THINK THERE'S LITTLE GOOD IN VIDEO GAMES? THINK AGAIN

Saturday, November 29, 2003

What do people learn from playing video games?

If your answer is "nothing much" -- or "nothing good" -- James Paul Gee would like to change your mind.

Gee is a professor of reading in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His specialties in the field of linguistics are literacy and the social aspects of learning.

Where do the video games come in? As with many of us whose formal education ended pre-computer, through our children. Gee's 4-year-old son was playing a game whose purpose is to help kids get over their fear of the dark, and Dad wanted to help. (Dad's help is no longer welcome, Dad notes ruefully.)

Gee tried to play the game himself, and found it surprisingly difficult. But it couldn't be that hard, could it? After all, "a 4-year-old was willing to put in this time and face this challenge -- and enjoy it, to boot."

Schoolwork seldom elicits a similar degree of challenge and perseverance, as both teachers and professors of education know, so Gee decided to play some more games and try to figure out what was going on.

In his recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he examines how general principles of education apply in the design and the playing of games.

Apart from a brief family fixation with a Pac-Man knockoff that came with our first PC around 1980, I didn't and don't play video games. That's not a policy, it's just a fact. But my son does -- he also writes them -- and I can testify to the fierce concentration he puts into solving a new game and the exhilaration he experiences when he succeeds in deciphering a piece of the puzzle.

What does Betsy Ross have to do with the escaping from the tentacle creatures? Ha-ha, that would be telling!

Video games are long and hard, with many taking 50 or 100 hours to complete. Yet good ones sell millions of copies. Gee says that the video-game industry makes as much money every year as the movie industry, or more.

"You cannot play a game if you cannot learn it," Gee notes, and if no one plays a game it doesn't sell. "Of course designers could keep making the games shorter and simpler to facilitate learning. That's often what schools do."

In fact, though, game designers keep making the games harder, yet people are able to learn them. That's because, Gee suggests, games evolve in a Darwinian competition where the only survivors are the games that rely on sound principles of learning. Not that the designers necessarily know anything at all about theories of learning; they just know what works for them as players of games.

The game world provides lots of opportunities to practice the basic skills of the game, where success is rewarded at every level of skill and the next step, though challenging, is always within reach. There's as little overt "telling" as possible, and purely textual instruction -- the game manual -- only makes explicit what the learner has already internalized.

The theories of learning embedded in the video games children play, Gee believes, are often better than the ones that shape the practices of the schools they attend.

Gee also emphasizes the social aspect of playing games. Increasingly games are played online with many other people. One such game is EverQuest, a role-playing game which had (at the time Gee was writing) more than 375,000 subscribers. Gee lets a 15-year-old player he calls Adrian recount the time his character in the game was killed, and he enlisted the help of other players in the real world whom he'd come to know to have their characters rescue his character (as is possible under the game rules, if the rescue comes in time).

Adrian adds, "I spend more time now tinkering with games and making games myself than I do actually playing them." When he goes on to college to major in computer science, Gee says, "he has already mastered most of the material in many of the courses he will need to take."

It can work that way. My son's career as a programmer had its origins in his frustration with a computer game called Hack. So his father brought home a copy of the source code, and told him if he didn't like the game the way it was, he should fix it. He was 8, but he figured it out, and by the time he was done he already knew a lot about writing code.

It was just like playing a game.