Video Games and Literacy

I’m not a gamer. I admit it. But I’m hearing more and more how important and beneficial video games can be academically and personally, and I’ve been interested in how (mostly because I’m not a gamer, ha). It’s not a shocker to hear that video games are a very large part of so many lives. It’s not a stretch to think that video games, in whatever form, is already a part of education and will increasingly be a part of education.

So I’m reading James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy.

Our group took the eight chapters and broke them up amongst our group (skipping the second chapter, on recommendation), having everyone also read chapters 1 and 8. The chapters I took a look at were 3 (“Learning and Identity: What does it mean to be a half-elf?”) and 4 (“Situated Meaning and Learning: What should you do after you have destroyed the global conspiracy?”).

This book immediately presents itself to me—not directly, but obvious still—as a pedagogical book. But I’m an education student, and I find myself seeing everything as pedagogical lately. So that’s the lens I’m reading this through. That said, it takes a bit of effort to take his application to video games and derive a more general application to literacy. In short: so what for non-gamers in school? It’s not as if we’re going to make school itself a video game (yet). I don’t know how much fun that’d be for me and others like me.

Who knows, though.

…I just deleted a ton of stuff. It was way sleepy.

Basically, to keep my readers awake, I’ll just say this: we need to learn how to appreciate/read video games to learn more ways to be better teachers.

Gee reads video games in ways many of us do not. He sees identity. He sees the real potential for the (re)appropriation of literacy and learning–or that it could be to the classroom if we did more than dismiss it.

Especially for those of us who don’t really get it, we need to know what keeps kids playing. And while there are girls who play, most players are boys and boys can be the most difficult to keep seated and engaged. So we need to know what it is about video games that keeps this kids engaged and what we can take and apply to how we think about them and teach them.

I have two boys. All they do is move—except when they’re playing.

Give them choices. Let them make mistakes and try again, to be better. Let them have a sense of pride of who they are and the work they do. Give them “levels” of achievement from beginner to master. Encourage intrinsic awards (holla, Alfie Kohn!)

Make it seem real. Gee talks about a game, Deus Ex (which sounds awesome), that really encourages choice and personal responsibility and, at the same time, just sounds awesome. Your choices have consequences, but once and if you fail, you can go back and try the other way. Isn’t that what life is? Isn’t that what we want as teachers—a kind of reflection? It’s not as if, when we fail in real life, we actually die. Usually. Isn’t that critical thinking? We learn from our mistakes, or so I’ve heard (don’t tell a perfectionist that).

When we give ourselves or our students something to read, shouldn’t they have some understanding of what they’re reading first before they read them? Maybe a walk-through? I can’t understand manuals until I have the vernacular down, and I’m generally uninterested until I know what I’m getting into. Until then my brain goes into shock and I call my husband or the handyman. Nobody got time for dat.

Background, intertextual knowledge, yo. Like he says, “Academic language, like the language in the Deus Ex booklet, is not really lucid or meaningful if one has no embodied experiences within which to situate its meanings in specific ways” (103).

To bring that home, I’ll bet many of you don’t know what he means by “embodied experiences.” If that’s the case, I’ll bet that sentence doesn’t make as much sense, and you might have just tossed it. Whatever, right? What he means is that you have to have context, background knowledge, to really understand what the hell you’re reading. And typically—this is just me—giving a kid a straight up definition doesn’t do it. It doesn’t matter. He says that generalized meanings aren’t productive. I still struggle with what he means by “embodied.” I keep thinking “disembodied” and then I’m thinking of ghosts and voices.

Teach the kids to act and talk like knowers, Gee recommends. Build up their knowledge and meanings of things through multimodal ways. Give things and technologies and tools a way to “store” knowledge. Let them practice—but, and this is just me and my friends speaking, that rote stuff ain’t practice. It’s frustratingly boring.

Seriously, this sounds more exciting writing about it (not that it wasn’t cool reading about it, but processing it this way is helpful).