Play Nice, Now: How Three Feuding Scholars Learned to Get Along

At first glance, the articles discussed in class about theoretical takes on videogames and learning would seem to be at odds: James Paul Gee’s “Why are video games good for learning?” contends that videogames allow players to develop perceptive, intellectual, and practical skills through simulation and mediated social interaction. In “Why gamers don’t learn more,” Jonas Linderoth argues that Gee misconstrues how learning works, and points to qualities of videogames that hamper their potential to teach, raising the need for further study. In “Reconceptualizing gamification,” Rowan Tulloch argues while videogames are useful for education, the games themselves need not necessarily enter the classroom. Yet there are grains of consensus among these authors – and understanding where their arguments align may provide a useful starting point for further enquiries into the place of games in education.

Gee and Tulloch agree on the manner in which videogames teach: Gee argues that through simulation, videogames provide a kind of perceptive training, whereby players learn “embodied empathy for complex systems” by actively taking part in their functioning, and in this way come to understand the system as a whole (5). Tulloch makes a similar claim when he writes that “video games ask players to […] perform tasks and understand logics with which they are have little to no prior skill […] [T]hese are not skills players simply have naturally, these are skills that need to be learned, and consequently that the games need to teach” (322). According to Gee games are good for developing cognitive skills in particular, as simulations train players to understand the kinds of action belonging to certain to roles and recognize situations where those actions are useful for the achievement of certain ends.

Tulloch and Gee also have similar ideas about games as pedagogic tools that structure behaviour. In discussing cross-functional affiliation, Gee discusses how multiplayer videogames like World of WarCraft can teach players to delegate tasks according to areas of personal expertise in order to work together more effectively. Tulloch would see this kind of collaboration not as an inherent property of videogames but a quality of collaborative games in general that might be appropriated for the classroom. Tulloch’s approach to games is to see them as pedagogic practices with lessons to be gleaned for formal education: “If we understand gamification as a form of training built upon the techniques used in, and heritage of, games rather than traditional pedagogy, then we find not only a framework that incorporates difficulty but a rich academic discourse for understandings its complexity” (328). World of WarCraft, in other words, can be a useful object lesson in staging situations where people learn to collaborate, even if the game itself is not used.

Tulloch’s emphasis on games as a field of pedagogic practice, rather than particular objects, may help resolve some of Linderoth’s objections to Gee. Linderoth questions the effectiveness of videogames as vehicles for skill acquisition: “[O]bservations of someone being able to play and progress in a game cannot be taken for granted as constituting the outcome of the advanced learning processes” (58). He later adds, “games can give us the sensation of progress and empower us without demanding that we develop the kind of skills that many other domains require” (59). His argument is supported by references to tools which flatten the difficulty curve, creating the illusion of progress. For this reason he questions the use of videogames as learning tools. I believe Tulloch would agree – again, while he is interested in games’ potential to train and motivate, he does not necessarily promote Thief as good instructional tool, as Gee does. Instead, Tulloch encourages the use of game-style difficulty curves to find ways of maintaining engagement in learning by managing challenges and rewards, even in a non-game context (328-9).

Tulloch also seems to share Linderoth’s position that “the matter of games and learning needs to be seen primarily as an empirical question” (58). He argues that existing studies do not properly understand difficulty, and therefore are not qualified to say whether the player is learning. Tulloch understanding games as carrying on a distinct pedagogical tradition, proposes that educators pay attention to games as a source of empirical knowledge: “Game design and game studies offer innumerable other important frameworks expansions and challenges to traditional pedagogic discourses” (329). Tulloch argues that we should consult academic knowledge on games as a way of discovering how they do teach, rather than attempting to fit them into existing frameworks.

A thread running across all three texts discussed here is the matter of whether games teach in ways compatible with the aims of formal education – whether games can help players develop real practical and cognitive skills. What Tulloch’s emphasis on gamification rather than games highlights is that games engage structures of learning which may be useful in and out of a gaming context – and that there already exists a wealth of data through which these structures may be discovered and adapted. The question facing educators is how to use this information. This recognizes Gee’s claims that videogames can teach through play, while also addressing Linderoth’s concerns that more rigorous study is needed. Tulloch’s article offers a perspective from which Gee and Linderoth’s work can be seen as compatible.

Works Cited

Gee, James Paul. “Why are video games good for learning?” 2005.

Linderoth, Jonas. “Why gamers don’t learn more: An ecological approach to games as learning environments.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds 4:1 (2012). 45-62.

Tulloch, Rowan. “Reconceptualizing gamification: Play and pedagogy.” Digital Culture & Education 6:4 (December 2014). 317-333.