Game Playing

    I am not a fan of role playing games. I'm the grandfather in Gee's book who says it's all a waste of time. Gee makes good points in his book and in the article for this week about game playing teaching people on how people learn. The tricky part is taking that information on how people learn together with something that is worth learning. We have a lot of game players in this class who went back to their old games and were amazed at how easy it was to pick up the old commands and remember the game. I guess it's a lot like riding a bike. You never forget. But with the cost of gas nowadays, riding a bike is a useful skill. Hitting the A button while depressing the green tab is not real useful.      
    Role playing games seem to have such contrived puzzles that take a convoluted logic to figure out, and they require you to have a spatial awareness of where you are in a 2d world. I have never been able to place myself in a game. I have to try and understand programmers minds all day long, and in reality that's what a role playing game is, trying to figure out the mind of the developer of the game. Looking for hidden objects in a made up world is not my idea of fun.
    Now you know what I thought of this whole game playing stuff when I began these readings and playing Myst. (I still haven't figured how to turn the power back on yet) I must thank John for providing me an article last week that makes me willing to change some of my ideas. The article pulls together the Boer War, the similarities to Britain at the beginning of the 20th Century and the U.S. at the beginning of the 21st, and reasons why the comparison is not valid. This one article helped me with my web site and my understanding of the learning concepts of this weeks readings. The article "Is America in Decline: Why the United States will Survive the Rise of the Rest" by Fareed Zakaria is in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs. Zakaria says that the well known statistic that US learning in math and science is in crisis because our students score significantly worse then other countries on standardized tests is misleading. If you look at the data you find the problem is with equality, US students from affluent neighborhoods score better than the top from other countries, but US students from poor neighborhoods score significantly worse. Zakaria stated that Singapore, a country on top of the testing scores, recently sent a delegation to the US to learn how we teach our students. He quotes Thomas Shanmugaratnam, a former Singapore Minister of Education, " We both have meritocracies. Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. We know how to train people to take exams. You know how to use people's talents to the fullest. Both are important, but there are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well -- like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority." This sound just like the things Gee is talking about in the learning process of games.
    The article got me thinking about one of the best books about game playing I ever read. It's a science fiction book by Orson Scott Card called "Enders Game." The book is set in the future where mankind is battling the evil "Buggers" and is looking for their next great military leader. They try to find the leader by having kids play games in outerspace. They have a "Battle Room," which has got to be the greatest place to play army ever and instead of using a character in a video game, the kids can play and "die" and play again. Since there is no gravity all the rules of movement are thrown out the window. The book traces the learning process of Ender and how he finally succeeds by breaking all the rules. A great book to understand game playing as a way to teach critical thinking and leadership skills.
    I am more a deductive learner than an inductive one. That's why I like strategy games, like Civilization. The other article "How to Win a War" by Niall Ferguson (The link on the syllabus doesn't work, but this one does) talks about a game, "The Calm and the Storm" that seems to be up my alley, and I will probably give that one a try.
     All in all, I have spent much more time this week playing games and thinking about playing games then I had allocated in my time-line to get my web site done. So I guess I was right at the beginning, all this game playing is a waste of time.

Comments

[Jeff]

John,

You make some very excellent points. I agree with you that melding how people learn with something worth learning is tricky. Games today are indicative of the most rudimentary economic aspect of supply and demand. People demand a certain sort of game, and the game companies supply it. Go into any game or computer electronics store and see what’s on the shelves: 1st person fantasy and war games. People want the challenge and immersion/holodeck experience. They want the inductive vs. the deductive game. And, therefore, I think the learning experience that Ferguson and Gee speak to is not going to happen.

You're right on with playing games that have certain artifacts you need to find before you can move to the next level. This is not an open ended game, but one that in all reality manipulates the player. Where's the learning in that? I think what you learn in those games is akin to a mouse learning it has to push the button in order to get the cheese. That's why for first-person person games, I play the on-line versions: they're completely open ended without a preconceived path you need to walk down in order to win. I don’t buy into Gee’s argument that there is a built in learning component in video/computer games that draw people back to them. Again, as I mentioned in my post on the subject, I think it’s the challenge factor.

[Carl Young]

John -

I think you, like me, are approaching Gee's proposal too linearly. I am convinced that Gee is not seriously suggesting that we use games to supplant learning, but to look at what techniques make games effective in teaching what is required to be successful in the game.

Along the linear "
Games cum education" line I agree that Card's "Ender's Game" is a most potent examiniation of reality v. virtual reality that can impact reality. I think alot about the military's growing use of drones and simulators in this regard.

Similarly, I oppose the military's reliance on computer-based-training to supplant paying for "real" training. NOTHING replaces hands-on, experiential, and experimental learning.

HOWEVER, CBTs can create great sandboxes as Gee envisions. Further, the success of Rosetta Stone foreign language CBTs cant' be argued as it leverages Gee's concept of Cycle of Expertise: Good games create and support the cycle of expertise, with cycles of extended practice, tests of mastery of that practice, then a new challenge, and then new extended practice. This is, in fact, part of what constitutes good pacing in a game. -- This is precisely the model that the Rosetta Stone foreign language courses use. This is similar to the age-old practice of apprenticeship and journeymen... gain skills, build on them to gain "rank" and "permission" to do new things

Just some thoughts...

CAY

[jerry prout]

Hi John

Agree; last game I played was Sim City (the original) though I actually really enjoyed it.

JP