First, I am far from a video game expert. I play them frequently, often just for spurts of time, and only occasionally finish games that are finish-able (looking at you, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim). I prefer not to play first-person shooters and battle royale games, as I am pretty horrible at them. I love retro games and will always waste quarters on Galaga or Pac-man. While I am not an “expert” in most games, I’m pretty stinking confident in my Mario Kart abilities. Most recently, I have been devoted to Animal Crossing: New Horizons because who wouldn’t be? (I’ve also been playing a lot of online “Settlers of Catan” on my iPad or computer with various groups of friends, but not sure how much that counts.)

Second! Like many of you, I know many people who have complicated feelings about the way they were taught in school. Many of these people also play video games. Let’s come back to this point later.

Third and last, I am in the MAT program for English and absolutely agree with many of the points that James Paul Gee makes in “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” As a future English teacher, it is my responsibility to consider any form of narrative that students will be immersing themselves in. No matter the grade level I am teaching, there will be students playing video games in my classroom.

I work for a tutoring company as both a tutor and an admin–as such, I have encountered dozens of students who love video games and many who want to eventually design them. Many of these students, similar to my point above in regards to peers of my age, have complicated relationships with some of the ways in which they are taught.

Therefore, it would be negligent of me to not consider the connections between good video games and good education if they can help these same students learn comfortably.

Will I be asking students to play Goat Simulator for homework? No–although I wouldn’t not recommend they have fun with it in their free time.

Good games are games that incorporate many layers and levels of skills and knowledge. They demand things from the user; they force problem solving; they allow players to enjoy learning.

Gee likens most school subjects to “games,” and he is not wrong. In games and in school subjects, learning purely knowledge is not effective in isolation. You have to learn skills and how to do. Video games, like any text or task, are a medium with which to teach.

When planning lessons for an English classroom, there is a huge misconception that a unit or lesson is formed around the text a teacher wants his or her students to interact with. It is instead the learning goal that the unit or lesson is formed around–what will students learn how to do as a result of working with this text? How will they work with this text to reach that goal? What is the purpose of using this text in this way?

Students could very easily incorporate many of the learning principles that Gee lists simply by using video games as a medium too produce something in the classroom. Interaction, production, customization, agency, and system thinking are just a few of his principles that apply.

For example, many students are often asked to create new representations of scenes from Shakespeare plays. It is a great way to work with the performance-based medium and allow students to create a kind of directorial intent, something they are ideally analyzing in other representations beforehand.

Often, these projects are filmed (in my time, on digital cameras, but now more often on phones) and edited in iMovie or similar softwares. Other times, they can act it out in class in real time. Sometimes students are able to create or draw things akin to graphic novels or storyboards. The goal of these kinds of projects are for students to demonstrate they understand the language of the scene, but also that they understand how to effectively manipulate rhetorical devices (tone, symbolism, setting, etc.) through various mediums (not just writing, but also visuals, props, sound/music, etc.).

There are a number of video games* where students could utilize existing characters (or customize them), put them in settings (and customize those settings), utilize certain props, set everything up in a manner that represents the action/meaning they are trying to portray, and then either screenshot several crafted scenarios (to create a storyboard) or record the scene. Not only are the graphics in most games superior to many other tools students could find for free online, but they can also use something they are familiar with to engage with the material more effectively. Like students using video technology or other graphics, the students would have to explain their choices and why they included them, still demonstrating the same skills and understandings as their classmates.

(*Animal Crossing: New Horizons, MineCraft, SIMS, Skyrim, and many more.)

This is a basic example of an assignment that incorporates good video games, but it is something I would absolutely accept as a teacher. Multimodality should not be limited to PowerPoints and iMovie, and I know many adults who would have loved to be able to utilize their favorite video games as project mediums for school.

Even more simple? I need to keep playing games. I push myself to keep reading in order to keep up with what my future students might enjoy. I already enjoy video games, so I need to keep doing that as well–students will not stop playing video games any time soon.

I do not need to be an expert on video games, but empathy and understanding of something they are passionate about goes a long way toward effective teaching and a healthy classroom culture. I do not want to lose the appreciation I have for this medium, and I also know that it will only continue to grow as a form of complex narrative as time goes on.