book club discussion

While reading this book I’ve paid special attention to James Paul Gee’s use of the phrase, “unfortunately, this is often what we do in schools.” Gee’s foundation of his connection between video games and literacy relates a lot to the way people crave an interactive learning experience. If a video game is too challenging or too easy the users lose interest. Unfortunately, this is often what we do in schools! Gee discusses the need for teaching basics, and encouraging identity progression. As a future teacher I find these ideas very interesting and useful. Each student will have their own personal interest for learning in my classroom and hopefully my lessons will be able to celebrate that and not squash it. Gee discusses identity in video games as projected identity, self identity, and character identity. The projected identity is the most interesting to me because it mixes the game user’s desires, values and ideas with the character’s own in the game. The projected identity identifies as the game character while also using one’s personal choices to move through obstacles.
Although I’ve never played the games Gee describes in his book, I’ve played others like Pokemon on the gameboy, Pacman and Mario on the Xbox. These games have less choice based learning yet give you a task to complete and skills to complete it. Each level produces different and more challenging obstacles. This would be a very good example of low stakes learning. “Lives” in video games give you lots of chances to try again until you succeed and can move on.