Future Learning: Part 4

The fourth and final part of our series on gaming and future learning covers a few skills that show exactly why games have a lot to offer in schools and homes:

Teachers and lecturers who don’t adapt to the alternative ‘curriculum’ presented through games and active learning will become increasingly disconnected from students who value different approaches to learning. On a basic level schools will be seen as lacking high production values.

Dragon Age: Origins shows the kind of production values accessible to large media companies. Apart from the videogame, players can also pick up the videogame guide, the novel and the tabletop RPG. Few universities and public consortiums can begin to approach production values at such levels, as shown by the BBC’s Adventure Rock. The ‘game world’ looks great but the games aren’t much fun and the ‘learning’ lacks interactive prompts and ‘wizards’ to help kids get started. Adding these features was simply too expensive.

Dragon Age: Origins

Games expose students to a rich range of experiences and different perspectives on the world. This variety and blend of experience and social interaction may promote creativity and the expression of creativity. Creativity and innovation can be seen as being associated with high-skill, high-wage economies.

Assassin’s Creed 2 is too bloodthirsty for kids but it has a lot to offer in terms of adult learning. Players are dropped into an immersive Renaissance Italy, where they must use planning and technique to operate as an Assassin. The game’s modelling of Renaissance Italy offers a window on a period of Italian art and culture that is not normally accessible to many students. You can discuss the pros and cons of the game’s violent content but when doing so it’s worth considering that the game’s vision of corrupt guilds vying for power is historically accurate and relevant in today’s world.

Assassins Creed II

Games can model cognitive learning processes. This offers the option of aligning how our brains’ cognitive processes learn with how we help our brains’ cognitive processes to ‘learn’ or develop.

Chess involves understanding abstract relationships across a whole ‘system’, predicting likely outcomes and applying critical thinking to select the best option. This is comparable to using our cognitive models or blueprints, (based on past experience and adapted by our circumstances), to take informed decisions in the real world.

Link to Classic Wood Chess Set

We’ve linked to an inexpensive wooden chess set at Amazon, as the Lewis Chessman shown below is well out of our price range. Thanks to photographer Andrew Dunn for releasing the image under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

Many games can model cognitive skills but some games offer more valuable models than others. Open-ended tabletop roleplaying games appear to be among the most valuable, because players have to adapt to new situations, use knowledge and skills to evaluate problems, and take frequent game critical decisions.

The games we’ve talked about were, for the most part, made without learning in mind. They’re fun, and of value, because they make us use cognitive skills that we’re wired and/ or trained to enjoy using. Future games and future learning might be even better if we start to put a game’s skills, content, context and evaluation together at the design and testing stages. While we’re waiting for that to happen there are plenty of games which appear to offer valuable skills; and we’d probably be well-advised to start working out what kinds of learning we want future games to deliver.