When Jim Gee first published "What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy," he painted a portrait of a gamer engaged in an immersive world where the gamer is lost, for hours, in meaningful play as a soldier in World War II or a Greek god.
What Gee was talking about is that schools should rethink their design to be more akin to games. What if curricular design had as much depth as the design of major commercial video games? For the most part, this topic was never explored. Instead, attention just concentrated on funding the development of educational games. In our excitement, some critical ideas were confused.
Here is the problem: Gee argues that games, unlike schools, offer deep, meaningful, and somewhat inefficient learning experiences. This is in contrast to schools, where we ... aim for efficiency.
So realistically, what does that mean about the games we design for schools? If schools won't dedicate 40 hours a week to history or science, why design games that demand just that? This is where the original funding for games in education started to head: trying to recapture the magic of best-selling commercial platform games. But schools went about business as usual ...
Part of the reason for the success of my games, I believe, has to do with the fact that I design my games to be more like other technologies that have been easily absorbed in the classroom as opposed to a commercial opus. Researcher Katherine Culp identified these features as being key for classroom games:
The technology needs to address conceptual "sticking points" for students that teachers are familiar with.
The technology needs to be flexible.
The technology needs to be able to be used simply at first, and allow teachers to grow the sophistication of use over time.
Games in education are vital because of their ability to engage all students. But we have to work within the realities of schools.
