Response to Civilzation III and the Classroom

I couldn't get my post to work as a comment, so I just put it here.

Right away I have to state that I am not a video game player. My boyfriend is and I leave the room every time he starts to play. But sometimes he stops me and tells me what his task is in the game. I have been shocked at the different historical aspects that are part os what I call his "blood and guts games". In one such game there is a character that must face Aries, the god of war. I remember the test that I took in high school where I had to memorize the different Roman and Greek gods and now I have no recollection of who they are, but my boyfriend knows them all from his game.

All this to say that I think that video games can and do cover some content areas that have historically been a part of traditional scholarship in an interactive, memorable, and exciting way. My boyfriend's engagement with the material is much greater than mine and his recollection is instantaneous.

Buckingham and Burn, in their article entitled Game Literacy in Theory and in Practice, place additional value on gaming not as a teacher of curricula or to re-engage learners, but as a valuable entity unto itself as a cultural medium. As Buckingham and Burn describe gaming literacy, I am definitely illiterate. I find other ways to play that have not included the video game scene. So I wonder how prevalent gaming literacy is currently and how popular it will become. Is it a valuable literacy to teach in the classroom?

Video Games and Literacy: More Than Meets the Eye

I've been doing a lot of thinking about video games and literacy, and I just want to put a couple of ideas and questions out to the group to both extend my own thinking, and maybe to frame the conversation a bit, moving it outside of the "video games are not as good as books" argument that I hear a lot.

First, I think that it's really important to define terms in a discussion like this one. One central term is literacy. Are we thinking of literacy as being able to decode symbols to create meaning (functional literacy) or are talking about literacy as the ability to understand, critique, and question text, media, or other things interacted with (critical literacy)? Or are we saying the ability to read and comprehend books (print literacy)? Another central term is video game. Is the discussion around "mini" games such as Tetris, MarioKart, BrainAge, or around "complex" games, games that require players to take on a new identity, play for more than 10-100 hours to complete the game, problem solve and face consequences for their decisions, such as Final Fantasy, Spore, Sims, DragonQuest, etc? (BTW, I borrowed these terms from Marc Prensky, who talks about them in his book Don't Bother Me Mom, I'm Learning.)

From the reading and studying that I have done, I think that complex games can probably improve critical and perhaps even functional literacy. James Paul Gee makes a case for this in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, in which he argues that educators can study games to observe extremely effective teaching techniques. (Whatever you think of the content of games, they are very good at both motivating people to keep playing them, and teaching them an internalized implicit set of rules so that they can understand and play the game.) One example of Gee's arguments about how games can support even print literacy (there are many, and I really encourage you to check out his book if you are interested!) is that games teach players "to learn about and come to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system, [which is] core to the learning experience." To paraphrase, learning to read at its most basic is really a process of learning how to decode and understand a symbol set. While games may be teaching players to understand a different kind of symbol set (not the English language), they are honing the same underlying skill.

In addition games provide a unique chance for players to immerse themselves within narrative structures, becoming part of the story creation itself. Some games have better stories than others, true, but they also do something that books can't (even Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books!): they give the "reader" / player agency and power over shaping the story line.

Finally, I'm borrowing from Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good for You to make this little chart about the differences between books and video games. While books do many things very well, and we have invested them in Western culture for hundreds if not thousands of years because of the things they do well, video games do other things very well, and I don't know that it has to be an either/or dichotomy. Maybe print literacy is not the main benefit of video games, and maybe it shouldn't be. But perhaps there are other, just as valuable, skill sets that video games have to offer. Take a look and see what you think.

Civilization III and the Classroom

Gaming is something I know next to nothing about, I’ll admit that. I was a mother by the time Atari came out and was introduced to the industry when my sons got one from their grandmother for Christmas. They loved it and gaming is still the favorite past time of both of my grown sons.
My elder son, Tim, was a new teacher in 2005 and as a gamer, he, and Jim McIntosh, another social studies teacher at Roosevelt High School in Chicago, decided to introduce Civilization to their World Civilizations class as described in MTV’s article http://tiny.cc/SEmgz.
Tim and Jim wrote Firaxis, the creator of Civilization III and asked for a donation of the game for their class. The company sent 25 copies of the game so that the entire computer lab could be loaded up. It was Student Development Day, a monthly day in which the students take a break from literature and math and study things that enrich their lives in other ways. Teachers were supposed to teach something that they themselves were good at and/ or about which they were passionate. Gaming was a natural for Meegan and McIntosh.
"I think one of the things video games provide students is a sense of an immediate reward," Meegan said. He wanted to tap into that. "I want to use it as a tool for them to discover more about what really happened and who these people really are," he explained. Meegan said the game can help illuminate such concepts as guns vs. butter, supply and demand, and the pros and cons of military strength.
I agree with Tim in that the most valuable part of this experience is in learning about supply and demand, but Buckingham piqued my interest in his discussion of gaming as a medium in and of itself because the user has to interact with it and that that creates a literate gamer.
Is it true that everything I interact with makes me more literate, more knowledgeable? That is what I think of when I think of literacy. Knowledge – both in knowing how to do something and in understanding what it means, or could mean, either to one personally or to the neighborhood, or to the world at large. Are video games really making us more literate? I would have to vote no, not by what I have seen so far. Sure, the storyline of a game like Civilization could have value in a classroom but to say that gaming brings a literacy all its own Is really stretching it, in my opinion.
That is not to say that gaming does not have a place in school or in the library. I just argue that it is not making our children more literate. Additionally, I think that the time today’s children and teens spend with video games is detrimental to their literacy. Interacting with a character on a TV screen is not as valuable as interacting physically with another in play or sports, nor is it the same thing as broadening horizons with a book.

His and Hers Gaming, Facebook Style

I must admit that I play more Facebook games than is probably healthy for a grown woman. I am, in fact, relatively embarrassed by my level of involvement, and I actually try to mask the extent of it by only allowing posts for a particular game to be seen by other friends who are already playing. (Yes, my friends are nerds like that, too.)

Some games I got into because a friend or relative asked me to get involved so that they could level up. Many of these games I’ve abandoned because I figured out that I don’t actually have to play for them to get something out of my addition of the application. Some games I got into because I saw them in other people’s posts and wanted to see what they were about. Many of those I have found not to be nearly as interesting to me as they first appeared. Some games have absolutely sucked me in for various reasons. Some things I don’t even really consider games. I’m going to try to analyze my and my husband’s Facebook gaming styles here.

(NOTE: I am a recent stay-at-home mom living far from family and friends, and we’ve moved each of the last two summers to a new area because of my husband’s career track. My online connections are sometimes my only connections since I take a long time to get acclimated to a new group of people (and then we pick up and move!). I didn’t used to be like this!) J

YoVille. One of my college friends was already playing when I signed up for Facebook shortly after having a baby and moving cross-country. He asked me to be his neighbor (to advance his game play), and I accepted. Then my internal interior designer started raging because I was living in a tiny rental and couldn’t do anything to my actual home. I did what I had to do to make my apartment (and later, my house) look like I wished my real-life house looked. Unlike a lot of younger users, I always make my avatar as much like me as possible, but the rest of the game was purely vicarious living. I didn’t interact with other players; I just created my own little happy place that I could call my home. (Now that I’ve made my living spaces just like I want them, I rarely visit anymore except to occasionally redecorate when I’m procrastinating for something else.) I am embarrassed to ask my husband to play this one. He is not into interior design.

Mafia Wars. My brother is the one who got me into this one, and no one less than family could have made me do it. This is one game in particular of which I am ashamed, but clearly not enough to stop playing now! The first time I clicked on “Kidnap a Businessman’s Children,” I felt a terrible pang of guilt. You don’t see a picture of it happening. You don’t act it out yourself. You click on a button and your completion percentage bar fills in a little bit more. That’s it. But the required tools include an automatic rifle, and my maternal instinct balked at doing this job. However, my somewhat obsessive personality took over—I just couldn’t leave that job tier incomplete!—and I did the job. I actually don’t even look at what the job is anymore; I just systematically complete the jobs, one country at a time, one tier at a time, one level at a time, in decreasing energy requirements, until I’m done. Another item crossed off my list. (That is, by the way, the way I do chores around the house as well—one room at a time, biggest jobs first, moving on to the next adjacent room when I finish. That’s how I roll.) Sadly for me, they keep adding new countries to the game, so I just keep going! My husband also started playing, but his play is somewhat sporadic, so he goes in little spurts of strategy and game play and doesn’t get far. He also randomly selects jobs to complete, so he’s never quite sure of where he still has progress to make.

FarmVille. Yep, I’m one of those people. I started playing when my husband invited me to be his neighbor and because my dad was a farmer before we were born. It also seemed like a peaceful kind of game, like the online version of one of those Zen gardens with the sand and the little rake. My focus is not so much on advancing as it is on making my farm look cute. Sad, I know. My husband and other guys I know play by making as much of their farm plot into profitable space as is possible, even if it means all their animals are layered so close to one another that you can’t tell what’s there. (I actually know one woman who also does this.) This is aesthetically offensive to me. :P I play Café World in the same way. (My brother-in-law is at fault for this one, and he doesn’t even play anymore!)

Wordscraper. Ah, Wordscraper. It’s like Scrabble, except you can play it online. I therefore like it. All my consistent opponents are male. I generally lose because I like to make big words and don’t plan very strategically. I still like it because I have to think about words, and I like words.

African Safari and Willy’s Sweet Shop. These are the non-game games. I have no idea why they call them games or say they’re fun. They’re really not. I go to them religiously, however, because participating supports a worthy cause (Nothing But Nets and St. Jude’s, respectively).

Where does this leave me in terms of the readings? I don’t know. I guess they’re all rather passive games, so I’m stereotypically female in that way. I don’t know that any “game literacy” likely applies to them since there aren’t really characters and, the way _I_ play, at least, the ones there are don’t really do anything. I don’t play most console-based video games because my hand-eye coordination is abysmally poor and they give me a headache from how fast they move. I do play Wii games with my husband, though, because the physical movement of the controller is more natural to me than poking buttons, so I have a little more success. (I can’t be game literate if I am “simply hopeless,” now can I?) We never had a game console in our home growing up although we borrowed a Nintendo a couple of times and we played Tetris, Sleuth, and Sim City on the computer growing up. I’m sure that influences my gaming choices, too (although my computer-programmer brother has every console known to man in his home and is quite proficient). Does anyone else have a similar gaming style to mine, or am I the odd (wo)man out?

Media Literacy: Crib Notes

While I was doing my research about media literacy education in elementary schools, I saw that there were occasional references to even younger children. I didn't have the time to go off on that tangent and had forgotten all about it, but this morning while talking to my almost-two-year-old, I realized that I actually do elements of media literacy education all the time with her. She had just finished watching Clifford, and I asked, "Are real dogs red?" (expecting and getting the response most little kids are conditioned to give when you ask a question in that "Isn't it silly?" kind of voice)--"Nooooo!" "Are real dogs as big as houses?" (again) "Nooooo!" We do this with books, too, and I have noticed that I do it with more serious issues as well--a kid is being mean to another kid in a book or on a show, and we talk about how mean that is and how it makes the other kid feel--if someone gets hurt, we talk about how they should be more careful or how someone should help them--if someone does something kind, we talk about how nice that was and how we should all do that kind of thing. (We do this for real-life situations, too, since babies are learning to be life literate as well!) When we listen to music, we sing along with the words, dance in time, talk about how it makes us feel ("Does this music make you happy? Does it make you want to jump and jump and jump?"), and sing the tunes later with new words that fit our everyday situation (which she has started doing independently as well). We use words and ideas from her favorite books and shows to help her understand new situations in real life and make connections between media ("Remember when Alpha Pig's shoes didn't fit because he was growing? You're growing, too! Your shoes are too small!"). These things might be basic and random, but they are, to me, the very beginning of media literacy for my little girl!

Ten Billionth Download: ITunes and the Music Revolution

This article, http://tiny.cc/qbBIV, talks about the soon- to- be 10 billion song countdown on ITunes, the digital music vendor for the IPod. This milestone was reached this week by the downloading of “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash, by Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia. The article states that it only took ITunes 5 years to blow past all the major music retailers and that 70% of global digital music sales are ITunes. By the end of 2010, the IPod should overtake the Sony Walkman as the single most popular consumer device of all time. What does this say about how we view music and how we use music in our lives? Has the music industry been put out of business?
Have digital music files – mp3s – killed the music industry? As I ponder the readings of two weeks ago regarding music literacy, I am fascinated by the rapid fire way music has changed in the past 40 years or so. A teenager in the early 70’s, most of my friends bought albums. One could also purchase 45’s, singles sold separately for a fraction of the cost, but the real money maker was the album.
Each of the innovations that have been introduced during the last few decades since then, have changed music. Vinyl records, FM radio, cassette tapes, CDs and MTV have all affected the music industry, but have not killed it. In fact, it seems to me that popular music has infiltrated our lives more with each new innovation. Everything in our society today, at least in the West, is about instant gratification and this – push a button and get the song you want instantly - is a healthy part of that. No going to the store, no asking for your album, you don’t even have to buy the whole album anymore. This has many critics saying that the music business is gone forever. I disagree. At no other time in my life has music been so prevalent in everyday life. Now that we can download music from the internet and onto mp3 players, like the IPod, popular music has exploded into advertising, TV shows and movies, as well as at the gym and in our cars.
The more easily we can get our hands on our own copy of our favorite songs, the more we listen. When the Walkman came out, and we realized we could record our favorite songs and bring them with us where ever we went, it revolutionized how we listened. Sure, we had portable radios before the Walkman – transistors – but we still had to rely on the DJs to play songs we wanted to hear. By being able to record our own, we could choose when and what we listened to.
This change in the music industry has also been good for new artists like Colbie Caillat who wrote “Bubbly”, posted it to Youtube and her career was born. Maybe instead of thinking that the music business is dead or dying, we have to re-evaluate and just admit that it is alive and well…but different. We cannot be afraid to change with the technology, in our thinking and in how we do business, or we will become obsolete.