The most basic and important aspect in understanding how video games can refurbish education is shifting the widely shared standpoint that games are just “mere entertainment.” More than a multi-billion dollar industry, more than a gripping toy for both children and adults, more than a means to computer literacy, video games are significant because they let people participate in a new and advanced realm. They let players think, talk, and act—they let players inhabit—roles otherwise far-off to them.
These rich virtual worlds are what make games such significant contexts for learning. In the world of virtual gaming, learning no longer means facing words and symbols separated from the things those words and symbols are about in the first place. The inverse square law of gravity is no longer something understood exclusively through an equation; students can gain virtual experience walking on worlds with lesser mass than the Earth, or plan manned space flights that entail understanding the changing effects of gravitational forces in different parts of the solar system. In virtual worlds, learners experience the concrete realities that words and
symbols describe. Through such experiences, athwart multiple contexts, learners can understand complex concepts without losing the connection between abstract ideas and the real problems they can be used to resolve. In other words, the virtual worlds of games are influential because they make it possible to develop situated understanding.
Although the typecast of the gamer is a lone teenager seated in front of a computer, game play is also a methodically social phenomenon. The best examples are massively multiplayer online games: games where thousands of players are concurrently online at any given time, participating in virtual worlds with their own economies, political systems, and cultures. But vigilant study shows that most games—from console action games to PC strategy games—have tough game playing communities. Whereas schools largely sequester students from one another and from the outside world, games bring players collectively, competitively and cooperatively, into the virtual world of the game and the social community of game players. In schools, students mostly work alone with school-sanctioned materials; avid gamers seek out news sites, read and write faqs, take part in discussion forums, and most notably, become serious consumers of information. Classroom work has less impact outside of the classroom; its only real audience is the teacher.
Game players, in contrast, develop reputations in online communities, transforming audiences as writers through discussion forums, and occasionally even take up careers as professional gamers, traders of online commodities, or game modders and designers. The virtual worlds of games are powerful, in other words, because playing games means developing a set of effective social practices. Video games definitely can build social confidence.
In other words, by developing virtual worlds, games incorporate knowing and doing. But not just knowing and doing. Games bring mutually ways of knowing, ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of caring: the situated understandings, effective social practices, powerful identities, and shared values that make someone an expert.
There is a lot being learned in video games. And this is true. But for some educators it is hard to see the educational potential in games because these virtual worlds are not about memorizing words, or definitions, or facts.
Video games are about a whole lot more.
