Month: June 2011

There’s been quite an upswing in talk about gaming your life, where you add an application to assist yourself in achieving a goal. For instance, you could use the Nike app for the iOS platform, and track your progress as you walk 5k, or more like me, walk to the fridge. Naturally, educators have seen how people learn on their own, usually with a great passion, and want to leverage that into the classroom. The common one I’ve heard is that people will memorize the various class requirements and bonuses on a piece of gear for World of Warcraft, but of course don’t bother memorizing the times tables, who the president of Nicaragua is, or any other mundane information that is useful but ultimately discarded in favour of how many bonuses Cloudsong has.

Full disclosure: I actually played World of Warcraft, and the game Dark Age of Camelot, and did in fact have my Cloudsong stolen during an artifact raid in Dark Age of Camelot. I also knew the bonuses for a level ten Cloudsong, but since then I have forgotten them. I’m sure I could look it up, but it’s not that important.

The simple conclusion is to make education more like a game – add “achievements” and “unlockables”… oh wait. Education has already tried that. Achievements like diplomas, and unlockables like second year. So what’s the difference? Well, now we add gaming designer to the crew of people who are involved in curriculum design. Actually, we already had a gaming designer, except the “games” (ahem, classes) weren’t that well designed. The problem isn’t that classes need more “gaming” elements or achievements, the problem is simply that education practice has not kept up with changes in society over the last (I’ll be generous and say) fifty years. Adding more gaming elements that don’t have a purpose for learners is not going to help them learn, it will only frustrate them. Moreover, anyone asking an instructor to be a gaming designer and not only be a web designer, engaging lecturer, techno-guru, curriculum designer, tech support for their class as well as subject matter expert, well, that’s not going to happen. One can only wear so many hats.

It’s interesting that television really brought this to my attention. I was flipping around the dial after the Daily Show, and up popped an interview with Jane McGonigal, the author of  the book “How Video Games Will Save The World”. Of course, anything with that title is going to pique my interest. I wasn’t that interested as it’s the same ground being tread by Stephen Johnson’s book about popular culture’s effect on society. Towards the end of the interview, Jane mentions a charter school in New York that has employed a game designer in addition to the  usual battery of curriculum designers. Of course, it was out of the scope of the interview, but it would have been really interesting to see what were the drawbacks of this approach. In gaming there is a relatively harsh penalty for not completing a task – your character dies, your game is over. Learning is not so binary (of course, good games don’t have to be that binary either).

So ultimately, I think gaming in education will be a marginalized thing for formal education, and it will continue to drive informal education as it has done for the last decade.  I think that gaming can learn from education though – and that hopefully gaming will learn not to push out so many crap games year after year.