Small Things Games Can Teach

Mary Flanagan · Katherine Isbister

Thu., June 11, 2:00–3:00, Browsing Library (2nd floor, West Central)

The visionary educator James Paul Gee argues that immersive and engaging digital environments provide educational possibilities through situated cognition, social learning, and pattern recognition and connection making. Gee has argued that people “think best when they reason on the basis of patterns that they have picked up through their actual experiences in the world,” and indeed, not when “they attempt to reason via logic and general abstract principles detached from experience” (Gee). According to the Shaffer, games “are significant because they let us think in new ways” (p. 191).

Like our colleagues in the field, our team wishes to further the task of teasing out what these new ways of thinking and learning actually are. Our interdisciplinary team picks up where Gee and others leave off by interviewing game designers, players, and technology–aware educators in a nationwide effort to collect data about the gritty details regarding games and learning. In this paper, we are interested in pinpointing the exact instances where such national experts have found that games can “teach us well”. Designers have discussed with us moments of learning in existing games through video interviews, and through examining this repository, we share the commonalities expressed by this group.

In contrast to Gee’s notion that players use their actual experiences as a basis for reasoning in a game, we have repeatedly heard from designers actively engaged in the field that this is not the core issue with learning in games. From their eyewitness perspective, our myriad of designers argues that situatedness of the learning in games has to take into account the game itself as the very situation in which learning happens. This breaks the causal link between actual experience and game experience, leading to a very different approach to learning in games — one in which learning is actually based on in–game experience only and not on presumed, across-the-board transference.

One well-understood path is to read existing published work. For this project, the work spans the fields of learning theory, social science, psychology, game studies, and usability. We have learned from Steinkuehler (2006) that interdisciplinarity is key. Steinkuehler, utilizing Pickering’s phrase “mangle of practice”, demonstrates the messy interrelationships among designers, players, exploiters, and explains how these all function within broader social interactions and expectations in MMOs. We have collected published work ranging from theoretical models to large-scale studies of learners and players. However, not everyone with important insights at the intersection of games and learning publishes journal articles or conducts publishable studies, for a variety of reasons. Another way to tap the deep reservoir of knowledge in the domain of games and learning is to consult with experts directly.

Interviews with experts is our supplementary data-gathering effort, which is a wide-ranging set of interviews with people involved in games and learning from a host of different perspectives, including:

We ask interviewees a short, relatively open-ended set of questions aimed at uncovering key insights and avoiding known pitfalls in order to help shape our research agenda in parallel to conducting the more traditional literature review. The interview corpus will be used to identify common themes and directions for the overall Games and Learning Conference. At GLS, we will share our current findings and show brief clips here (with the permission of those interviewed) that point to key issues that may be of interest to others working in the area.