I have always been on the fence about video games. I personally never ventured off further than an occasional game of Pacman with friends in the 90’s. I watched others in my family discuss the dangers of kids losing themselves in video games and their parents losing their wallets over purchasing those games.  The topic of video games was never a big issue to me until I had my children.  I tried my best to veer my son, Dylan, away from the world of video games.  I only chose the games that were “educational” and “healthy”, like the Smart Bike. I warned Dylan about becoming like his cousins, my sisters’ sons, who locked themselves in their bedrooms for hours playing their Xbox 360 and PlayStation.  I was doing very well until Dylan was hospitalized. He had to have an open-spine surgery, which rendered him in the hospital bed, flat on his back, for days. My family and I did not know the seriousness of his medical condition, which left us all in a panic mode. My sister ran off and bought him a Wii system. I went to BestBuy to him purchase a 3DS and an Ipad. My nephew drove up from Charlottesville to deliver his Xbox 360 for Dylan.  Thank goodness, Dylan’s surgery went well, but now I was faced with a recovering kid at home who was glued to these games.  I wish I had read James Paul Gee’s book, “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy”, earlier.  I would have had many restful nights considering video games from an academic viewpoint. Clearly, Gee takes a positive view on computer games and tries to explore contribution of games by listing 36 learning principles found in games. He outlines the different chapters, which all draw on theories on learning and education.

Like Gee, I tried to share my son’s world by watching him play his video games.  Over time, Dylan slowly learned to improve his gaming skills.  Learning was not easy for him since he failed a great deal.  Unlike his school homework, Dylan did not give up on achieving the next level of the game. He started over again and again immediately after failing. He was relentless in his efforts to complete each game.  During his breaks he insisted that I played in his place.  Like Gee, I was not prepared to “learn and think in ways at which I was not then adept.” (Page. 4) Unlike Gee, I gave up! I shared the frustration experience with Gee, but I did not feel the “life-enhancing experience” that Gee underwent.  Maybe if I did not give up, if I spent hours playing the game, I too would refer to the game as “pleasantly frustrating”. That said, I do find Gee’s statement to be true, “The key is finding ways to make hard things life enhancing so that people keep going and don’t fall back on learning only what is simple and easy.” (Page 3)  Why is it that I gave up on transforming a difficult game into a life enhancing experience when Dylan does not stop to even question his option to quit the game or to buckle down and win the game?  Is it due to our age or generational difference? Is it due to our different social environment (Most of Dylan’s friends are engrossed in video games whereas none of my friends even think of playing games.)? Or, is it due to our different levels of interest and purpose?

In the chapter on Semiotic Domains, Gee argues that like other activities in life, computer games are a semiotic domain that you slowly learn over time. Gee believes that video games offer better opportunities for critical learning and problem solving and that computer games are definitely not a waste of time, because they are a germane domain.  Since Dylan began playing video games about a year ago, I notice an improvement in his reading skills (he is forced to read the instructions during the game and the communication between the characters in the games), in his thinking skills, and in his ability to sit still and focus on an assignment.

In the chapter on Learning and identity, Gee explains how computer games give new opportunities for learning experience and student engagement with the material. Computer games spark critical thinking and learning that matters. Since Dylan identifies with his environment in the game, he is that much more engaged in the learning experience. In the games, there are not real consequences for failure; if Dylan fails a level, he is encouraged to continue trying.  How can we create a learning experience for students keep them engaged in learning without the fear of failure?

Gee asserts in Situated Meaning and Learning chapter that video games are encouraging new forms of learning. Dylan interacts with the game world through exploring different ways to learn and to perceive things in a context. He builds on his prior knowledge (other games he played, reflecting on his successes and failures) with each new game he encounters. Learning cannot be complete without touching up on the Social Mind. Dylan is becoming a better gamer because he networks with better game players – his friends. This rich social environment around computer games, as Gee points out, is a form of peer learning that would be very beneficial in schools.

Gee attempts to analyze the learning structure of computer games, but he builds on theories from his field and does not dive deeper into real connection to existing research. For example, Gee is overly optimistic in his views of video games in relation to the violence in our society. I understand that the book was written in 2007 and is perhaps a bit outdated on some new research, but I am still on the fence about video games and violence. I believe that video games, such as the Grand Theft Auto, does impact our youth – they can become desensitized to violence if they are engaged in these types of games on a regular basis.

A number of posts so far have addressed the “now what?” factor of reading Gee’s text in the context of our course on teaching literature.  While I am also vexed by this, I wanted to take a stab at translating some of Gee’s ideas into a lesson plan of sorts.

In Gee’s third chapter on learning and identity, I think I could take his ideas about understanding video games as having “worlds” and ask students—already familiar with this idea of videogames as having worlds—to draw this same parallel with the novels we might read in class.  Gee challenges us to perceive that a video-game character has three different identities:  virtual identity, real-world identity, and projective identity.  Some of these are harder to transcribe than others, but I think all of them are adaptable/transferrable.

Let’s say I’m teaching the novel Jane Eyre.  This is a text that—like basically every text written before 1990, it seems, right?—a lot of students might complain is unapproachable to them because it’s so outdated, they can’t relate to it, the characters aren’t like them, the world in which the novel is set is unfamiliar, etc.

I could start by leading the class in a conversation about understanding the “setting” of the novel as a “world,” much the way we understand the world of, erm, Sonic the Hedgehog to be a “world.”  I could ask the students to describe Jane Eyre’s world.  What are the rules of this world?  What does this world look like?  How do you “play the game of life” in this world?  These would be questions that I hope would open up the “world” of the novel and get students engaged as readers of this “world.”

Then, I would ask students to consider again that in a video game’s “world,” you have access to that world through the lens of a certain character.  So in Tomb Raider, our lens into that world is the character Lara Croft.  But in Jane Eyre, our lens to that world is—no surprise in the title here—Jane Eyre.  (Similarly, a lot of video games are named simply for their main character.)  So, if we want to better understand Jane Eyre’s world, we should try to understand Jane Eyre herself.  And this is where the three identities would come in…

A discussion question about virtual identity might be:  What is Jane Eyre’s virtual identity?  That is to say, within the world of Jane Eyre, what role does she play?  How does she fit into the hierarchy of that world?  (Having already described/defined the world, now students are ready to place Jane Eyre within it.)

Real-world identity is harder to translate, because students aren’t actively engaged as “builders” of Bronte’s novel, but here’s what I came up with for a discussion question:  In what ways is Jane Eyre like or unlike you, the reader, who lives in the real world?  How do those differences and commonalities affect your response to the character Jane Eyre?

Projective identity (harder still to translate, for the same reasons), to me seems like an opportunity to ask students to “project” the character into the “real world” of the reader.  So this discussion might focus on questions like, What would a modern-day Jane Eyre be like?  What clique might Jane be in at school, or how might she dress?  What would her Facebook profile be like, what kinds of things would she “tweet”?  What sort of modern problems would she have?

These interpretations of “three identities” have less to do with building worlds (which is how Gee uses them) than with interpreting worlds, but I still think they could be useful.  And really, the most useful thing of all is just the overall metaphor—being able to take something students know a lot about (videogames) and using that something as a lens or way into something that they are unfamiliar with (Jane Eyre) and/or resistant to because they think it has no relevance to the “worlds” they already understand.  It’s a way to take a literacy they already have (playing video games) to show them how to develop their literacy as readers.

I’ll sign-off with a non-sequitur:  Did anyone else think the section on birding (pgs. 192-6) was completely bizarre? I suppose I get Gee’s point, that learning is a social activity and so on, but, wow…  Then again, I guess I can’t criticize, because I did get an idea about teaching out of that section (though it may not be quite what Gee had in mind).  It would require a lot of collaboration with another instructor, which may or may not be feasible, but what if I were able to coordinate with another lit class that was the same level as mine and running concurrently with mine, and what if I were able to coordinate with the instructor of that class so that my first text was his/her last text, and vice versa…then in the middle of the semester, we could bring our classes together for occasional “norming” sessions, whereby the “experienced” class that already encountered the text could coach the students encountering the text for the first time, and they could compare their reading/birding notes?  This would give the students a chance to mentor each other and learn from each other’s textual interpretations rather than just mine and their own.  And this wouldn’t necessarily be something they were graded on, and as peers, the stakes might feel lowered (or not? Social anxiety still prevails in undergrad…), and this might be a way to achieve the “psychosocial moratorium principle” Gee advocates.  Anyway, just an idea…

I am not a gamer.
As a child of the 80s, this has always been a significant self-identification for me. In terms of its descriptive value, it ranks right up there with “child of divorce,” “coffee over tea,” and “lover of cake” as a way of communicating my identity. When I was younger, I thought there was something wrong with me for failing to appreciate the games that held universal appeal to members of my generation. I’ve had my hands on the controls maybe a half-dozen times in my life, though I’ve spent countless hours watching, with varying levels of engagement, my friends play video games. For some reason, it just never took. I could recognize that certain games had great visual styles and graphics or that others followed an interesting storyline but I never had any desire to play the games myself. I was pleased to note, then, that Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy not only helped me understand how video games encourage learning but also helped me to connect the experience of gaming with an interest more relevant to me personally: reading.

Early on in the book, Gee convolutedly states: “[Video games] situate meaning in a multimodal space through embodied experiences to solve problems and reflect on the intricacies of the design of imagined worlds and the design of both real and imagines social relationships and identities in the modern world” (40-41). Blah blah blah. What he means, in essence, is that if people learn best through experience, what better way could we learn than by experiencing for ourselves a variety of identities, actions, and events? If we learn best through experience, the most intelligent among us will be those who have had the most experiences and who have been able to reflect critically on both the situations and our own role within them.

This notion, which I caught myself thinking of as “vicarious experience,” is the basis for Gee’s defense of video games and it has helped me to recognize part of the reason why these games never appealed to me. I am not immune to the charms of vicarious experience: rather, I have used (and continue to use) reading as a way of indulging in multiple different personas and experiencing situations and events deeply removed from my everyday life. Although there are many differences between the execution of these skills, reading and gaming both offer vicarious experiences and the opportunity to reflect on both content and form in a way that leads to metacognitive understanding.

While I have never really considered video games a waste of time, I am guilty of failing to recognize their appeal. By connecting the basic goals and skills of gaming with the textual literary skills I am more familiar with, Gee has enhanced my understanding of the value of both interests.

OK, I’ll admit I’m clueless when it comes to video games. When I was young, our neighbors across the street acquired the revolutionary game of Pong, a version of tennis played on the TV screen. Awed by the sheer majesty of two moving lines and a little ball (along with the weird little “boop” sound effect), I tried once, twice, thirty times to volley the ball back to my opponent – and failed. (Auth. note: I suck at video games, even prehistoric ones.) So I opted out of the video game world, puny as it was back then, and never got back in as it grew more vivid, violent, clever, profitable and deeply engrossing (for others) than I could have ever imagined. Today, anything I know about video games stems from my teenage son’s love for them.

That said, I’m not hostile to the games or dismissive about their potential to help kids gain useful skills beyond eye/hand coordination. I thought the vast majority of Gee’s points about the ways video games address key principles of learning and literacy were valid. I especially liked his point about the “psychosocial moratorium” principle, wherein students can take risks in a low-consequence environment. I like the idea that learners can try out new ideas and approaches to problems, but also know that they can “save” a game if they get stuck, think about it and come back anew, hopefully with fresh ideas. And the committed learning principle, I think, is an incredibly important aspect of video games’ contributions. By virtue of their appeal to a large number of people, utilizing the games in some kind of learning capacity increases the chance that learners might stick with a subject longer and with great focus (one can hope). I like the way taking on an identity in a game and learning the semiotics involved parallel adopting an identity in the classroom (as a junior scientist, mathematician, psychologist, etc.) and learning the language, processes and behaviors that are employed.

Where I think Gee fell short is not making his book about the case for the educational value of video games … well, fun. That’s the place where the motivation to play video games comes from, isn’t it? Certainly, Gee’s work would have served its readers even better with some illustrations from the games he discussed and some more concrete suggestions of how video games might be employed inside a classroom environment (or outside, as part of an assignment). Beyond being aware of how their design and content aids learning, I think it would be great to use them as learning tools. I realize that Gee notes that this was not the primary goal for this book – I would argue that it should have received significant attention.

For my part, I am fully in favor of marshaling as many different kinds of media and entertainment pastimes as possible in the pursuit of learning: books (fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, comic books, etc.), websites, Facebook, Twitter, music, movies, television, radio, video games, board games, card games, and whatever else we can get our hands on. Far from Gee’s fear of “co-opting” youth culture, it is an acknowledgement that this is the world our students – and we – live in. When we find ways to approach learning that capitalize on learners’ interests, we can make lessons more immediate, meaningful and, yes, fun.

In response to What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee, I would have to first point out the line which hooked me into his thought process: “For heaven’s sake, why would you do that alone?” (8). This quote, from a 21 year old, points out one of the simple truths about effective learning, it is not a process to  approach by one self. This is observed at all levels of instruction; with the exception of independent study, actual learning only happens when one person develops a greater understanding with the aid of another’s support.
I was also happy to see the statement: “In such multimodal texts … images often communicate different things from the words” (17). This made me consider our future reading of Baker’s Nat Turner and reconsider my first reading of that graphic novel. Did I pay enough attention to the images? Did I use the images to support/confirm the words? Or, did I use the images to add to the words and speak for themselves? Gee’s statement, “If you can’t read the images, you will not be able to recover their meanings from the words,” makes it clear that visuals must be carefully considered. It is not the artist’s intention to obfuscate the meaning, and a reader’s responsibility is to pay close attention to each element of a text. My 9th grade students clearly recognize this with our ongoing reading of “Romeo and Juliet,” where we are both reading and watching the play. The play without images would be incomplete. Following Gee’s concept of semiotic domains, it would be my best guess that a Shakespearian play includes multiple modalities: oral and written language, images, gestures, etc.. But this line of thought made me question if I am testing my student’s on their ability to comprehend Shakespeare based only on his writing or if my assessments are inclusive of the multiple modalities the play expresses. Gee’s “content” discussion did not do much to alleviate my concerns. Now I wonder if my students are simply learning to memorize content (blank verse, monologue, soliloquy), rather than learning to read/process the multiple modalities, as in the “Newton’s law” example on 23-24. The logical conclusion to this line of thought, following Gee’s experiencing, affiliations, and preparation, would be testing my students on a play not discussed in class to see if they make an affiliation with their experiences from “Romeo and Juliet.” I can only hope the experience sticks with my students and the “preparation for future learning” is assumed through their effective affiliation (24).

Like Megan, I really wanted to like this book. In my experience as a high school teacher, I saw the affect video games had on my students’ work habits and was hoping to come away from the reading with some strategies to get my students as interested in Steinbeck as they are in Sims.

Unfortunately, I did not find any “ready-made” strategies to use. Instead, I have 36 principles that I’m going to have to stretch my mind in order to make these principles apply. I know that Gee didn’t have to have classroom application examples for every principle, but he hardly had any at all. When I did see some application tips, they were usually for math and science classes. I’m really hoping we have a discussion like we did last class on possible ways to put theory into practice

This book read like a book about video games with some references to teaching rather than a book about pedagogy with some references to video games. For me, it was the most difficult reading we’ve been assigned because there was so much of it, and I just didn’t always see the point, honestly. I busted my ass this week trying to read this book, hoping at some point to glean something useful, but Gee spent too much time explaining video games instead of how to use video game principles into practice. I started seeing red every time I had to read about another video game summary.

What he SHOULD have done was take his principles and write a few paragraphs about how to use the techniques in class to help kids learn using video games as examples as how the principles work to engage kids. I don’t think his readers needed to be convinced about why video games are an okay place to look for teaching inspiration. Kids like video games, but I am never going to be able to compete with a video game unless Fairfax County hires me a pyrotechnics crew.

One activity I used that might fit a few of Gee’s principles* is one I used for Romeo and Juliet. I divided the class up into two groups, the Montagues and the Capulets. Every day I would keep track of who had his homework, who was on time to class, even who got good scores on assessments. I would award each team points based on their efforts. The teams were highly competitive and wanted to beat the other team. It created a rivalry similar to that in R&J while also bolstering interest in a subject that was sometimes stale (Shakespeare is not as interesting as Sonic). Team members also encouraged one another and texted to remind each other about assignments and screamed to get people to come to class.

The downside to this assignment is that it felt like my workload doubled. It was a lot of work to plan and even more work to count points. When it came time to teach R&J the next year, I opted not to do the assignment because I just couldn’t muster the energy to do it again.

I think good teachers are going to try to make their class engaging and in doing so, yes, their class might contain elements that good video games do, but I don’t think using video games as a model is necessary. Thanks for playing, Gee.

*Semiotic domain principle, identity principle, text principle, affinity group principle

Gee’s thesis about video games being useful models for how children and adults can be faced with challenge and still, miraculously, stay interested in the game—is interesting. I admit that I was skeptical of Gee’s thesis, at first, and that throughout the text, he did convince me that video games are, in fact, good models for how to teach a learner how to “read,” interpret, and problem solve in a variety of situations (like pick up little pieces of a space suit from another planet, etc). But, I’m not sure how I can connect this to my classroom.

I agree, as Gee mentions that we should spend some time studying how game-makers create self-contained little learning worlds. We should spend time thinking about how they make decisions about the pre-level tutorials, and the in-game help pages. We should figure out the recipe they use to ensure that they achieve just the right amount of challenge (read: frustration), while still giving the player hope that they’ll succeed eventually. And of course, I agree, that these are all conditions that I would ideally like to reproduce in my literature classroom. But how?

I can see myself assigning students homework that involves them going home to play a videogame, then writing meta-cognitively about how they approached the game (with what attitude, what kinds of tools, what levels of expectations, excitement, frustration, etc). I could see, then, asking them to complete a similar kind of assignment for a short, challenging, text. Then, I suppose, I could bring that conversation deeper, asking students to identify what it is about difficult reading that is somehow more frustrating than a difficult game, or vise versa. In this way, I could initiate a conversation about the idea of difficulty, and about what we can expect to not understand as readers, and how we can transfer the patience (or at least willingness to try it again) we seem to use with video games, to reading a text.

I can also see using the idea of the video game tutorial, to talk about the “how to” of reading. What questions to ask yourself if you’re confused. What strategies to use when you don’t understand a passage. Etc. Which buttons to press when you want to use the bow and arrow instead of the shot gun. I might also use this opportunity to talk about how a text teaches us to read itself, and how we find those clues.

So, I see the video game comparison as an apt analogy, and I see Gee’s point, that the conditions game-makers create in video games make for really efficient, active learning Of course, I’ll try to reproduce those conditions as best as I can in my own classroom, scaffolding the reading, starting in Level 1. I just wish Gee had given me some concrete suggestions of how I might make my Literature classroom work like a challenging video game level—that is, “pleasantly frustrating.”

About five years ago, I had an Asian student in my English 111 class at Nova.  He was a quiet, attentive student, who occasionally dozed off, but generally, started the semester strong.  After a few weeks he started skipping class and stopped turning in work.  When I finally saw him, I kept him back for a few minutes after class and asked if everything was ok.  He was failing the course and I wanted to see whether he was willing to get back on track, or if he would drop.  He confided to me that he had an addiction – a video game addiction.  He never slept, instead he played games all the time – all night, all day.  He had already failed out of VCU and he was mortified to admit this.  Worse, he was in danger of failing out of Nova – which would multiply the humiliation dramatically.  Given his ethnicity, and the pressure from his parents, as he explained it, he was in big trouble.  In his words “An Asian kid failing Nova is pathetic”.

This left a really strong impression on me and I’ve never forgotten him.  Before that I hadn’t encountered the truly debilitating impact that gaming can have on young people.  This young guy had no control over his life.  While I’ve bought my fair share of games and own the latest gaming system, I just don’t buy the connections that Gee is trying to make:  teachers could be capturing students by incorporating elements and strategies of gaming.  I see socializing via the Xbox, but I see it in real life too.  I see scaffolding and planning a strategy in Xbox, but they are already there in real life too.  I creativity in Xbox, but it’s already there in real life too.  My point is that whatever skills kids are using in their games, they are already using them in life – in fact, they learned them in their real life.

I am not going to use video gaming ideals in my college teaching.  And I’m not sure I would want to even see an elementary school teacher using gaming.  It all seems a bit trendy to me – and many of these would-be trend setters don’t address the negative impacts of gaming.  Now the newest trend is figuring out a way to apply some of the strategies kids are already employing in their gaming, to the classroom.  However, I think the classroom should push students out of their comfort zone, out of their virtual worlds if need be, and engage them meaningfully in the real.

I am very much in favor of using different technologies in my classrooms, but all assignments are intentional acts of creation, with editing and revising, team work and presentation.  These are also acts that students might be using in their favorite video game. But I don’t see that it’s necessary for me to draw those parallels for students – it seems quite unnecessary, to me.  And I feel absolutely no compulsion to join the trend.

Foreword: I would just like to say that it has been extremely hard for me to write this blog post without geeking out over the particular videogames that were used as examples. This is primarily because many of them are my absolute favorite games, and because the arguments about video games being a “waste of time” are almost verbatim what I experienced growing up. The Tomb Raider (particular TR1 and TR4/Last Revelation . . . the whole Von Croy sequence was a long-running inside joke between my friends and me), Sonic the Hedgehog, Half-Life, Elder Scrolls, and System Shock (and their spiritual successors, Bioshock) series pretty much defined my childhood and adolescence. So please forgive me as I try not to ramble.

One of the most interesting synch-ups Gee makes between videogames and the learning process is in “Telling and Doing”, Chapter 5, regarding tutorial levels. He explains that the videogames he played and observed contained either explicit or implicit tutorial sequences that taught the player the rules of the game and essentially put them in the shallow end of the pool to muck about before pushing them toward deeper water. They begin relatively easily, even as they set up the premises of the game and its characters, plot, and atmosphere, and gradually give way to more and more challenging levels and tasks that assume your accumulated expertise. That doesn’t mean that the tutorials are always necessarily cakewalks (though some certainly are, as in Half-Life, where the tutorial is entirely separate from the main game), or that they are always necessary (if you’re an already experienced player, why can’t you just skip the “how to play” bits?), but they are always there for first-timers or people who have fallen out of practice, and they ultimately help a broader audience connect with the game.

So too do we have “tutorials” for teaching literature. Even the best English student in 9th grade will be lost if you stick Ulysses, or even A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, in front of him. You have to give him “Araby” first. And then “The Dead”. And so on, and so forth. That doesn’t mean that “Araby” is an easy piece to work with by any means, or that it is lacking in quality; quite the contrary, it’s one of the best stories ever written, and it’s relatively dense and difficult compared to, say, Animal Farm by George Orwell, which is dense and difficult in relation to other things, etc. But generally speaking, I’ve noticed a trend, at least with my education, of teachers prefacing longer, more difficult works with shorter, more accessible ones that contain the same qualities and patterns as those we might be expected to look for in the longer work (think: game controls and environments). It is important to challenge a reader, but not to destroy them. Don’t give them Orlando first; give them Mrs. Dalloway. Don’t give them Ninja Gaiden first; give them Super Mario Bros. They will surely have trouble with anything you give them if they’ve never read a book/played a videogame before, but some things act as tutorials that challenge without the intimidation of failure (even though failure is definitely still possible).

It is interesting then, to note that games in the 80s (and before) often did not have tutorial levels or tutorials of any sort at all. If you happened to play on an arcade cabinet, they would have a “demo” screen showing some pre-programmed circumstances in the game, and labels for the controls in front of you, so you could get some sense of what you would be expected to do. Beyond that, they threw you straight into the deep end, and you got better by continually putting quarters into the machine every time you died; obviously, this was done to make as much money off of the cabinets as possible, and (I would hope) is nothing like how we would want to approach teaching literature and reading skills. Conversely, we now have a phenomenon where games essentially refuse to end their tutorials; rather than escorting the player through the basics in the context of the game at the very beginning, many games now are guilty of “hand-holding”. For example, a game might continually prompt players to press the ‘E’ key in order to perform an action that they’ve performed thousands of times before, all the way up until the very end of the game, even though the player has known how to do that since 5 minutes into the game. It’s seen as “dumbing down” the games for a wider audience, and that could be analogous to teaching literature as well: if you assign students to read Hamlet, you should not expect to have to walk them, step-by-step, through the entire play. Ideally they’ll have had a “tutorial” of some sort with a previous play, and then a “refresher” with the beginning of Hamlet, but after a certain point, they can be expected to lead themselves, and have the game/instructor simply provide the framework and occasional game over/correction when necessary. Arin Hanson, an online game reviewer, voice actor, and comedian who goes by the name “Egoraptor”, famously criticized games for hand-holding and analyzed (in an effective, nuanced, hilarious, and extremely profanity-laden, adults-only manner) the phenomenal implicit tutorial of the first level of Megaman X, a game for the Super Nintendo, and used that analysis to point out flaws in newer games that “hand-hold” players through the entire game, depriving them of the challenge and learning experience that the game might otherwise provide, which in turn deprives them of the fun and enrichment they would have*.

What I’m trying to say with all of this is that there seems to be a balanced approach to teaching literature, the same way there is a balanced approach to setting up a videogame. Not every book requires the same style of tutorial, nor the same depth or length tutorial, but generally speaking, we should be able to provide one as instructors. Feeding answers and interpretations to students beyond a certain point becomes “hand-holding”; it defeats the purpose of reading in the first place, and prevents students from coming up with their own skillsets for a particular work and transferring those skillsets to other works.

*For those of you wondering, the review is called “Sequelitis: Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X”, and it’s great but, once again, it’s incredibly profane, so viewer discretion is advised.

The most interesting idea that James Paul Gee mentions, for me, is the idea that ‘literacy’ extends beyond reading and writing; that there are different kinds of literacy. This is not a new idea to me, but one that I was happy to encounter here, as it is not an idea seen very often. Video games have their own kind of literacy, a system of operating and language unique to them as both a semiotic domain and as individual games.
On a broader level, we encounter any number of different ‘languages’ in our daily lives and manage them with very little trouble because we’ve learned to be literate in them: the ability to understand road signs is a great example. TO someone who’s used to driving (or just encountering on the road) American signage, the system of symbols is perfectly clear and requires very little thought because it’s become second nature. But put the same person in a foreign country (Japan, for instance), and the signs are different and confusing. Some look similar and mean the same thing, some are completely different, and some look the same but mean something else; you become functionally illiterate in an area you thought you understood.
We’ll probably encounter more on this as we get into Nat Turner but reading comics is an entire language in and of itself, requiring a completely different style of reading from, say, a novel. The way information is presented and processed works differently, and someone who had never encountered a comic before might not be able to follow the action from panel to panel.
Getting back to video games, I was literate in them maybe twenty years ago. I could do fairly well at games on the NES or Sega, or in an arcade. I now own an XBox and find myself struggling to master any of the games that I have for it. There are three times as many buttons on the controller, the games are all more complex and expansive than anything I played as a child, and the skills that I learned then have atrophied. These all become factors in my frustration with modern video games, but I continue to try because I value the entertainment they give me, and maybe I just might learn something else while I’m at it, too. Many of the games require complex problem-solving skills, something I’ve always been fairly good at and a skill that is nothing new to video games. Years of playing the various King’s Quest games on old desktop computers taught me the kinds of solutions that are often required in similar games, and that’s knowledge that does transport over to newer games. Similarly, those lateral thinking skills have also served me well in the real world, helping me to “think outside the box” and find creative solutions to problems that I face in more mundane circumstances.