What Gee has to Teach Us About Games, Learning, and Problem Solving

What Gee has to Teach Us About Games, Learning, and Problem Solving

In What Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee delivers his early theses and reflections on the relations between games, learning, and problem solving. He later changes some parts of his overall position on games and learning in some talks that he gives and articles or chapters he writes, but to understand the more recent version of his framework, we have to understand the early version of his framework, which appears to have made ripples in the ways that the study of game-based learning have become more mainstream.

Gee writes that he picked up playing video games after observing the ways in which his son appears to have learned from playing games, and that he experienced 3 realizations from playing games:

1.     Games require players to learn and think in ways that require novel solutions, not routine solutions from our daily lives that we might be eager to easily apply (p. 2).

2.     Some people are not used to having to inhibit the common or routine solutions, and confronting the new ways of learning and thinking necessary to conquer the game’s challenges can be both frustrating and “life-enhancing,” allowing the player—or learner—to experience “pleasant frustration” (p. 3).

3.     Gamers don’t like short or easy games, they usually like easy-to-learn-to-play games and dislike games that are hard to learn, and good games (ones that gamers buy, play, and deem worth the money) have principles of learning built into the design of the game, not just the experience of learning to play the game (3).

According to Gee, one of the keys to making a good game is “finding ways to make hard things life-enhancing so that people keep going and don’t fall back on learning only what is simple and easy” (p. 3). He adds that the third realization (see above) is important to the study of gameplay, game-based learning, and formal learning in general (1-3), and much of the reminder of his book establishes the definition and relevance of 36 learning principles.

Before listing out these principles, it’s important to recognize the influence of Gee’s prior background on the semiotics-based framework Gee uses to articulate, understand, and apply the 36 principles. In his earlier works, Social Linguistics and Literacies and The Social Mind, Gee argued that literacy and thinking are social and cultural achievements, not just mental achievements by an individual (5). Not only do people read and think in different ways, but they also always read or think in some particular way; it’s never just reading or thinking “in general” (5). Gee argues that one’s experiences with others who are members of various social or cultural groups who, through social practices, encourage reading or thinking in some way. One can never think or read outside of every group (i.e. without using standards of thinking and reading that don’t align with any group); meaning is relative to the purposes and practices for reading and thinking that are specific to a group (6). Gee writes that these different social identities we uphold, in real life or a virtual world as in games, “lead to different ways of looking at, feeling about, and interacting with” the world (7).

Like reading and thinking, learning and gaming are never “in general” or separate from social identities. Gee extrapolates this implication for the nature of different academic disciplines or learning domains:

“But all learning is, I would argue, learning to play “the game.” For example, literary criticism and field biology are different “games” played by different rules. (They are different sorts of activities requiring different values, tools, and ways of acting and thinking; they are different domains with different goals and different “win states.”)” (7-8).

To better elucidate his insights, Gee centers his book around semiotics—the study of how signs, including text, images, sounds, gestures, movements, graphs, equations, objects, and humans, have meanings—and then gives his definition of semiotic domains: a set of practices wherein people think act, value, and make and communicate meanings in certain ways by using one or more modalities (sounds, music, bodily sensations, oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, gestures, etc.) (18-19). This is Gee’s semiotics-based framework through which he defines and examines games and learning… and apparently problem solving, for Gee defines games as sets of problems to be solved. Thus, in Gee’s framework, games, learning, and problem solving are bound up together as constructs that each try to carve out parts of some important semiotic domain that Gee values, and Gee examines them for learning principles that can help us achieve in more complex, higher-order semiotic domains, such as those one encounters in schooling.