Gamer Nation

I wanted to post a vid, and couldn't do it in a comment, so I thought I'd just post my comment as a new blog post. I wanted to respond to a couple of Todd's questions about video games as learning tools. But first, watch this:



Todd asked a questions about what constitutes an embodied experience. I think Craig answered that question in class when speaking of an experience he had playing a game against a younger opponent. "I''m dead again," he said. Note the first person reference. That, to me, is what constitutes an embodied experience. The character in the above video is female, for example, yet I have no difficulty putting myself into the game and operating in the first person, as Craig did. This kind of experience has a great deal of value, I think, and the role-playing possibilities teach lessons we don't always recognize right away. What does seeing a character unlike ourselves, yet referring to that character as I do to our notion of other? Also, while this game might be less valuable to teachers of composition, than to, say, teachers of physics and other hard sciences, I think we can all agree that we have come a long way since Pac-Man.

Portal is not a small market kind of game. It has a huge mainstream following. But it is also just one example. Here's another:



"Gee suggests that video games tap into "profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning" (29). This is because video games both challenge and entertain us on an intellectual level. Perhaps we, as educators, should pay attention to this style of learning. Can hard work be entertaining?"

While many of us are probably familiar with the Tomb Raider series, or at least saw the movies, most probably dismiss the game itself as simply, well, a game. But anyone who has played it can tell you that the puzzles and obstacles included in the game are extremely intricate. What does this tell us? What does it tell us when we see huge groups of consumers buying games like these, and then demanding more and more difficult mental challenges. Wait, I think I might have just answered my own question.

Like Todd, I have come to appreciate James Paul Gee for his recognition of the value of entertainment and enjoyment in learning. While games like the two I use as examples (and there are many more) may not provide us with much we can use in our own classrooms, at least not directly, we can take from these examples an understanding that this is the learning that students are choosing.

Fun, it would seem, works.