World of Schoolcraft: The Rationale Behind Games as Learning Tools

I'm crazy.

Well, maybe not me personally.

All of us likely appear crazy to outsiders (us, of course, being educators looking at our long-time enemy as a source of pedagogical inspiration). Exploring the benefits of student gaming is certainly the road less traveled in educational research, and I think it's worth noting that people like James Paul Gee, my advisor Dr. Mike Young, my colleague Dr. Roger Travis, and all those involved with the Games + Learning + Society conference are doing a great service for students, school districts, and parents who aren't sure what else to do with our floundering public education system. The interesting thing about video games and learning, beyond the affordances I've described in my previous entries, is that the notion of useful game-based education is not without supporting psychological research. In fact, there is a rapidly building body of empirical evidence that explains how and why games and learning blend so well together; a fortunate development for those of us trying to utilize games as tools in the ever-churning sea of curricular design.

That being the case, I thought it would be worth explaining how I came to support game-based education in the first place. In the interest of saving you (the audience) a substantial headache, I'll explain my rationale with a TL;DR version first (that way anyone who doesn't want to sift through a wall of technical jargon and citations can still get an idea of what I'm talking about).

Current research in the area of game-based learning can be summarized in the following bullet points:

• Games are useful for teaching students specific skills but less successful in teaching broad, macroscopic knowledge that transcends several different content areas (unless they are designed as well-guided lessons where metacognitive discussions between students and their instructors take place regularly).
• The skills students acquire from games closely match the overarching game objectives (meaning that games in which the objectives are predominantly violent are successful in teaching aggressive, anti-social behavior, while games in which the objectives are predominantly pro-social are successful in teaching leadership, team-work, and collaboration).
• MMORPGs are an effective means of fostering team-building skills amongst players/students, particularly since they overcome challenges that would inhibit growth in a traditional classroom (such as disability, racism, geographic distance, or other cultural, economic, and societal hurdles).
• Students with addictive personalities suffer (academically) from game usage, but those without addictive personality traits show few to no academic side effects that can be associated with gaming.
• Uncontrolled/unbridled game usage has a measurably negative influence on student academic performance (SATs and GPAs); however, this is true of any single activity (soccer, horseback riding, and chess could all produce the same result if no behavioral parameters are set by the parent, teacher, or guardian).
• Much more research is needed in the area of game-based learning. This does not mean there is no research available on gaming, but the areas of interest are so varied that there are few educators examining the same kinds of things (making the research pool appear very small). Similarly, there are only very broad, generalized uses of the terms "video game," "good," and "bad," making it nearly impossible to equate one research finding with another.

 So what does this mean?

I am convinced, as are many other educators, that affordances discussed in the game-based learning literature are not only the same good practices teachers have exhibited for decades, but that video games are capable of stream-lining those practices in a way that encourages much more efficient, engaging scholastic achievement. Because of the way games delicately superimpose highly-stimulating narratives on top of their underlying learning objectives, they serve as a natural basis for conveying a message in the same way most every other art form does (and I would argue that games are, in fact, better because their narratives cannot progress without player participation and understanding of the fundamental learning objectives).

"97% of children, both male and female, have played video games by the time they reach high school."

However, the articles I've cited do little to explain exactly how video game learning affordances are structured within individual games; they focus on more broad explanations in hopes of establishing trends shared between all video games. This has left me especially interested in the specifics of how massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online have flourished for the better part of the last decade. What is so compelling (from an educational standpoint) about any one title that it is capable of retaining 11 million players, all of whom pay as much as $15 per month in recurring subscription fees? (This, of course, does not include Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, both of which now function with pay-to-play downloadable content stores instead of subscription fees.)

In order to get better acquainted with this question and relay my thoughts on its possible answers, I feel that I should announce my newest experimental, game-based learning project...

World of Schoolcraft

You may be wondering:

What is World of Schoolcraft?

No, this is not some new, wicked epic MMORPG, but rather my personal analysis of a widely successful, established one. Because World of Warcraft (WoW) has managed to do what many teachers could only hope to accomplish in their careers (getting players/students to willingly spend hours on tasks as mundane as picking jewelry out of animal poop), I believe it may be worthwhile to study this phenomena firsthand through the perspective of a WoW "student."

Experimental Methods:

Though I have prior experience with WoW, I plan on beginning this experiment by utilizing a class I have never tried before: a warrior. The game's learning affordances should remain relatively novel as long as leveling a new class in WoW is similar to the experience of a high school student who has familiarity with general academic success but not the specifics of a brand new course.

Sententiosus, Night Elf Warrior

My character, a Night Elf named Sententiosus (Latin for "full of pithy wisdom"), will be played on the East Coast - Norgannon (PvE) server and leveled from 1 - 80 (the full level spectrum) through the Protection, or "tanking," spec. The reasoning behind this decision was primarily due to WoW's embedded "Looking For Group" system, which will allow me to get the most access to other players and examine how their feedback helps to shape my learning of the warrior class (this is also partially for the sake of expediency: tanks are frequently sought for player groups, thereby reducing downtime between group-centered play). I will not use any of the game's so-called "heirloom" gear as to better reflect the armor decisions a new player would make while leveling from 1 to 80. I will use only the game's affordances to guide my  learning; I will not (until directed to do so by other players) seek online forums containing information about which talents are the "best" for a Protection warrior since a new player would not know where to access that information. I will use only game mods that are available to all players and all classes in order to modify the game's built-in user interface without changing anything about the warrior-specific leveling experience. Additionally, I will attempt to quest and group in areas where I have limited knowledge of the narrative and learning objectives in order to get the most out of my learning experience.

In-Game Screen Capture of Sententiosus at the Outset of His Journey

I wholly encourage anyone interested in joining me in this endeavor to speak with me online - I'm looking forward to the results of this experiment and would love to have some fellow educators join in on the fun. I'll be using my WoW experiences to guide many of my upcoming blog entries, so even if you are not participating in the experiment itself, I hope that you will provide feedback to some of the educational hypotheses I form as a result of my experience.

I look forward to seeing you in-game!


FOR THE ALLIANCE!

 

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NOTE: For those of you interested in the detailed specifics of this post (namely how game-based education is supported by empirical research), please feel free to read on. The following is a literature review I recently authored as the first-step in a meta-analysis of video games and their value to educational psychology:

Gaming in Education: What Students Can
Learn From Video Games in School

As new teachers enter the workforce with greater technology familiarity than their predecessors, a wider margin of accepted teaching methods has developed, changing the way in which educators are able to form successful instructional relationships with their students. Many districts, in order to help faculty keep pace with their rapidly changing and technologically capable student bodies, are attempting to alter their most well established modes of erudition (namely lecture, discussion, co-operative group, and hands-on learning); as a result, there has been a continuing trend in the reduction of teacher reliance on textbooks and an upswing in the incorporation of classroom media across all levels of the education system. These changes, primarily serving to accommodate the vast increase in computer reliance for day-to-day tasks and the need for students to develop team-based collaboration skills, have led educators to begin more deeply investigating the potential benefits of video game-based pedagogy. Games, unlike textbooks and more traditional forms of direct instruction, may more thoroughly afford students the opportunity to integrate their learning of subject matter with the 21^st century leadership skills necessary for success in academia, law, the armed forces, and private industry.

However, as video games are examined with increased scrutiny, there remains little consensus on the benefits and detriments of applying them to the classroom environment. In some circles, games are seen not only as a useful tool in encouraging student motivation to learn outside of the academic environment (Coller & Scott, 2009), but also as a means to increase student engagement during in-class learning sessions (Annetta et al, 2009), foster valuable skills with respect to finite tasks or jobs (Duque et al, 2008; Coller & Scott, 2009; de Freitas & Griffiths, 2007),  and improve upon visual acuity, spatial recognition, contrast sensitivity, visuomotor coordination, and general intelligence (Spence & Feng 2010; Caplovitz & Kastner, 2009); Achtman, Green, & Bavelier, 2008; Quiroga et al, 2009). Conversely, detractors contend that games, at best, produce no statistically significant change in skill acquisition (Annetta et al, 2009) and, at worst, produce negative effects on academic motivation and success with relation to several common measures of learning (such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), student grade point averages (GPAs), and academic testing of both reading and writing skills) (Anand, 2007; Weis & Cerankosky, 2010). There has been ample demonstration, too, that addiction tendencies have a consistent, negative correlation with the implementation of game-based learning due to select groups of students developing a compulsion to obsess over games themselves (Skoric, Teo, & Neo, 2009). The schism in understanding video games and their role in education, broadly painting them as both aids and distractions, indicates that the usefulness of this media will ultimately rest on how parents and educators utilize it in a scholastic context (Gentile, 2010).

The most succinct way to frame this muddled amalgamation of perspectives on educational gaming comes from Robert Gentile’s 2010 work, in which he described the influence of gaming on student learning as “not an either-or proposition; games can have both positive and negative consequences, and which consequences researchers find depends on what they are testing” (pp. 71). The major discrepancy in the educational literature seems to lie within the definition of what constitutes a video game and how any one game’s effectiveness can be accurately measured compared to another. Not surprisingly, this miscommunication has led designers and educators to often take for granted the notion that students will enjoy a video game purely because it is called a game, unintentionally ignoring or overlooking the elements that make them educationally useful to begin with (Bourgonjon et al, 2010).

Fortunately, after more than two decades of mounting commercial video game popularity, a substantial core of data is beginning to highlight precisely how video games can serve as a positive influence on the education system rather than a negative one. Most prominently, video game play (unlike many types of traditional pedagogy) appears to augment student self-efficacy through the elimination of many stigmatizing cultural differences between various ethnic and gender groups, enabling students of all backgrounds to share equally in the education process without fear of exclusion by their peers (Browell, 2008). While this may only seem to be a tangential advantage for the majority of students, researchers have found that the free collaboration of students through the sharing of game-based learning outlines a direct correlation with the development of vastly improved 21^st century occupational skills, including team-building, group management, and individual persistence (Browell, 2008; Gentile et al, 2009). World of Warcraft in particular, the leader in massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs), has been developed with these desirable occupational skills at the forefront of its game objectives, forcing its players to hone their group and inquiry-based learning abilities through the rigorous process of peer-to-peer meta-cognitive analysis (Schrader & McCreery, 2008). Other, more pro-socially constructed MMORPGs have even displayed a reversal in the learned aggression long attributed to violent video games, implying that games may act as vessels for delivering specific types of knowledge and skills (whether they be violent, helpful, or educational by design) in addition to providing subtle learning cues for leadership and group management (Gentile & Gentile, 2008; Greitemeyer & Osswald, 2009).

To that end, teachers and school administrators need to identify how engaging narrative objectives may be gainfully superimposed over the state and national learning standards such that forthcoming educational games mimic the intellectually useful elements of privately produced games and incorporate positive social training measures. Game designers, unlike educators, function with the knowledge that their products are not essential to consumers, meaning that the games they release must have such widespread entertainment appeal that players will voluntarily pay for the ability to interface with the narratives being presented to them. Survival-horror and war games, for example, have become highly profitable to game designers because their well-designed learning affordances (those that compel players to continue playing despite high levels of violence) are well masked by narrative and problem-solving elements presented throughout each game (Kearney & Pivec, 2007). This economically valuable instructional strategy (scaffolding learning through enjoyable, visually stimulating, community-based play) has already proven to be extraordinarily helpful in training military and medical personnel (de Freitas & Griffiths, 2007; Duque et al, 2008). Rather than finding themselves bored with the subject matter, students reported that game-based simulations granted them the opportunity to practice skills in a far more engaging, entertaining way, fostering ownership over the course work and intrinsic motivation to succeed (Annetta et al, 2009; Duque et al, 2008). If such a strategy could be adequately implemented in a school community (thereby challenging, encouraging, and supporting students in their individual learning), struggling learners could potentially develop lasting, positive relationships with the subject matter being taught, thereby increasing academic performance in the long term (Dickey, 2007).

When applied appropriately, video games seem to offer greater affordances to students than their non-digital instructional counterparts. Despite their apparent efficacy, however, the chief obstacle to the widespread implementation of scholastic gaming remains the need for more substantial research in this area of study. Thus far, there has only been enough educational data collected to make limited recommendations as to which gaming elements are the most effective and important for successfully transitioning video games into the classroom environment (namely: intriguing stories, appealing characters, a sense of urgency, life or death decision-making, opportunities for the player to make predictions, and distinct, purposeful goals) (Browell, 2008; Becker, 2008; Mooney & Kirshenbaum, 2010). Not surprisingly, this has directly limited the quantity of research projects using game-based narratives as the basis for entire courses, signifying that much more work must be done to establish the effects of teaching specific academic knowledge, evaluative techniques, and skills through the guise of video games. Before any long-term pedagogical recommendations can be made, educational researchers will have to establish how the aforementioned gaming components can be successfully bound to state and nationally mandated standards in a robust way that moves beyond a series of capricious musings and into the realm of being both practically applicable and academically useful in a functioning classroom.

           Ideally, continuing investigation on the effects of video gaming and learning (specifically in merging established curricula with game-based learning elements) will provide the information necessary to aid educators in their mission to bridge the ever-widening rift between student engagement levels and an increasing number of government mandated learning objectives. Contemporary educational literature suggests that video games themselves, despite their conditional short-comings, can indeed be a useful means to improving classroom climate, creating situated learning affordances, and increasing assessment granularity, inherently providing students with the skills necessary to succeed in 21^st century careers (Kearney & Pivec, 2007; Foster, 2010; Charsky, 2010). As such, it falls to educational psychologists to continue designing inquiries that encompass video game-based learning so they may eventually parse the underlying principles of what makes games effective teachers and reconstruct content curricula in a more engaging and entertaining game-like context.

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Works Cited

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Anand, V. (2007). A study of time management: The correlation between video game usage and academic performance markers. Cyber Psychology & Behavior, 10(4), 552-559. doi:10.1089/cpb.2007.9991.

Annetta, L., Minogue, J., Holmes, S., & Cheng, M. (2009). Investigating the impact of video games on high school students' engagement and learning about genetics. Computers & Education, 53(1), 74-85. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.12.020.

Becker, K. (2008). The invention of good games: Understanding learning design in commercial video games. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A, 69, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

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Bourgonjon, J., Valcke, M., Soetaert, R., & Schellens, T. (2010). Students’ perceptions about the use of video games in the classroom. Computers & Education, 54(4), 1145-1156. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.10.022.

Browell, D. (2008). World of studentcraft: An ethnographic study on the engagement of traditional students within an online world. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A, 68, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Caplovitz, G., & Kastner, S. (2009). Carrot sticks or joysticks: Video games improve vision. Nature Neuroscience, 12(5), 527-528. doi:10.1038/nn0509-527.

Charsky, D. (2010). From edutainment to serious games: A change in the use of game characteristics. Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, 5(2), 177-198. doi:10.1177/1555412009354727.

Coller, B., & Scott, M. (2009). Effectiveness of using a video game to teach a course in mechanical engineering. Computers & Education, 53(3), 900-912. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.05.012.

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Greitemeyer, T., & Osswald, S. (2009). Prosocial video games reduce aggressive cognitions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 896-900. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.04.005.

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