What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

Rating:
Summary: Information from entertainment
Review: Video game sales exceed the movie industry's annual box office draw, now by a significant margin. The popularity and sophistication of today's video games demonstrate an important modern phenomenon. This is the admixture of information and entertainment. Many people-particularly young people-now get their "news" from non traditional sources-often associated with entertainment. Players of video games elicit information about their world from video games. War games, action adventures, sports games, even role playing games actually (even if sometimes inadvertently or as an unintended result) teach.

As the author of this book points out, they have to. Otherwise, players would not learn to play quickly enough or well enough to become proficient enough to enjoy the game. Furthermore, players must learn unobtrusively. They have to learn without it seeming a chore-and they certainly are not going to read or spend a lot of practice time. Given how important sequels are in the video game industry, failure to learn and to enjoy a first game results in lost sales for many games.

What Gee is really getting at is "just in time learning" and "learning in place." When you juxtapose the sorry state of our public school system with the importance of video games as a milieu for learning, gaining experience, and obtaining information, you see this is a serious subject.

It is imperative for people interested in these things to read this book. This book is well written. The author has a feel for the subject because he has a passion for gaming and a sincere interest in "gamers"-who, to him, are "students."

I have read a number of Gee's other works-aimed at academics, and I am very happy to see that this book is accessible to a popular audience.


Rating:
Summary: Presenting thirty-six learning principles
Review: What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy by James Paul Gee (Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a controversial yet thought-provoking look at interactive games and what can be learned from them. Persuasively presenting thirty-six learning principles that are built into good interactive video games, and contemplatively studying everything from issues of forming identity, to the acquisition of problem-solving skills, to learning non-verbal cues, What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy sheds considerable light in a most extraordinary way on this rapidly evolving and increasingly pervasive aspect of American popular culture in the twenty-first century.