What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee attempts to respond to the many critics who dismiss playing video games as a “waste of time” by discussing and demonstrating how video games actually communicate information and teach specific skills incredibly efficiently and effectively, how children and young adults actually learn a great deal by playing video games (and enjoy themselves at the same time!), and how schools and teachers could actually learn a great deal from video games as well – about engaging students and encouraging true learning.

Gee begins by summarizing the arguments of those who view video games as a “waste of time,” stating that in their view (and unfortunately, in the view of many current educators and administrators), important knowledge is “content”: facts and figures that can be “drilled and skilled” – learned and memorized by students, and then measured and assessed by standardized tests. This is effective education in their eyes, and they view any other form of work (especially playing video games) that does not involve such learning as “meaningless.”

The absurdity of such an approach is immediately evident to Gee, and he attempts to help the reader appreciate this absurdity by considering another type of “gaming”: the game of basketball. “Imagine a textbook that contained all the facts and rules about basketball read by students who never played or watched the game,” he writes. “How well do you think they would understand this textbook? How motivated to understand it do you think they would be?” Not. At. All.

Isn’t that absurd? Wouldn’t it be absurd to try to teach children the game of basketball by forcing them to memorize all of the facts and rules related to it rather than by actually playing it? “But we do this sort of thing all the time in school with areas like math and science,” Gee rightly observes. True learning only occurs when the game of basketball (or any type of subject or skill) is experienced directly by the learner, and that is the primary reason why Gee believes that video games are actually better at facilitating learning than the current flawed educational system in place in many of our schools and enforced by many of our teachers and administrators.

Rather than being the “waste of time” that most adults believe them to be, Gee concludes that video games “encourage [the player] to think of himself as an active problem solver, one who persists in trying to solve problems even after making mistakes; one who, in fact, does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning.” In sharp contrast to much of what passes for education in this era of “No Child Left Behind” which forces students to simply “ritualize the solutions to problems,” the playing of video games encourages children and young adults “to be the sort of problem solver who leaves himself open to finding new ways to solve new problems in new situations.”

If you are at all interested in education and/or video games, or are at least willing to have your assumptions about education and/or video games challenged (and hopefully corrected), then I highly encourage you to read Gee’s book. Support your local library and check out What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy!