Games are at the verge of evolving into a serious method of teaching pretty soon. Why? Because they are fun, they involve intense and passionate involvement, they give us structure through their rules, they are interactive and can be adapted to a learner’s teaching style and pace, they can take various routes to learn the same concept thus catering to a much larger audience profile. Is that not all? No there is more, they spark creativity, interaction and a challenge, and they also give us emotions. All of this can fit into a game and are needed if a game is developed keeping in mind a basic rule: “Would I like or love to play this game?”. I use this rule of thumb while creating a game, if the answer to this question is ‘like’ I know that it is time to relook the strategy, the graphics, etc. If the answer is ‘love’, I take a second opinion. :)
The educationists have been trying their hands on teaching and learning through ‘hands-on’ methodologies. Really great work, I too have for some time worked on such theories with some renowned educationists (3.5 years to be precise). And I completely agree with them that having a hands-on experience makes learning most easy and fun. I have sat with children who have been put through some of these teaching materials, gathering scientific data, and no quantitative number can suffice for the joy that you see in the child’s eye when they understand the ‘Why?’or the ‘How?’. But, how do you make a learner realize the demand and supply curve when all they have an idea about it is that it’s synonymous to food and hunger? Do you put them in the market with an assured sum and let them pick the details? No!, here is where a game can help. Learning from experience can only go that much. And for areas that are dangerous or risky, games can help. I played a game recently on the web about the situation in Somalia, which very distinctly played with my emotions. I could feel their pain and I was sitting no-where in Somalia at that time. But was this just an isolated reaction or a general reaction to people suffering? Either way there was learning happening.
Gaming at present has not been researched properly. More negative than positive feedback can be found on the Internet, if you care to search. But the plethora of feedbacks both negative and positive are not from “educationists”, so we cannot be sure. We have been indoctrinated in the concept that a person with a PhD knows the stuff. The rest are just living their life. I however, found a research done at two universities in Canada and the US that show very positive and conclusive results. My work to create a similar game for a UK based client that uses student perception to market behavior as its concept helped me understand this research. I could relate much easily to the research work and its findings as I had sensed the feelings of utter confusion and then the dawn of realization too. I could see the results tallied with my initial reaction to our game and how I react to it now? The difference that I used to feel was written down for me to read in this research. The research paper.
Now, I am not condemning books but games are more than capable of doing what the books have been doing since man scribbled on sand, and games can do much more than what the books have ever achieved. I love reading books and their musty smell. I used to be the proverbial ‘book worm’ and still love to read a book just before I go off to sleep, something I would never do with my laptop. (I don’t have money to waste on getting smaller and costlier gadgets just to enable me to read in a reclined position.) But just wonder if games were here before books got invented. Read through:
Everything Bad is Good for You - Steven Johnson
Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: video games were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel universe, kids have been playing games for centuries - and then these page-bound texts come along and suddenly they're all the rage. What would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something like this:
Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying - which engages the learner in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements-books are simply a barren string of words on the page. Only a small portion of the brain devoted to processing written language is activated during reading, while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new "libraries" that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.
Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia-a condition that didn't exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can't control their narratives in any fashion-you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure utterly choreographed by another person? But today's generation embarks on such adventures millions of times a day. This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one. The book readers of the younger generation are learning to "follow the plot" instead of learning to lead.
It should probably go without saying, but it probably goes better with saying, that I don't agree with this argument. But neither is it exactly right to say that its contentions are untrue. The argument relies on a kind of amplified selectivity: it foregrounds certain isolated properties of books, and then projects worst-case scenarios based on these properties and their potential effects on the "younger generation”. But it doesn't bring up any of the clear benefits of reading: the complexity of argument and storytelling offered by the book form; the stretching of the imagination triggered by reading words on a page; the shared experience you get when everyone is reading the same story.
A comparable sleight of hand is at work anytime you hear someone bemoaning today's video game obsessions, and their stupefying effects on tomorrow's generations. Games are not novels, and the ways in which they harbor novelistic aspirations are invariably the least interesting thing about them. You can judge games by the criteria designed to evaluate novels: Are the characters believable? Is the dialogues complex? But inevitably, the games will come up wanting. Games are good at novelistic storytelling the way Michael Jordan was good at playing baseball. Both could probably make a living at it, but their world-class talents lie elsewhere.
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