Can Games teach us?

Reflections on the optimistic paradigm explained in “Video Games and the Future of Learning”

Video Games are undoubtedly the most pervasive products for entertainment gifted by Computer Science. There has always been a lot of criticism around the effects of games in our lives and our society. Though these digital games have been in existence for quite a long period of time, we still find ourselves in a non-converging decision as to whether they are doing good or bad to us. This is mainly due to the inherent versatility in the kinds and genres of the games and individualistic preferences of the Game Development communities. However, unofficially we often find a vast majority of people who believes that Games are nothing but a sheer waste of time and they leave players in their fantasy worlds which subsequently has bad effects on the personality of the player. In such a belief system of our society, it’s very difficult to make people understand the possible good effects a game can have on a person, if not impossible. In the literature “Video Games and the Future of Learning” written back in 2005 at Wisconsin Center for Education Research, the authors have done an excellent work of explaining the bigger picture of the usefulness of the Game Based environments which can be put for a betterment of the society. He shows various examples of games which feature the situated learning environments and explains how those can affect the overall learning experience of the player. Though there’s no consensus on the good or bad effects of games, almost every researcher and literature believes that a game always makes the player learn “something”. He doesn’t provide any comparison on the good or bad consequences of that “something”, rather explains how we can take advantage of the good side of it and model it further to meet our needs. The literature doesn’t talk much about the side effects of the frameworks explained in it and we believe that it’s the way the authors want to portray their work. His vision of deploying the Game Based Learning environments in every education system may seem a little ambitious at times, but overall his goals were pretty concrete and focused considering it was written 10 years back. After such a long time now after that work was published, we have actually started to see his dreams coming true in some of our educational systems, if not all, which is a great achievement for us. Lots of middle schools in the country now has started deploying ITS(Intelligent Tutoring Systems) in their classrooms and results of student learning are also pretty good. In this paper, we discuss the insights of the frameworks presented in the aforementioned literature and provide our views on the same wherever we feel the need. Towards the end, we also briefly mention few things that we believe the author should have included in his work to make it little more comprehensive. Overall, we must say that the paper is a great reflection on how games should be perceived as a holy agent of education and not always a demon to us.

Why video games can be so effective in learning?:

A very convincing and widely agreed answer to the above question is the presence of virtual reality in these games. As stated by the author, video games let the players be someone which he is not in the real world. It’s a natural human tendency to do stuff which you don’t get to do in your daily lives. So it becomes a big advantage of such systems and they leave a huge imprint on the players mind. These players often get so much immersed in these virtual environments that they start following the values and rules of that simulated environment and start living that virtual identity. If we can mould this advantage to make the players learn good things, then it can have a large impact on the overall learning experience of the players. He talks mainly about “Situated Environment” based games here, which are the ones where the player performs a role of some identity in the virtual world of the game and are often assigned tasks to complete. Few examples included are Lineage, Deus Ex etc. Some games like Clash of Clans, which is classified under the genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Games, are so addictive in nature that players starts to live in that virtual world. This is a very serious instrument which must me modeled to put into a good cause, and a major portion of the paper deals with it. He shows examples of how “knowing and doing” is related to game based environments and backs that up with various suitable examples.

Learning in a Virtual Community:

The notion of how we think or epistemology is one of the key concepts which the paper centers around. In authors words, “It’s a practice which determines how someone in the community decides what questions are worth answering, how to go about answering them, and how to decide when an answer is sufficient”.  Usually learning by doing things among people who already follow the rules and values of what we intend to learn, is relatively much easier than just going through a session about the same. We can leverage this up to a great extent by designing game based environments which has a society with shared values and beliefs related to the intended knowledge domain. The author explains the effectiveness of the approach by citing examples from a game called “Full Spectrum Warrior” which is a video game based on a U.S. Army training simulation. In the game, the player is exposed to a military environment where he has to lead and instruct soldiers to win goals of the game. It focusses on teaching the values as a shared experience. Some part of the intended knowledge domain are instilled into the other characters in the game and some part of the knowledge has to explored by the player himself. This way the learning proceeds in a collaborative manner and is often found very helpful. 

A large portion of the literature explore the ways of using these Epistemic Games for initiation and transformation of the relevant epistemic frames. Examples are drawn from a game named Madison 2200, in which players take the role of an urban planner and solve planning problems in the simulated environments. Results and feedbacks showed a great deal of achievements obtained in terms of learning benefits and players actually started to understand urban panning issue in real life. These show how effectively game based environments can expose even a novice to a learning arena. Similar to these games, we do have few games which help in transforming the views and the ways the experts of that field think. He concludes this section with some pros and cons of both the paradigms.

Games in Schools: Will they allow?

Game Based simulated learning environments have been widely used for training purposes in private and government organizations. US Army is probably one of the major contributors and believers in the field. But we don’t see many invasions of these systems into the educational systems in schools and colleges. The author cites the great potential that these games have in tutoring the students. He gives various examples like he says for Madison 2200, which shows the pedagogical potential of bringing students the experience of being city planners. But this big dream of deploying learning games into our schooling system has a major hurdle to handle with. No matter how effective and an engaging game we produce to be used in schools, we always have a problem with parents and teaching community not encouraging its usage due to the established negative opinions about the games, as mentioned earlier. Even if we make a game which doesn’t teach any violence or bad things, still games inherently expose students to an uncontrolled learning environment which is against most schooling system on today’s date. So before our dreams come true, first we have to focus on changing the believes about the games and influential people speaking about those, is definitely a good start according to the author. 

Concluding Remarks:

If we look back to the whole century about how much advancement we have achieved in our education systems, we find it’s significantly high. We have almost completely digitized the whole system and made the facilities available at a fingertip. But the author states that still somewhere we feel the need to go beyond the classroom programs to make the students take knowledge to a different level. This is where maybe game based intelligent environments can shed some lights. If properly designed, these games can do wonders and help students not only learn things, but also to get attached to “particular social practices”. The work also mentions about some organizations who is favoring intelligent games design in recent years. Finally he discusses some points related to the challenges that we might face while designing such games. Understanding the design of proper virtual worlds which fits students’ needs being the most important thing to follow up. He concludes by stating his dream of how we can march towards a smarter planet by making these intelligent games ubiquitous.

The work in the literature is a unique one in it’s field and truly a motivational and thoughtful read which gave the flavor of the limitless possibilities of Intelligent Game Based Learning environments. However, as we know that the paradigm of gaming itself has a ton of disadvantages along with the pros, we must not forget those as well. We feel that the author could have considered mentioning few things that can go wrong when we try to deploy such systems in huge scale, which can become a major concern at that time. He being completely optimistic about it, have almost left out the dark side of it. We are not suggesting for a pessimistic review here, but just brief touch on some side effects would be a valuable addition. Finally, we also feel that the description could provide some possible insights into the intelligence to be associated with these systems like student modeling and tutor modeling, so that the descriptions provided can be mapped to real to systems easily. Nevertheless, considering all the nice descriptions and insights in the paper and keeping in mind that they wrote this 10 years back from now, we must say that undoubtedly it’s a great literature and is a must read for anyone working in the field.

NB : The article is a critique on the paper Gee, J., Shaffer, D. W., Squire, K. R., & Halverson, R. (2005). Video Games and the future of Learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 67(02).