Groupe Compas

This is a book of collected essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy.
The main point Gees makes about video games is that “good learning principles are built into their very designs … Many of these principles -with or without a game -could well be used in schools to get students to learn things like science, but too often today schools are centered on skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning“. (p. 2)

“I care about these matters both as a cognitive scientists and as a gamer. I believe that we can make school and workplace learning better if we pay attentionto good computer and video games. this does not necessarily mean using game technologies in school and at work, though thai is something I advocate. It means applying the fruitful principles of learning that good game designers have hit on, whether or not we use a game as a carrier of these principles.” (p. 29)

Gee hence asserts that learning principles embodied by (good) video games aresupported by learning sciences, but only few sources are cited, which does not really count as a deep analysis of the results obtained by learning sciences (cognitive and neurosciences devoted to the study of learning processes) - additionally this is a rather young domain of research, and straight indications for implementation of learning principles into education are rare and quite general.

Let us have a view on the main tenants of Gee’s position about games and their relationship to learning and the human mind.

Video games are not bad or good per se

A tenant of Gee’s position is the statement that video games are not bad or good per se. This issue is mainly raised by those who criticize video games on the ground of their violent contents (and risk of violence arousal), or on the ground of social isolation from peers.
“…video games - like any other technology - are neither good nor bad all by themselves. It all depends on how they are palyed and the social contexts in which they are played. Effects (good or bad) flow not from the game but from game + context; played strategically, with reflective interactions with partners and peers, they have good cognitive effects for children. Played as babysitters by children from violent homes, they are bad“. (p. 3)
The same, asserts Gee, is true for books. Not to say that “in a world in which millions of people across the globe are dying in real wars, many of them civil wars, it is surely a luxury that we can worry about little boys getting excited for ten minutes after playing a shooter.” (p. 11)
Gee is referring to studies, like the ones conduced by Anderson, that show that arousal and violence shortly raises after playing violent video games, with no proofs concerning long lasting effects or effects in real life (outside the test lab). As a matter of fact, says Gee, people respond emotionally to fiction as if its contents where true, but just as if. We all know that we can cry in a cinema theater, but not run away for the police. The reason, says Gee, “is relatively simple: action requires the cooperation of our affective (emotional) responses and our higher-order thought processes and, at the level of conscious control and awareness, all but the very sick know a movie or a game is not reality.” (p. 15)
Gee does not really address the issue of addiction, but with this meaningful sentence: “But then, I will say, there are escapes that lead nowhere, like hard drugs, and escapes like scholarly reflection and gaming that can lead to the imagination of new worlds, new possibilities to deal with those perils and pitfalls, new possibilities for better lives for everyone. Our emotions and imagination - our souls - need food for the journey ahead.” (p. 12)
It is interesting hence, that instructions and knowledge about the effects of video games can not only come from direct, lab tests (which do not say much about effects in real life), but also from observation and explanation of cognitive functions related, say, to the use of fiction.

Good video games

However, the video game must have certain characteristics that define it as a ‘good video game’. Only good video games are good for the soul, as Gee expresses himself. So: what is in a good video game?

“So the question is: How do good game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex and difficult games? The answer, I believe, is this: the designers of many good games have hit on profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning. They have had to, since games that were bad at getting themselves learned didn’t get played and the companies that made them lost money. … Good game designers are practical  theoreticians of learning, since what makes games deep is that players are exercising their learning muscles, though often without knowing it and without having to pay overt attention to the matter.” (p. 29)

The description of video games in terms of their ‘learning’ structure is one of the big contributions that Gee brings into the debate about video games and education. First of all, “good video games give people pleasures … connected to control, agency, and meaningfulness. But good games are problem-solving spaces that create deep learning, learning that is better than we often see today in our schools. Pleasure and learning: For most people these two don’t seem to go together. But that is a mistruth we have picked up at school, where we have been taught that pleasure is fun and learning is work, and thus that work is not fun (Gee 2004). But in fact, good video games are hard work and deep fun. So is good learning in other contexts.” (p. 10). For instance, in professional activities, which, according to Gee, share many point in common with video games.

Let us see the principles of learning that, according to Gee, are built into good video games:

1. Good learning requires that learning feel like active agents. And, in fact, in a video game, players make things happen.
2. Different styles of learning work better for different people. And in fact, some games let players customize the game to fit their learning and playing styles or at least they allow different styles of learning.
3. Deep learning requires an extended commitment which is recruited when people take on a new identity they value and in which they become heavily invested. And in fact, good games offer players identities  that trigger a deep investment.
4. For humans perception and action are deeply interconnected. And video games inherently involve action.
5. The problems learners face early on are crucial and should be well-designed to lead them to hypotheses that work well, not just on these problems, but as aspects of the solutions of later, harder problems, as well. And problems in good games are well ordered…early problems are designed to lead players to form good guesses about how to proceed when they face harder problems. This is an important issue about constructionism, free exploration and other issue related to modern pedagogy. According to Gee, in fact, this is not the good alternative to instructional methods, since models are necessary guides to good exploration: “Learners are novices. Leaving them to float amidst rich experiences with no guidance only triggers human beings’ great penchant for finding creative but spurious patterns and generalizations that send learners down garden paths… The fruitful patterns of generalizations in any domain are the ones that are best recognized by those who already know how to look at the domain, know how the complex variables at play in the domain relate and inter-relate to each other.” (p. 34)
6. Learning works best when new challenges are pleasantly frustrating in the sense of being felt by learners to be at the outer edge of, but within, their ‘regime of competence’. That is, these challenges feel hard, but doable. Furthermore, learners feel - and get evidence - that their effort is paying off in the sense that they can see, even when they fail, how and if they are making progress. And in fact, good video games adjust challenges and give feedback in such a way that different players feel the game is challenging but doable… There are no ’special’ learners when it comes to video games.
7. Expertise is formed in any area by repeated cycles of learners practicing skills until they are nearly automatic, then having those skills fail in ways that cause learners  to have to think again and learn anew (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). And good games support exactly this cycle of expertise.
8. Humans are poor at using verbal information…They use this verbal information best when it is given just in time (when they can put it to use) and on demand( when they feel they need it). This is what good video games do: Players don’t need to read a manual to start, but can use the manual as a reference after they have played a while … Game manuals, just like science text books, make little sense if one tries to read them before having played the game. Playing the game is not, for Gee, just a matter of putting one’s hand on; it is also a matter of familiarity with a certain language (for instance scientific, technical, academic language, which is a characteristics of science in general, and has specific words, practices, styles for each science); reading a textbook with no cognition of these interrelations of languages and practices, and with no contextual information (how words are used, in what kind of experiments or for what kind of problems to be solved), then the textbook is just a confusing amount of words. This is what Gee refers to when he speaks of ’situated knowledge’ and language.
9. Fish tanks: models that allow learners to grasp the critical variables of a complex system. Fish tanks are good for learning: if we create simplified systems, stressing a few key variables and their interactions, learners who would be otherwise overwhelmed by a complex system … get to seem some basic relationships at work and take the fist steps towards their eventual mastery of the real system (e.g. they begin to know what to pay attention to)… Good games offer players fish tanks, either as tutorial or as their first level or two… With today’s capacity to build simulations, there is no excuse for the lack of fish tanks in schools.
10. Sandboxes are safe places where one can learn to manage more complex situations, by  experiencing in similar but ‘protected’ conditions: if learners are put into a situation that feels like the real thing, but with risks and dangers greatly mitigated, they can learn well and still feel a sense of authenticity. As in the case of fish tanks, tutorials or levels one and two are conceived as fish tanks: the player becomes competent by experiencing the world of the game in safe conditions, simple levels that they can manage. Additionally, these fish tanks and sandboxes do not look like manuals, they are the game: one learns to go move further by playing and not by instruction. One can recall information when needed, fit the level of difficulty of the game (tutorial) to her needs. Hence, tutorial is un supervised, customized, in context, and fun.
11. People learn and practice skills best (and practice is necessary in order to gain mastery) when they see a set of related skills as a strategy to accomplish goals they want to accomplish. In other words, the boring repetition of an exercise becomes fun when they see the goal first, as it happens with games.
12. People learn skills, strategies, and ideas best when they see how they fit into an overall larger system to which they can give meaning. And players normally feel what goes and what goes not in the world of the game.
13. Humans do not usually think through general definitions and logical principles but in terms of their experiences, of what they have seen and done. And this is the main principle of video games. This principle is related to the just in time and on demand principle.

Video games are good models for describing the functioning of the human; this is the reason why they are good tools for learning

Gee grounds his assert that “games act like  the human mind and are a good place to study and produce human thinking and learning” (p. 23) on studies conduced by L. Barsalou, and in particular on Barsalou’s idea that “comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare agents for situated action” (Barsalou, 1999). In the same way, games are models of some world, hence simulations; and they are aimed at action. So, games are good metaphors for describing the human mind as it is conceived by contemporary cognitive science, as the computer metaphor has been associated to mind as described by classical cognitive science and AI.

Video games are social spaces for learning (affinity spaces) technical language

Video games are not solitary activities for Gee. Rather, even solitary games, create affinity spaces where learners meet and exchange their knowledge because they share the same interest, and not because of gender, race, social affinities. The language that is used for sharing this kind of information, or even for playing, is a specialistic one, rather complex, and in any case it is not common language. Hence, it works as a training for academic, technical languages. And the mastery of these languages is the key for the access to science and to good results at school.