I loved Gee’s article on video games and learning. I hadn’t realized that every new game has to teach you how to play it through the experience of playing the game. I’ve played many video games in my life, and whether or not I enjoyed the game and continued to play it often was a result of the quality of each game’s early tutorials. When they feel too cumbersome and don’t feel situated in a meaningful context, I (and others, I imagine) give up before even making it to the actual gameplay.

While I appreciate the connections Gee makes, I also think he may be overstating the connection between video game learning and academic/intellectual learning. Many of his examples have to do with strategies and decision making. Questions like, “should I make my character a wizard or an orc?” or, “Which troops should I advance, and where?” are complex decisions that have a lasting impact on the game-life of whoever is playing. Video games that teach you how to make these decisions effectively teach broader skills of decision making and  make people aware of the fact that their decisions will have lasting impacts while teaching them how to identify the structures that dictate their decision’s lasting effects. Many of the skills taught in video games, though, are simple motor skills. In my experience, much of the learning that happens in games has to do with wanting your character to do a certain physical action, and figuring out how to manipulate the subtle mechanisms of the controller to consistently produce that motion. Currently, I mostly play sports video games. These have no story lines and are exclusively about fine motor skills. These motor skills form the foundation of almost all games, including story based ones. Games that involve role playing and strategy combine motor skills with character, emotion, and story.

I think this is where the the learning potential of video games is strongest. Humans love having a feeling of agency. We like to see our thoughts and decisions affect the world around us. The physical manipulation part of every video game satisfies this. It gets us hooked. Then, as we work our way through the physical worlds of games, we learn skills,  practice making decisions, and get experience decoding complex systems of information. If we want students to do these same things in the classroom, it all starts with a feeling of agency, the feeling that connects us to the world around us. When students’ actions in the classroom affect the environment of the classroom, they cease to be an isolated individual temporarily placed in the classroom and become a citizen of the classroom.

A good game makes us feel like we’re immersed in the world of the game. When the user/game interface is too salient, we feel separated from the game and thus it is harder to invest in the game. The classroom should reflect this, allowing kids to take on the identity of “student” and immerse themselves in “the game”.

What happens, though, at the end of any story based video game? You beat it. All of the learning that happens in a video game has an end goal of beating the game. What does it mean to beat the school game? If we view the end goal of school as graduation, then the skills we teach in school will reflect that. Then we run the risk of making school too much of a game (something I think many of us can sympathize with regarding our high school experiences), and the incentive of winning may supersede the kind of learning we want to foster. No matter how we structure our “tutorial” at the beginning of the “school game”, no matter what skills we promote as the most desirable and useful, students ultimately want to beat the game, and will adopt whatever strategies are easiest and most successful. In the world of video games, that means cheat codes, but what does that mean in the classroom?