Customer Reviews

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I read through the entire book today, enthralled that an academic of the same generation as my parents finally "got" what made videogames (focusing on action, adventure, and rpg games) a fascinating medium both for players and creators. Furthermore, the author was then able to apply this knowledge to his area of expertise, educational theory. I knew videogames could be art, I knew that as simulations they could be political, but I never quite saw what seems to me perfectly obvious now, that good videogames of almost every variety teach us how to think and learn, and that they do this much better than our school system.

This book should be loved by anyone with a strong interest in videogame theory or educational theory, as it impressively doesn't simplify either area to fit the demands of the other.

I also applaud the organization of the book, as each section centers around a few key concepts of educational theory which are repeated in the appendix giving everyone who has read the book an easy way to recall the '36 learning principles'.

As a science teacher, I have asked myself (as Gee points out...many teachers and parents do) why it is that the same students who sit listlessly in my classroom will go home and spend upwards of 8 hours engaged in frusterating video-game play.
Gee effectively answers this question and makes a strong case in favor of video games being more akin to agents of learning (like recreational reading) as opposed to mindless entertainment (like really dumb movies).
Videogames are an interesting window through which we can study issues such as learning theory, motivation, and development of expertise. Fellow game players will recognize themselves in Gee's descriptions of what makes games so compelling, and nonplayers will be surprised by how far games have come since PacMan. I recomend this book to parents, administrators, and anyone else interested in education.

The book is primarily a criticism of 'traditional' school-based learning methodologies, using observations of children playing video games and the author's own play sessions as representative examples of the 36 principles of good learning he describes. He uses primarily 3d shooters and RPGs as his examples of 'good' video games (meaning that they encourage learning things about and within the world of the game). The author defines and conceptualizes his principles of learning and contrasts it with the school-based education process, noting the vast differences between the two. On this topic of criticism of school-based education, the author makes a strong argument.

His second argument, that these principles missing in school are demonstrably present in video games, is very vague and unfulfilling. The author often stresses elements of learning that can easily be found everywhere in life and social activity and in other forms of media, not just in video games. One point he makes in the middle of the book about incremental difficulty and the player's dynamic 'regime of competence' was a good topic consistent with video game design (although easily found in other places, such as golf handicaps), but it was not good enough to warrant his emphasis on video games in the other ~150 pages of the book. He repeatedly mentions that kids enjoy playing video games but don't enjoy learning in school and suggests that school should be like playing a video game, but he leaves it at that. Because he focuses on the process of learning and assumes videogame content and classroom content to be of an equal nature, the burning question of how to make learning calculus equations as fun and desirable to learn as advanced combat strategies to annihilate your friends in Starcraft remains unfortunately beyond the scope of this book.

If the intention of the book was to show that video games have the capability to encourage learning of arbitrary content, it succeeded. However, watching TV or movies or playing non-video games with your peers can be just as conducive to learning (and, depending on the content, just as mind-numbing). Having been weaned on Mario and Zelda myself and already appreciating the incredible complexity and carefully tuned learning curve of videogames, this book was somewhat interesting for its general theory of education but not as thought-provoking regarding video game theory as I had hoped.

This book is probably a better read for older generations that didn't have video games as an integral source of learning during their formative years and have as a result never taken them seriously.

This book offers a perspective on videogaming that is novel and thought-provoking. I am a (young) baby-boomer, and therefore a digital immigrant, according to Gee. Videogames were not a part of my youth, and my opinions have been shaped by the popular critiques of such games for their violence and misogyny. Frankly, I had the impression that videogames were at best, mindnumbing entertainment, and at worst, yet another reflection of the general malaise of our self-absorbed, thrill-seeking society. Accordingly, I was intrigued by the title of the book, which claims that videogaming might offer some useful insights into learning and literacy.

I must admit, I was skeptical at first, but I quickly became convinced by Gee's arguments about the deep nature of learning supported by videogaming. His arguments are supported by extensive examples of actual games that, believe it or not, Gee has played himself. Gee is a linguist, and he uses some concepts that are unfamiliar to a general audience, but I can assure potential readers that he explains these concepts in a clear and accessible manner. (I was even able to describe a "semiotic domain" to a friend after reading this book.)

One reason for my interest in the book is that I design e-learning curricula for professional training and higher education. Gee's book has suggested to me many ways in which we might improve the delivery of e-learning, making it less like "school" and more like a compelling, "real-world" experience. I have even started playing videogames myself, and I can attest to credibility of Gee's analyses (particularly the part about how difficult these games can be!). I strongly recommend this book to other baby-boomers, educators, and anyone who wants a fresh perspective on this unfairly maligned aspect of popular culture.

Video game sales exceed the movie industry's annual box office draw, now by a significant margin. The popularity and sophistication of today's video games demonstrate an important modern phenomenon. This is the admixture of information and entertainment. Many people-particularly young people-now get their "news" from non traditional sources-often associated with entertainment. Players of video games elicit information about their world from video games. War games, action adventures, sports games, even role playing games actually (even if sometimes inadvertently or as an unintended result) teach.

As the author of this book points out, they have to. Otherwise, players would not learn to play quickly enough or well enough to become proficient enough to enjoy the game. Furthermore, players must learn unobtrusively. They have to learn without it seeming a chore-and they certainly are not going to read or spend a lot of practice time. Given how important sequels are in the video game industry, failure to learn and to enjoy a first game results in lost sales for many games.

What Gee is really getting at is "just in time learning" and "learning in place." When you juxtapose the sorry state of our public school system with the importance of video games as a milieu for learning, gaining experience, and obtaining information, you see this is a serious subject.

It is imperative for people interested in these things to read this book. This book is well written. The author has a feel for the subject because he has a passion for gaming and a sincere interest in "gamers"-who, to him, are "students."

I have read a number of Gee's other works-aimed at academics, and I am very happy to see that this book is accessible to a popular audience.

James Paul Gee gives a different and interesting form of learning in his book. Gee shows how video games can actually help people of all ages obtain knowledge through many forms of learning. Gee argues that many schools can actually take note from video games on how to teach children and to actually hold their attention during class time. Throughout the book Gee highlights 36 learning principals that he feels video games possess and that many traditional schools should use to teach the youth of the world. According to Gee schools can learn a lot from the techniques used by video games to keep people interested in playing the same game over and over again.

One of the 36 principals that Gee represents is how video games help kids learn the use of patterns and how important they are in everyday life. Patterns help people beat video games by recognizing what methods could be useful by relating the game to parts of other video games they have played. Patterns are also present in the classroom in all subjects and Gee argues that if students could learn to recognize patterns in school material like they do in video games then students would learn the material much easier. Gee believes that schools should be responsible for helping students to recognize the patterns that exist in the material they teach.

As a teenage college student I thought the book started out a little slow. It seemed like another text book that I was forced to read for class but it quickly grabbed my attention after the second chapter. This book shows how video games are anything but a waste of time and actually can be considered to be a useful learning tool much like books. It changed my opinion on learning and teaching. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in different teaching methods or video games.

This a remarkably approachable book despite being written by an academic. Mr. Gee does an excellent job of exploring the role of video games in the lives of contemporary people. He explains succinctly how learning principles from video games can be applied to learning.

I particularly appreciated his discourse on literacy and explanation of semiotic domains and where video games falls into these domains. Certainly this book provided me many ideas on aspecting and identity and how mutable these concepts are for people, particularly through an interactive medium such as video games.

Still he seems to only apply these learning skills to hard sciences, which reveals a tendency of soft science academics trying to find validity by likening their work to hard science. The fact is soft science academia and the humanities is not and never will be hard science...while applying some of the examples to hard science is necessary it'd be nice to see how these principles apply to the humanities and soft sciences.

four out of five stars

What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy by James Paul Gee (Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a controversial yet thought-provoking look at interactive games and what can be learned from them. Persuasively presenting thirty-six learning principles that are built into good interactive video games, and contemplatively studying everything from issues of forming identity, to the acquisition of problem-solving skills, to learning non-verbal cues, What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy sheds considerable light in a most extraordinary way on this rapidly evolving and increasingly pervasive aspect of American popular culture in the twenty-first century.

It digs deeper in the trench than Prensky to suggest why learning is intimately tied to games (hybrid learning the philosopher Sterelny calls it) and gives those of us who are not ludologists links between cognitive science and 3d entertainment media that are verifiable.
I am all for prescriptive work that ties in the above and above all reads well not dryly. I read this just after Bartle's book (which is interesting from another angle, especially on experiential realism, but not so polemic) and if you are interested in this tangent (you thought it was wrong but..) then I think you will enjoy this book.

I am involved with the entertainment industry and so I have seen first hand the impact of video games. Gee's book is about the ways in which good video games incorporate good learning principles, that is, how good games get themselves learned well and make learning part of the fun and engagement of playing.

This is so, as Gee claims, because if games can't be learned well or cease early on to involve any interesting learning, they will not sell well, either because they are unplayable by lots of players or boring. He also argues that the sorts of learning principles good games incorporate are well supported by contemporary research in cognitive science, the science that studies human learning.

I liked the fact that the book is based on his own game playing (an enterprise he came to late in life) and his own research in linguistics and education.

I noted the one negative review on this site, that ironically, comments on the only part of the book where Gee is reporting on an interview he conducted with a young gamer, not his own gaming. This has little to do with the main point of the chapter, which is that young people, even those challenged in school, often draw on a rich array of social resources to learn and game deeply and well when they are playing video games.

Gee's book is a ground-breaking integration of cognitive science and game studies. It is a celebration of games and gaming and of human learning when it is set free of the sorts of strictures that one finds in schools that stress drill-and-kill.