Pedagogy in Commercial Video Games

13 February 2012 2,624 views No Comment

This post is based on an email correspondence with a colleague; it became an interesting discussion so I turned it into a blog post.

What do you find meaningful about the emphasis on fun in games?

I think the power of “fun” to create engagement in learning can’t be underestimated. Marc Prensky describes a certain game that detects player decision-making and makes the game harder for them. Despite being more frustrating, players keep playing and try to overcome the limitations they are given. “Fun” doesn’t mean avoiding challenges, in fact when it comes to games it usually means meeting them head on. This is often the opposite of the behavior that we see in classrooms, so this is an important point that we can learn from games.

What are your impressions of Gagne’s 9 events relative to games and learning?

I think Gagne’s events are present to different degrees in games, and some are more important than others. I’m not sure that gaining attention is as important as it used to be, since people find out so much about games through word of mouth. Expectancy is also less used in some games, like Myst, where you really only discover the story as you play – it’s not all revealed at the beginning, like for instance in pacman where you already know the basic story when you start playing and it doesn’t really change.

If I had to pick 3 events that were crucial to learning with games, I would choose a) providing learning guidance, since gamers do not always have someone next to them giving advice, even when you play with a friend you are usually figuring out the game together, b) the second one would be eliciting performance – although you CAN learn a lot by watching other people play, I did save a lot of quarters this way when I was a kid, at some point you do have to dive in and play. The people who tend to be better at a certain game are usually the people who have put in the most amount of time. Babysitting before we got a Nintendo in the house was obviously crucial to mastering Super Mario Bros simply so I’d have access to the game 🙂 and the third one I would choose, this is harder because there are a few that might qualify but if I had to pick just one more I would go with providing feedback. You really need to know how you’re doing in order to adjust your play and do better. Dying is good way to find out that your fighting strategy wasn’t quite up to snuff – games are great at providing this kind of immediate feedback and showing consequences. Sometimes in education the consequences are so far from the original action, for example getting a test back a week after you took it and you’ve already forgotten your answers, that they are hard to learn from. Games are made for this kind of immediacy.

Do “good games” already embody sounds pedagogy in their designs?

This is a tough question to answer if only because “good” games are often defined as games that embody good pedagogy. So the answer is yes! I think it helps me to differentiate between games that are good at motivating, and games that are good at teaching. Tetris is often brought as an example of a good game, and it’s definitely addictive, but I’m not sure what I learned from it. I did get better through practice but I’m not sure that the game really uses good pedagogy- it didn’t support the learning, other than providing a forum for continued practice, which is only one aspect of the learning theories we’ve been reading about. So it’s very good at getting the player to keep playing, and perhaps provides a good model for motivation in learning, in the way it keeps increasing the challenge without making it too hard for the player, but isn’t necessarily helpful as a learning model. So I think there are different ways to define “good” games, even within Becker’s framework of good game pedagogy.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian_d/


Elisa teaches online professional development courses for teachers at teachertechtraining.com.
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