I really wanted to like this book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, and in some ways I did, but in other ways I felt like I was left asking, “Now what?”  Maybe this is a problem with my expectations about the book rather than any real problem with it.  I can buy into one of James Paul Gee’s premises: video games are not necessarily a waste of time, they can actually provide a powerful learning experience that is, in some ways, more authentic or valuable than a lot of school learning experiences.
I hadn’t really ever thought about video games and the power of literacy, so Gee does push me to give credit where I previously hadn’t in the arena of video games.  I particularly found myself doing this in the early chapters of his book, and I was on board with what he was saying in Chapter 2—“we can say that people are literate in a domain if they can recognize and/or produce meanings in the domain” (20).  I’m certainly not literate in the domain of video games, and that’s likely how some of my students feel about arenas where I expect literacy.  Gee’s learning principles for this chapter, which deal with understanding and thinking critically about a subject and the necessity of knowing how to be literate in a certain domain are solid educational principles.
In fact, all of his learning principles are solid principles, and that he makes a strong case for the way they are all found in video games.  But, this is where I have the problem: what do I do with that information?  I don’t think that Gee is advocating the abandonment of any kind of traditional literacy by replacing it completely with video games.   I don’t even think he’s necessarily advocating bringing video games into schools so that all students are required to play them.  I think he’s making solid points like: “[Video games] lower the consequences of failure…players are encouraged to take risks, explore, and try new things” (216).  I would not argue with this being a sound educational principle or that video games do this.  What I’m struggling with is this: most educators would already agree that we need to create a safe environment for students to take risks.  It’s what Blau talked about extensively.  Gee makes many good points about what video games can do: create strong identities, allow students to make choices, encourage them to explore and go back and do recursive thinking.  And he says that schools should do this too, and he’s right.  But here’s where I get stuck: how? This is where maybe I want something out of this book that it was never trying to provide.  Maybe it is intended to be largely theoretical rather than practical, but I’m struggling with that too because of the many, many specific examples Gee provides about specific video games without specific examples of how to translate that to the classroom beyond just the idea that we should translate it to the classroom.