Don’t like it? Get better: Games and Pedagogy Take 2

I’m writing this post to clear up a few things that were confusing in my last post.

What I worry about is not those who work to integrate games into their pedagogy, or even ‘gamify’ their classrooms by embedding things like competition, progress bars/reports, HUDs, quests etc. That has been done well, theorized about well, and has been shown to be effective. When done thoughtfully, the educational power of games is unmatched by anything I have ever encountered.

Take Samas Aran as example for teaching motivation and why people make the choices they do. It’s easy to take an action (or, hey, even a conference presentation) out of context, but then you are left confused as to why the person made particular decisions. Part of rhetorical training, of course, is an attempt to get at this enigma of why people do what they do. But understanding the context of why Samas is an unstoppable killing machine makes all the difference. Understanding motivation and the context behind decision-making is a key part of understanding your audience: a cornerstone of first-year composition. Playing and then analyzing Metroid in this way is meaningful. What would not work is bringing in Metroid, having my students play for a half hour, then lecturing about commas. They will be no more engaged in learning about commas because I let them play a game first. The activities have to be connected in deeper and more meaningful ways.

What perhaps was not clear enough in my last post was this: cosmetically changing things in the classroom, without exploring why those things were not engaging in the first place (gamification, as it is currently misued/misunderstood/misappropriated fits into this category) is not just unhelpful, but is detrimental to those who do games and education well and thoughtfully.

People, especially politicians right now, have latched onto gamification in terrifying ways. Educators have been called to ‘make their class like Call of Duty,’ because kids like that right? Those are the people I was addressing in my first post. And, to be frank, it worked well for my audience. When I gave the talk, a woman stood up and admitted that she had not allowed her 3 young boys to ever use media in the household. One professor said he was asked to teach a game theory course in the fall and had zero prior experience with it. He said my talked helped him see that he has some real prep work ahead of him to make the class worthwhile for his students—that he couldn’t just bring in a 360, plug it in, and sit back and grade papers while they taught themselves. This is the audience I was attempting to reach.

Perhaps I’m too new to academia to ‘get it.’ But I sense that it is far more important to spend our time reaching out to those who don’t understand our position or who disagree with us than it is to focus on the minutiae that does little to add to the theoretical conversation and in the end really doesn’t make us better scholars or pedagogues.