What Video Games Have to Teach Us... - Book Review

Shaynna Austin
Digital Rhetorics
March, 2015

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy - James Paul Gee

Chapter 1 - Gee starts off by telling us how he decided to write a book on this topic by relating how his experiences with video games made him realize that they were devices geared toward making people learn. He realized this when he was playing video games with his son and found that even games for kids were long and somewhat difficult. Regardless of the difficulty though, his son still enjoyed playing video games. In an attempt to understand why his son would want to pursue something so difficult, Gee decides that he should start playing some adult video games that require 30-100 hours of play time. Doing this, he realizes that games that sell the most copies tend to be long and difficult and requires the player to learn.
He goes on to say that learning is a lot like reading and thinking, in that, everyone has a different perspective. He also says that reading, thinking, and learning is a social activity. No one can have their own private reading of a particular text and assume that no one else has thought or said it before. Somewhere along the line, a person falls into a group or multiple groups, even if they haven't met those people who share the same perspective. Gee sees video games as social learning that shouldn't be done alone.
He then lists off that the book will discuss several principles that he believes video games possess. By doing this, he hopes that he can provide some insight into making education better. Perhaps, even offering some suggestions to make school more interesting for kids.
Gee closes the introduction by explaining that throughout the course of the book he will not be talking about violence or gender at all, simply because there has been extensive research in both areas. He also says his book would get extremely "cluttered" and would need more space if he added those two issues in there. Instead he mentions his thoughts on the two issues: 1) That there is no evidence of video games resulting in real world violence. Rather, the violent crime rate has decreased as video game sales increase, and 2) That while female video game characters are over sexualized at times, and a large majority of girls stop playing video games by the 6th grade, there is still evidence of dedicated girl gamers.

Chapter 2 - In this chapter Gee discusses how images and sounds are just as educational as text is for reading and writing. He believes that the multimodal nature of video games delivers more knowledge and information than print alone could. Gee also says that video games is a type of literacy and that it has it's own domain, along with it's own sub-genres of games such as First-person shooter, strategy, fantasy role-play, etc. From here he launches into a problem he noticed, where older generations of people will look at a game and say that it's, "A waste of time." He argues that people who say this seem to associate academic domains of knowledge gained through reading and writing in school as more valuable than something as enjoyable as a video game. He explains that this type of attitude comes from the fact that the person who isn't playing the game hasn't learned the rules of the domain, and thus believes it doesn't do anything. He creates an analogy to explain how this logic is misguided by saying, "...Imagine a textbook that contains all the facts and rules about basketball and read by students who never played or watched a game. How well do you think they would understand this text book?" (23) Instead of thinking that video games offer nothing, he wants to give us another perspective on what video games do for us.
One way that they do things for gamers is that they get the gamer involved in active learning. The gamer, "...experiences the world in new ways, forms new affiliations, and prepares for future learning." (24) Games make gamers do "work" but in a context different from, say writing a book report for Digital Rhetoric's class. When playing a "good" game, a gamer has to be able to associate elements of the game to certain meanings. An example that Gee uses is yellow pikmen who not only throw bombs at stone walls to let the gamer progress, but also are able to be thrown farther than the red or blue pikmen. Because of this, the yellow pikmen have multiple meanings that the gamer needs to not only memorize, but utilize. The also allows the gamer to make choices, such as whether or not they want to engage in a fight with a sleeping enemy or sneak past him? Aside from this, Gee believes that a good game makes gamers think critically. They do this when the concepts that were originally introduced at the beginning of the game get harder. As well as when the atmosphere of the game changes from inviting and playful, to suddenly serious and extremely dangerous for the fictional character the gamer is playing as. When this happens, the gamer is forced to rethink the things they though they knew and force the player to either start taking risks, or be more conservative. A good game will even make the gamer go beyond the game to solve a certain aspect of the game more thoroughly by using FAQs or forum discussion boards for help.
Gee says that doing these things requires the gamer to take on the identity of, "...an exploratory problem solver." (45)

Chapter 3 - In this chapter Gee argues how identity is key for learning. He explains how identity can be split into three different types of identity when talking about semiotic domains. First, there is the real-world identity that very person has. This real-world identity is defined in ways such as gender, class, and race, but also more specifically like, chubby, wear's-glasses, born during the information age, etc. His second identity the he mentions is the virtual identity. This is an identity that is, "...fixed by the history and workings of the semiotic domain" (55) that it belongs to. Meaning that it is something any person can conceptualize, such a "physicist" and know what physicists do such as the methods of inquiry they go through to do an experiment, and what kind texts they write in their field. The third identity is a "projected" identity. "The learner as scientist," (62) as Gee says. Gee goes through a lot of examples to explain this identity because it's a lot more abstract than the other two. This identity is where the real-world person projects themselves as the virtual identity--while also realizing their limitations to do so. This identity is when a person sees themselves as being, for example, a physicist, and the values and desires they bring with that. He explains that in the classroom, it's difficult for some students to realize this identity because they might have been "damaged" before coming to the classroom. By damaged he means that the student might not have the motivation to do work, or believes they lack the ability to do the things a physicist can do. He argues that schools need to focus on this problem and "repair" these type of students by doing three things that games are already doing. 1) The learner needs to be motivated to try, 2) They need to be motivated to put in a lot of effort, and 3) There needs to be a pay off for the learner. (58) He explains that video games are able to this better than schools because instead of just throwing facts at the gamer and expecting them to know what they mean, the game gives the gamer a chance to try again if they fail. Usually when a player dies, they can restart from the last save point and try again. By doing this, the player has a chance to try new ways of beating a boss or solving a puzzle. (While it should be noted that there are games that do punish a player for dying, as a general rule the type of punishment a player's character experiences does not aim to discourage the player to quit. Rather, it acts like a reminder that dying is something to be avoided at all costs--thus encouraging the player to approach that portion of the game from a different angle.) He closes the chapter by saying that games encourage gamers in ways that schools do not, and he has no faith in "Skill and Drill," methods of teaching.

Chapter 4 - In this chapter Gee discusses how video games create an embedded experience for gamers. Embedded experiences are those that allow gamers to make choices that affect the flow of gameplay and plot of the narrative. This launches him into a discussion about how people need more than just texts to understand a semiotic domain that they're learning. Just reading technical writing on something as simple as geology or even how to play a video game doesn't offer the same amount of depth of knowledge as a learned experience does. He even says that not only do most games these days lack a booklet that tells the player how to play the game, but that in the real world businesses would rather have employees that already have experience in the field. He explains that lived experiences start with the simple process of "probing, hypothesizing, re-probing, and rethinking," (96) and move on to more complicated learning methods. He ends the chapter by saying that there are people who know things but might be able to do well in terms of writing taking tests. These people are able to think and problem solve by associating knowledge in materials and objects rather than relying solely on repeating facts.

Chapter 5 - Here Gee discusses how games use training modules to get gamers to learn. He uses examples from Tomb Raider, Wolfenstein, and System Shock 2 to explain how video games require gamers to transfer previous knowledge from a one game to another game. He considers "transfer" as a very important process for anyone to learn--but that it also can be risky in the real-world. For example, "...Maybe social studies is better off not being done in the style of biological thinking..." (126) He points out that video games seamlessly meld the real-world person with the virtual character to help the gamer learn the controls of the game. Most games have an emphasis on encouraging the player to explore the virtual world to learn the controls, and once they have mastered the basics, the game steadily gets more challenging as the story progresses. He explains that if the game had just thrown the player into an area without explaining the controls, or having advanced enemies in the first episode of the game, the player would become extremely frustrated. He also says that if such a situation did occur, then it might lead to a "garden-path" type of mentality, where the player would expect all enemies to be advanced, and never realize that there could be underpowered enemies that didn't require as much ammunition or effort needed to dispose of them. Thus, Gee argues that it's silly to throw a student into a field of science or math without some kind of guidance/instruction and expect them to eventually come to understand the thing in its entirety.

Chapter 6 - In this chapter Gee talks about how video games allow us to reflect/question cultural models. Cultural models are described as things that people hold to be true and tend not to question until something new puts it into question. His examples involve how a person understands what is considered "good." Is good something a person does for the benefit of everyone? Or do you stand up against the majority point-of-view to defend the minority? Another example he uses is the depiction of war. Older movies and video games from the eighties and early nineties tend to focus on one man who is a superhuman hero, taking a good deal of damage from multiple shots before succumbing to death. More modern games show how confusing warfare can actually be when the player usually dies without knowing where the enemy is shooting from, has to choose whether to follow orders that might get them killed or might keep them alive, and then doesn't even know if the gamer's character made a difference at all in the overall outcome of the mission in the game. His last example involves how a gamer tends to view difficulty as a good thing rather than a bad thing--and that failure isn't a big deal like it is with education. He concludes the chapter by saying that games teach people to reflect on what they thought they knew to be true, and how to change their perspective on it. He adds that learning is more than just reaching the end goal quickly and with little fuss, its also about learning different ways to get there and what you pick up along the way.

Chapter 7 - Gee starts off the conversation by saying that people who play video games are generally, actively social even if the people that gamers play with aren't in the same room with them. He believes that gamers create "affinity groups" (mentioned earlier, but basically means a small group of people who have intense knowledge about a subdomain) and share distributed knowledge. Distributed knowledge is something that everyone in an affinity group knows, but can be distributed to other people as well. One simple example he uses is his experience with cheat codes in DOS for Windows, and explaining how to bring up and use DOS to younger gamers who were too young to know what DOS was. In this chapter, he also explains that affinity groups are not like community groups because affinity groups are neither good or bad. The values and attitudes shared in an affinity group varies from other affinity groups of the same subdomain. He also adds that each member of an affinity group has a specialty that can be crossed-shared with other affinity groups. He ends the chapter discussing how PC video games are designed to encourage gamers to manipulate software in the game to make new content. This new content (mods) can be shared publicly with other people, which in turn gives the creator feedback (and works into the appreciative systems that he mentioned earlier). He believes that this allows gamers to have a "producer"-like mindset where they are given the chance develop programming and hacking skills which help them learn how to create something that people want/need.

Chapter 8 - For Gee's conclusion, he goes back and lists the principles he believes video games teach gamers that he wishes learning in the classroom could implement. He repeats that he is not arguing that schools need to use video games to teach, but merely follow the same principles that video games already use to make gamers learn. His final closing remark for the book is that he admits to writing the book because he has found video games extremely enjoyable, and feels that he was learning things without actually realizing he was learning anything.