As James Paul Gee details his experience playing a video game for the first time, he wonders “how do you get someone to learn something long, hard, and complex, and yet still enjoy it?” YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober referred to this conundrum as “The Super Mario Effect” in his TedxPenn talk. Here and here are links to the two relevant parts, but feel free to watch the whole thing! The first link is the results of the study, the second is the gamification of instructions. To summarize, Rober found that if failure is not on the learner’s mind, then the success rate improves dramatically. Gee reckons that “at a deeper level, however, challenge and learning are a large part of what makes good video games motivating and entertaining,” a point confirmed by Rober: “by reframing the learning process and focusing on the cool end goal, the fear of failure is often taken off the table and learning just comes more naturally.”
Indeed, failure is a natural part of games; game over is rarely the end. In fact, some games not only expect you to fail, but encourage you to fail! In Death Stranding (2019), dying takes you to a different world where you need to return to your body. The Dark Souls series presents to you the “You Died” with regularity and offers you the ability to regain all lost points. As Gee points out, “Good video games lower the consequences of failure; players can start from the last-saved game when they fail. Players are thereby encouraged to take risks, explore, and try new things. In fact, in a game, failure is a good thing.” He continues, “School too often allows much less space for risk, exploration, and failure,” thus marking the problem of education: failure and exploration is not rewarded with progress, but instead hinders the very goal. Instead, Gee suggests that “curricula in school should not just be about self-pacing, but about real intersections between the curriculum and the learner’s interests, desires, and styles.” Certainly, this “customization” is my favorite part about graduate school: there is a way to tailor the course to suit my interests. I might be in the field of English, but my specializations are wholly mine. I wonder if my primary school education mimicked that of a game–or that of graduate school–then how much of a better student would I have been? I was a pretty bad student.
Anyway, much as Gee asserts, I believe that flexibility in a curriculum is mandatory for some “true” learning or “real” success to be attained. Schooling is a game set up for a very specific kind of player–the lack of character customization, the high risk of failure, and consequent lack of exploration all result in stifling growth. If players/students could “perform before they are competent, supported by the design of the game, the ‘smart tools’ that the game offers, and often, too, the support of other, more advanced players” then I imagine that graduation rates, or whatever measure of “success” that high schools and universities use as their datapoints, would reflect better than present. Some 50% of graduate students drop out, and I wonder how much of that has to do with the lack of “customization,” to continue the metaphor. Just because my experience in grad school was positive (and therefore flexibile) doesn’t mean others’ were, too. Perhaps gamifying the education system–removing the punishment of failure, allowing some level of customization, and leveraging an intangible goal of self-investment as the reward–would serve students better than it does now.
Thanks for these observations and the link to the TED talk. Since I am not involved with K-12 education, I’m curious to know how elementary educators might be trying to do this–make school less one-size-fits-all and take away the fear of failure while making attempts (successfully or not) to engage students. The number one method of “engaging” students in school across the board has always been threat of failure. That is going to have to change. We know encouragement works as well as failure for many students, but it also is not enough. While I believe a gamification approach to all educational activities is not the answer (there are many things that can go wrong, ie, it can be approached in a formluaic manner, unsupervised by humans, you don’t want to use iPads to babysit seven year olds for extended periods of time), thoughtful implementation of gamification seems like a good idea. I would especially think activities that include the skillsets that you want them to learn, like mysteries that require them to read and write as well as speak and watch, and to interact with other students, and work cooperatively, etc. to solve problems seem like a great idea. Then maybe provide a variety of different kinds of gamification for different learning styles.