Categories: Technology, Communication Design, Theory & Rhetoric
Summary:
Why do instructors face so much resistance to using computer games in education? The authors begin by exploring the funding for studying, developing, and teaching using games. They then discuss the accessability, familiarity with games, and other user challenges that decrease the enjoyment of learning games. They suggested that those who state excuses for using games in education perform rigorous research or produce a scholarly argumentative paper supporting their position. They then look at what to teach with video games and how to assess it. Their answer boils down to a solid, "it depends," but they do provide questions to help an instructor make such decisions. They move on to discussing the ethics of forcing gaming on students and the messages each game inherently sends by its rhetoric and situation. After all of the warnings, the article suggests that games can be used in classrooms effectively, when done properly.
Citation-worthy:
"There is good reason to recall both techno-enthusiasm of the past and Hawisher and Selfe’s warning: not only are computer games ideologically-laden virtual environments over which instructors have little control, but even the most basic games require expensive pieces of machinery to run and the medium is often perceived by students and faculty alike as a toy or distraction. Games also depend upon fun, which is notoriously difficult to define, let alone assess. Instructors wanting to use games in the classroom thus potentially face a fair bit of resistance from students, faculty, and administrators" (deWinter, Griffin, McAllister, Moeller, & Ruggill, 2010, p. 1).
"Theoretically speaking, play and games are often positioned as the opposite of work. They are seen as frivolous, unproductive, and apart from the "real" world" (deWinter, Griffin, McAllister, Moeller, & Ruggill, 2010, p. 2).
It is at the point of access where the rubber meets the road in computer game-based pedagogies. There simply is no possibility of such pedagogies if students, teachers, and institutions cannot easily and indeed pleasurably play. After all, play is the catalyzing component that enables games of all kinds to teach deeply and directly. Without play, games are just work, and thus no different from math problems, spelling lists, or any of the other mundane heuristics teachers as well as students have long grown tired of (deWinter, Griffin, McAllister, Moeller, & Ruggill, 2010, p. 3).
"One possible reason students resist playing games in the classroom is that they perceive games and other forms of new media as fundamentally radical and are uncomfortable with their formal education partaking of this radicality. Consider, for example, the following explanations our students have offered for why the idea of incorporating computer gameplay into high school and college classes is illegitimate: 1) Games take too long to play; 2) Games are a waste of time 3) Games are too expensive; 4) Games can be reviewed, but what’s to study?; 5) Games depend on exploitative imagery; 6) Games tell stories badly; 7) Games are all the same; 8) Games are historically inaccurate and can’t be trusted; 9) Games lead to addiction; 10) Games? I don’t play computer games; 11) Games? What could you possibly teach me about games?
"On the surface, it seems that students present these barricades to new learning not because they are enacting an introspectively-motivated political stance but because they are restating the arguments made countless times on television, in magazines and newspapers, or by their guardians and teachers" (deWinter, Griffin, McAllister, Moeller, & Ruggill, 2010, pp. 3-4).
"The process of using computer games is not necessarily a smooth one. This is partly because computer-game studies is expansive and ranges from pedagogies based on games as analyzable texts to those based on games as various kinds of products. Computer games are also part of a dynamic entertainment industry that requires constant and expensive technological upgrades to keep up with a never-ending flow of new games. In order to provide students with up-to-date games to play and consider, instructors must both raise funds for "frivolous games" and spend countless hours playing them in a pre-screening process. These hours and monies can be, we believe, well spent. Computer games synergize multiple literacies into a format that students not only can but want to play with, experiment on, disassemble, and reinvent. Undertaken thoughtfully, computer game-based composition pedagogy can parlay students' playfulness into marked advances in their abilities to read, write, and critique both traditional and new media texts (deWinter, Griffin, McAllister, Moeller, & Ruggill, 2010, p. 17).
