Jon’s 6th Blog Post

I chose to read James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, and in particular one of his claims from chapter 4 stood out to be very important and reflective of the overarching theme unifying this course. To paraphrase, he asserts that video games encourage and recruit situated, experiential, and embodied forms of learning. Learning and thinking become “powerful and effective” rather than “passive and inert”. This theme is referenced throughout the book and has a lot to tell us about how best to practice teaching. Gee describes the current situation in schools as making use of general, purely verbal meanings and abstractions, with no ability to customize for specific situations and no invitations for embodied actions. In other words, schools operate using decontextualized meanings – “If you can’t use ‘democracy’ in a situation-specific way, then the word does not make sense to you”, Gee explains. In contrast, the video game Deus Ex, which Gee focuses on in particular, allows the gamer to learn in an embodied and situated fashion – all of the actions are themselves part of a storyline, and the game actually punishes the gamer for not thinking in a situation-specific manner.

It was interesting to see the other members of my group respond to Gee. I’m somewhat unique for my age because I don’t play video games for whatever reason, aside from the occasional Grand Theft Auto, which becomes impossible to avoid after a point. But even then, the level of engagement is less “situated, experiential learning” and more “brief, indiscriminate shooting rampage” before I get frustrated and hand off the controller to someone else . So, while I was more less enthralled all the way through Gee’s book (being an outsider looking in, just as Gee was when he started researching these games), my peers who’ve been playing video games for many years and have built up complex schemas to make judgments and critiques of them (“appreciative system” is the term used in the book) found him slightly less impactful. That being said, I think all of us ultimately liked the book, especially for his concise, unpretentious style of writing.