A former colleague and friend, Mark Burkholz, had his son’s picture land in The Boston Globe in a feature article titled “Parents seek balance as screens’ allure grows,” an article about the seemingly ever-increasing amount of time that children and teenagers are spending on gaming. In the article, Mark is quoted as stating that these skills (those learned in gaming) are crucial ones for living in an adult society. He and I have discussed this in depth: Mark contends that team-building, teamwork, and strategy development are all important to advancement within the current workforce. Yet, society and the media both appear to badger us with the message that increased time spent gaming is related to decreased performance on some far more desirable criteria, such as grades. Even the author of the article on Mark’s son Noah seems to leave us with the impression that gaming is a bad thing. Who is right?
According to an article published by John Tierney in The New York Times, Mark is. Tierney cites researcher Edward Castronova, professor of telecommunications at Indiana University, as stating that the problems faced in games aren’t all that different from work activities in his article “On a Hunt for What Makes Gamers Keep Gaming.” Jane McGonigal, a researcher at Institute for the Future, took this a step further in an article appearing in The Wall Street Journal titled “Be A Gamer, Save the World.” In the article, Dr. McGonigal suggests that the power of games could be used to solve real-world problems. Tierney’s article resonates with this idea: it mentions the First Aid Corps, an organization who has produced an app for iPhone and Google Android cell phones that allows individuals to make a game of sorts by cataloging nearby defibrillators to provide a valuable service to those in need of them.
Could traditional education also be leveraging games to help solve instructional challenges? As Tierney points out, leveraging games as an instructional tool dates back at least as far as Charlemagne. Yet, game usage as a part of classroom instruction tapers off dramatically as students advance through grades. According to both Tierney and McGonigal, gamers are happy, and recent research has suggested that happiness and academic achievement are at least interrelated. Schools could potentially increase the happiness of students and thereby improve academic achievement merely by incorporating game-playing into the curriculum.
However, the real benefit to education lies in the gaming ecosystem. As British Journalist and TED speaker Tom Chatfield and others have pointed out, it’s amazing how resilient humans are when playing video games. According to McGonigal, gamers spend up to 80% of their time in games losing. Two factors are obviously at play here. First is the classic Gambler’s fallacy. Just like a gambler, we believe that the previous losses will eventually regress to the mean and we will then be “rewarded” with a win. We know intuitively that a toss of a coin will – over time – turn up an equal number of “heads” and “tails.” Therefore, after a few losses, I am “destined” to win. While this does not work for the gambler in a pure game of chance, it certainly plays out well for the gamer, where repetitive play yields improved skill. Second is the low cost of failure. With gaming as a virtual reality with little to no impact on the “real world,” losses are less averse than they ordinary would be. The gaming system creates an artificial construction where people need not be stigmatized by losses.
Think of the huge potential benefit to education: a “lossless” world where students are empowered to fail and thereby to learn something as a result. Moreover, the variable reinforcement schedule of most video games – the little trinkets and rewards distributed throughout the game – make the patterns much less prone to extinction. The resulting overall environment would be one in which students were not afraid to fail and received the patterned and important feedback that would drive them to further play and, as a result, further learning. The potential educational benefits for students is tremendous: they can test out ideas and immediately see the simulated result, with no real world consequences. A biology student can literally make decisions about how to control infectious diseases and see a simulated result of those decisions.
The possibilities of real-world problems that are escapable are endless, but why are you sitting here wasting your time reading this? I think we both best be getting to our video games.
2 thoughts on “Escape to . . . Reality?”
February 8, 2011 at 9:11 pm
Today’s students often complain that what they are learning in today’s classrooms is not germane. Students want more challenges in the classroom than ever before and need those challenges to be connected to real life conditions. In other words, classroom learning needs to serve a purpose other than providing a “classroom” learning experience.
For teachers, the challenge is to find ways to help students transfer the classroom learning experience into an education that will be relevant for the remainder of their lives. The quest for academic excellence has now caused education reformers to look at core curriculum and national standards to be able to help students move beyond the traditional “three R’s” (reading, writing, and arithmetic).
Gaming is an untapped educational resource that is not being utilized by many schools in today’s society. Gaming enables students to pick answers and learn the correct/incorrect answers instantaneously. This form of learning often mirrors real life learning. Throughout life, the situations we learn the most from are the ones we fail at. Gaming is a learning process of answers and instant gratification of the success or failure of the answer. Learning is encouraged due to the “fun” provided by the learning process.
There are many discussions about gaming in connection with children. The educational gaming discussed here would be beneficial to children. The biggest adversary to gaming in the classroom may be to change America’s original thinking process to accept this new form of learning. Often, it is easy to accept the old ways of education and therefore overlook new possibilities, such as gaming. Of course, gaming can be developed to teach the “three R’s” without the student realizing they are learning life skills while having fun!
February 10, 2011 at 12:13 am
Are we as a society spending too much time on the internet? Instinctively you may say yes, but new research is beginning to show that perhaps there is more to online gaming and the IT Revolution than meets the eye. Advancements in technology and the evolution of the internet, has made the gaming experience more engaging. A higher score is not necessarily the only thing one has to gain from gaming. A virtual game can offer the opportunity to reach a goal and demonstrate task mastery in a fast paced environment. In addition to beating a level in a game, gamers could also be stimulating strategic thinking, creativity, cooperation, collaboration, and innovation.
The internet has revolutionized how we connect and interact socially. “The World is Flat” emphasizes that as technology has evolved, it has created a global network of collaboration. Everything we do today is internet based, whether it is gaming, emailing, social networking, creating and sharing documents, or obtaining the news. The “Netscape Revolution” was a breakthrough that allowed people all over the world to begin connecting and collaborating in ways that were not possible before.
The teenagers of today now have the ability to join teams all over the world and engage in gaming scenarios from the comfort of their own home. It can be easy for a parent who did not grow up with the internet to overlook the constructive nature to online gaming. Certain games can offer challenges that require strategic thinking in order to reach goals. And a benefit to this is that skills gained from online gaming are measurable. This evidence allows us to use online games in novel situations in order to train or re-train the brain. Many evidenced based rehabilitation institutions are now implementing game programs in order to improve cognitive functions for those recovering from brain injury. Research demonstrates that as a result of participating in a specialized program of brain training games, one can expect to increase cognitive skills such as attention, memory, and processing speed. Now there is a little more to the scenario of the teenager who spends his time after school in front of the computer!
Gaming certainly has evolved over the last several years. Now gamers are able to connect with each other and collaborate on a large scale, thus making gaming a potential team building activity. When engaged in the virtual world of the game you are surrounded by a network where you can be social and are exposed to real life challenges. Gamers can even communicate in real time via a headset to teammates in order to facilitate the skills needed to strategize as part of a team. This being said all games are certainly not created equal. While many games offer the opportunity to build real life skills, others are still just a meaningless way to pass the time. It is important to be selective when picking a game if you are aiming to target skills such as strategic thinking, being able to come up with creative solutions, or fostering leadership skills.