Funmurphys: the Blog

Not Just For Fun

I suppose it all started for me at the age of three when I won a tiddlywinks "tournament" at a friend's birthday party. I have been an avid player of non-sporting games ever since. I find them both relaxing and stimulating, a combination hard to find. Now Professor James Paul Gee claims that the oft maligned video games can be a great way for kids to learn.

"I was 53 when I began and was blown away by how long, challenging, and complex games like Deus Ex were. Yet millions of people pay a lot of money to buy them and they learn them very well, including kids who wouldn’t spend twelve concentrated minutes really learning algebra in school. It dawned on me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and learning. Many of these 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. Games are good at getting themselves learned for good old Darwinian reasons, namely, the ones that can’t get learned, don’t get bought and the companies that produce them go broke (Suikoden III is a good example of a very good game that does a poor job helping the player learn how to play it). What makes the situation interesting is that game designers can’t make games easier to learn by dumbing them down, since players want ever longer, more challenging, more open-ended games.

Yes, Virginia, he has a book out about it.