gamer will back me up on the “deep and intriguing” part of
that statement. But very few would believe that a violent video game, or even
a kiddie game, could be educating.
Chat with Professor James
Paul Gee for five minutes and your views will be changed. James Paul Gee is
the author of
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
It’s so simple, but not very obvious, especially when you think of “learning”
as being “school.” School is generally boring because it is taught in a
typical, unexciting fashion. Video games, on the other hand, teach us
incredible things that we, the players, don’t even realize.
James took time off from his
busy day to chat with us about his book and all of the amazing things we can
learn from video games.
There are a lot of paranoid
parents out there who will never believe in the positive things gained from
playing video games. What have you learned about games – both violent and
kid-friendly – that you could share with parents and perhaps make them
understand the importance of this new form of entertainment?
We have found that a great
many parents have no idea what their kid is doing with the computer or the
game machine. We have interviewed kids who have redesigned the family
computer, designed new maps and even made mods, designed Web sites, written
guides, and contracted relationships with people across the world through
games like StarCraft and the parents just say the kid is “in there
playing games.” Some of these kids are in college now majoring in computer
science. Games make kids smarter when they play them proactively, that is,
when they think about game design, how their own styles of play interact with
that design, how different strategies work, and how games relate to other
things like books, movies, and the world. Schools may not yet care about
this, but modern workplaces care about whether people can think about how
their environments are designed and can be re-designed to be better and more
productive.
How long have you been
studying video games? When did you first begin to see a connection between
video games, learning and literacy?
I started only two years ago
and, when I did, my fellow academics thought I was crazy. Now there is a gold
rush to study games and gaming. What got me into it was trying to play adult
games to better understand how and why my then six-year-old played games. I
was 53 when I began and was blown away by how long, challenging, and complex
games like Deus Ex were. Yet millions of people pay a lot of money to
buy them and they learn them very well, including kids who wouldn’t spend
twelve concentrated minutes really learning algebra in school. It dawned on
me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were
good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge
research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and
learning. Many of these principles could be used in schools to get kids to
learn things like science, but, too often today schools are returning to
skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning. Games are
good at getting themselves learned for good old Darwinian reasons, namely, the
ones that can’t get learned, don’t get bought and the companies that produce
them go broke (Suikoden III is a good example of a very good game that
does a poor job helping the player learn how to play it). What makes the
situation interesting is that game designers can’t make games easier to learn
by dumbing them down, since players want ever longer, more challenging, more
open-ended games.
What is it specifically
about video games that help people learn? Does it have more to do with the
gameplay than the story, the visual content or the characters?
My book covers 36 good
learning principles built into good games like System Shock 2, Rise
of Nations, Arcanum, or even Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation.
But there are many more. Let me just give a few examples. First, humans are
terrible at learning when you give them lots and lots of verbal information
ahead of time out of any context where it can be applied. Games give verbal
information “just in time” when and where it can be used and “on demand” as
the player realizes he or she needs it.
Second, good games stay
inside, but at the outer edge of the player’s growing competence, feeling
challenging, but “doable.” This creates a sense of pleasurable frustration.
Third, good games create what’s been called a “cycle of expertise” by giving
players well-designed problems on the basis of which they can form good
strategies, letting them practice these enough to routinize them, then
throwing a new problem at them that forces them to undo their now routinized
skills and think again before achieving, through more practice, a new and
higher routinized set of skills. Good games repeat this cycle again and
again—it’s the process by which experts are produced in any domain.
Final example: good games
solve the motivation problem by what I think is an actual biological effect.
When you operate a game character, you are manipulating something at a
distance (a virtual distance, in this case), much like operating a robot at a
distance, but in a much more fine-grained way. This makes humans feel that
their bodies and minds have actually been expanded into or entered that
distant space. Good games use this effect by attaching a virtual identity to
this expanded self that the player begins to care about in a powerful way.
This identity can then become a hook for freeing people up to think and learn
in new ways, including learning, or least thinking about, new values, belief
systems, and world views, as the Army realized in building America’s Army.
If you stick with it, The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind does this
brilliantly and people play the game very differently depending on the
different ways in which they have invested in their character. We would do
better at teaching science in school if kids really invested in a scientist
identity. But you have to make it happen, you can’t just say “preten.”
Is anything learned while
playing a game solely for its story? RPGs like Final Fantasy VII have drawn
people in almost entirely because of its story. How does this learning
experience differ from one that is had while playing a game entirely for its
gameplay?
Stories in video games work
very differently than do stories in books or movies, and we really don’t
understand well how they work, yet, because we keep treating games like
movies. In books and movies, the story is “top-down,” someone else has made
it and you discover it in the order and at the pace the designer has
determined. In games, stories are “bottom-up.” The player picks up bits and
pieces sometimes in an order and at a pace determined by the player.
Furthermore, the player has to choose when, where, and whether to try to put
the pieces together.
Often in a game you feel
like you are floating in a sea of partially digested details that have given
you a powerful sense of theme and image, but not always of linear plot (e.g.,
the wonderful Xenosaga: Episode 1). Even if there is a master plot, in
the midst of action you always feel in the middle of it and not on top of it.
This opens up whole new ways to get people to think, feel, and participate in
stories. In Final Fantasy X, I was totally taken by the changing
emotional relations among the characters and stunned when I found out some of
them were actually dead, because I had invested in them as having futures.
This mattered to me more than the plot. Games can get you to think of stories
as flows and not just plots. By the way, the ending of Deus Ex, where
you have to choose among three different ways in which the world should be
transformed, is a brilliant example of provoking thought about values and
world views. In the end, the really powerful learning in games, though, stems
from the integration of story and gameplay via world building.
How old should a child be
before he or she is allowed to play video games?
In my view—and I know it is
controversial—kids should be playing games from early on, three-years-old,
say. They should start with computer games like Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat,
Winnie the Pooh, Pajama Sam, and Spy Fox, initially
playing these games with the parent. They can then move on to games like
Pikmin, Animal Crossing, Zelda, and Age of Mythology.
But there is a proviso here. Parents must ensure that kids play games
proactively, that is, that they think about the design of the game, the types
of thinking and strategies it recruits, its relationship to other games,
books, movies, and the world around them. Kids should also be fully engaged
in other tasks, like drawing, writing, and social activities. Kids today very
often do just this. Blue’s Clues is a game, a show, books, and
activities. Six-year-old kids play Age of Mythology, take books out of
the school library on mythology, enact mythological characters in play and
drawing, and relate them to their favorite superhero characters. They also go
outdoors and play sports. We have had a hard time finding kids who don’t
multi-task in this way, unless they are in environments that don’t offer
support for this.
Besides your own personal
experiences, was any research conducted for this book? Did you talk to fellow
gamers, visit any Web sites or peruse any message boards?
First, I played lots of
games for hours and hours, on computers and platforms. You can tell when
people are writing about games and don’t play them. My graduate students are
required to play them, so are the students who take my course on video games
and education. I visited lots of game sites and boards, including
GameZone, which I still visit every day (it is one of my favorites).
And, my students and I interviewed game players from six to twenty years old.
I went to LAN parties on campus (where I was gratified to see that cultural
diversity is no problem—kids of every kind come there as gamers in a way you
just don’t see in other aspects of campus life). Not all of this is in the
book, since I wanted to do a second one on the social aspects of gaming, a
task I may leave to my students (one of whom is a very successful Princess and
leader in Lineage).
In your opinion, have there
been any violent games that went too far? Is there a line between learning
something good from a game and just blowing up something?
I haven’t played every
violent game, but I like Grand Theft Auto III (though a lot of the
violence I did was to myself driving) and love Mafia. As I said above,
there are two ways to play a game, you can play proactively and strategically
or just become a good button-masher. If you want to be strategic—both in
terms of the decisions you make and the ways you solve problems—Grand Theft
Auto III is subtle and amazing. I found the gang fights distasteful, so I
just didn’t trigger them. I went out of my way to see how little damage I
could do while still earning my living through crime. Such choices make the
game partly mine and not just the designer’s. Games allow you to accept a
given assumption (I have to earn a living through crime) and then see how you
personally would think, feel, and act.
Have you shared your video
game views with your students?
When I started, my graduate
students charged each other a quarter if anyone got me talking about games.
Now they all want to do research on games and we have a game lab where we can
all play. And so now it’s very often a case of them teaching me. I play
games all the time and own every platform. But as a baby-boomer, I am an
immigrant and the younger academics, as well as game designers, as natives,
will make the really big discoveries.
Do you feel that schools,
colleges and universities should begin using video games as a learning tool,
through discussion and literature or actual game-playing assignments?
Yes. But most companies
making games for school don’t get it. They think that pointing and clicking
is what makes a game or that what’s different is that kids operate at “twitch
speed.” What makes a game is an interactive world that the player partly
creates through his or her actions and decisions. Also, people are too hung
up about learning “content” in the sense of facts. What we need people to
learn is how to think deeply about complex systems (e.g., modern workplaces,
the environment, international relations, social interactions, cultures, etc.)
where everything interacts in complicated ways with everything else and bad
decisions can make for disasters. Games—not as stand-alone entities—but as
part of whole curricula—will eventually be crucial to this. People will live
in multiple worlds, leading multiple lives, learning in the powerful, but
informal ways that everyday life has always involved. But such powerful,
informal learning will, for the first time, come to school and marry formal
learning.
A lot of legendary game
developers feel that to be a truly great game developer, you must have many
interests in life, and do many things – not just play video games. Do you
agree with that view?
Yes—and it is true of good
academics, as well. Too many academics are trapped in a narrow world-view
determined by their specialty. That’s why they treat games like novels or
movies and miss the fact that they are very different.
What if a child (or adult)
has no other interests? Will liking video games – and only video games –
really prevent him or her from being just as creative as someone who likes
many different things?
Of course, there are always
exceptions, but, in general, any art form—and games are an art form—gains new
creativity and life from sources outside its boundaries. As small game
companies get bought up by big ones, we are in danger of games losing
creativity and becoming standardized. By the way, I know lots of
people—including game people—don’t think of games as an art form. But I defy
anyone to sit for hours in the worlds of Metroid Prime or The Legend
of Zelda: The Wind Waker and not see them as art. However, the art in a
video game is not pictures, it is the interaction of the player’s mind and
body with a visual world. When you are rolling through thorough strange
tunnels as a shinning ball in Metroid, it’s image-action art.
Thank you James for all of your
thought-provoking answers. It was great interviewing you.
For more information on What
Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, visit:
Palgrave Macmillan: Catalogue: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About
Learning and Literacy.
