10 Big Pieces: Gee, What Videogames…

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
James Paul Gee
Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY 2007

Summary

Gee’s project is to find the “theory of human learning built into good video games,” but also built into “gamers and the gaming community.” (4) He centers his approach within three related areas: situated cognition (or “thinking as tied to bodies that have experiences in the world”), New Literacy Studies (viewing reading and writing as “social and cultural practices with economic, historical and political implications”) and connectionism (a model of cognition that sees humans as primarily “powerful pattern recognizers”). (8-9)

He defines literacy in that context by holding that “people are (or are not) literate (partially or fully) in a domain if they can recognize (the equivalent of “reading”) and/or produce (the equivalent of “writing”) meanings” in a particular semiotic domain. (20) Doing so is “active learning:” “experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning.” (emphasis in original, 24) “Critical learning” involves a further step: being able to innovate in that domain. (25)

In speaking of “design grammars” particular to the semiotic domains of games, Gee states that “players need to know what patterns or combinations of elements the game’s internal design grammar allows. They need to know, given the situated meanings they have given to each element in the pattern or combination, what the whole pattern or combination means in a situated way useful for action.” (32) Such knowledge comes from two sources: the game architecture itself and the community of players. (38) This contrasts with teaching in schools, with removes learning from context. (84)

Gee describes the content (and, implicitly from the overall discussion, value) of videogames as “They situate meaning in a multimodal space through embodied experiences to solve problems and reflect on the intricacies of the design of imagined worlds and the design of both real and imagined social relationships and identities in the modern world.” (emphasis in original, 40-41)

Gee sees the person in the game space as a “tripartite identity” composed of their real-world identity, the identity of the avatar in the game space and a “projective identity,” an aspirational construct bounded by the constraints of the gameworld and the desires of the player for the character in the gameworld. (50-53). As “all deep learning – that is, active, critical learning – is inextricably caught up with identity in a variety of ways,” the tripartite nature of identity in the game space is the key to deep learning, not just in such spaces (54-55), but in any space: “If learners in classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective identity, something magical happens. The learner comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual identity as the real-world identity.” (63)

Gee then sets out 36 principles of active learning, discussing them in the context of specific game examples, and contrasting them with typical classroom techniques.

Critique and Analysis

While Gee consistently couches his theory and analysis in terms of learning, contrasting that which takes place in videogame spaces from that taking place in the classroom, his is essentially a political theory, and not only because it provides a devastating critique of a powerful and far-reaching organ of the state. Gee provides a tacit theory of citizenship: if the goal of learning is to develop people’s capacity to be both literate and innovative in a range of semiotic domains, it follows that the proper society is one which enables both broad choices and open opportunities to participate in such domains.

As the school has reflected the interests of the dominant political and economic institutions of the 20th Century, the bureaucratic state and corporation, Gee is essentially calling for learning systems which would reflect a very different social order, one not unlike Sclove’s “strong democracy.”

Utility

As with each work on this list, Gee’s book suggests the unity of values in the design of a learning system and the design of a political system. Gee mirrors Sclove: while it would be interesting to design a game design process using Sclove’s political principles, it would be equally interesting to design a political system using Gee’s learning principles. I hope to do both.