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

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

My last post has all the quotes I noted down for this book that I found interesting or useful for my project. However, since my project has changed some of these are not important anymore but there are still some I can relate my project too:

'... 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

'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 afraid 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.' - p61

'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 afterword, 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

As I have mentioned this book - now - is not as important too my project as initally thought, however, I have still managed to find some really nice quotes and information that can help towards my progression of this project.

Useful information it has given me is examples of games that focus on story and environment e.g Half Life 2  and Deus Ex. Many of the quotes noted above have help give an insight into the types of things I need to look into in order to help create a story via the environment in my interactive experience.

This book's main focus was on teaching through games and comparing these techniques with school techniques. Throughout the book Gee stated and explained 36 different learning principles. I am not going to write them all here but here is a few I thought would be useful for my project; Create a 3D environment which, through exploration, tells a story.

10. Amplification of Input Principle

For a little input, learners get a lot of output.

15. Probing Principle

Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.

16. Multiple Routes Principle

There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem solving, while also exploring alternative styles.

20. Multimodal Principle

Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.) not just words.

21. "Material Intelligence" Principle

Thinking, problem solving, and knowledge are "stored" in material objects and the environment. This frees learners to engage their minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects.

28. Discovery Principle

Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunity for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.