'What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy' by James Paul Gee - Book Quotes

'What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy' by James Paul Gee

Sadly this book is not as useful too my project as it was at the beginning due to my change of direction, however I still continued with it, highlighting interesting features and noting down interesting expressions.

I am first going to highlight all the quotes and page numbers before writing a short overview of the book and how it has related to my project.

'...you can think about people who kill themselves to set off a bomb, in pursuit of some cause they believe in, as suicide bombers, murderers, terrorists, freedom fighters, heroes, psychotics, or in many other different ways. Different people can read the world differently just as they can read different types of texts differently.' - p2

'...I predict that shooting will be less important and talking more important in many games, even shooter games. Even now, many shooting games stress stealth, story, and even social interaction more than they used to.' - p10

'When people learn to play video games they are learning a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word "literacy" is normally used. Traditionally, people think of literacy as the ability to read and write.' - p13

'Three things, then, are involved in active learning: experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning.
This is "active learning." However, such learning is not yet what I call "critical learning." For learning to be critical...The learner needs to learn not only how to understand and produce meanings in a particular semiotic domain that are recognizable to those affiliated with the domain, but, in addition, how to think about the domain at a "meta" level as a complex system of interrelated parts.' - p23

'...video games are potentially particularly good places where people can learn to situate meanings through embodied experiences in a complex domain and meditate on the process.' - p26

'It is important to realize that meanings are no more general - they are just as situated - in lifeworld domains as they are in any other semiotic domain...think of the different situated meanings of the word "light" in everyday interactions in these sentences: Turn the light on. This light isn't giving much light. I can see a far off light. I am just bathing in this light.' - p 37

'In the modern world, we are used to having to face the fact that children, including our own, are specialists when and where we are not. Many children are adept at the semiotic domain of computers - sometimes because they play video games and that interest has led them to learn more about computers - when the adults in the house are intimidated by computers.' - p38

'...thinking about the (internal) design of the game, about the game as a complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways. This is metalevel thinking, thinking about the game as a system and a designed space, and not just playing within the game moment by moment. Such thinking can open up critique of the game. It can also lead to novel moves and strategies, sometimes ones that the game makers never anticipated. This is what I meant by critical learning and thinking' - p42

'...while some young people will let a superhero first-person shooter character kill "civilians" and not just enemies, a good many others will not, since they feel that it just isn't fitting for such a superperson - that is, the person they are projecting into the world - to do such a thing...Players are projecting an identity onto their virtual character based both on their own values and on what the game has taught them about what such a character should or might be and become' - p58

'Such teaching and learning is, in my view, a matter of three things:

1. The Learner must be enticed to try, even if he or she already has good grounds to be afriad to try.
2. The learner must be enticed to put in lots of effort even if he or she begins with little motivation to do so.
3. The learner must achieve some meaningful success when he or she has expended this effort.

There are three principles here because people will not put in effort if they are not even willing to try in a domain; success without effort is not rewarding; and effort with little success is equally unrewarding.' - p 61

'...a very powerful learning principle, a principle we can call the "amplification of input principle."...they give, for a little input, a lot of output. In a video game, you press some buttons in the real world and a whole interactive virtual world comes to life. Amplification of input is highly motivating for learning.' - p64

'The story line in a video game is a mixture of four things:

1. The game designers' ("author's") choices
2. How you, the player, have caused these choices to unfold in your specific case by order in which you have found things.
3. The actions you as one of the central characters in the story carry out (since in good video games there is a good deal of choice as to what to do, when to do it, and in what order to do it)
4. Your own imaginative projections about the characters, plot, and world of story.' - p81

'Playing a good video game like Deus Ex well requires the player to engage in the following four-step process:

1. The player must probe the virtual world (which involves looking around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging in a certain action).
2. Based on reflection while probing and afterward, the player must form a hypothesis about what something (a text, object, artifact, event, or action) might mean in a usefully situated way.
3. The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing what effect he or she gets.
4. The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts or rethinks his or her original hypothesis.' - p90

'A game like Deus Ex has a great many texts inside the virtual world it creates, texts you find along the way, like notes, e-mail, diaries, and messages you have hacked from various computers. These texts help you not only to piece together the ongoing story but to make decisions about actions you will or will not take' - p100

'In video games players soon learn how to "read" the physical environments they are in to gain clues about how to proceed through them. The shapes and contours of the physical environment, and the objects lying around, come to guide the player...in making good guesses about how to proceed.' p109

'...a point I am trying to make quite generally in this book: Good video games incorporate good learning principles, because otherwise there would be no video games, because too few people would have purchased them.' - p114