Videogames, Learning, And Literacy

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a GameZone.com article interviewing Professor James Paul Gee, the author of a new book advocating videogames as a learning tool. According to Gee, "It dawned on me that good games were learning machines... Many of these [game-contained] principles could be used in schools to get kids to learn things like science, but, too often today schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning." He goes on to reference "good learning principles" built into games like System Shock 2, Rise of Nations, and Arcanum, and advocates early gaming for learning: "In my view - and I know it is controversial - kids should be playing games from early on, from three years old, say."

Comments

Re:Things I've learned from games

[silentbozo]

That should have read, "I spent countless hours". Good lord, how embarassing. Let that be a lesson to all. Just because you've learned proper grammar from a game, doesn't mean you've learned to proofread posts!

Re:Things I've learned from games

[johndoejersey]

I learned how to jack a car from GTA3. Run up to the door and press the triangle button?

What I learned from RPGs

[kahei]

I think playing through the great SNES RPGs of the Golden Age (Final Fantasy, Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Tales of Fantasia, Secret of Mana, and so on) was a very important, formative, and educational experience for me.

Among the things I learned:

You can never carry more than a certain fixed number of objects.

People may be small moving 16x16 blobs from far away, but up close they turn into large still images.

Don't hit anyone, because if you do a little number will bounce out of them and it's kind of unnerving.

When just wandering around in life, you'll need a wide range of area attacks to keep little problems at bay. But when facing a major crisis, such as Kefka or the Profound Darkness, you need big heavy single-target attacks.

Two or three people co-operating can be much more effective than one -- but only if the game supports combo attacks. Unless it's Chrono Trigger in which case the combos are weaker than individual attacks. I guess there's a moral there.

It is possible for an art to flourish and die out completely not only within one lifetime, but within just a couple of decades.