What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy

ABSTRACT

Good computer and video games like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Pikmin, Rise of Nations, Neverwinter Nights, and Xenosaga: Episode 1 are learning machines. They get themselves learned and learned well, so that they get played long and hard by a great many people. This is how they and their designers survive and perpetuate themselves. If a game cannot be learned and even mastered at a certain level, it won't get played by enough people, and the company that makes it will go broke. Good learning in games is a capitalist-driven Darwinian process of selection of the fittest. Of course, game designers could have solved their learning problems by making games shorter and easier, by dumbing them down, so to speak. But most gamers don't want short and easy games. Thus, designers face and largely solve an intriguing educational dilemma, one also faced by schools and workplaces: how to get people, often young people, to learn and master something that is long and challenging--and enjoy it, to boot.

REFERENCES

• 1: BARSALOU, L. W. 1999. Language comprehension: Archival memory or preparation for situated action. Discourse Process. 28 (1999), 61-80.
• 2: BEREITER, C. AND SCARDAMALIA, M. 1993. Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise. Open Court, Chicago.
• 3: BROWN, A. L. 1994. The advancement of learning. Eduational Res. 23 (1994), 4-12.
• 4: BROWN, A. L., COLLINS, A., AND DUGUID 1989. Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Res. 18 (1989), 32-42.
• 5: BRUER, J. T. 1993. Schools for Rhought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• 6: Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1996
• 7: Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford University Press, 2003
• 8: COGNITION AND TECHNOLOGY GROUP AT VANDERBILT. 1997. The Jasper Project: Lessons in Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment, and Professional Development. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ.
• 9: DISESSA, A. A. 2000. Changing Minds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
• 10: ELMAN, J. 1991. Incremental learning, or the importance of starting small. Tech. Rep. 9101, Center for Research in Language, Univ. of California at San Diego.
• 11: GLENBERG, A. M. AND ROBERTSON, D. A. 1999. Indexical understanding of instructions. Discourse Process. 28 (1999), 1-26.
• 12: LAVE, J. 1996. Teaching, as learning, in practice. Mind, Culture, and Activity 3 (1996), 149-164.
• 13: LAVE, J. AND WENGER, E. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
• 14: NEW LONDON GROUP. 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Rev. 66 (1996), 60-92.
• 15: PELLIGRINO, J. W., CHUDOWSKY, N., AND GLASER, R. 2001. Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.
• 16: Etienne Wenger , Richard McDermott , William Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, 2002

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.1 Computer Uses in Education

Keywords:
education, games, learning, literacy