So I went to dinner last night with a few educators I admire and the talk turned to Twitter and blogging and gaming and how people learn and why people play games. I got all these resources in mind to send them, and then decided I might as well blog about them, too, since they might be useful to more people. This seemed a lot easier to write in a way that made sense while I was dreaming about it last night.
Let’s start with what’s often shared in the news: Video-game Ownership May Impair Kids’ Academic Achievement. This news article sums up a study on short term effects of game system ownership. The study is published in the Psychological Science Journal and only members can read it. So I’m not able to see how long “short term” is. Basically the blurb says they discovered the shocking news that if you give someone a gaming system, that person is going to play games on it, thereby spending less time doing other things they would have done without the new gaming system. They probably would have found similar results had they given these boys really interesting books to read, a new interesting museum to go to, or anything at all new that they were interested in. Think of anything new worth a couple hundred dollars that has entered your life. After you got it, did you spend more time with it for awhile than you did other things, perhaps causing some negative effects with the other things? Did the ‘new’ wear off after a bit so that it settled into a normal routine and you then focused on what you should have been doing again? Basically, without having read the actual study, it sounds to me like these kids and their video game systems were set up to fail.
I’m not saying there aren’t potential problems with time management where games are concerned. Almost Normal is an awesome web comic that explores time management issues with gaming. I’ve picked out a few of the strips below. Read what she writes about each strip, and read the comments from her readers to really understand where they all come from. The artist is a real gamer with real life goals that she is accomplishing.
- August 21, 2009: This strip introduces the characters pretty well.
- November 6, 2009: This illustrates the frustration and doubt everyone experiences about being able to accomplish their dreams or change the world. Gamers get that doubt, too. This is especially relevant to Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk about gamers. One of her points, and I think it’s the only one I disagree with, is that gamers believe they can change the world, but only a virtual world, not the real world.
- November 13, 2009: You can see here that all of her characters need stuff. This is one of the ways the game keeps players playing. David Wong compares video game design to Skinner box design to explain this.
- February 19, 2010: This one is for all the Farmville gamers you know, and it illustrates how many different responsibilities pull at our time, both in real life and virtual.
Reactions to Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk about gamers:
I agree with and learned so much from all but one sentence Jane McGonigal shares–the once where she says gamers believe they can change the world, but only a virtual world. I think she needs to meet some of the gamers that I know. These are people who believe they can change the world, and they do change the real world. I play with successful business owners, kids who start charity events to raise money for children’s hospitals, published and self-supporting artists and musicians, parents raising responsible and well-behaved kids, and lots of people who have day jobs to pay the bills and very fulfilling, creative hobbies in addition to playing games.
So why do we game? David Wong’s Skinner box analogy explains how the game meets a need for feedback, for our efforts to be rewarded. Jane McGonigal explains that we play to escape reality. These are definitely reasons why I play. It’s why I read. It’s why I do art projects. It’s why I go for a drive, go hiking, go biking, and dream of going on vacations. Working with reality can get frustrating. You work really hard to meet a goal and you can’t tell if you are making progress or going backwards, and the finish line can be years away. Around any corner, you can meet people who say you can’t succeed. Since I’ve started playing World of Warcraft (WoW), I find that at those times, I play. It’s a great break. I get rewarded. I can tell I’m making progress. I can team up with people to accomplish things none of us could do alone. After awhile, I re-energize and am ready to take on my real life goals again.
David Wong describes the light shooting from your body when you accomplish goals in game. This is my toon achieving the most difficult thing I’ve done in game so far:
This took a few months to accomplish and I am still really proud of it. Real life rewards very few people this way. In real life, I earn something to list on my resume or a good story to tell.
An author and game designer, Sirlin, shares a video of Jesse Schell’s 2010 DICE lecture describing an amazing world in which marketing takes over and rewards everyone for every little thing they do in real life. The video is at the top of the page and Sirlin’s analysis follows. He closes with, “Jesse Schell’s future is coming. How resistant are you to letting others manipulate you with hollow external rewards?” So it seems that Jane McGonigal hopes for a world where we create games where people learn to live responsible lives by virtually exploring the consequences of doing otherwise. Jesse Schell thinks advertisers will control our reward systems and we will learn to live lives that buy the products they want to sell. Hopefully it will be a combination of the two, and we will also learn to be critical and question these reward systems.
These award-winning serious games include examples of what McGonigal wants to see in the future as well as many educational games. Each banner launches a video about the game.
Keith Devlin wants to build a virtual game on the scale of WoW that helps people learn to think mathematically. He thinks that commercial game developers will not be motivated to spend the necessary money to build an educational game. I’m not so sure that’s true. If it’s a good game, what geeky gamer doesn’t want to be in a world of math? I would play. In fact, I’m very tempted to buy an early reading program, ItzaBitza, because it’s just a really great game. Click the “Try ItzaBitza” button for a 15 minute free trial and you’ll see what I mean. I hope I can spend my gaming dollars to learn things like higher math, physics, and programming someday soon.
Edits: I updated this on Monday, March 22nd to add some formatting and adjust some words to make it a little more readable and to try to say what I mean more clearly. I’ll continue editing this in the future. I’m still analyzing all of these related sources and figuring out the points I want to make about them. Thank you for reading trudging through it in its current state.
