Epic Win

So I’m going to admit something here. I love video games. I don’t consider myself a gamer, but an afternoon of Mario Kart for N64 sounds like a great time. I grew up, however, listening to my mom tell me that these video games were going to “rot my brain.” Several arguments could have been avoided if I would have had access to McGonigal’s talk. I found the Gee paper and McGonigal’s TED talk fascinating in how they actually gave solid evidence for the place of video games in education and even as tools to save the world. 

The games discussed at the end of McGonigal’s talk were very interesting. I have to admit that I was a little skeptical in the beginning. I mean, saying that 21 billion hours of gaming each week is going to solve global warming? This seems a little counterintuitive. When I think of games, I think of the hours I’ve spent helping Link or Mario save the princess. I don’t think these skills will help me solve the world’s problems. When she described “A World Without Oil,” I started to see where she was coming from. This game, she said, actually got people to think differently about spending and oil usage to the point that they actually changed how they acted outside of the “virtual world.” This is a powerful tool that can be used to get people to think about problems and be able to virtually solve them. Perhaps they will then feel that they can solve similar problems in their real lives.

What fascinated me most about the Gee paper is all of the connections I saw between the positive outcomes of gaming and some of the teaching goals we have discussed in all of our classes. For example, Gee makes the point that games are able to provide feedback and new problems to the gamer. We have discussed the usefulness of effective and timely feedback in our classes. In a video game, that feedback is instant, which allows for faster self-evaluation. If your character “dies” trying to defeat the “boss,” you know you did something wrong and you can go back and try something new. He also talks about how games effectively facilitate practice and give appropriate challenges. Games allow the gamer to practice certain skills for a period of time before offering new problems with new required skills. Therefore, the gamer spends a lot of time practicing a particular skill set. Once the player has mastered these skills, the game poses a new challenge. We have discussed in several of our classes the importance of practice and providing work at the appropriate difficulty level. Gamers are willing to devote HOURS to practice. If the gamer is playing a game like those discussed by McGonigal, these hours of practice could actually lead to positive change.  

The only part of the talk and the paper I took issue with was that they talked about how, in games, there are no real consequences for our actions. If we fail a level, we just go back to the beginning and everything is reset to the original conditions. This is the one aspect of gaming that, to me, is nothing like real life. I am all for encouraging risk taking, but if gamers are to take such risks in real life, I believe it is necessary to have an accurate picture of possible consequences. If you “fail” and something in real life, things don’t just reset to how they were before. Certain actions cannot be undone.

All in all, I really enjoyed this weeks reading. I’ve learned even more technological applications I can use in the future. McGonigal described gamers as an “untapped human resource.” I agree that we should move away from dismissing gaming and actually try to use gaming to solve the problems that, as McGonigal said, will help us survive the next century. I also hope that by the end of this program, we all feel as though we have achieved an “epic win.”