Ok....Ok....is this the same McGonigal from Harry Potter? No..but she may as well be teaching principles of magic. I will admit, she makes great points about gaming helping us to become collaborators, and positively motivated to trust and help each other, but all I can see is wasted time.
Gamers love their alternate reality because they know that the game they are playing was written and that there is a solution already written into the game. They know that they can stop and take a bathroom break, or crash and burn, and come right back to the same situation. Life is not written, at least not by anything human. The problems that we face in day to day life may not have solutions. Playing at solving real problems lacks that guaranteed solution, which is why so many people escape to a reality that doesn't have that obstacle. Playing at solving real problems doesn't really require more than shallow knowledge. Say for instance, their was a game created to help us figure out how to beat cancer, would the solutions found therein be valid, without deeper knowledge?
I agree that there is huge potential for gaming as an educational avenue. The fact that most kids will spend at least 10,000 hours playing video games by their 21st birthday alerts us to the intrinsic motivation that moves these kids to spend that much time learning on their own. If we could harness that, we could change the world, and not just on bathroom breaks.
I think you have 2 opposing thoughts here, which is exactly how I felt. A lot of people have mixed feelings about the value of video games. I think this is extremely common because we are in a transitional period. I appreciate the way that you brought up both questions and showed your thinking about each. I hadn't really thought about the fact that video games have a solution (and gamers know that) but the real world doesn't. Knowing there is a solution probably has a large influence on someone's motivation...
ReplyDeleteAnyway, your questions and comments really echoed my thought process. At the end of the day, though, I'm curious what you think will happen. Do you see video games being brought into schools on the large scale? And if you had to predict the outcome of that, what would you say the result would be?
I do see video games being brought into schools on the large scale. What I cannot see is the outcome of such a possible slippery slope. McGonigal asks that half of us play an hour a day in order to create a "virtuoso gamer" with the urgent optimism and desire to cooperate in a virtual environment that may help us figure out some of the world's problems. Using that tactic, I think about 2/3rds of that "half" would just end up wasting time, while the remaining 1/3 would probably provide the results McGonigal speaks of.
DeleteIt seems that if we aren't careful, we will lose more than we gain with this tactic.
On a postive note, the possiblities for teaching and learning from a gaming perspective are endless.
So I do find myself firmly in the middle of this issue.
I really like your point "Life is not written." I've never thought of it that way, but how true that video games have a solution built into them (and the point of the game is to solve the puzzle) and real-life problems don't. That's really insightful.
ReplyDeleteI'm inclined to agree that the McGonigal talk was a bit removed from reality. I would like to think the purpose of those TED talks is to get people thinking ...
McGonigal runs a bunch of games that try to bridge the gap between game-in-another-world and impact-in-the-real-world, so that distinguishes her from the Angry Birds type of gaming. I think an important word here is TRANSFER - do students transfer the skills they develop as gamers into other parts of their lives? McGonigal might say yes. She was chronically ill for a time period and developed the SuperBetter game to try to "game" herself to health. (All that being said, I'm on the fence about gaming, too.)
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