Videogames

E–Learning, Volume 2, Number 1, 2005

Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines
JAMES PAUL GEE University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

ABSTRACT This article asks how good video and computer game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex and difficult games. The short answer is that designers of good games have hit on excellent methods for getting people tolearn and to enjoy learning. The longer answer is more complex. Integral to this answer are the good principles of learning built into successful games. The author discusses 13 such principles under the headings of ‘Empowered Learners’, ‘Problem Solving’ and ‘Understanding’ and concludes that the main impediment to implementing these principles in formal education is cost. This, however, is not only(or even so much) monetary cost. It is, importantly, the cost of changing minds about how and where learning is done and of changing one of our most profoundly change-resistant institutions: the school.

Introduction Many good computer and video games, games like Deus Ex, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, or Rise of Nations, are long, complex, and difficult, especially for beginners (from now onI will simply use the term ‘video games’ for both computer games and games on platforms like the Playstation 2, the Xbox, and the Nintendo GameCube). As we well know from school, young people are not always eager to do difficult things. When adults are faced with the challenge of getting them to do so, two choices are often available. We can force them, which is the main solution schools use. Or,a temptation when profit is at stake, though not unknown in school either, we can dumb down the product. Neither option is open to the game industry, at least for the moment. They can’t force people to play and most avid gamers don’t want their games short or easy. Indeed, game reviews regularly damn easy or short games. For people interested in learning, this raises an interesting question. Howdo good game designers manage to get new players to learn their long, complex, and difficult games and not only learn them but pay to do so? It won’t do simply to say games are ‘motivating’. That just begs the question of ‘Why?’ Why is a long, complex, and difficult video game motivating? I believe it is something about how games are designed to trigger learning that makes them so deeplymotivating. So the question is: How do good game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex, and difficult games? The answer, I believe, is this: the designers of many good games have hit on profoundly good methods of getting people to learn and to enjoy learning. They have had to, since games that were bad at getting themselves learned didn’t get played and the companies that made them lostmoney. Furthermore, it turns out that these learning methods are similar in many respects to cutting-edge principles being discovered in research on human learning (for details, see Gee, 2003, 2004, and the references therein). Good game designers are practical theoreticians of learning, since what makes games deep is that players are exercising their learning muscles, though often withoutknowing it and without having to pay overt attention to the matter. Under the right conditions, learning, like sex, is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans (and other primates). It is a hook that game 5

James Paul Gee designers own to a greater degree – thanks to the interactivity of games – than do movies and books. But the power of video games resides not just in their presentinstantiations, but in the promises the technologies by which they are made hold out for the future. Game designers can make worlds where people can have meaningful new experiences, experiences that their places in life would never allow them to have or even experiences no human being has ever had before. These experiences have the potential to make people smarter and more thoughtful. Good games...