Gaming as Learning

Well, it seems I've got another week until my school year starts. We've been moving to a newer, freshly refurbished building for the new year and it now seems that the work crews have discovered some unpleasantness in the ductwork that will require a lot of tearing out and replacing. So start of class has been postponed for a week. This after having already postponed class for a week due to renovations taking longer than expected.

But it's all just as well. I've got loads of work to get done before the start of class, and now I have a much better chance of getting some of the fancier flourishes I'd hoped for ready on time. I'm making up play mats for students, painting up miniatures and models, and cooking up some neat handouts for use in gaming.

On with today's topic: It has been very sensibly asked why I'm trying to replace traditional teaching methods as much as possible with gaming. I'd like to answer that.

When I was a tyke going through the school system, I had a number of different history teachers. None of these teachers were terrible, but none are likely to have inspirational films based on their lives either. They were in most respects Typical History Teachers. They had us fill out worksheets; read chapters from our textbooks (always followed by answering review questions, of course); color and label maps; memorize dates when Important Bits of Paper were signed by Equally Important People; write out lists of Presidents, Kings, and other Great Heads of States; and also watch the occasional video, (or even, god help us, film strips). It was a very standard history education, and I believe I learned essentially nothing from it.

There's a reason most Americans are somewhere between Entirely Ignorant and Actively Hostile when the subject of history comes up: it isn't taught very well. It doesn't have the immediate applicability of math or grammar. It doesn't have the pyrotechnics and physicality of the sciences. It's stuck in an almost entirely abstract world of facts and figures.

This is really unfair to history. History is the world of stories. It's full of cool places, people and events. When we make it into a movie or TV show, people often pay attention. When we put it on HBO with all its warts intact, it wins critical awards. When we put a shiny new display in at a Museum, people will actually plan a whole day to come and see it. People do like history. They just don't like the way it's taught at school.

I actually got very good grades in history. I found it easy to remember whatever data was required long enough to regurgitate it onto a test paper. But it quickly faded from memory, and it left no real lasting mark. When I reflect on my history classes in jr. high/high school, I can only recall with clarity three lessons:

1. A project where we were all assigned to research and build a model of something from medieval or renaissance history. I chose to build a siege tower and castle wall and do a report on siege warfare. I can still tell you many facts I learned on that assignment. I kept the model proudly on a shelf in my room until I left for college.

2. A game we played in class one day meant to simulate the feudal system. Certain kids had slips of paper worth various amounts of land, and the rest of us were minor lords who ran around pledging service to the landowners in an attempt to get as much land as we could. Towards the end of class, we all stopped wheeling and dealing and made a big chart showing the web of loyalties that now bound us all in awkward and often contradictory patterns. It really made an impression on me, and in later years whenever studying feudalism, that chart and game always popped right back into my head.

3. A very brief discussion of the French & Indian war. It was actually a picture in our textbook of a battle that made the impression, because it reminded me of some plastic toy soldiers my brother and I had been given by our aunt one 4th of July. I went home that night and set up a big battle like the one in the book, and I've always remembered the French & Indian War because of it. I remembered who fought who, and that it was fought just a few decades prior to the American War of Independence, and that it featured a rookie season George Washington.

These three meager lessons are all that stuck with me from years of education. As I left high school, I had no real interest in history. I wanted to be an animator for Disney or possibly an architect. And then a funny thing happened on the way to the university. I started playing video games.

My brother had always been a video game enthusiast. I had been much less of one. But then I found in a single summer Sid Meier's Pirates, Koei's Bandit Kings of Ancient China, and Microsoft's Darklands. All of these games were set in purely historical settings (okay, bandit kings *did* have one or two wizards running around...but that was out of a cast of hundreds, and the wizards honestly didn't have much impact on play). Anyhow, these games really sucked me in and made me want to know more about the characters and places involved. I started going to the library and hunting down books on assosciated topics. I started learning chains of cause and effect between people and events that defined the various scenarios in each game. I started learning more of the background behind the spots on the game map. I looked up the actual fates of the characters I'd become familiar with in the game. It was like delving into middle earth or narnia, but with a whole library full of additional appendices. I had finally discovered history.

During my first year of college, I got very into Koei's 'Liberty or Death' game. I was fascinated by the little portraits of the hundreds of historical personalities, the various regional battle maps, the political options to raise support through pamphleteering and courting the favor of foreign powers. Once again, I started going to the library to find out the full story of these video game characters and events. I decided, on a lark, to take some classes on colonial America. I had a truly great professor who knew how to tell a story and answer a question, and soon I was taking graduate level courses on a topic that had nothing to do with my actual major.

Long story short, I ended up as a history teacher. And I will happily swear on any convenient holy text that games were what made all the difference in leading me to it. At some point, I realized the few things that had really stuck with me from my years of prior education were hobby or game-like activities. There was a connection here between method and subject matter.

That's my experience, and that's why I'm so keen to get games into the classroom. I do not by any means think my experience is universal. I do however think my experience is far from unique. I am also convinced that in this age of video games outgrossing hollywood and collectible card games staking out a sizable portion of the elementary school playground, my experience is likely to be more common now than it was when I was in school. Games are a mainstream part of our culture. They are a major part of how kids in this culture interact with the world around them. I think the time is right to aggressively move gaming into the education process.

I do not doubt that a game-centered approach to education will cover less material than a traditional 'lectures, readings and worksheets' approach. It will cover less things, but it will do so in more detail. The traditional approach is also a bit misleading; it may cover more material, but I'd be willing to wager heavily that very little of that broad exposure will be retained in any meaningful way. By taking things in a more focused and dare I say it, fun way, I think there is every reason to hope that students will actually retain more learning than they would in a traditional classroom.

Or at least that's my theory. One more week until kickoff, and then I'll be able to start putting things to the test.