Video games are essentially complex systems that very young children can learn to navigate very quickly.
What if we could leverage the skill with which games teach players to play? Consider the ease with which you learn the physics in Angry Birds, how quickly you came to understand Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. What if we could use similar strategies to help students to master traditional academic content? Many people are trying to do just that.
In Greg Toppo's new book, The Game Believes In You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter, he explores game-based learning in detail.
Jordan: I really enjoyed reading your book. You do a fantastic job not only of surveying the game-based learning landscape, but also of explaining the ways of thinking that are driving it.
I was struck by an observation you made about learning game developers. You write, “I found that most of them had gotten into this discipline not because they love games, but because they love children and want something better for them. After a while, I stopped counting the number of times that someone leaned in and told me, ‘I am not a big gamer.’”
I’ve also discovered a related trend that I think of as the game developer late-life moral crisis. Entrepreneurs, designers and producers who were so instrumental in forming the commercial game industry—former execs from Atari and Activision and LucasArts and Electronic Arts—now seem to be using their talents to build social impact games and educational games. I’m thankful for their commitment. But culturally speaking, both the educators’ impulse to not identify themselves as gamers and the seasoned gamers’ impulse to consider their recent projects to be ‘career shifts’ seem indicative of a strange moral polarization in the way we think about video games.
What is it about video games? We don’t talk about ‘social impact’ movies; nor do we talk about ‘educational’ books. Why do we have these bipolar gaming categories? Despite the 1.5 billion people worldwide that play games, there still seems to be a stigma—or at least there’s a narrative of alienation or marginalization that goes along with gaming, a sort of adolescent outsider rebellion kind of thing. Games have an aura of sinful pleasure about them. Perhaps this is why they are often discussed as an unhealthy and addictive temptation from which we need to protect our kids. How do you think our collective neuroses around games and screens impacts the larger conversation around education technology?
Greg: You put your finger on an unspoken piece of the conversation that really fascinates me. You’re right: We don’t talk about “social impact” movies and the like, and I think that’s for a reason. Most other forms of media don’t suffer from the same kind of odd inferiority complex that games do.
A couple of years ago at the Games for Change Festival, game designer Eric Zimmerman observed that art educators don’t spend their time thinking about “art for learning.” They’re not concerned with “educational art,” whatever that is. Book lovers don’t worry whether books are educational, he said. They’re not trying to “bookify” the world.
Yet here we are, trying to make the rather counterintuitive case that games can have a positive impact on learning. When you look at the processes happening when people play digital games, it makes perfect sense. But it still seems a surprise to many. I think in part it’s because games have always had a whiff of immorality and danger to them that other media don’t.
I blame pinball.
If you read about the history of pinball, it was originally a form of gambling, more a game of chance than skill. Flippers, which introduced the element of skill, weren’t added until after the machines were banned in many cities. It’s been more than 70 years since New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called the pinball machine a “real larceny machine” and gathered reporters together so they could watch him smash a few units to pieces, then dump them in the Hudson River – nice visuals! Pinball spent more than 30 years underground and behind curtains. Coin-op video games, which grew up alongside newly legalized machines in the 1970s and 1980s, couldn’t help but catch a whiff of danger, even though they were basically advanced hand-eye coordination trainers.
We’re still recovering, in a way – think about all those gamers in basements today, far from the watchful eyes of adults. But as more adults become gamers, they’re beginning to understand what’s really going on in gamers’ brains. To complete that process, we need to keep talking about games as naturalized parts of our intellectual lives, as tools rather than just toys. It helps, I think, that you don’t have to feed a quarter into your PlayStation to make learning happen.
I’ve always loved Georgia Tech theorist Ian Bogost’s idea for how we should understand “serious” games. He has said, only half-jokingly that he’s fine with the term if we think about games as we do cheesecake. “When you say, ‘Dude, that was a serious cheesecake,’ in that case, serious means two things,” he says. “There is a kind of care and an attention to detail, and there’s this desire and realization of a thing’s fundamental structure. This is the apotheosis of cheesecake. You have realized it.”
Jordan: You point out that any resistance we have to games in schools is really more of a general resistance to change. You write: “Even chalkboards got an icy reception from teachers in one-room school houses where large-group instruction was rarely emphasized.” Of course, any big change is likely to be met with resistance. And one of the crazy things going on in education right now is that a transition toward data-driven, digital, and interactive tools and games which provide exploratory and iterative learning experiences seems not only necessary, but also inevitable.
From the developers’ side, the whole edtech sector looks like a bunch of companies and researchers with very similar products pushing up against one another trying to get to the front of the line. It feels like a fight for adoption and at any moment the stanchions will tip and then classrooms are going to shift very quickly. But from the educators’ side, it looks different. You describe it as a “bottom up reform, often championed by individual teachers fed up with how little had improved in their own classrooms.” You and I both know that if you spend any amount of time talking to teacher-bloggers or reading the #edtechchat Twitter conversations, there’s a grassroots feel to it.
You’ve written an entire chapter about “How disdain for centralized authority and an impulse to play brought us ‘supercomputers everywhere’” in which you go into detail about how there’s a countercultural vibe in the game-based learning industry (and the personal computer industry in general). It seems to me, however, that there’s some serious inherent tension here. On the one hand, one of the strongest arguments for games in schools is their scalability—the efficiency and economy with which they can distribute quality learning experiences from one centralized place outwards. On the other hand, games seem to promise a more personalized, or differentiated approach to individual students.
How would you respond to the critics of game-based learning—and, I suppose, general screen based pedagogy in the classroom—who worry that technological differentiation is more like “targeting” in advertising? Aren’t some critics right that games, to some degree, involve replacing local and regional authority with a digital “big brother?”
Greg: This is an important question. I guess it all boils down to what you mean by “local and regional authority.” As I reported the book, what I saw in classrooms was that the decision-making around games was coming almost entirely from individual teachers or small groups of teachers. You could make the case, then, that the decisions were getting more, not less, local, since no one from the school district (or even from the school’s main office) was insisting that specific games be used. In fact, the principal often didn’t even know that games were being used. It was very much the opposite of what seemed to be happening elsewhere with the accountability and standards movement.
But you’re right to point out that at its core, a digital tool is a standardized tool, and though teachers are often adopting these tools without permission, they are, in a sense, relying on another kind of authority. I am a bit uncomfortable with the term “big brother,” but if we accept that term, we should put it in context. It seems we got comfortable with educational big brothers a long, long time ago, when we began adopting textbooks. I suppose I see games as presenting teachers with the possibility of using – pardon the awkward phrase – “personalized big brothers” that they’re more comfortable with and can use as they like.
In a sense, though, the game-based big brother you worry about is – another awkward phrase -- actually a small brother. Often it’s a tool created by a tiny group of developers, many of whom didn’t do well in school and are looking for ways to rescue the next generation of students from the pain, boredom and drudgery that they experienced. If that’s the new big brother, bring it on.
Jordan: I have to admit, as much as I loved your reading your book, there was one part that concerned me. In Chapter Three, you present a neurological view of gaming. You explain that when we play a game “our brain is enjoying the fantasy, but on some level it believes the killer whale is real.” The idea here, in your words, is that “ten thousand generations of natural selection have pruned our ranks to the point where we, the living, the lucky ones who survived, have evolved to be curious.” You continue, “We’re ‘infovores,’ born with an innate hunger for information and connections . . . We are paid to be curious. The banker is our brain and the payment is a curated selection of drugs with names like endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline.”
This evolutionary framing confused me because elsewhere in the book you write about the problems with the early behavior modification tools that B.F. Skinner built for the classroom; you say that they weren’t as “nuanced,” or as “humanistic,” or as “thoughtful” as video games. Do you see where I’m going here?
It seems to me that if the goal is to bring games into schools in order to move away from the current mechanical incentive-driven industrial way of thinking about education, it could be counter-productive to describe the gaming experience as a kind of neurological economy of evolutionary benefits. Doesn’t this way of explaining things—reducing them to an animalistic instinct—just perpetuate the notion that play is somehow primitive? And aren’t you at all worried that if we continue to rely on these kinds of banker-in-your-brain proof-metrics we will eventually end up with precisely the kinds of systems that B.F. Skinner would have built if the technology of his day had been as sophisticated as ours?
Greg: Yes, I see your problem with that analogy. Actually, in that chapter, I later modify the analogy, saying that the brain isn’t actually a banker – it’s a “three-pound, pattern-seeking drug dealer.” Why not go all in?
But you’re right, there’s a bit of tension between the way I describe our brain’s fairly simple preferences and what I’d like to see in schools, especially around future tools. Here’s a better way to say it: No matter what tools we use – whether they’re purely behavioral or more nuanced – we need to acknowledge that our brains are hopeless novelty- and pattern-seekers, that we’re not happy as learners unless we’re doing these basic things. School has somehow forgotten this, and so Job One, it seems to me, is to bring this idea back. What happens next is the difference between B.F. Skinner’s “teaching machines” and a more nuanced tool like Sim City or DragonBox.
You’re correct to push against the idea that play is somehow primitive, but I would suggest that even advanced activities – and play is certainly one of the most advanced – have primitive roots. We build our culture around simple ideas that get more and more complex. It’s a very short journey from tag to NFL football.
The game designer Greg Costikyan has written that what makes us different from other animals is that we “complexify” everything. I love this passage from his great book Uncertainty in Games:
“Animals eat. We eat arugula and goat chese with lardoons, toasted walnuts, and Dijon vinaigrette. All animals drink; we have Coca-Cola and the Schramsberg blanc de blanc. Mammals have sex; we have all-day weddings with elaborate ceremonies – and BDSM clubs. Apes will tap out a rhythm; we have the Eroica symphony, and Rock Band. Animals can see; we have the Mona Lisa. Beavers build dams and wasps build nests; we build Paris.”
Though great games can be simple games, maybe the humanistic impulse comes out in the complexity and the expectations around it. Wouldn’t you say that Monument Valley is a more humanistic game than Pong?
Jordan: Yes, I would. But then you already know that I agree. I’ve written a lot about how video games have the potential to transform the way we think about education. You and I have talked about this before. In fact, while you were still researching this book, you and I toured the Institute of Play’s Quest to Learn School together. It is a New York City public school where the curriculum is developed through a collaboration between game-designers and educators. The principles of game design are also the framework through which the students are taught to look at everything. But that doesn’t mean the kids play video games all day. In fact, they hardly play at all. Instead, as you explain in the book, they are constantly asking “what happens if we take apart a system and put it back together?” And you observe that, “this deconstruction/reconstruction process, it turns out, is what games do best.”
You also explore the notion of iterative learning. “The games-in-schools movement is built on several principles,” you write, “but perhaps most essential among them is this: we must lower the cost of failure.” This framing of success as correlative to attitudes around failure is very popular these days, not only in education, but also in business and entrepreneurship. And I sometimes find this rhetoric around failure a bit misleading. I mean it sounds good, we all know you learn from your mistakes. But it is not the failing that teaches us. Rather, learning comes from the precise feedback that one receives as the result of multiple failures. You make this distinction clear: “Whatever game your child loves, she loves it in a large part because it reacts instantaneously to her input every time, shows whether she’s improving, and encourages her—actually, requires her—to improve her skills.” That’s why the deconstruction/reconstruction process that’s happening at Quest To Learn is so fantastic. Students there are learning the kind of systems thinking that makes it possible to move from failure to iteration. They are learning how to analyze and interpret failure-data.
With that in mind, let me go back to what you said about lowering the cost of failure. Because that’s a big deal. When I tour schools and watch kids play with learning games, I’m shocked to see how anything related to learning makes kids stiffen up and worry about getting the right answer. It is so weird. When my own kids tell me to check their homework, I always tell them I won’t. I figure that if I help them get the right answers, their teachers won’t know what they need to work on. I’d be distorting the data. The whole point of homework is not to show what you know, but to show what you don’t know. But they can’t wrap their little heads around this idea, and I’m not sure most teachers get it either. They think of it like an exam, like they’re supposed to prove something. What is it about assessment? Why are we all so confused about it? And even with all of the potential, don’t you worry that without a bigger cultural change in how we think about learning and assessment even video games will just lead to a high stakes competitive attitude around accumulating points and leveling up?
Yes! I am very worried about this. I worry about a couple of things: First (and this is a bit unrelated to your question) I worry that people might read books like mine and yours and somehow think that games are going to “save” or “rescue” schools. That’s actually a very game-like way to think about things, so it’s probably a healthy reaction, but in this case it’s all wrong. We shouldn’t rely on games to save anything, because when they don’t get the job done, we’ll be disappointed and move on to the next thing. I say to people these days that I really hope games won’t be “the next big thing” in education, because the next big thing always sucks. Also, it rarely works. I hope games will be the next small thing – a stealth tool that will just keep on delivering, improving schools as it goes.
But that aside, the question of assessment is a huge one. You’ve written that we don’t need more gamification in schools, and I totally agree. Part of the research I did for this book was about self-determination theory, and it made me realize that schools and workplaces – and even families – so often rely on two ineffective tools to motivate people: bribes and threats. Need your son to take out the trash? Here’s a lollipop. Need your teachers to improve math skills? Threaten to fire all the teachers who don’t. Neither one works more than once in a while.
So I am worried that people will lock on to ideas about games and gamification, and that in a few years we’ll be left with nothing more than really fun, cleverly designed bribes and threats – optimized bribes and threats, in fact. But what we need is much different. We need smarter, more humane ways to help kids access material and experiment with it. Failure should have no cost at all. And the assessment should be invisible. If it’s not – if it’s somehow taking the fun out of the game – then we’re doing it wrong.
Failure is not the key – the key is what we do after the failure happens.
I say near the end of the book that, as I was reporting, I often started to feel that our schools have been designed by the people for whom school was easy, who have always done what they’re told. It’s designed by the winners, in other words. I think that’s why we get assessment so wrong. For the winners, assessment is just a formality, a way to show off, another small step that proves how easy and fun school is. But for the rest of us, it’s a huge hurdle, and in fact it’s the very thing that trips up so many students, since they’re tested before they’ve mastered the material.
I’ve long felt that education seems to mess up everything it touches, even the great ideas. While reporting the book, I finally decided that it’s not in spite of the fact that school is designed by the winners – it’s because it’s designed by the winners. We need a huge cultural change, one that not only acknowledges that the winners have been wrong all these years, but that hands the reins to the people who haven’t been winners. If games in school accomplish anything, I think, it’ll be that.
Greg Toppo's new book is called The Game Believes In You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. It is a smart, well-informed look at video games, digital interactive play, and the future of education in the United States.
