College classes are video games
College classes are video games in most of the ways that matter.
The developer controls the challenges and rewards for the user.
Unlike the student's social or spiritual life, everything that happens in their academic life is within a constructed environment.
Architect: you, within the boundaries set by accrediting agencies and the institution you work for.
Engagement is voluntary.
You might try a computer game because your friend said it was good, but you probably won’t stick around for your friend’s sake. Similarly, some students may come to college classes because influential people in their lives said they should, but that isn’t what will make them stay.
Both distort the passage of time to accelerate skill acquisition.
Video games often do this by making skill acquisition take a lot less time than it would in real life.
College does this by forcing students to read, write, remember and practice more in a semester than they typically would in a year (or five). Compressing all that activity into such a short period of time makes time pass faster on campus than off campus (subjectively).
Up to a point, the user’s/student’s actions in a game/class don’t impact their life outside the game/classroom.
If you die mid-level in a game, you start the level over. If you fail a college class, you take it again next year.
Both attract users by offering new skills and experiences.
This, I think, is why video games are often addictive. It’s not just that they offer escape; it’s that the escape mimics real life. Every video game involves tasks, resources, obstacles and rewards—a video game is basically a job, right? But it seems like people get addicted to gaming more easily than they do to work. Why?
Video games are idealized jobs.
Humans were created to be and to become (Gen. 1:26-28). We can be without working, but it seems like the primary path for becoming is work.
The Fall and the Curse made work less effective (Gen. 3:17-19). My theory is that video games attempt to unravel the Curse, to make work unusually effective, to make the user feel that (1) they are sufficiently competent and (2) they can learn and improve their skills through rewarding, meaningful work.
Video games take the friction out of becoming.
I’m all about taking the friction out of becoming. Mechanized farming—yes please. Instruction manuals for IKEA furniture—hand it here. Documentation from W3Schools that lets almost anybody learn to write nice computer code—beautiful, please keep doing that.
The drawback is that video games only simulate becoming, right? The player does become something as a result of playing, but it’s usually not what the game depicts them as having become.
But college teachers can learn some things from video games. College classes combine a lot of the features that let games idealize reality—the developer’s control over resources, tasks, consequences and rewards, for example—with the fact that students are actually doing the tasks. If they learn to write in your class, they’ll still be able to write when the class ends.
Let’s work with that.
What can teachers learn from video games?
Tell your students what they are becoming by doing the work in your class.
If they play Minecraft, they’ll get little reward pop-ups occasionally as they learn to do new tasks. Those pop-ups remind them that they are learning and growing. The pop-ups make explicit what’s true: they’re actually getting better at Minecraft.
I think this is what outcome statements in your syllabus should do. “If you do the work for this class, you’ll be able to read most of 1 John in the original Greek, even if you start the class knowing no Greek at all.” Wow—that’s a meaningful development! Celebrate and forecast those achievements by making them explicit.
Don’t forget that you are designing the user experience for your class.
You can make your class as intimidating or as welcoming as you want to. You can make the instructions for that major paper as complicated or as easily-traversable as you want to.
Video games artificially reduce the friction players experience—they make work feel rewarding, surprisingly effective. You can do that too.
If you want to, you can emphasize the nitty-gritty formatting details as if they are important in themselves. (They’re not. They’re arbitrary.)
If you want to, you can emphasize that if students learn to use this set of formatting conventions, that skill will make them more employable and more publishable in the future. Some students have no inclination to be published in the future. Is that okay? Is it possible that not everyone needs to learn the formatting guidelines for your discipline?
Let’s frame that another way, though. All your students will probably need to work somewhere at some point, and every job involves operating within a set of conventions, arbitrary or not. Why not phrase your paper formatting guidelines in those terms, then? “Even if you won’t use this format ever again, consider this as practice in the lifelong skill of working within systems.”
This is just a start—add to it in the comments, please!
—
- Mark Brown and his YouTube channel, Game Maker's Toolkit. These videos changed my world:
- Seth Godin's Udemy course, "Seth Godin on learning and education." He's the one who got me started down the "classes are games" path when he said in that course, "Our education technology has not kept up with our entertainment technology, and there's no reason that should be the case."
Comments
Post a Comment