[BLOG] What Video Games have to teach us about Learning and Literacy

GnomeQueenGnomeQueen The Lulz QueenMountain Dew Mouth Icrontian
edited November -1 in Community
This is a book review I did for my English 481 class. I wrote it rather last minute, and contemplated editing it for your viewage, but I'm simply too busy. I don't know if any of you will find it interesting, but it is somewhat about video games, so.

What Video Games have to teach us about Learning and Literacy


For my book review, I read What Video games have to teach us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. This book takes an analytical viewpoint of the mechanics of video games and the theories behind them, and how these theories could be applied to the field of education. Gee has chosen this viewpoint in order to pull out the principles behind these games so that they can be applied to the field of education, because games capture the attention of children in a way that school never has. While explaining these theories, Gee also concentrates on showing that students are learning while playing video games, not simply having fun.

Gee starts out with a question- he wants to know why games, which are often long and challenging are so successful- and in fact, what the particular traits of games are that cause game players to demand that they be so challenging and so long, and often require a steep learning curve. Schools ask students to perform tasks that may be challenging but are short compared to video games, but students rarely endeavor to perform these tasks the way they try to figure out games. He asks, " How are good video games designed to enhance getting themselves learned- learned well so people can play and enjoy them even when they are long and hard? What we are really looking for here is the theory of human learning built into good video games. This theory is built into not just the games but also games and the gaming community," (Gee, 4).

The book is divided up into many chapters, each of which is devoted to several of the thirty six learning principles that Gee has found in games. In addition to this, Gee seeks to show that learning is situated in society at all times, and does not take part in a vacuum, they way that schools often try to cause it to be. This is something that we have talked a lot about in class- that we need to teach writing and writing devices within a certain context, and that teaching it in a vacuum does little good. Gee calls this "Situated cognition," (Gee, 9). Gee also tries to introduce through his book New Literacy Studies "A body of work that argues that reading and writing should be viewed not only as mental achievements going on inside people's heads, but also as social and cultural practices with economic, historical, and political implications," (Gee, 9). Lastly, Gee states that he wishes to emphasize the fact that humans are patten recognizers, and that they learn best when these patterns can be connected in wit h the patterns of their everyday lives, and not situated in a separate space.

One of the important ways that Gee asks readers to think about video games is by introducing the term "semiotic domain." Gee uses this term to describe the entire vat of knowledge that we must have to read a particular piece of literature. He also uses this term to point out how almost all literature is multimodal, and requires a bigger semiotic domain than we often like to attribute. He uses the example of a newspaper, which requires readers not only to decode text, but also pictures and graphs, and if you go on the newspaper's website, mostly likely video as well. Readers must exist within the newspaper's semiotic domain to understand everything that it is trying to convey, which applies to video games as well. Video games are a form of literature the same as newspapers, they just have a different semiotic domain. Going along with this domain is the issue of content. Gee says that many people don't think that video games are teaching children anything because they don't convey the content that is learned in schools. Playing "Lara Croft: The Last Revelation" doesn't teach students about Huck Finn or The Great Gatsby, but it does encourage students to take take on "the same psychological space as Lara," in a way that just reading a story in an academic context may not, (117, Gee). Gee used that particular game to show how learning in classrooms should work- the game starts you out in a fun but low risk area, where you can learn the tenants of the game without worrying about dying or facing dangerous enemies right away. Since you are still playing the game though, the learning is situated in the right context to fully absorb and apply the information, what Gee calls, "the context of embodied action," (120).

Gee offers a lot of interesting thoughts and theories in this book, but it wasn't quite what I expected. I was hoping for a book that would give me information about how video games could directly be used for education or in a classroom setting, and instead, he took the theories behind the learning of video games and talked about how those would be good for education. This is important to do to, and Gee comes up with a lot of theories and explanations that do make a good deal of sense. Admittedly, I've heard many of these principles before, but Gee, explaining them in the context of video games, has shown them to me in a way I've never seen before. At the same time though, I'm having a hard time concentrating on the core theories of the book because I am disappointed in the lack of practical application. While all of Gee's principles make sense- and some of them could be easily implemented in the classroom- most of them leave me wondering exactly how I would use them, especially because Gee's examples are about video games, and not the classroom. Perhaps, ironically, that might be Gee's greatest weakness here- in using video games, Gee shows us learning principles in a way that we may not have seen before, but also limits our view to those games. As far as teaching writing goes, the book does have some interesting principles in that light, but what should also be noted is that Gee does state that video games cater more to the scientific mindset than necessarily the literary, though there is a good deal of reading done in these games, as well as piecing together bits of information into a cohesive story- perhaps the same way a book would, but in a multimodal way. Except perhaps in MMO's- Massive Multiple Online games, where many people play together through the internet and often communicate through text, little actual writing is done.

Overall, Gees shows video games in a new light, and many learning theories that could be helpful in the classroom. Perhaps more important to the gaming community and students that play games, it shows that video games do have a practical application and a usage, and they aren't simply a waste of time and space. The next step then, will be to situate video games in such a way that their learning potential can be truly realized.




Gee, Paul James. What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy. Palgrave
Macmillian. New York, 2007.





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