A Gameful of Sugar Helps the Learning Go Down

"While the boosters and debunkers may seem to be operating under completely different frames of reference, what they share is the tendency to fetishize technology as a force with its own internal logic standing outside of history, society, and culture. The problem with both of these stances is that they fail to recognize that technologies are in fact embodiments, stabilizations, and concretizations of existing social structure and cultural meanings." (Ito 90)

I love this quote by Ito, because I feel like it emphasizes that often people talk about "the media" as something that acts of its own volition, but it isn't! Okay, on with the rest of the post (which is, unfortunately for you, somewhat non-linear and wandering...I guess that's what happens when you draft a post in pieces instead of in one sitting).

In the Ito article, one game designer (I believe it was the guy who made SimCity...) made the distinction that he wished that people would talk about SimCity as a toy rather than a game. The author doesn't go into detail about the distinction between a game and a toy, but I feel like a toy is something that a child can play with and manipulate for their own purposes. Toys (at least good toys--the proliferation of toys from movies has actually done terrible things to imaginative play, but I'm thinking that's a topic for a different forum...) don't tell the player how to play with them. A toy has no rules, few restrictions, and no formula for "winning"; we just play with it. Treated in this way (as open-ended enterprises for play rather than as systems with established formulas/requirements), I think that games have tremendous potential to aide in the learning process. Number Munchers was always my favorite game during free game time (no dying of dysentery...). SimTower taught me that putting a lot of small apartments in a building can be more profitable than fewer large apartments. Zoo Tycoon taught me that I never wanted to be a manager of anything (and also that even though they require similar exhibits, placing penguins and polar bears together is always a terrible idea) because I always got sick of people complaining that there weren't enough bathrooms. Brent and I played around with the free version of Spore (which I sort of want to buy to play the whole game), and in all of his crazy creature generation we talked about what creatures would/would not survive based on the features they were given (a creature whose abundance of limbs makes it challenging to move will most likely not survive...).

For me, the big question is not, "Can students learn effectively with a game?" (but rather, "Can we construct an educational framework that acknowledges the kind of learning that is most effective in a video game?" This is not going to be another "we need to change the system!" post, yet we need to acknowledge that there is a big difference between learning in general and accomplishing curricular goals within a framework where teachers are held accountable for student performance. In Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Mark Prensky establishes that his preferred way of engaging 'digital natives' is to use video games in innovative ways, but I'm not completely sure that they have a place in our current system.