As you round the corner, you can begin to see the ashes descending from the sky. You break into a run, avoiding the rubble falling from the exploding buildings that surround you; and even though this apocalyptic nightmare was a perfect and idyllic spring day not two minutes ago, your training tells you what is coming next. The distant spaceship dominates the skyline. Already, the pods have left the ship and are descending upon Central Park. The invasion has begun, and thousands upon thousands of the alien legion will swarm the city streets by nightfall. You face impossible odds, the only Space Marine to survive the off-world wars, and yet, a smile spreads across your face as you calculate the odds.
Somewhere in the ether, in another dimension even, the player that controls you shares your smile.
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| Promotional Still from Halo: Reach, copyright Bungie |
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The subject of gaming and its role in education is hotly contested on many levels. At its basest, the argument most typically revolves around how and to what extent play represents “authentic” learning. Rarely does the discussion broach the topic of Hope.
Hope in videogames is omnipresent. The basic understanding when buying a game is that it can be beaten, mastered. In fact, it has been designed to be completed, to create anything counter to this would doom the product to bargain bins. With that knowledge, that the task is possible, failure becomes not a stigma, but a motivating challenge.
The best games have mastered a subtle art. They have balanced challenge with reward. Earlier, when the local Arcade was the hub of electronic gaming, the harder the game was, the more popular the game became, as players attempted to reach and enshrine themselves as the “highscore” before eventually dying, allowing the next player in line to get a chance. As gaming shifted away from the arcades and into suburban living rooms, the game design and intent changed. When you look at how the use of “save” features, “infinite lives,” and “continues” have grown to pervade games, it’s easy to see that gamers are far more apt to take risks in this simulated environment. Why? Because they know that there is an answer, and that they will achieve mastery at some point, if they work hard.
A typical videogame is a relatively short experience when compared with the long weekly slog through childhood and adolescence that we call “school”. We ask students to trust us that there is a greater goal waiting for them, but constantly restart them every new year with new rules and tasks. Often, at the start of the year, the students are treated as blank slates. Since the teacher is incapable of judging where each child is developmentally when they arrive cold, they start from the beginning to “guarantee” that they all get the same experience in the classroom. This is misguided at best, and oppression at its worst. By assuming that kids know nothing because there is no guarantee of what they know individually, educators rob students of the achievements they have accomplished in previous years, and they begin to see the process of school as a series of unconnected episodes, which are predicated upon satisfying an individual teacher, as opposed to developing a sense of their own mind.
Video games do the opposite of this. They are tailor made for the ones playing. Most games allow for “levelling up,” when the efforts put in by players results in a new power or skill that then becomes part of their persona. Other games have collectible “achievements” or “badges” that the player displays on their personal viewable profile. The game, and its subsequent sequels, never discounts the work done by players as they work towards the completion of the game.
I’m not sure that schools do this well enough. In this metaphor, are grades the equivalent of “achievements” and “badges”? By that rationale, do grade even represent what we are trying to engender in students, or are they simply a measure of compliance?
By the end of a school year, a students will have a variety of work-products from different classes across the subject areas that represent the “work” that they have done. They know that almost NONE of it will be utilized ever again in subsequent years, and that come September, they will be starting over. Is it possible that, after repeating this cycle year after year, students will begin to lose sight of why they are doing anything at all? That there might not be an end? That none of it is connected in any meaningful way? If we were to overhear an adult expressing what I’ve just described as the way they view their life, we would call that person “depressed”. And what is depression, if not a pervading feeling of Hopelessness.
In the Call of Duty series, a collection of heavily popular First-person shooting games that utilize a multiplayer match format, most players have “died” literally THOUSANDS of times. In fact, the average player has a Kill/Death ratio that is in the negative, which means their character is killed more than they kill. The series boasts 30 million players online across all iterations. The second-newest game in the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops, has been played for over 600 million hours so far. An outsider would look at the seemingly repetitive nature of the game and see no distinction between the tediousness of modern schooling and the hundreds of hours of gameplay an AVERAGE player puts into this virtual world. They would miss the subtle nuances that make it far different. Call of Duty uses a multi-tiered achievement system that is made up of levels. Players accumulate EXP, or experience points, from kills and other in-game achievements. Once they reach a new level, they are granted access to better or varied weapons, and “perks” (customizable enhancements that make the player better). Upon reaching the highest level, players are offered the chance to “prestige,” which is a fancy term for starting over. The caveat? When they begin the process again, they will be viewed by others as a “2nd Prestige”, or “3rd Prestige” and so on as they negotiate through. The ability to move upward in the game is limitless, requiring an almost ridiculous amount of time, with very little physical reward, and yet, it is one of the most addictive experiences in youth culture today. Why is this? What does it supply that differentiates it from schooling? Simply, they know that success is possible, viewable and transferable.
As a teacher, I’ve been in situations where a student who clearly knows the answer is succumbing to some form of institutionalized apathy. It became fashionable at some point, or maybe it was something I read, to further question the student in that scenario: When a student says, “I don’t know,” teachers were to respond with “But what if you did?” or “Well, (Student’s Name), what would you say if you DID know?” While I understand the conceit, I’m not sure if it is enough to truly change that willingness towards giving up and asking for the answer to be supplied. “But what if..” is a question that transfers ownership to the student, but if it exists in a structure where there is no guarantee of success, and where the easiest route to success is to succumb to being told what to think, I’m not sure it is enough to change the trajectory the children are on.
Gamers, on the other hand, think about this all the time. The difference is the situation in which they are engaged. The presence of Hope is what drives this method of thinking. When gamers are faced with a seemingly impossible task, such as an unscalable wall, or an undefeatable enemy, they ask themselves the following question, “In a perfect world, what would I need to solve this problem?” Most often, the answers generated from this type of questioning will solve the player’s in-game issue. The question can not exist outside the framework of a completable task, the understanding that no matter how difficult something seems, that there is a solution. Gamers know that every task they are given is doable, eventually, if they work and think harder. Isn’t that the type of student we are trying to create in our schools? And if that is true, how do we better accomplish it?
As teachers, we are tasked with occasioning a classroom space that is best suited for learning. The systems we create in our classrooms must be optimized for this end. Our classes contain boys and girls, Jocks and Nerds, The wealthy and the poor; but they also contain Starship Captains, Warlords, Farmers, Questing Knights, Puzzle Masters, Flying Dragons, Aspiring Detectives, and Cowboys avenging their past wrongs (things most of us as teachers have only read about). At anytime during our day, we are teaching children that have saved planets, rescued damsels, and survived the Zombie Apocalypse; children that have faced absurd odds, and through their own wits and skill, smiled in the face of the seemingly impossible. Every single one of them had an understanding, both tacit and explicit, that no matter how difficult the task, that it was attainable. The way we provide Hope in our schools must change, if we desire to tap into the fierceness and voraciousness with which our students are capable of learning.
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