Another Reluctant Gamer Comes Around

Much of what Sarah posted (Reluctant Gamer, March 14) resonated with me. Video games have long seemed pointless to me. Shooting and avoiding being shot, or moving to the next level, just don’t hold much interest for me. The whole language of using up one or more of your given “lives” has no appeal. But, like Sarah, I am slowly but surely coming to see that there is more to gaming than shooting and fighting and that there might be some fun, and yes, even some value, in playing video games—at least some of them.

Part of my resistance to video games comes from my essential non-competitiveness. I really don’t much enjoy beating people, and because my exposure to video games has consisted almost entirely of listening to people (most often my sons) playing shoot-em-up and fighting games, my impression of video games has been one of violence and fierce competition.

Another source of resistance is that I’m just not physically quick enough to play many of these games. I can’t react fast enough with the little buttons or joystick, I’m vaguely embarrassed at how bad I am at it, and I don’t have the time to play them over and over until I can get good at them.

I am aware, of course, that there are games that aren’t violent and don’t require shooting, such as Oregon Trail, Sim City, The Sims, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Portal, and now Spore. And I can see where they might be more fun for me, but by the time I was aware of such games, I no longer had the time or inclination to learn and play them.

I also was fascinated by Will Wright’s demonstration of his game, and I can imagine I might enjoy playing it (again, if I could only find the time) and I can see where kids might learn from playing it, which has gotten me thinking about why and how video games could be viewed as educational tools, or at least as not being brain-draining, creativity-sapping, time-wasting traps, which is pretty much how I have viewed most video games in the past.

Why might learning about evolution and long-term thinking be more likely to happen from playing Spore than from studying those topics in school? Why would kids prefer to learn about the difficulties of opening the frontier by playing Oregon Trail than by hearing a lecture or reading a book? Because playing Spore or Oregon Trail is fun, of course. And what makes it fun? It’s fun because it’s play. The essence of play according to the Wikipedia article that we read, is that it is both voluntary and intrinsically motivated. I’m willing to accept that this is an excellent definition of play. Something that a young person does willingly will naturally be more successful than something he or she is required to do. I think this principle also explains, at least in part, why attempts to introduce games, whether video games, role-playing games or board games, into classrooms are sometimes not very successful. When a teacher requires students to play a game, it immediately stops being play; it is no longer voluntary or intrinsically motivated.

This concept of intrinsic motivation also underlies Maria Montessori’s method of teaching. She understood that children love to play and that they can and will learn from playing, especially if they are offered high-quality materials in a carefully prepared environment. The Montessori “method”, in my view, is not so much a method, which implies rules and certain steps to be taken, as an approach or way of thinking. She believed that children inherently want to learn and make sense of their world and are remarkably capable of doing that on their own if provided with the tools to do it and the freedom to do it at their own pace.

This belief about how children learn was echoed by John Holt, a teacher and school reform advocate who eventually became a radical advocate of unschooling. He wrote passionately about the ability of children to learn on their own. He believed that: “Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.” In his view, education is more about allowing children to discover than about teaching them what we have decided they ought to know.

I believe that both Maria Montessori and John Holt would have liked Will Wright’s Spore. This game provides children with a chance to learn by engaging in an activity they choose simply because it is interesting to them.

I want to note, also, that I think it is significant that the definition of “play” that I am using here does not include the word “easy”. I can imagine someone reading what I have written so far and thinking that learning can’t always be easy, can’t be all fun and games, and that sometimes it takes good old-fashioned effort to learn something. I agree. My point has more to do with the voluntariness of learning and the motivation for learning. Although I don’t think I could advocate an immediate and complete abandonment of the public school system, I do think that the more that children are trusted to guide their own learning, and move at their own pace, and learn by the methods that they know work best for them, the more they will learn, and the more quickly they will learn. And for that reason, I would hope that parents and teachers alike might maintain an open mind about the possibility that children are not just wasting time when they play video games and about the possibility that they might be learning the skills they need to learn when they choose to play games.