Mass Communication and Popular Culture
16/01/2016
Digital Savagery
The digital revolution brought along with it myriad unique phenomena. And as all new things which come to be and replace those things which came before, these phenomena are subject to the relentless scrutiny of millions of minds. People need to know, and therefore people tend to study, exactly what the possibilities, the draw-backs, the implications, and the dangers of these things are before it is seen fit to permit them without further inquiry in amongst our societies, our civilizations, our lives. Text messages: do they de-sensitize us from human connection, or do they allow a deeper sense of intimacy? Televisions: are they mind-washing machines designed to keep society enslaved upon the couch, or are they educational viewports which look out unto a world too vast to comprehend without their magic? Video games: are they easy ways for children to become infatuated with crime and violence, or are they advanced machines of education designed for interactivity and applicability? These all are questions which society unveils the answers to more and more every day. It is the lattermost topic I will be concerned with herein as I look into the work of a number of people whom study video games and the effects which video games have on peoples’ abilities to learn and comprehend. Although not without opposition, it is the consensus of the authors which I have researched that video games not only have a positive influence on cognitive training, but also allow for a truly revolutionary way of thinking about, looking at, and interacting with the world in which we live.
The criticisms unveiled by my analysis are fairly conventional arguments. The primary criticism is a rather striking fact: 96.8% of male [video game] users objectify the virtual environment, as well as use others for their own personal gain (Paraskeva et al.); this would seem to rest on the foundation that “mercy doesn’t have an experience point value” (Sofge). The secondary criticism of video games as learning tools is that the typical game is either full of incorrect information, or else has fairly accurate information on only a very narrow topic of focus. The problem with that is this: video games are being learned from, one way or another, but it seems that what the games are teaching has the potential to leave a person more misinformed than if they had learned nothing about the subject in the first place (Dickey). Some in the field wish to correct this error by building games specifically intended to teach. The problem with this is that teachers make good lessons, but often terrible games; and game designers make good games, but often terrible lessons (Dickey). The products which each of these parties will put out is referred to as a ‘Shavian Reversal’. Shavian Reversal is a term coined by Professor Seymour Papert, and it denotes an offspring which received the hereditary gift of the worst qualities of both of its parents (Eck). In the context of game design this would mean a drill-and-kill learning sequence, devoid of any enjoyment. It has been suggested that instead of trying to combine the two skillsets of game design and educating, what instead should be done is to allow each party to play to their own strengths. What this would look like is allowing a game, Call of Duty for example, to be produced by game designers with the aim of entertainment. Followingly educators would step up to the plate; for example a professor of history would get his students to play a section of the Call of Duty game and the next day in class there would be a critical analysis of how the war and the battles are depicted in the gameplay, against how the war and battles are depicted in the history books. This way the professor could fill in missing information, correct false information et cetera (Eck), and from the students’ point of view the information becomes suddenly relevant! “What [they] must learn is directly related to the environment [they] learn within” (Eck); this sort of relevant learning is known as situated cognition (Eck). For “Lions do not learn to hunt through direct instruction but through modeling and play” (Eck). Another specific, successful, example is seen as Teacher Librarians use Minecraft (a game in which you quite literally construct the world you are within, from micro to macro aspects) to have students take the things which they have been learning and actually build a demonstration or a presentation into their Minecraft world (Hovious, Eck).
There is a great deal of research in the social sciences which supports game based learning as a tool to teach specific concepts, yet also is there much research supporting game based learning as a tool to teach much more abstract things. Games are a highly-valued source of learning, because of the necessity to, within them, employ a great deal of higher-order thinking, which is the thinking involved in such processes as hypothesis testing and strategization (Paraskeva et al.). The training of such faculties is crucial to the development of a capable mind, and therefore of a capable society. Simply realizing there is a problem, realizing there is a way past the problem, and trying different things until something works. In the last decade or so there has been a surge in the popularity of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), which are a subset of the similarly popular parent genre Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). Due to the advance in internet technology, game players are now immersed in artificial worlds where every other character they come across in the game is being actively played by another human somewhere else in the world. No longer can a nerd skate by on devilish strategization and fast fingers alone, now there is a new element of community, or teamwork which is necessary to operate effectively in the game environment (Dickey)(Paraskeva et al.). Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) allows players to communicate in real time, and in the midst of engaging with the game. That is to say a player need not take focus away from the task at hand in order to type out messages to his guild/party/raid team; the player now just speaks into the microphone in front of his or her face and communicates/strategizes/accommodates/theorizes et cetera on the fly. Research brings up very interesting phenomena when studying MMO/MMORPGs. Dickey found that many students whom were quiet and shy in the classroom, when engaged in a MMO environment, took on extensive leadership roles within the game, playing into such roles as mentor, or rather playing Master to the newer Apprentices. Although this seemed not to carry across mediums- that is to say students were still very reserved individuals in the physical world regardless of the mentorships they may have entered into within the game (Dickey)- I think it is nonetheless a crucial that these, apparently, natural leaders have some place where they feel comfortable enough to express those attributes of themselves.
I would now like to turn our attentions slightly. There is a concept known as cognitive disequilibrium. Cognitive disequilibrium is when one holds two contradictory beliefs about the world, and it forces one to adapt either one or the other belief so that one’s world-view re-aligns harmoniously (Eck). Cognitive disequilibrium is complimented by one’s ability to reason about the contradiction, and come to a resolution. A well-made video game is effective because of how it creates cognitive disequilibrium without exceeding the capacity of the player to succeed in resolving the contradiction (Eck). Now I will jump into an adjacent lane for a moment. Video games, by their very nature, present what is known as a procedural rhetoric (Bogost). Procedural rhetoric, simply put, is the way in which video games ‘talk about’ things in the world, more specifically about procedures in the world. Games present pseudo-realistic processes to the player, which the player must overcome or otherwise deal with, and these processes are modelled after the way that the real world works. Therefore video gamers have the unique opportunity to run hypothesis experiments in a padded environment. Bogost begins his article discussing Animal Crossing, which is a video game in which “[t]he player is penniless upon arrival, and the game quickly thrusts him into the reality of making ends meet” (Bogost). To a critical mind Animal Crossing models consumer capitalism. Bogost’s five-year-old plays Animal Crossing as well, and so is placed into the procedural rhetoric of consumer capitalism and faced with the cognitive disequilibrium of whether or not to take out a mortgage on a larger home. She wants a big house, like her dad’s Animal Crossing house. Also she wants to buy more material goods like toys and couches and wallpaper, but she needs more space to put it all in. Yet the more she spends on mortgage payments the less she is able to spend on new toys and wallpapers, and so here we have a surprisingly complex system of contradiction of desires, but it is laid out in a way that this five-year-old knows what is going on and approximately how to deal with her problem (Bogost). The way in which the procedural rhetoric presents the cognitive disequilibrium of mortgaging is not nearly as complicated as it might be analyzed to seem. The kid just runs around collecting bugs and selling them at the store, making ‘mortgage payments’ with the profits; when she has paid off the whole mortgage the shop owner/loan shark offers to ‘upgrade’ her home again, which will incur another, larger mortgage (Bogost). Maybe this sounds educational for a five-year-old and not so much for an independent young adult who has been managing money for years? Well it has educational benefits to the more experienced borrower as well:
In real life when we pay our mortgage bill we don’t see where the money ends up. But in Animal Crossing, the player experiences the way his debt makes the bankers wealthy. After a player makes a major payment to his mortgage, Tom Nook [the lender] closes his shop and upgrades it; the game starts with Nook’s Cranny, a wooden shack general store, and ends with Nookington’s, a two-story department store . . . Tom Nook is a condensation of the corporate bourgeoisie, Tom is the only character with which the player makes transactions of any kind and so it is easy to see the effects of the redistribution of wealth in ways children are fully capable of comprehending (Bogost).
Additionally consider that this is just a single instance of procedural rhetoric, a sample of a single instance of the practice stages of life which video games provide.
So here now together we have travelled upon only the outskirts of the debate of video games as learning tools. We have discussed the most common objections which arise, being that people (men especially so) tend to objectify both environments as well as others when gaming, using things solely for their own personal gain; which obviously brings up questions about ethics, morality, and to what effect such behaviours in-game will carry over into real life. The other objection was that video games which are enjoyable are not educational, and video games which are educational are not enjoyable. In response to this latter objection there was proposed an ingenious method of allowing the educators to educate with what the designers design, and regardless of the incorrect or missing content therein. After this we breached the topic of MMO/MMORPGs and the implications and effects of such advances in technology. To conclude we discussed cognitive disequilibrium within the environment of procedural rhetoric. As I mentioned just now, these are only the very fringes of this debate. There is much more to be learned, and much more that has been learned which has not been covered herein. Yet even so I feel confident in restating that video games not only have a positive influence on cognitive training, but also allow for a truly revolutionary way of thinking about, looking at, and interacting with the world in which we live.
Works Cited
Bogost, Ian. “The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Edited by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on
Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 117–140. PDF.
Dickey, Michele D. “World of Warcraft and the impact of game culture and play in an undergraduate game design course”. Computers & Education: An International Journal. 200 – 209. Elsevier Ltd, 2011. PDF.
Eck, Richard Van. “Digital Game-Based Learning: It’s Not Just the Digital Natives Who Are Restless….”. EDUCAUSE Review, 2006. Vol. 41, no. 2. PDF.
Hovious, Amanda S., Richard N Van Eck. “Digital Games for 21st-Century Learning: teacher Librarians’ Beliefs and Practices”. Teacher Librarian. EL Kurdyla Publishing LLC, 2015. PDF
Paraskeva, Fotini, Sofia Mysirlaki, Aikaterini Papagianni. “Multiplayer online games as educational tools: Facing new challenged in learning”. Computers & Education: An International Journal. 498 – 505. Elsevier Ltd, 2010. PDF.
Sofge, E. (2008). Orc holocaust: The reprehensible moral universe of Gary Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons. Retrieved 10.03.08 from. Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2186203/.
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