3D Game Lab: Philosophy & Ideas about Gaming

There were three quests in 3D Game Lab that had me watching 3 different TED talks about games, gaming, and gamers. Of course, the prompt was…watch and reflect. So I’ve embedded the videos below incase someone wants to watch them (they are thought provoking) and you’ve got my wandering reflection further below.

First I watched Tom Chatfield’s “7 ways games reward the brain.”

The second video I watched was David Perry’s “Are games better than life?” The video includes an excerpt from Michael Highland’s film “As Real as Your Life.”

The third video I watched was Jane McGonigal’s “Gaming can make a better world”

Chatfield’s video gave overwhelming numbers about how many people are playing games, how many hours, and how much real-world money is being spent in virtual worlds on virtual objects (the other videos also gave awe-inspiring numbers as well). Ultimately, all these statistics got me thinking about “what motivates the game play?” How can education tap into that motivation? The face that McGonigal showed of the gameplayer on the verge of the Epic Win (I think that was the term) got me thinking about this dichotomy between how we construct younger generations as unfocused multitaskers (when we talk about them and their mobile technologies) and overfocused addicts (when we talk about them and gaming). This is a fascinating distinction that is tied to the type of technology associated with the assumption being made. Something I’ve been thinking about is how to get students to learn to distinguish between “work” that can be done while multitasking and “work” that requires time, energy, and focus. Duh…it appears they already have. How can we help construct learning exercises that engage both of these behaviors and help students become self aware about engaging them as well?

I really enjoyed how both Chatfield’s and Perry’s focus on the emotional, social, and cultural aspects of the game. This actually got me thinking about how people who are “engaged” by technology are sometimes dismissed as “just wanting to play with the new toys” (especially teachers). In other words, teachers who distrust technologies dismiss those who play with new technologies. One aspect of my dissertation data I loved was how every teacher, whether they were a bleeding-edge Beta adopter or the latest-of-the-late adopter, said they would not implement a new technology unless they could articulate how/why they thought it would better facilitate learning. This gets back to the point about emotional, social, and cultural aspects of gaming…gaming and gaming technologies are just the tools or applications to DO the emotional, social, and cultural work.  Of course the technologies can carry biases to how the designers and programmers think (yes, yes Cindy Selfe…that article always sticks!), however, it is still the human pushing the button or pulling the trigger.

I liked when Perry (I think, maybe it was Chatfield) was talking about all the data gaming systems are collecting about their players. On the one hand, this is Orwellian scary; however, as an educator it got me thinking…”all that data might appease the politicians screaming for data.” In other words, could constructing courses more like games give us access to more data that would help feed the quantitative assessment Nazis? And what I like about this is that we can still ask for qualitative assessment within the game; however, the act of gamifying it turns some of that qualitative materials into the quantitative numbers the bean-counters want.

Finally, I do appreciate Chatfield and McGonigal giving lists and terms to work with as I think about teaching and learning. (It’s the lingering modernists/structuralist in me…hey, you can’t go post-modern/structuralist without first having the walls, barriers, or categories to break.) Chatfield’s 7 rewards are useful in thinking how to design courses/learning:

1. Experience bars measuring progress…how easy is this with gradebooks, really?!
2. Multiple long & short term goals…this connects to the need that faculty need to give students both short-term, low-stakes learning activities besides the longer, high-stakes assessment activities.
3. Reward effort-don’t punish failure…this definitely jives with how I’ve been constructing homework increasingly with a “just do it” attitude; and if they really need to revise it, let them!
4. Rapid, frequent, clear feedback…yeah, I wish I was better at this. This is how these mass-courses (especially seeing in math) are being developed. I think this is going to be the crux of the problem of trying to make mass-FYC courses; most of us who teach FYC don’t trust computer graded assessment of writing and reading/responding takes time.
5. An element of uncertainty…or, build in surprises. I think this is smart and asks instructors to be creative; most of which contemporary politics has squashed out of teachers. Could this be an opportunity to reclaim it (and reclaim all the amazing people who have left the teaching profession”?
6. Identifying Windows of Enhanced Engagement-a period when the brain is read to learn in terms of activity memory and confidence…ah, yeah…of course I want to learn how to better identify and engage this time/window.
7. Other people-aka, we are social critters and enjoy working together…Interestingly this is one of the skills that business and industry is always howling that graduates don’t have enough practice doing. Will building course activities into a game make cooperative/collaborative learning both easier for the instructor to facilitate as well as for students to pallet (many don’t like doing it)?

McGonigal said that gamers were good at the following:

• Having Urgent Optimism, extreme self motivation
• Weaving a tight Social Fabric
• Blissful Productivity…happier working hard
• Desire Epic Meaning—attached to meaningful work

Therefore, she claims, “Gamers are Super-Empowered Hopeful Individuals…only problem is, only believe can change virtual worlds instead of the ‘real’ world.” Isn’t this just an issue of transfer? Haven’t those of us in education been juggling this problem…forever? But maybe we’re the ones to help with it?

August 17 2011 | Posted in Games & Education