This is a re-posting of my reflection for the first course of the Graduate Certificate Program in Serious Game Design and Research at Michigan State University.
Please note: these posts are not intended as any kind of commentary on or assessment of the course I’m taking, or its instructor, OR of Michigan State University or the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, or the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media. They are solely my thoughts and reactions that stem from the readings.
Feel free to comment, disagree, or what have you.
Week 3
These are the readings for the week:
- Ch. 6, Prensky, M. (2001). Digital game-based learning. New York: Mcgraw-Hill.
- 6: Digital Game-Based Learning: Why and How it Works
- Ch. 4, 5, Gee, J. P. (2007). Good video games + good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. New York: Peter Lang
- 4: Good Video Games, The Human Mind, and Good Learning
- 5: Learning about Learning from a Videogame (Rise of Nations)
These are the Games:
- Osy Osmosis www.osyosmosis.com
- Life Preservers lifepreservers.msu.edu
My Response
My dissertation (available here in case anyone wants to look) sought to answer the question: How does a commercially and critically successful modern video game support the learning that players must accomplish in order to succeed in the game (i.e. get to the end or win)?
My question went through many changes to get to that state, as most do. One of the parts I struggled with a lot was describing the kind of game I wanted to study. At first I just called them “good games”. This is what Jim Gee called them, and so I called them that too. I got grief and resistance from my supervisor and committee every time I used the word “good”, and they were right.
Reading through Gee’s collected essays, I am reminded of the work I had to do in order to justify the appropriateness of the games I ultimately chose to study, and struck by the contrast between my approach and Gee’s.
Gee appears to use the fallacy of circular reasoning to define what he means by “good” games: Good games are good because they do what games are supposed to do in order to be good. He then names many different games as examples of ‘good’ without further justification. While I do not dispute many of his claims about various desirable qualities of games that may support learning, I am struck by the lack of evidence in the form of references to prior work to support his claim.
As a popular article, his essays are enjoyable to read and even quite inspiring. However, as scholarly articles, they come up lacking in both research background and theoretical underpinnings. Research is advanced through building on the work of those that have come before and it is our duty to give credit to those who have paved the path for our progress. Gee’s list of references is striking in its omission of the contributions made by many of the theorists mentioned in this week’s lecture. Even though he writes about “principles” such as co-design, learning styles, identity, well-ordered problems, “pleasant frustration”, just-in-time learning, and many others, he fails to acknowledge the ancestry of these ideas, most of which have well-formed and thoroughly researched foundations. If I hadn’t already been studying learning and instructional theories and models before reading this, I might have concluded that these were original concepts. He does refer readers to some of his prior work, but unfortunately, Gee’s prior work does not give credit to the originators of many of these ideas either.
This week’s chapters do an excellent job of describing many of the aspects of various game designs that offer promise for education, but it lacks sufficient background to support the scholarly work that remains to be done to advance this work. It’s a great place to go for ideas, but if you want to advance the body of knowledge, you’ll have to look elsewhere for a sound literature review.
Postscript: If anyone is interested in how I addressed the challenge of justifying the games I chose to study, I have written about it in my thesis (Chapter 5) and also here:
Katrin Becker (2011) Studying Commercial Games: Justifying Choices, Journal of Game Design and Development Education, Vol.1 No. 1 p.51-62
