Will this be on the test?


Game studies was already acquiring the makings of a field when James Paul Gee published What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy in 2003 and it has grown substantially since [1, 2]. Gee's work is deeply informed by decades of research into literacy, cognition and pedagogy. For those of us interested in the pedagogy of writing Gee is not simply one more wild-eyed prophet of active learning screaming "your next!" at the indifferent masses at that year's 4Cs. Rather he clearly outlines the limitations of active learning strategies and uses electronic games in a rather unexpected way: to highlight the importance of critical learning. Gee understands literacy as involving the ability to navigate multiple domains of signification, both in relation to specific media and across multiple domains of signification. “Even though reading and writing seem so central to what literacy means traditionally, reading and writing are not such general and obvious matters as they might at first seem. After all, we never just read or write; rather, we always read or write something in some way” (14). Gee's view of literacy as a situated practice thus reflects the influence of both cultural studies and new media analyses that have sought to challenge monolithic theories of cultural production. Gee's insistence that facility with multiple literacies is vital for engaged civic participation will strike a chord with many writing teachers and theorists; it is tempered by his argument that effective citizenship is not the only end goal of literacy learning and perhaps not even its most important goal [3]. Fundamental to the notion of effective citizen engagement, nevertheless, is understanding the distinction between practitioners and consumers: While you don’t need to be able to enact a particular social practice (e.g., play basketball or argue before a court) to be able to understand texts from or about that social practice, you can potentially give deeper meanings to those texts if you can. This claim amounts to arguing that producers (people who can actually engage in a social practice) potentially make better consumers (people who can read or understand texts from or about the social practice). A corollary of this claim is this: Writers (in the sense of people who can write texts that are recognizably part of a particular social practice) potentially make better readers (people who can understand texts from or about a given social practice). (pp. 15-16) The reason Gee emphasizes the word “potentially” is out of the recognition that “producers care often so deeply embedded in their social practices that they take the meanings and values of the texts associated with those practices for granted in an unquestioning way. One key question for deep learning and good education, then, is how to get producer-like learning and knowledge, but in a reflective and critical way” (p. 16). Not surprisingly, therefore, he is very critical of the view of education as content-delivery. While the acknowledged target of his criticism is high schools, it is hard for a college teacher not to feel that many of his criticisms hit a little close to home: “One good way to make people look stupid is to ask them to learn and think in terms of words and abstractions that they cannot connect in any useful way to images or situations in their embodied experiences in the world. Unfortunately, we regularly do this in schools” (76). As a result students end up with a set of general meanings and few ideas about how to translate them into lived experience, into the kind of knowledge that only comes with practice. The spiritual ancestor of Gee's critique of traditional educational practice is Seymour Papert, whose work Mindstorms (1980) argued not only that computers had the potential to transform educational practice, but that computers and children were natural allies [4]. He has also consistently championed the idea of the complexity inherent in electronic games. Papert's ideas underwent considerable revision, and in his 1993 work Children's Machine, he is critical of his own earlier understanding of how to bring about educational change. Nevertheless, a constant in Papert's work—and the foundation of Gee's critique—is that computer technology facilitates the kind of exploratory, self-directed, assimilative learning that children employ in their earliest years. Papert argues that the mode of learning the child is forced to employ in school is very different: “Ask a sympathetic adult who would reward her curiosity with praise” (Children's Machine, p. 10) [5]. Papert was a major influence on the active learning movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and Gee also draws heavily upon these ideas. He stresses some of the elements that active learning in a given domain can give us: 1) new ways to experience the world, 2) the possibility of joining the social group in this particular domain, and 3) learning and problem solving skills that prep us for future work in this domain or related ones (p. 23). However he notes that this active learning is not yet critical learning: The learner needs to learn not only how to understand and produce meanings in a particular semiotic domain that are recognizable to those affiliated with the domain, but, in addition, how to think about the domain at a “meta” level as a complex system of interrelated parts. The learner also needs to learn how to innovate in the domain—how to produce meanings that, while recognizable, are seen as somehow novel or unpredictable. (p. 23) Learning, therefore, is a complex, recursive process: analysis, theorization, practice, reflection, analysis, theorization, adaptation, more practice. . . It is against this background that Gee explores the learning principles embedded in videogames and finds them vastly superior to the learning theories embodied in our standard modes of schooling. He is at pains to point out the he is not arguing, "that what people are learning when they are playing video games is always good. Rather, what they are doing when they are playing good video games is often good learning. We can learn evil things as easily as we can learn moral ones” (p. 199). For Gee, games are so wildly successful in large part because they challenge people with complex tasks and give them the base skills, supportive scaffolding, iterative practice, and steadily increasing levels of challenge which allow them to be successful even as they push themselves. Papert is concerned that the transition between the child's "natural" exploratory mode of learning and the authoritarian reward/punishment structure of formal schooling could have an effect on the child that is "perhaps brutal and dangerous" (p. 10). His work however concentrates on information technology as a tool for helping to ease this transition and improve conventional schooling. For Gee himself and those who share his interest in games as learning platforms, new media technologies threaten conventional schooling with irrelevance. Prensky, for example, declares that “The reality is that, at least for the foreseeable future and despite the efforts of many educators, the real opportunities for our kids to advance are not found—and will possibly never be found—in school. These opportunities occur mainly when school is over: in after-school programs, community centers, at their friends’ houses, in the malls, and particularly at home” (p. 139) [6]. Gee's work on the applicability to education of the learning theories embodied in electronic games was derived mainly from playing and analyzing single-player games. In this regard, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) raise the bar: they are exponentially more difficult and time-consuming than even the most complex single-player game. Their applicability to the concerns of educators in general and writing instructors in particular is, however, even greater because they are highly social domains, driven by interpersonal communication and utilizing a variety of complex community structures. Indeed, while such games are seen by the non-gaming public chiefly in terms of their content (as representations of fantasy or sci-fi worlds) they are in fact simulations designed to facilitate the construction of different identities and the exploration of different modes of behavior. When we compare our current design practices that govern our writing courses against those of MMORPG designers, what do we learn? How well do our composition and rhetoric courses address the situated literacies and principles of learner-centered development outlined by Gee?		1. Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 2. For a useful introduction to the field see Wardrip-Fruin, N., & Harrigan, P. (Eds.) (2004) First person: New media as story, performance, and game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. And, like any game worthy of its market share, this volume spawned a sequel: Harrigan, P., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (Eds.) (2007). Second person: Role-playing and story in games and playable media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

		3. The most important goal for Gee is the effective maintenance of a "lifeworld:" those areas in which we are making sense of things not as experts but as generalists, as everyday people (p. 37). While this has the potential to sound like an old-fashioned emphasis on individual perfectibility (and from the point of view of cultural studies in particularly can appear the high point of neoliberal self-indulgence), Gee argues for the notion of a lifeworld not as a retreat from our surroundings but a domain where we process the impact of the world around us in order to promote more effective engagement: "“I firmly believe we need to protect lifeworld domains from the assaults of specialists (yes, even our own children). We need to understand and value people’s “everyday” knowledge and understandings. At the same time, I believe it is crucial, particularly in the contemporary world, that all of us, regardless of our cultural affiliations, be able to operate in a wide variety of semiotic domains outside our lifeworld domains" (p. 39).
		4. Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, computers and powerful ideas. New York: Basic Books.
		5. Papert, S. (1993). The Children's machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York: Basic Books.

		6. Prensky, M. (2006). “Don’t bother me mom—I’m learning!”: How computer and video games are preparing your kids for twenty-first century success—and how you can help!. St. Paul: Paragon House. One note of caution about Prensky's book. It is aimed directly at parents and he knows that he is working against a well honed propaganda machine that continues to be highly critical of electronic games. Nevertheless, Prensky both simplifies and abstracts the learning associated with games until it becomes virtually meaningless. Unlike Gee's work, it is seldom clear how game-based learning might serve larger objectives. In the passage quoted, for example, it is unclear what kids are "advancing" towards and for what purpose. Increasingly, for Prensky, the purpose of games is to provide kids with rich, complex, "experiences" (p. 139), a signifier that becomes as empty as the good old educational standby so beloved of the committees that write college mission statements: excellence.

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