Go figure that “It will rot your brain!” isn’t necessarily true.  Gee studies a six year old child to observe how he makes connections when playing video games such as Pikmin.  Reading Gee and knowing his previous works, he is big into social discourse.  His claim is that people are literate in a domain if they can recognize and/or produce meanings within the domain.

Gee makes excellent points comparing video games to any kind of fictional story.  There are characters, a problem/conflict to solve, an objective, the everlasting theme of good verses evil.  But the one thing that video games have that a novel doesn’t contain is motivation.  How many books motivate you to try again and do better in the very same environment?

The six year old is learning to strategize and become a problem solver who does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning.  We see this many times in the educational field.  Or, at least, we should. Do we get opportunities to find a new way to solve a problem?  I believe this is a sort of intelligence if one can find a different outlet to get a desired result.  A teacher would most certainly be proud!

Gee observes that this young child is learning in a variety of ways.  A game like Pikrim encourages the child to explore, to test out a hypothesis, to take a risk, to persist past the failure, and to have the positive mindset to figure out what went wrong and try to do it better.  Sounds like a scientific theory, but it’s a “brain rotting” video game!

Learning actively and critically is what we expect from our educational systems, but it is seen in video games.  Players are learning to experience the world in a new way; collaboate with a new affinity group; developing resources fotr future learning in the semiotic domain; learning how to think about semiotic domains as design spaces.  Two things help the player in achieving this learning style: internal design and semiotic domains.  Internal design encourages metareflective thinking about the design.  Semiotic domains connects to other semiotic domains such as knowledge of a domain can be a good precursor of learning a new one.

So, how do you learn best?  Gee emphasizes that humans learn, think, and solve problems by reflecting on previous experiences in the world.  Human thinking is deeply rooted in an embodied experience of the world.  To illustrate, people have experiences, store these experiences, and finally make connections or associations among them.  Same holds true when the six year old plays Pikrim and observes the world around him and repeats the same scenery and challenges several times until mastery.

What video games have influenced you?  What game took a long time to master the skill?  Did you have to get a cheat magazine to figure out special moves?  My brother was very big into video games and would show me how to do special moves or enter certain rooms (domains) because he read the gamers’ magazine.  But, you got to be quick!