blog #2: gee claims

According to Gee, video games are more challenging than the common classroom. He explains the popularity of challenging video games by stating, "If no one plays a game, it does not sell, and the company that makes it goes broke. Of course, designers could keep making the games shorter and simpler to facilitate learning. That's often what schools do. But no, in this case, game designers keep making the games longer and more challenging (and introduce new things in new ones), and still manage to get them learned." (6) Now, I can see the point that Gee is making, children are more willing to play video games than work on school work, but is there a fundamental difference in the type of learning that is occuring?

In video games, you are visually stimulated in a completely different way, but are you learning in a different way? One of my complaints with my early schooling was the lack of attention that was paid to actual learing. Instead of investigating problems and finding ways to solve them we have been told, "You do this", "Plug this number in here", etc. There was very little teaching as to why we did things (as far as I can remember), we were just told to do them and, honestly, I never did think twice about this approach until I got to school and realized I had very little skill at note taking or studying because my teacher would always tell me "what I needed to know".

So how does this learning relate to video games? In my experience, in what little video game playing I did, the type of learning is similar to what I was taught in school. You play the game and memorize the moves and paths you need to take. I remember knowing where each and every secret suprise was in Super Mario Brothers. I don't know if this differs exactly, but I just thought it was important to this discussion about learning and video games. Is memorization essential to learning or are there other approaches?