Gaming and Literacy

I have been reading James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy. His book explores literacy from the perspective of a gamer, and organizes and defines many different ways of learning literacy. I really like the book because even though I don’t have very much experience with video games, I see how his theories could be easily applied to many different types of activities and literacies.

This book provides us with great examples of multi literacies as well as functional literacy which we have been discussing in class. Video games are an area that people can learn to be literate in other than the traditional areas of reading and writing, and gamers need to know a lot of basic skills and rules about the games in order to achieve the functional literacy needed to excel at the games.

Gee has come up with a lot of interesting principles about learning and accomplishing literacy that can be explored through the world of gaming. One of the learning techniques that really interested me was the idea that people have a lot more freedom to take risks and explore within a game rather than in real life because their character will just come back to life if it gets killed off. Gee calls this the “Psychosocial Moratorium Principle”. I thought this learning technique was really interesting because I associate literacy very closely with creativity, and sometimes people can be intimidated or embarrased to share their work and ideas with their peers in a classroom setting. The fact that a game isn’t real takes some of the pressure off of kids and allows them to take greater risks and experiment more.

I also liked Gee’s “Multimodal Principle”. This is the idea that literacy needs to incorporate symbols and pictures along with text, which is exactly what a video game does. It seems like learning to master a video game and incorporate meaning for pictures along with words is a skill that would be critical for functional literacy. For example, in order to drive you need to be able to read signs, but before reading the word stop on a stop sign, you would probably recognize that you are supposed to stop based on the shape and color of the sign.

Gee had many other principles, but the overall message that I have taken from his work so far is that we need to think outside the box and broaden our ideas of what literacy is, how to teach it, and what it means to become literate. We should always be exploring new methods of teaching kids and be open to the idea that literacy comes in many different forms.