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In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2004), James Paul Gee has written what is perhaps one of the most important books to be published in the last several years on video games, cognition, and e-learning. His book essentially bridges the theory gap that has been widening between the principles of e-learning and video game-based simulations, multi-player role-playing or narrative-based interactive video games.

Gee, a distinguished professor of reading at the University of Wisconsin has written an extremely accessible book that takes a close look not only at specific video games, but also examines how the games are played. The quest for understanding why children learn video games apparently in a vacuum and completely on their own is a paradox in our current culture of formal education. Gee shows how children and adults master the games, revealingly, without the benefit of proscribed classroom exercises, workshops, or formalized online learning modules. What makes Gee’s text so valuable is that he goes through a long list of learning principles and demonstrates how each one manifests itself when individuals learn and master video games.

Gee’s primary thesis is that our educational system has failed us. The classroom, as it is today, bores and frustrates both students and teachers. It is not a question of funding or resources, but a misguided emphasis on rote memorization, passive “skill and drill,” irrelevant curriculum, and material detached from the world, individuals, and society around it. Initiatives such as “No Child Left Behind” are doing nothing at all to correct this; if anything, according to Gee, such programs exacerbate the problem by extending the distance between effective and ineffective instructional strategies.

What makes this book enjoyable is that Gee takes a long list of learning principles and makes them come alive in the mind of the reader by using a child’s process of learning a video game as an illustrative example. Gee avoids the usual pitfalls - he neither “dumbs down” the theory nor restricts it to a certain age group. What usually troubles one about books that involve learning theory is that they are often meta-textual and painfully self-reflexive - theory about theory. With Gee, the concepts return to their appropriate provenances: cognitive psychology, neurology, behaviorism, sociology, developmental psychology. In essence, what Gee is doing is providing experimental / experiential grounding in an informal way, and thus supporting the validity of the theories themselves. Thus, the reader can move to the outstanding footnotes and excellent appendix to find the history of the ideas, seminal studies, and key researchers in the various fields. The book is a treasure trove of resources and concepts without ever being clunky or painful.

Gee takes a holistic approach to the analysis of cognitive and behaviorist actions engaged in video games. He confronts something that often confounds educators who design learning materials for pre-schoolers and early elementary levels: How is it that young learners, who are restless, suffer from a wide spectrum of attention and cognitive challenges, and who are assumed incapable of abstract thinking, complex problem-solving, feats of memory, and fine motor skills, are able to sit for hours in rapt, focused attention as they accomplish tasks of remarkable complexity. At their computers, they build buildings, cities, worlds, and engage with multiple opponents, and multi-task in a dynamic environment.

Divided into conceptual blocks, What Video Games Have to Teach Us clusters learning theories as applied to video games into the categories corresponding to semiotics, identity construction, situated meaning, narratives, word-action relations, cultural grammars, and social constructivism. One of the aspects that is most appealing about Gee’s book is that it is simultaneously an adventure and a storage system. Gee engages one in a journey where it is possible to observe a person learning and exploring popular video games while it constructs a convenient conceptual file cabinet where one can mentally archive and retrieve the 36 learning principles that he considers to be foundational to learning, whether it be in traditional classrooms or in hand-on applications.

Although Gee’s book ostensibly addresses early childhood development and K-12 education, the concepts and theories are applicable to adult and non-traditional learners as well. For example, Gee was a presenter at the sold-out, standing-room only Serious Games Summit D.C., held October 18 - 19, 2004, in Washington, D.C. In the two-day affair, video game developers and users of distributed, multi-player interactive training met and discussed trends and new developments. Representatives of the military, higher education, health industry, and urban planners explored ways that games and gaming can transcend entertainment, or move beyond expensive and difficult to change simulations. The idea is to deliver distributed education solutions in ways that result in “deep learning,” by employing just the techniques that Gee describes in his book: “just in time learning,” scaffolding, relevant tasks, connections to a social group, projected identities, identification, and more.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (New York), ISBN: 1403965382 (paperback edition)
240 pages, List price: $15.95 (paperback version)