How Video Games Save Education

I know education and I know gaming.  I’ve taught middle school students for the last fourteen years, and I have struggled as most teachers do to get the next generation to participate in their learning. Students sit glazed over with bored expressions as we tell them the way to learn is completely separate from their methods of interaction with the world.  Our education system was created near the beginning of the last century and had a purpose that is different than what we currently need and hasn’t been much revised since.   As professionals we’ve done cooperative learning and differentiation; we offer scoring guides and samples and student choice, and our literature has been sanitized so hard that is colorless and tasteless if a little too sweet.  None of this is part of the rest of our kids’ lives, where they become someone else, live through stories, or watch them unfold.  Popular video games have much to offer our students, a world they are interested in, a system of constant rewards and variety, and methods they already use to relate to the world.  The games need not be created specifically to educate because within them are complex systems to be studied, stories, characters, worlds, conflicts, geography, architecture, psychology, as well as critical thinking skills, evolutions to inspect, explain, explore, and evaluate.  Games need not be the whole of education, but a tool, combined with elements we already use.  Critical thinking in one area can be transferred to others.  If we show everything games can contain to students we open their minds and challenge game designers to keep up with us.

What’s Wrong with Education- I Know, Call on Me!!

Education is stuck in recycled programs we rename and trot out every few years, and standardized testing and finger-pointing and lower standards and victimhood.   Conversations in this vein are not helpful and amount only to hand-wringing and magic cure-all tonics.  Our current educational system was created post WWII where our national goals were to prepare most students for vocational or factory jobs and a chosen, blessed few for college careers.  Nowadays students need college degrees for entry level jobs; factory jobs were outsourced or made obsolete by technology.   Our everyday experience has changed drastically from when I was in school in the 80’s.  Now everyone has a cellphone and the internet and the internet on their cellphones, there is DVR and gaming systems that do more than game.  97% of teen boys play video games regularly and 94% of girls do the same.  What is wrong with education is we keep telling kids how they are supposed to be educated and assume they’re going to be excited and grateful- they’re not.  Imagine what it’d be like to be asked to sit silently and read a book or puzzle out a math problem on your own when everywhere else kids are bombarded and a part of media.  They are keystrokes away from a hundred people.  The world is literally at everyone’s fingertips, and we are asking them to be solitary, silent, and focused when every other second is filled with light, color, sound, and text.

Books are fantastic and should never go away, but even the ways we can read have expanded.  We need to meet kids where they are at and begin to incorporate more types of the media into classrooms, especially video games.  Video games are available to wider and wider audiences and every individual can find a game that suits them.  Games are interactive and give immediate feedback which encourage players to go further, to try again, to be curious and this is the foundation for learning.  Jane McGonnigal points out that we will fail and fail again in games and happily return until we succeed.  Games are cooperative and competitive and students are inherently social. Games are a language children understand and part of their daily lives.  Why aren’t we using them to teach?

WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO OFFER

It’s obvious,  kids love games, adults too.  Ask a teenager the perfect character build in Modern Warfare or how to beat the big boss in Mario Sunshine and they can tell you in detail.  Ask them how they solved a puzzle in Uncharted or to describe what happened in Rapture and they will.  There is nothing wrong with the minds of our youths; they are just as spongy as they’ve ever been, but this does not appear as obviously in their schooling as it once had because we are looking for it in the wrong place.

Video games, even the popular, pulpy ones contain volumes of useful information, insight and creativity.  Almost every game from zombie invasions to MMA fighters have some sort of storyline and idea of characterization and character development.  Many games look at themes such as war, family, utopia and dystopia, redemption- some in such a way that moments stay with you well after the game.  We can teach students to look at these, evaluate them, compare them to other works and media.  Games explore gender and social roles in ways that are more personal because players have a stake in them; they are living as that character in that world, playing through their circumstances not just reading about someone else who will make their own decisions.  In games, students can explore the consequences and effects of different actions in the same situation.  Games can practice morality and ask big questions.  Games ask us to take care of our avatar and the world they are inhabiting, isn’t this what we want ?

Games are filled with systems that students can learn to break down and investigate as they would in science or math.  Design elements, setting, geography, characters, can be explored and explained, researched and studied on the veracity of the game’s historical or scientific settings.  There is almost no subject that cannot be studied in video games, and it is work students will want to do, and can continue doing in their own homes.  When our youth are shown an expanded way of seeing, of knowing, of evaluating they can use it anywhere. The video game industry has grown from a few guys making puzzles for their friends to a work place with specialists, writers, actors, programmers, designers, and games have developed their own canon and giants on whose shoulders the next generation stands.

Then there is the creative and praxis side of things where students can be asked to plan games, create characters, settings, stories, themes, systems and they can do it in small groups or on their own.  They can research, revise, and learn the creative process that is used in every field, conceive, experiment, evaluate, scrap, revise, start again and it takes place in a world of infinite answers instead of just one. 

Education needs games.  They can create a love of learning.  They can engage.  We need to meet the kids where they are at and to catch up with the modern day and the reality of how people glean and disseminate information.  Our kids are playing them anyway, why not show them all the magic that is there? Why not teach them how to be wonderers and thinkers?  Isn’t that the purpose of education to begin with?