Book review: What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. James Paul Gee. Palgrave Macmillan.
(This review is based on the first edition of the book.)
This book was a very nice discussion about video games in light of various academic theories of learning. I particularly liked this point:
“The fact that human learning is a practice effect can create a good deal of difficulty for learning in school. Children cannot learn in a deep way if they have no opportunities to practice what they are learning. They cannot learn deeply only by being told things outside the context of embodied actions. Yet at the same time, children must be motivated to engage in a good deal of practice if they are to master what is to be learned. However, if this practice is boring, they will resist it.
“Good video games involve the player in a compelling world of action and interaction, a world to which the learner has made an identity commitment, in the sense of engaging in the sort of play with identities we have discussed. Thanks to this fact, the player practices a myriad of skills, over and over again, relevant to playing the game, often without realizing that he or she is engaging in such extended practice sessions. For example, the six-year-old we discussed in the last chapter has grouped and regrouped his Pikmin a thousand times. And I have practiced, in the midst of battle, switching Bead Bead to a magic spell and away from her sword in a timely fashion a good many times. The player’s sights are set on his or her aspirations and goals in the virtual world of the game, not on the level of practicing skills outside meaningful, goal-driven contexts.
“Educators often bemoan the fact that video games are compelling and school is not. They say that children must learn to practice skills (“skill and drill”) outside of meaningful contexts and outside their own goals: It’s too bad, but that’s just the way school and, indeed, life is, they claim. Unfortunately, if human learning works best in a certain way, given the sorts of biological creatures we are, then it is not going to work well in another way just because educators, policymakers, and politicians want it to.
“The fact is that there are some children who learn well in skill-and-drill contexts. However, in my experience, these children do find this sort of instruction meaningful and compelling, usually because they trust that it will lead them to accomplish their goals and have success later in life. In turn, they believe this thanks to their trust in various authority figures around them (family and teachers) who have told them this. Other children have no such trust. Nor do I.” (pp. 68-69)
This part struck a particular chord in me since I had just read an opinion piece making exactly such an argument: that not all parts of education can be made to be fun, and that “it’s important to realize early on that mastery often requires persevering through tedious, repetitive tasks and hard-to-grasp subject matter”. I found myself somewhat annoyed with that position, but couldn’t formulate my exact reasons for why.
After reading What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, things became much clearer in my head: part of the value of video games is that they can make a subject feel interesting and meaningful on its own. Once a person has encountered a topic in an interesting context, they will be much more likely to find the topic interesting in other contexts as well. Personal example: when we were first taught probabilities in high school, me having read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made the subject matter feel more interesting, even though our exercises made no mention of the Infinite Improbability Drive.
Yes, children should learn that mastering valuable skills often requires repetitive practice… but if we want them to actually learn, we should also be teaching them how to experience that practice as interesting and meaningful, and as something that is helping them get better in a field they care about. What we should not teach children is the attitude that much of learning is dull, pointless and tedious, detached from anything that would have any real-world significance, and something that you only do because the people in power force you to. Unfortunately, many traditional school systems are very successful at teaching exactly this attitude, and only the kids who have sufficient trust in various authority figures to make the learning feel meaningful manage to avoid it – and even they only succeed partially.
What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy also talks about the impact of identities on learning, and by associating school with games and school success with success in fun games, we could help learners more easily develop identities as good students, helping make the learning process feel more meaningful – even when they had to tackle tasks that weren’t as inherently fun.
I also liked the discussion of the fact that if a person reads a text that covers a topic the person doesn’t have much experience of, it can be very hard to understand exactly what it is that the text is saying. The words aren’t clearly connected to the concepts that they are discussing. And much of school learning does consist of having the students read elaborate discussions of concepts that they don’t necessarily have much experience of. Even when the students do successfully memorize the rough content of the writing, they are not likely to understand it or be able to apply it very well.
In contrast, somebody playing a video game is actively engaged in the content of the game, free to experiment around with it. Well-designed video games also involve a gradual and natural progression where the players naturally obtain various skills required for playing the game. Once they have beaten the game, it is certain that they have acquired those skills to a far greater extent than if they had just read and memorized the game manual. Games provide for active learning, and the way that a game proceeds from easy initial levels to challenging late-game levels forces a player to constantly acquire additional skills while also practicing the basic skills, in an organic and natural fashion.
The main flaw of the book is that while it provides an excellent discussion of academic theory on learning, its discussion of the way the theory relates to games is at times somewhat superficial. A more detailed analysis of the content of some games in light of the theory would have been nice.
Fan fiction libraries
Today’s analogy: a fan fiction writer sets their story in a world created by someone else, and thus has the opportunity to use both characters and world/story elements that were originally created by others. Especially for novice writers, this can be a boon, as they can focus on some sub-area of fiction writing without needing to create everything from scratch. That experience will help them later understand how to create their own elements and how such elements need to fit together with everything else.
But even experienced writers might prefer to just focus on telling some particular kind of story, without needing to design the whole world and characters from the ground up. In that case, using an existing world can make things much easier. Of course, often a writer will want to tell a story which isn’t quite a perfect fit for an existing world. If that’s the case, the borrowed elements will need to be tweaked, with the creator replacing them with altered versions which inherit most of the elements’ original properties but change some things. If this would require too many changes, it can be simpler to just create an entirely new world, instead of spending a lot of effort forcing existing elements into a purpose they’re not really a good match for.
Still, there are advantages with using existing elements. If the writer doesn’t modify them, and the elements behave as others expect them to behave, the story becomes compatible with a vastly larger set of stories, all taking place in the same universe. Other stories can in turn easily build on the contributions that this story made. It also becomes easier for others to read the story, as those others will already be familiar with the expected behavior and properties of the reused elements and can take advantage of their existing knowledge.
In other words, a writer who’s writing fan fiction is like a programmer who’s using existing libraries.
(And although I’ve only spoken about fan fiction so far, obviously the real world is the biggest standard library of them all. Fanfic writers sometimes get flak for being uncreative and just playing in someone else’s world: but at the same time mainstream writers have no shame in recycling the ideas of others, such as when they brazenly use concepts like “people” and “cars” without bothering to come up with their own objects.)
Why I’m considering a career in educational games
Your honor, the prosecution would like to argue that the way the world is currently organized with regard to education vs. entertainment doesn’t really make any sense.
Exhibit #1: the award-winning strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a 2012 reboot of an old strategy game franchise. As of this writing, I have logged 94 hours of play on this game, much of that due to getting so addicted that I couldn’t quit even when I wanted to. As a result of playing, I have learned numerous pieces of utterly useless trivia. For example, I know that the easiest enemies in the game (sectoids) have three hit points on difficulties “Easy”, “Normal” and “Classic”, meaning that they can be killed with a single grenade, but they upgrade to having four hit points on “Impossible”. I also know that soldiers who are assigned to the “Sniper” class initially begin with the “Headshot” special ability. At the next level, one may choose between the “Snap Shot” and “Squadsight” special abilities, out of which the “Squadshot” special ability is clearly far superior. And so on.
Exhibit #2: the classical education system. Even when I have a genuine interest in the topic that I’m supposed to be studying, it often involves an active expenditure of willpower to get myself to do so. The human brain is most strongly motivated by frequent and rapid feedback, but traditional education tends to involve rather long feedback cycles. Maybe there are exercises that are due once a week, but it can also be the case that you’re required to spend a considerable time reading a book and listening to lectures before you’ll get a single piece of feedback in the form of your exam grade. Much of the education is delivered in a form that keeps the learner passive: lectures (a terrible way of learning) or books, rather than the kind of interactivity that would really be engaging. When there are exercises, they often feel pointless, boring and unfun.
Thus, games are doing a far better job of teaching things than the education system is. The defense is about to present witnesses who will argue that traditional education is slowly but surely reforming, shifting towards better methods of teaching. The defense will no doubt point out that the prosecutor himself is currently taking a university course based on the problem-based learning paradigm. The prosecutor hastens to grant these points. However, they do not alter his point, which is that such reforms aren’t taking things far enough. All, or at least most, of education could be done via games that were as addictive and enjoyable as traditional games.
Next, the defense will present arguments that educational games are all bad, and that you can’t really make a good one. I request that the honorable judge dismiss this argument as sheer nonsense. We have already shown that enjoyable games can teach quite a lot of things, such as the statistics of various aliens. I would also point out that I began being taught English in school around (I think) the third grade, but I never learned much in school that I wouldn’t already have learned from other sources, computer games being some of the most notable ones. Finally, part of my understanding of history comes from playing games such as Civilization, Colonization, and Europa Universalis. Games are already teaching us countless of things: it’s just that we might want to adjust the things that they are teaching us.
And let us not forget exhibit #3: DragonBox. About a month ago, I witnessed a kid who was around eight years old blaze through ~80 levels of the thing in just a few hours and have a lot of fun doing so, and afterwards she had no trouble solving the equation ax/5=a/b on pen and paper. Also, her older brother was complaining that he wanted to play, too, which was the first time that I’ve ever seen kids argue over who gets to solve first-degree equations. Before this, I also witnessed a four-year old solve about a hundred of such equations playing the game, though with considerably more coaching. This was the game that really opened my eyes for the possibilities of educational games.
But DragonBox, as fantastic it is for teaching the rules of algebra, does nothing to teach the reasons for the rules. It doesn’t impart a deep understanding of why math works the way it does. Because of that, it remains a useful tool for teaching algebra, but only a tool – it doesn’t work as a stand-alone teaching method. You can’t learn math from only playing DragonBox, the way I pretty much learned the basics of English from only playing video games.
What kind of a game would let you learn math only from playing it? Let’s cast away all modesty for a while, and think big instead. Why was math invented in the first place? Part out of intellectual curiosity, part for solving practical problems. Geometry was created to help with things such as planting the crops and building houses. A game which was really good at teaching math might put you in an imaginary world where no abstract math existed yet, and would task you with inventing ways for improving the world. You would invent math from the first foundations, for the same reasons people originally invented it – to solve the concrete problems threatening the kingdom. You’d see your people living in caves or primitive huts, start thinking about how it’d be better if they had some better homes, and then invent geometry for that purpose. Then, based on how well you did, people would start building better houses and you could walk around your kingdom looking for new problems to solve or new improvements to make.
How would that work in practice, given that math is fundamentally an act of creativity? How could there be a game that let players doodle around with math, experimenting with ideas, until they finally discovered the foundations of first geometry, and then the other subfields of mathematics? I don’t really know, but I do think that it could be done. For one, you’d want to equip the game with some sort of a theorem-prover, so that the players could experiment around with putting together various kinds of axioms and lemmas and see whether they produced interesting-looking theorems. Maybe an architect would suggest that it would be useful if you could prove some property about triangles, and then you could play around until you produced a statement that the game deemed to be logically equivalent with the wanted property. If you were running low on ideas, you would be given hints – perhaps in the form of taking a walk around your kingdom, until you saw something in nature that gave you an idea of an intermediate step or useful additional lemma, and the game would then give that to you as an intermediate goal.
Of course, there’s no reason for why this would need to be restricted to just mathematics. Inventing biology, physics, chemistry, medicine, economics, political science, and so on would certainly also be useful for your kingdom. The sciences are the easiest, since they have clear-cut correct answers that can be tested automatically, but one could also think about ways of teaching humanities in this way. History, for one, would be a natural fit, and the students could practice writing skills by composing essays and stories about what happened in the game.
School, then, would become a place where you went to play a fun game and talk about it with your friends and teachers afterwards. (I’m much inspired by the way an Australian teacher had his students by Plague Inc., after which they talked about the game in the light of the theory of evolution.) We could do away with the stressful and unfun exams this way – it’s obvious that we need exams for as long as school is stupid and boring and students won’t study unless they’re tested on the material, but with a game, you’re constantly proving your talents in-game. If we insist on giving kids grades – and I’m not sure that we should – we can do it by scoring their progress in the game.
Your honor, I submit that this kind of an organization would make far more sense. Maybe people would still need to spend some willpower to start playing the educational games rather than the entertainment games – after all, games that are optimized only for fun are likely to win in that department – but they wouldn’t need much willpower. And once they got started, they’d be hooked for a good while.
The prosecution rests. But not for long, because there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Kansalaisaloite on vaaleja luotettavampi tahdonilmaus
Helsingin Sanomat uutisoi eduskunnan pääsihteeri Seppo Tiitisen vähättelevän kansalaisaloitetta:
Hänen mukaansa uudella järjestelmällä ei ole tarkoitus muuttaa normaalia käytäntöä, jonka mukaan lainsäädäntöaloite on pääsääntöisesti hallituksella.
“Kun aloitteenteko kohdentuu joko marginaalisiin tai muutoin riidanalaisiin asioihin, se ei voi olla se tie, jolla kansalaisten valitseman eduskunnan enemmistön tahto alkaa syrjäytyä”, sanoo Tiitinen.
“Eduskunnassa on edelleen sama vaaleissa ilmaistu tahto. Sen mukaan mennään vaalikausi.”
Tiitinen tuntuisi koettavan sanoa, ettei kansalaisaloitteita tulisi ottaa kovin vakavasti, sillä niiden takana on vain pieni osuus kansasta. Vaaleissa valitulla eduskunnalla taas on kansan valtaosan tuki puolellaan, joten eduskunnan itsensä tekemät lakialoitteet heijastavat kansan tahtoa paremmin.
Tämä päättely on kuitenkin virheellistä, sillä vaalitulos kertoo kovin vähän siitä, mitä mieltä kansa jostakin yksittäisestä asiasta on. Valtaosa kansasta saattaa kannattaa jotakin lakialoitetta, vaikka valtaosa eduskunnasta vastustaisi sitä. Voimme havainnollistaa tätä yksinkertaisella ajatuskokeella.
Ajatellaan ensin, että eduskunta voisi koko virkakautensa aikana äänestää vain yhdestä asiasta, että kaikki kansanedustajaehdokkaat kertoisivat etukäteen kantansa tähän asiaan, että kaikki valituksi tulleet ehdokkaat äänestäisivät vaalilupauksensa mukaisesti, ja että käytössä olisi jokin siirtoäänivaalitavan kaltainen äänestysjärjestelmä. Tässä tapauksessa kansanedustajien vaali ei eroaisi siitä, että kansa äänestäisi päätettävänä olevasta asiasta suoraan, ja eduskunnan koostumuksen voitaisiin todellakin sanoa heijastavan kansan tahtoa. Voisin kansalaisena päättää kantani asiaan, etsiä kantaani noudattavan ehdokkaan, ja äänestää häntä.
Mitä jos eduskunta voisikin äänestää kahdesta eri asiasta? Nyt minun tarvitsisi etsiä ehdokas, joka olisi kanssani samaa mieltä molemmista asioista. Mutta ehdokkaita on sen verran paljon, että tämänlaisia ehdokkaita löytyisi varmasti vielä monta. Jos aiemmin puolet ehdokkaista oli kanssani samaa mieltä, nyt heitä saattaisi olla kenties neljännes kaikista ehdokkaista.
Monestako eri asiasta eduskunta voi oikeasti päättää? Lakeja voi säätää periaatteessa mihin tahansa liittyen, joten erittäin monesta. Eduskunnan kotisivujen haku löysi viime vaalikaudelta 5744 eri aloitetta, joista noin kymmenesosa (549) oli lakialoitteita. Monikohan kansanedustajaehdokas olisi kanssani samaa mieltä 549 eri asiasta? Jos leikimme, että jokaisen uuden asian lisääminen eduskunnan päätösvaltaan puolittaa samaa mieltä olevien ihmisten määrän, ja katsomme pelkästään lakialoitteita, niin kanssani täysin samaa mieltä olevia ehdokkaita olisi 50%^(549) = 5*10^(-164) prosenttia eli nolla pilkku 163 nollaa viisi prosenttia. Eli vielä selvemmin sanottuna, ei yhtikäs ketään.
En siis voi löytää ehdokasta, joka olisi kanssani samaa mieltä aivan kaikesta. Täytyy siis tyytyä ehdokkaaseen, joka on samaa mieltä minulle tärkeimmistä asioista. Kenties suosikkiehdokkaani on kanssani samaa mieltä vaikkapa kymmenestä eri asiasta. Kaikista lopuista asioista tarvitsee vain hyväksyä se, että valitsemani ehdokas äänestää tahtoni vastaisesti.
Eduskuntaan saattaisi siis hyvinkin päätyä hallitus, jotka olisivat äänestäjiensä kanssa samaa mieltä pienestä määrästä asioita, mutta eri mieltä valtaosasta muita. Kansalaisaloitteen kohdalla tiedämme sentään varmasti, että ainakin 50 000 ihmistä oli sen ajaman aloitteen kanssa samaa mieltä. Vaalituloksen perusteella tiedämme paljon vähemmän siitä, mitä mieltä ihmiset loppujen lopuksi olivat.
Joku saattaa protestoida tässä kohtaa. Jos ihmiset kerran äänestävät sen perusteella, mitä asioita pitävät tärkeimpinä, eikö se tarkoita että pelkästään kansalaisaloitteella keskusteluun saadut asiat eivät ole erityisen monen mielestä kovinkaan tärkeitä?
Kenties. Mutta tässä kohtaa meidän kannattaa ottaa huomioon kasa muitakin asioita, jotka tekevät vaikeammaksi päätellä kansan tahdon eduskunnan tahdon perusteella. Alla niistä joitakin:
- Tiedon puute. Yksittäisen äänestäjän on hyvin vaikea tietää, mitä kaikkia asioita hänen suosikkiehdokkaansa todella pitää tärkeimpinä. Ei riitä, että joku ehdokas kannattaa enimmäkseen kaikkia samoja asioita kuin minäkin – meidän on myös oltava samaa mieltä niiden tärkeysjärjestyksestä. Muuten hän saattaa uhrata minulle tärkeän asian edistääkseen jotakin, joka on minusta yhdentekevää. Vaalikoneista ei saa luotettavaa kuvaa, sillä ehdokkaiden kannattaa usein pyrkiä antamaan vastauksia, jotka miellyttävät mahdollisimman montaa. Harva äänestäjä edes vaivautuu tutkimaan ehdokkaiden kantoja kunnolla, äänestäen ennemmin hatarien mielikuvien varassa.
- Vinoutunut tieto. Liittyy olennaisesti edelliseen kohtaan. Koska kansanedustajat tarvitsevat kansan ääniä pysyäkseen vallassa, on heille tärkeintä vaikuttaa siltä kuin he pyrkisivät toteuttamaan kansan tahtoa. Tämä ei mitenkään välttämättä ole sama, kuin kansan tahdon toteuttaminen. On arkipäivää, että poliitikot antavat tarkoituksella lausuntoja jotka kätkevät heidän todellisen kantansa, tai koettavat piilottaa eri toimenpiteiden varsinaiset seuraukset. Saatan siis äänestää jotakuta joka väittää kannattavansa minulle tärkeää asiaa, mutta ei oikeasti kannatakaan, tai ainakin pitää sitä paljon vähemmän tärkeänä kuin mitä väittää.
- Keinotekoiset rajoitteet kansan tahdon toteuttamisessa. En voi äänestää ketä tahansa ehdokasta, sillä Suomi on jaettu vaalipiireihin. Mitä jos jostain ihmeen kaupalla löytyykin minulle täydellinen ehdokas, mutta hän ei ole omassa vaalipiirissäni? Englantilainen sanoisi tähän “tough luck”, Dna Oy:n mainosmies taas että “elämä on”. Puhumattakaan äänikynnyksestä, jonka kautta nykyiset eduskuntapuolueet ovat pyrkineet sulkemaan pienemmät tulokkaat ulos.
- Suomen vaalitapa. Olen tähän asti puhunut vain ehdokkaan äänestämisestä. Suomen vaalitavassa äänestetään kuitenkin ensisijaisesti puoluetta ja vasta toissijaisesti ehdokasta. Enää ei siis riitä, että löydän ehdokkaan joka tukee kantojani – hänen puolueensa on myös oltava samoilla linjoilla, ja mahdollisia puolueita on paljon vähemmän! On siis hyvin todennäköistä, että merkittävä osa äänestäni päätyy tukemaan sellaisia ihmisiä, joiden kanssa olen enimmäkseen eri mieltä. Vaikka löytäisinkin sen itselleni täydellisen ehdokkaan, voi olla, ettei minun siltikään kannattaisi äänestää häntä, koska hän on väärässä puolueessa. Ja jos on vaikea arvioida, mitä mieltä yksittäinen ehdokas on, on puolueen yleiskannan arviointi vielä vaikeampaa.
Näitä tekijöitä voisi halutessaan löytää paljon lisääkin. Esimerkiksi se, että kansanedustajehdokkaiksi valikoituu ylipäätänsäkin vain tietynlaisia ihmisiä, vaikuttaa varmasti lisää kansan mahdollisuuksiin saada tahtonsa lävitse. Ja suhteellisen matala äänestysprosentti kertoo siitä, että tarpeeksi moni kansalainen tietää vaikutusmahdollisuuksiensa olevan niin huonot, ettei mielipidettään kannata vaivautua ilmaisemaan lainkaan. Ja niin edelleen.
Tämän kaiken huomioonottaen, mitä eduskunnan tahto siis kertoo kansan tahdosta? Mieli tekisi sanoa “ei yhtään mitään”, mutta se olisi jo liioittelua. Mutta ei eduskunnan mielipide nyt ainakaan hirvittävän paljoa kerro. Kansalaisaloite taas kertoo sentään sen, että sillä on 50 000 ihmisen tuki. Näin poikkeuksellisen selvälle viestille olisi hyvä antaa edes vähän painoa.
Onko “kansan tahto” muuten ylipäätään erityisen hyvä perustelu valtiollisten päätösten tekemiselle? Olen tästä hieman skeptinen. Mutta jos sitä pitää hyvänä perusteluna, niin ei ainakaan voi ruveta vähättelemään kansalaisaloitteita.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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