Video Games in the Classroom?

Our guest expert today is James Paul Gee, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mr. Gee's latest book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, explores the ways that video games can provide in-depth educational opportunities for children, teenagers, and college-students. Parents everywhere, rejoice!

Mr. Gee will answer some of your questions here. Welcome, Mr. Gee.

OK, let's get started....

Jones, S., (July 6, 2003). Let the Games Begin: Games and Entertainment Among College Students." Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Durkin, K., & Barber, B., (2002). Not so doomed: computer game play and positive adolescent development. Applied Developmental Psychology, 23, 373-392.

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Fischer, G., (2003). Beyond "Couch Potatoes": From Consumers to Designers and Active Contributors. First Monday (www.firstmonday.org), Issue 7_12.

However, I would not want to claim that "video games have positive effects," but rather that "video games used in different ways have different effects." We learned long ago that a technology -- television, for example -- is not "good" or "bad." When children watch television passively, it is not particularly good for them, but when they watch with adults who get them to think and talk about what they are watching, then it can be good for them. I argue that video games can be good for children and adults when played actively and thought about at a meta-level in terms of their design features and the sorts of interactions they allow or encourage.

Furthermore, I don't claim that there is now lots of research showing games are good for deeper purposes. Rather, I argue that game technology has a great potential to be useful in getting people to learn and think about things (socially, cognitively, and morally). We need to study this potential and make use of it in new settings beyond the commercial markets to which most games are directed. This enterprise is just beginning. It has taken us years of research to sort out the uses and effects of literacy as a technology in its various social, historical, and cognitive settings and situations. So the questions really are these: Is game technology a worthwhile thing to study? Does it hold potential for spreading to contexts outside gaming?

What is most powerful about video games, I would argue, is that the "consumer" (player, learner) is also a "producer." Players actively co-create the virtual worlds of games by the decisions they make and the actions they take. In opened-ended games, the game is different for every player. Further, they can fairly easily build extensions and modifications to many games.

I work for Becta, the UK Government's education and ICT agency. We've been looking at the potential of games in education and providing advice to teachers on this subejct (eg. see http://www.ictadvice.org.uk/index.php?section=tl&cat=003&rid=1804).

I certainly agree that there is educational potential in many aspects of games, and that it is also important to take more account of what children are doing with technology, including games, outside of the classroom.

One of the concerns I have is that what is going on in a game and what a player is actually doing may be misunderstood. As a personal example, setting up an empire based on trade in Medieval Total War may indicate that I have been exposed to information about Medieval trading practices, types of boats, key imports and exports, etc. What I am actually doing is learning the parameters and processes of the game itself (strategies). The details about what objects I may be using to generate credits is unimportant -- they could be from Medieval Europe, or from Mars. Both factual elements and strategising have educational potential, but I can see assumptions being made about what is being learned.

What ideas and advice would you give to teachers who want to encourage students to put games based strategies into other contexts? How might they more easily recognise what kinds of learning a game may actually be supporting?

James Gee:
    You hit on a key issue: content. We don't want to rush too soon to ask questions like "Is this game teaching (academic) history or biology?". Games are first and foremost teaching the player how to play the game and ultimately master them. But a good game -- and Medieval Total War is a great game -- are teaching players (if they are playing them reflectively) how to think about complex systems. Thinking reflectively and well about complex systems is a crucial skill for the modern world where workplaces, communities, government, global institutions, and the environment are all complex systems. In such systems a great many things interact with each other and the consequences of local actions can readily radiate outward to have quite unanticipated consequences. Another thing good games are about -- and this, too, is crucial for the modern world -- is design. A game is an intricately designed world that encourages certain sorts of actions, values, and interactions. At the same time, the player co-designs the game's world by the actions and decisions the player takes. The player brings the world alive and in open-ended games every player ends up with a different world and having played a different game. Players can also use software that comes with the game to design new scenarios, levels, and even make modifications to the game. Many of the complex systems we interact with in the modern world (e.g., new capitalist workplaces) are designed to encourage certain sorts of actions and interactions, for better or worse. So, first of all, whether dealing with children or college students, we want to encourage them to think reflectively and act reflectively in regard to both the design of the game and the complex system that the game's world constitutes. Games like Rise of Nations, Civilization, Morrowind, and StarWars: Knights of the Old Republic already lend themselves to this sort of reflection.

Next, we need to design games that build in yet more of the thinking about design and complex systems that we want to encourage. In our rush to design games to teach content (e.g., biology or history) we have missed the fact that this goal is readily in reach. We then want to move on with a curriculum that encourages design thinking and reflection on complex systems more generally.

Finally, we need to design games that get students to think about, reflect on, and interact with knowledge domains like biology and history. But here I would not want to see games used largely to teach facts. The power of game is to let people experience something like science as a human enterprise that involves facts, concepts, and theories, but also characteristic sorts of actions, interactions, values, dilemmas, and decisions.

One area where games have great potential is in creating worlds in which people can reflect on and know what it is like to act on certain sorts of moral ideas. Churches and ideologically-driven organizations (like the Neo-Nazi organization, National Alliance) already use games to embed people in worlds that reflect certain sorts of moral views. We educators are badly behind the curve here. I would love to see a game that got players to reflect on the sorts of values and decisions embedded in the work of being a scientist. Too often our students fail to see knowledge production as morally laden, but it is and that is what gives it value. (By the way, StarWars: Knights of the Old Republic can lead to a good deal of interesting reflection on identity and responsibility for past deeds.)

Let me also say that a teacher of small children could use a game like Animal Crossing off the shelf to enhance language and literacy learner for native and non-native English-speaking children. If the game were enhanced just a bit for these purposes, it would be a nearly ideal language and literacy tool, but even as is, it could be very motivating and useful. But here -- and when using all games -- we need an active teacher designing tools around the game that come to constitute a curriculum.

Additionally, I think academics need to start thinking about producing these games as collaborations within and across schools and universities. We have the tools and knowledge--we just need to network better, I think.

I myself do not think games are a panacea or that they should be viewed as stand-alone educators. Rather, I would like to see them as part of a whole curriculum, connected to texts, Internet sites, discussions, and lectures. While games can most certainly be used to teach basic skills and facts, I believe their true strength is getting people to think and act at a conceptual level and to engage in meta-level reflection.

Scholars in an area usually find what they do entertaining and highly aesthetic. When I was a theoretical linguist engaged in research on syntactic theory, I found this area amazingly entertaining and beautiful, but, of course, also challenging. I want students to come to see why we think what we do is entertaining and beautiful, something undergraduates rarely sense. Good video games are long and challenging, yet young people enjoy learning them and put up with lots of failures in the game to do so. We need to recruit such motivation in what we teach, as well.

These technologies utilize scripts which the agent uses to engage the learning in tutoring dialogs, for instance. These scripts are actually text files, in the case of AutoTutor, and we have developed a tool to simplify the process of creating them.

Teachers could easily create scripts that would address deficiencies in the game as it exists and to address potential misconceptions. Since these technologies are separate, they could be run alongside the game. This would be a quick and effective way of modifying the game without having to have access to the underlying technology and programming skills.

Could you give your views on computer games as an emergent form of multimodal text and perhaps describe how you respond to those who argue that "basic skills" are what's needed?

James Gee:
    First, I want to say "Amen" to the comments that precede your question. Video games are often long, complex, and challenging. Yet players have to learn them and enjoy learning them or the companies that make them go broke. Games often do a better job at getting themselves learned than schools do in getting things like science learned. Rather than reject games, we can learn things about learning from them. There a number of things they get right. One of these is how they handle language and (written) texts. Humans are very poor at retaining and using lots of verbal information they have received out of any context of application or use, though we do this to kids in school all the time. Games give verbal information "just in time" when it can be used and often, too, "on demand", so that players can get it when and if they want it. They also allow players to access verbal information (often what they have already seen "just in time") later when they want to reflect on it or review what they have already encountered. But even more importantly, games almost always relate verbal information to both visual images and to actions in a world that the information relates to. Some recent work in cognitive science has argued that, for human beings, the meanings of language in actual use (oral and written) is closely tied to both perception and to affordanaces for action. When language is decontextualized from perception and embodied action it is hard for humans to fully understand it. Furthermore, people can understand things more generally when they have first experienced lots of concrete examples tied to perception and action. Yet, in school, we often start with the general (an equation, for example) and move to the concrete, rather than vice-versa. There is an effect anyone can see if they play games. Very often the manual that comes with the game is inexplicable-not to mention boring-when read before one has played the game a while. However, if you play the game for a while and then pick up the manual, what was abstruse becomes lucidly clear because now all that technical language can be spelled out in terms of specific meanings tied to situations and experiences. In my view, exactly the same is true of a science text book in school.

Let me say something about "basic skills," as well. Of course, when you learn to play a game or a genre of game (e.g., first-person shooters or role-playing games), you have to master both basic and less-basic skills. If you look at a game like Rise of Nations, you will see that good games always "teach" basic skills as part and parcel of playing the game or a simplified version of the game. They also always introduce skills not in isolation, but together in sets that constitute strategies for accomplishing certain goals and tasks that the player clearly wants to accomplish (and knows why). This, too, is a far more effective way to teach "basic skills" than is on offer in some schools.

Video games most certainly represent the emergence of a new form of multimodal "literacy", a new way of integrating words, images, sound, actions, values, decisions, and interactions. It is a way that many young people today find natural. It is also a way that creates fairly optimal conditions for learning, even learning tied to written texts.

In a recent study, we also found anecdotal evidence that mysteries and adventure games tend to appeal equally to boys and girls.

What are your thoughts on these different types of games and their learning potential?

James Gee:
    I think you are right about the gender issue. Unfortunately, adventure games have fallen on hard times in the U.S., though they remain popular in other countries. The wonderful game Syberia was, however, very popular here (and its sequel looks like it will be great). Shooters can involve a great deal of thought, however. Games like Metal Solid Gear involve a great deal of stealth and planning and involve pretty complex plots. As I mentioned in another answer, StarWars: Knights of the Old Republic is also a good game for reflection. But, yes, if we are going to build games that stress reflection and meta-level thinking (about content, design, and complex systems), we will want games that downplay shooting, and stress a world of talk, actions, decisions, and interactions. I know many people who loved living in Morrowind even when they were not fighting. We need to build worlds -- including persistent worlds -- that people love to live in.

When the powers that be say things at odds with their own profession's core teachings, something strange must be happening. My question: Is the thing that is happening Kuhnian? Are we all fighters on some paradigm front?

James Gee:
    In my view, game technology has the potential to bring major changes to lots of academic areas, to schools and workplaces, and to society at large. But there is a major generational divide here. Baby boomers (like me) control academic areas and other institutions, but are not embedded in the experiences and technologies that younger people today are, especially the so-called "Millennials" (kids starting college and down to babies). Popular culture today -- things like Pokemon for young children -- is quite complex, far more so than the popular culture of my youth. Video games are often long, challenging, and demanding, and yet they are very much part of popular culture. We baby-boomers are now immigrants in a world in which our children are natives.

Your question certainly foregrounds a major paradox in your field and others. We take behaviors in experiments to be "real" and "natural", but not behaviors in "virtual worlds" like those in games. But, of course, experiments in laboratories are very much created worlds, and often far less natural than the worlds one experiences in games and simulations. In my view, human beings are always behaving under the terms of some socially-situated identity. At any moment, a person is being (one or more of) a student, teacher, husband, wife, worker, friend, father, African-American, baseball fan, etc., through a nearly endless list. We react to each other in our interactions in terms of such identities. Thus, too, behavior cannot be understand apart from how people think about, enact, and recognize such identities. Without doubt people make different economic decisions based on which identity they are enacting at the time. Are they being a frugal head of family or an enthusiastic collector of old cars? So, too, in school, the child who sees him or herself as "being a scientist" in science class is liable to behave differently than the student who sees him or herself as simply "doing school" for a grade. Games allow people to experience and act in terms of many more such identities than ever before. Indeed, in massively multiple-player games they do so with other real people. This is an extension of our normal human behavior, but a massive one. Only when you have played games seriously are you aware that the character you play, in role-playing games most especially, is a blend of your virtual identity in the game world and one or more of your identities in the real world. This is all the more true in massively multiple-player games. While your fellow economists may not take these worlds seriously, organizations like the Army most certainly do, as they move a good deal of their training to game-like simulations "played" with other people.

We just completed a year-long study with 5th & 6th graders in which we studied game preferences, communication style, and attitude toward comptuers and games. At the beginning of the study, girls felt technology was less appropriate for girls than for boys. After playing and designing computer games, they felt technology was just as appropriate for girls as for boys.

What are your thoughts on gender and game play? Do we need to design different games for girls and boys, or just provide more structured opportunities for girls and games? If the former, why aren't the "girl" games like Barbie, Purple Moon, etc. more popular with girls?

James Gee:
    If you look at anime in Japan, they make programs for boys, for girls, and ones that attract both audiences together. When the mixed programs play here, often the female content is taken out. We have found in interviews that often girls played earlier in life and at some point boys took the controllers out of their hands (and society said this was good). A class I teach here on games draws nearly only women and they come to love playing the shooting games. In games like Diablo or Dungeon Seige, they loved killing, shopping (for armor and stuff), and exploring (and, as "good students" were thrilled they could "cheat"). So, the answer in part is that women would like lots of the games now out if they played them in the right setting.

But I also believe lots of us want games with more conversation, interaction, exploring, decision making, and less killing -- not just women. The game Fable -- not due out for a while -- looks like it may be very promising in this respect. Let me say that I think that access to technology, most certainly including game technology, will be a great dividing line in the future between men and women, rich and poor, if we don't work hard on this issue. Today, privileged families know well how to use computers, games, DVDs, books, and activities in an integrated way to accelerate their children's cognitive growth.

http://www.jogd.com/

http://www.nasaga.org

http://www.informs-cs.org/

http://www.game-research.com/

http://www.game-culture.com/

http://www.ludology.org/

http://liquidnarrative.csc.ncsu.edu/projects.html

But, yes, games of the caliber of today's commercial games can be expensive, especially when the company that makes an "educational" game is not going to make as big a profit. Cost are, however, going down and modifications could readily be made to existing games (as the Army sometimes does). The key thing here, to me, is getting real game designers (not academics) and academics together and on the same page (privileging neither side, but truly integrating them).

I have already answered a question about the expense issue. But we are only going to get good "educational" games when we first and foremost concentrate on getting good games and ultimately blur the line between learning and playing. (This is why little kids are so good at learning in informal settings.)

Good games that had good educational aspects would sell well, though not at the level of mass-market game. My own belief -- take it as free business advice from someone who is not a business person -- is that people ought to build good games for the home-schooling movement and for families seeking to help their children at home (where price is not the main issue). Then they should move to schools.

When it came to the Web content that we were studying, it came as no surprise that kids seemed most approving of the things they considered to be games ... but the good news for designers is that it seems kids are willing to consider a lot of different types of things "games." Interactive components that allow for some type of competition (e.g., for kids to find the answer in the shortest period of time, collecting the most cards, or coming up with the best solution to a problem) can very easily take on a game-like appearance to younger users (and most adults, for that matter).

I think its important for designers to think out of the box when formulating educational games ... often the best educational games are those that many may not immediately call "games" but rather those things that invite a more general type of goal-directed play. The folks at Lucas Learning Arts did a great job with some of their Star Wars-related educational programs. Are there other good examples of designers that have thought out of the box or expanded the boundaries of educational-game design to include new formats?

James Gee:
    You make a great point. Furthermore, different people like very different sorts of games and use them in very different ways. This is one of their great strengths. There are lots of complaints today that commercial games are becoming too similar and not innovating enough. But there are examples: Animal Crossing for young kids; Black and White for older players; Fable, due out in a while. But you are right -- we need to think outside the box here. This is another reason to start a game-studies movement. It might even help the game companies innovate. There is also an active "movie making" movement using game technology, as well as new art movements built around games and game technologies. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the sorts of games you are discussing, and so I must just thank you for leading us to this issue.

Whew! What a chat! People here tell me that this has been the longest, most active chat we've had at the Chronicle. What does that say about the future of games in academe?

Unfortunately, we're out of time. I want to thank Jim Gee for spending so much time with us. And I want to thank all of you for contributing questions and comments to this discussion. It will likely continue -- at conferences and in classrooms -- well into the future.