Gaming and Learning: A Match Made in Awesome

It may strike many of you as odd that I am pursuing a doctoral degree by studying the use of gaming in education (or I suppose not, depending on how well you've known me over the course of the last fifteen years), but as a high school teacher, rarely did I see moments of higher engagement than when I had my students participate in games of my or others' creation during class. I suspect that there is something inherently useful about gaming in this context, not necessarily from the vantage point of being "fun" or "cool," but moreso from a human desire to learn through play. This is not a trend isolated to mankind alone, but we seem to be the best at illustrating it (consider the fact that wild animals like cats learn and practice their hunting skills through play with siblings, which is not dissimilar from learning social skills by "playing nice" with our siblings). In a way, we thrive when we are given the opportunity to practice doing things in a way we find entertaining. This notion of "work doesn't have to feel like work" is an extremely important principle when trying to shape classroom pedagogy, especially when the instructor is able to merge learning objectives with gaming objectives in a way that masks the "not fun-ness" of being a typical, disengaged student in an uninteresting class.

As a bit of anecdotal evidence, I point to the value of using hands-on experiments in a science classroom compared to direct instruction: yes, the same concepts can be taught through both pedagogical means, but the latter tends to be fairly understimulating in comparison to constructed, inquiry-based learning. If, as a 16-year old, I am expected to apply the skills learned in my biology class on a high-stakes test like the CAPT (creating an action plan to protect sea life from an oil spill, for example), it would behoove me to have had experience hypothesizing, forming an experimental procedure, collecting data, and coming to a conclusion about whether or not my ideas were valid solutions to the problem. Can this be done through direct instruction? Possibly, but the ownership of material in that case primarily belongs to the instructor rather than the student: the student is a passive element because he or she cannot A) test the procedures being presented by the teacher or B) easily deviate from the procedures being presented by the teacher in the event that he or she sees an alternative solution to the problem. A lack of ownership only serves to distance the student from the material and, more unfortunately, the skill he or she may have acquired through experiencing the learning on his or her own.

However, this is not to say that students should have unbridled freedom to experiment as they please. While there are some cases in which it may be valuable to allow free-form "play" in a classroom (for instance, allowing children to create novel ways to support the weight of several textbooks using only an index card and a strip of tape), laboratories are often dangerous places with many potentially hazardous materials. In this case, "sandbox" learning would be a huge detriment; not only can the students accidentally or purposefully put themselves in harm's way, but with little guidance, it is unlikely that they will ever reach the conclusion they need to in order to show skill acquisition. While a few students may reach the objective on their own, there is a distinct possibility that most of them will float through the ether until they give up, time runs out, or they reach an incorrect conclusion, thereby teaching them an incorrect or incomplete skill. If you begin a roadtrip in Maine and are told you need to drive to San Diego with no map or compass, that you can just "figure it out through experimentation," you may eventually reach your destination, but it could take weeks, months, or years (if you get there at all, assuming you have any previous knowledge as to where San Diego is relative to Maine to begin with). For obvious reasons, this sort of inquiry-based, constructivist learning is inappropriate for a learning environment in which there are severe time and resource constraints set by school hours, budgets, and standardized tests.

So what is the best answer?

Truly "good" teaching (if any form of teaching can be boiled down to such a fine point) falls somewhere in between these two examples. Master teachers are those that are able to blend their personal knowledge and skills into a refined instructional methodology where students are provided with just enough guidance to reach the learning objectives while still having the ability to veer off course and learn something through error. In the travel example, this may include pointing the driver in the right direction and telling him or her that he or she will need to continue to the state of California along the west coast of the United States, possibly with a compass and appropriate angle of approach but no specific roadmap to get there. This can be very tricky for anyone ill-experienced with lesson design because it relies on several key factors: creativity, adaptability, patience, and an extremely thorough knowledge of your subject area (imagine needing to know virtually all routes from Maine to California in order to provide additional guidance when needed). The real burden, though, is knowing that lessons like these take a great deal of time to scaffold and differentiate so that all students are equally engaged with the material and challenged by what they are learning (including the gifted students on one end of the spectrum and the learning disabled on the other). As any teacher will tell you, a strong, differentiated lesson can take as much as a month (or more) to prepare, meaning that it might take a single educator five or six years to create a wholly differentiated class (and that assumes an unlikely situation in which the curriculum does not change in that time).

Games, I firmly believe, fill in this gap with near-surgical precision. I am not necessarily referring to video games, per se, but I would argue that many of the affordances granted by something like the popular Playstation 3 title Demon's Souls are inaccessible through board or tabletop games (which may seem hypocritical as my research is directly related to a tabletop, roleplaying-based version of a Latin I language course; however, there are distinct pros and cons to both types of games, and I think there are definitive benefits to the use of video games in a classroom, especially when applied in tandem with tabletop games). The reason why I have chosen to highlight Demon's Souls in my first post is because of its unforgivingly high level of difficulty, comparable to other extraordinarily difficult games like Super Ghouls and Ghosts (SNES) and Ikaruga (Gamecube). Why is this important? Because, for whatever reason, a game that by all rights should be cast into the pits of Hell for the frustration it causes has still managed to find a substantial fan base that not only tolerates how hard it is, but derives pleasure from it. Consider how many people feel that way about their math or science courses, and imagine the power of successfully transferring that same near-masochistic degree of pleasure from completing derivatives, integrals, lab experiments, or other less-than-desirable activities. With scientists and mathematicians in short supply, it would seem incredibly prudent to start searching for ways to make those content areas a little more Demon's Souls-like.

For those of you who are not experienced with this particular game, I will provide a short summary: you, the player, take on the role of a champion in the far-off kingdom of Boletaria and are forced to exterminate an ancient, demonic evil that has spread over the land. There are several different environments to explore, including a castle, swamp, ancient ruins, a massive tower, and an underground cave system, each with its own selection of "baddies" standing between you and your goal of banishing the demonic threat back to wherever it came from (the game's narrative is a little thin, but there's an underlying good vs. evil theme). The game is divided into several "levels" within each environment, providing you with a way to teleport to each zone after completing your objective in the previous one (almost always involving a "boss" of the area). As you progress, you are rewarded with souls that you may use to teach your character new spells or upgrade your weapons and armor in what may be the most confusing, convoluted item management system ever created (though the system in Monster Hunter Tri may give it a run for its money). Upon completing the game, the player is able to begin anew, retaining all of the items, souls, and skills he or she acquired on the first playthrough; this can continue in an infinite loop, or until the player decides to stop playing altogether.

What makes this particular game so useful in discussing learning is the affordances it makes to the player despite its obscene difficulty. While the designers ensured that reaching the end would be no simple task (by brutally reprimanding you for your failure to properly complete an objective), they managed to include some very subtle, but important, features that keep the game balanced for the skilled and unskilled alike. The most glaring relationship between Demon's Souls and educational psychology comes when the player is killed in any one of the game's 20 or so levels: not only are you forced to begin the level again, but the game attempts to conduct behavioral modification through punishment. This includes halving your maximum health pool (meaning you have half as much time to get hit by enemies before you die), repopulating the level with the enemies you killed before dying yourself, damaging your armor and weapons (which you will have to pay to get repaired), and taking a substantial percentage of the souls you have acquired in your journeys (your currency for upgrading and improving your character).

In the loving words of one critic, this quickly becomes the game's First Law of "F$#& YOU, THAT'S WHY!"

Conversely, as you succeed in the game (by completing your boss-killing objectives without dying), you are positively rewarded: the game provides you with additional souls, a Demon Soul (that will allow you to retrieve a major piece of armor or a powerful magic spell), and (if you were in the "ghost," or half-health, state) you regain your full, maximum health bar. This is, in a very simplistic sense, a form of classical conditioning in which the player is taught what to do and what not to do with a reward and punishment system (much like those established to teach other skills in school; if you don't study for the test, you get punished with an F, but when you do study for the test, you get rewarded with an A). Positive and negative reinforcement end up going a long way early in the game to teach the player a few basic, but important, foundational skills:

1. Never put yourself in harm's way if you don't have to, or risk losing everything.

2. Do not engage enemies without properly positioning and preparing yourself for combat.

3. You will receive a reward for being patient and cautious throughout the game.

In other words, you learn early on that haste makes waste.

As the player progresses, some of the game's more interesting learning features build upon this foundational knowledge, providing great fodder for classroom teachers and school districts trying desperately to balance the needs of all their students. While the reward/punishment conditioning system is fairly black and white, there are several other, less obvious parameters set by the game designers to facilitate the learning necessary to complete the game in its entirety. Though the player is forced to face a series of additional challenges whenever he or she fails (read: dies), the Demon's Souls universe was constructed with a dynamic difficulty algorithm embedded in its programming to make sure it never became too hard or too easy for any one person. While the player suffers some very tangible side effects whenever he or she dies, the game is capable of recognizing that it is too challenging for the given player and adjusts itself accordingly, not dissimilar from the way the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) modifies its questioning based on the performance of the test taker. Each time the player character loses to a dragon, archer, or any of the thousands of pitfalls in the game, Demon's Souls will adjust its own artificial intelligence to reduce enemy health and damage done such that it becomes slightly easier for the player to kill what has ably been killing him or her. Likewise, as a player displays a high level of skill proficiency, the game's artificial intelligence will note the length of time he or she has gone without dying and will dynamically increase enemy health and damage done to have the opposite effect, thereby making itself more of a challenge. To prevent abuse of the system (ensuring that skilled players do not purposely die to get an advantage), the rewards garnered by fully exploring and completing each zone are tied to the dynamic difficulty algorithm, meaning the harder the enemies are when the player defeats them, the better the reward they leave behind.

From an educational perspective, an instantaneous feedback system like this would go far in aiding teachers who struggle to ensure that each of their students is being appropriately challenged rather than gliding through the content or facing a brick wall each time they open their textbooks. Imagine if chemistry, a content area I struggled with in college, was designed in such a way that every student in the class could receive continual assessment and feedback that would keep them engaged and learning at an appropriate difficulty level. Tracking systems in schools (i.e. remedial, college prep, honors, and advanced placement (AP)) have long attempted to accomplish this goal, but even within each level there is not a great enough degree of flexibility to properly accommodate all students across all units (an AP student who is excellent at all graphical, visual elements of calculus but struggles with the "math-ness" of complex derivatives, for example). While such a dynamic system may seem unattainable, it appears that in at least two cases (one game-driven, another required for graduate student admissions) there are tools available to make this a reality for public school students trapped in an antiquated and unmanageable system of skill measurement.

Surprisingly, the learning affordances in Demon's Souls do not end at ability measurement and difficulty adjustment. One of the other most influential elements of the game comes from the peer-to-peer interactions between players, which are not only controlled, but successfully incorporate tools usually isolated to on-line forums and first-person shooter games (both to aid one another cooperatively and through direct competition). Unlike many on-line video games, Demon's Souls does not allow players to write or say whatever they choose; there are very strict parameters for what information can be conveyed through the game, moderated via the use of text blips that contain information such as "Watch your step!" or "Use fire on the enemy ahead!" Players have the option to select bits of text from a master list and leave complete messages on the ground for others to see as they pass through the area. Furthermore, whenever a player dies, his or her death is recorded in the form of a blood splatter that others may click on to witness what led to the unlucky character's untimely end. From an educational standpoint, the simplicity of this peer-to-peer system is brilliant not only because it prevents players from harassing one another, but allows them the opportunity to take the reins as peer teachers, educating others on how to avoid many common problems and overcome challenges they may face as they progress through the game. If we were to frame this through the lens of the aforementioned Maine to San Diego roadtrip, the driver might find him or herself lost when a good friend suddenly sends a text message that says, "Take exit 76 to Utah!" Not only does this empower the player receiving the message, but it enables him or her to convey that same message to other players, thereby giving him or her ownership of the knowledge (and making it feel more important to retain that knowledge).

Along those lines, players having extreme difficulty with a boss may call in an allied player to lend a hand in the fight, supporting cooperative learning where strategy can be shared to achieve a common goal; conversely, players who find the game too easy may call in enemy players to add an element of human-versus-human combat (which is rewarded with additional souls, weapons, and armor). This ingenious peer education system helps players meet the learning objectives set within the immersive game environment as well as explore the metacognitive applications of their continued learning through play. Essentially, those playing Demon's Souls are not only thinking about how to meet the game's objectives, but also sharing what they have learned with others and, through cooperation, illustrating their chosen process of skill acquisition (which might be comparable to forming a math study group and showing your work to your peers as you all progress toward the same goal). In all, the game affords players several avenues through which they may share their learning with one another and highlight their specific strengths and weaknesses (especially in player-versus-player combat where one individual chooses to fight with melee weapons and another magic spells), creating a varied, interactive world of learning within the game's own context.

While these are but a taste of the learning affordances made through Demon's Souls, I believe they do the most to highlight how it stands out as a superior example of game design and, in many ways, acts as a pinnacle of game-based learning. Though it also features a great degree of character customization in the form of armor, weapon, and skill choices (for example, choosing to utilize swords, magic wands, or knives, thereby greatly altering gameplay) and allows for players to make educated choices when increasing their most desired traits (stamina for running and jumping, mana for casting magic spells, or health to take a greater beating from enemies), its biggest strengths lay within its simple, but efficient, means of encouraging ongoing learning despite the difficulty it presents to its audience. Overall, the player feels a great degree of satisfaction upon completing each zone even after receiving many figurative kicks to the chest since the learning process is so well-designed; it keeps the game feeling adequately challenging but never so overwhelming that it becomes a chore to play.

Schools, then, can learn a lot from a video game like Demon's Souls; we need not continue the ongoing trend of allowing students to feel defeated by algebra when we have the tools, innovation, and ability to blend game-like elements with already-established instructional pedagogy. One of the most important thoughts that has occurred to me up to this point in my career is that games not only have to be fun and well-scaffolded but have the added task of being so engaging that they compel consumers to spend money to do the learning designers are asking them to do. Would you have spent money on your high school math or science classes? Were they engaging enough to make you feel like you had ownership over the material? Gaming and learning are really two ways of looking at the same idea: one sees learning as play, and the other sees learning as a job. Perhaps if we, as teachers of the gamer generation, dedicate ourselves to adding a little more Demon's Souls to our instructional methodology, we will one day fulfill our professional objective of creating work for students and ourselves that doesn't feel like work at all; it will instead be a rewarding, engaging form of challenging fun.