What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy, by James Paul Gee

Sometimes attempting to do more than one has to do leaves one achieving less than one would have by being more modest, and such is the case with this book.  Ultimately, this author is trying to simultaneously push two agendas in this book:  to demonstrate the legitimacy of video games as a domain that can provide insight to pedagogical efforts and simultaneously to promote a leftist view of education and relativistic morality.  Unfortunately, the author’s ambitions in the latter category hinder his efforts in the first category, as while there are plenty of people who will be pleased to see the author praise radical Islamists who have created anti-Jewish games that paint Israeli settlers as the first wave of a military push, there are plenty of others, even those of us who are as favorably disposed towards video games as I am, who find the author’s aims in the second category offensive enough as to not make him a fitting defender of the legitimacy of video games at all.  The author should have stuck to trying to point out the ways in which video games involve teaching and can provide models of learning that teachers can adapt in the classroom, as that would have been good enough, but the author’s political agenda is unwelcome.

This particular book of a bit more than 200 pages is divided into 8 chapters that allow the author to present 36 learning principles that video games can provide to contemporary educators (at least that of a decidedly progressive bent).  The author begins with an introduction that discusses 36 ways to learn a video game (1).  After that the author discusses semiotic domains, pointing out that playing video games is not a waste of time and that the way that video games are structured not only teaches a certain approach to learning that is gently guided but also less coercive than many forms of instruction but can also teach useful content (as is the case with historical/strategy games) (2).  The author then turns to questions of learning and identity and the way that games can allow people the chance to explore other identities as well as examine their own moral worldview (3).  The author then looks at situated meaning and learning by discussing the way that games can provide moral (or immoral) instruction through the options that are presented to the gamer (4).  This leads to a discussion about telling and doing and the way that games often reward a certain rebelliousness on the part of the player (5).  After that is a discussion of the cultural models that are present within games, some of which allow players to play the “bad guy” and thus gain a moral understanding of evil from the inside (6).  The author discusses the social mind and how games can encourage interpersonal relationships with others of the same affinity groups (7) before concluding (8) and then providing the 36 learning principles in an appendix, after which there are references and an index.

Ultimately, perhaps the biggest problem about this particular book is the approach of the author to learning in general.  While it is indeed true that video games do provide an approach to learning that is worth emulating in some fashions (particularly in the way that teachers could better educate children through introducing them to subdomains of the larger fields that they are teaching, thus introducing students to the problems of the field and how they are tackled by academics and professionals), there is an underlying feeling here that the author is encouraging teachers to cater to the whims and rebelliousness and self-conceit of young people rather than recognizing that there is a strong need to encourage respect for authority and a respect for those who are older, something that is not in fashion and something that the author undercuts through a great deal of his own approach to video games.  As is the case throughout the book, the author has a worthwhile position to present in some aspects, but sabotages his efforts to win the goodwill of the reader by trying to be cool and pushing a leftist agenda, where he would have done more by being more modest and certainly more circumspect.  Video games are not a waste of time, but this author and his approach are not the best way of defending the worth of video games as a model for education.