To
facilitate encounters/experiences, we need to revisit Dewey's model of the
laboratory school. In his lab school, students learned through hands-on,
constructive activities. Core curriculum was tied life skills, students'
personal interests, and past individual experiences. It was a model that was
infeasible for most school districts due to the resources required to carry out
such interactive and personalized learning stations in the late 1800s, earlier
1900s. However, we no longer need to construct a series of hands-on
laboratories outside of the classroom to create the type of interactive
learning proposed by Dewey. All we need are computers and high-speed access to
the Internet.
A modern version of the Dewey
Laboratory School can be seen at Quest to Learn in New York City. It's the
creation of both game researchers and teachers, which "re-imagines school as one node in an ecology of
learning that extends beyond the four walls of an institution and engages kids
in ways that are exciting, empowering and culturally relevant"
("Quest to Learn"). Learning emerges from play as students engage in
games/quests and tackle narrative challenges in collaboration with each other.
By learning through games, students are able to practice their problem solving
skills. Unlike textbook narratives, games are non-linear. Greg Costikyan
explains how games depend on decision-making: "Decisions have to pose real, plausible
alternatives, or they aren't real decisions. It must be entirely reasonable for
a player to make a decision one way in one game, and a different way in the next"
("I Have No Words" par. 15-16).
Dewey
discusses extensively how we build knowledge through confronting problems,
experimenting with possible solutions, and making discoveries. Experimentation
is key and is an integral part of video game design. Players navigate
environments and instigate events and outcomes through their actions. Games
operate often through trial and error as players try to achieve their desired
results. As James Gee explains, "[Video
games] situate meaning in a multimodal space through embodied experience to
solve problems and reflect on the intricacies of the design of imagined worlds
and the design of both real and imagined social relationships and identities in
the modern world." Video games are hands-on, experiential, customizable, and
often inquiry-based models of learning.
As
mentioned earlier, Dewey asserted that a collaborative community is the core of
democracy. Often gamers learn from each other, divulging their discoveries and
cheats. This component of gaming has grown exponentially as games have moved
beyond their initial console boxes to become networked online. The largest
example of this is the World of Warcraft Wiki which contains over 99,000
separate pages. Because collaboration has become a key component of the gaming
experience, one could argue that video games can be used to promote democracy
globally.
In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that video games can be
seen "as global collaboration laboratories, or collaboratories: online
spaces for young people from around the world to come together and test and
develop their ability to cooperate, coordinate, and cocreate at epic
scales" (279). She gives the example of a game she designed for the 2008
Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, Lost
Ring. The game premise is that ancient Greeks banished an Olympic sport and
tried to destroy evidence of its existence. Now, gamers must collaborate and
work together to piece together the history and rules of this lost sport. Once
collaborators discovered the whole history of the sport they began to play it,
gathering in various cities to revive the lost sport. On the last day of the
Summer Olympics, six teams assembled in various cities across the globe and
competed for honorary medals in the Lost-Sport Olympics. As this example
demonstrates, a global collaboratory was formed as people worked together to
cooperatively revive a sport and create events.
Recent interest in interactive
games and online collaboration have led to games based on real world problems,
such as our dependency on oil. The game World
Without Oil creates a simulated oil crisis asks online players to consider
life without oil, what the effects would be, and how they would adapt.
Essentially, players are engaging in problem-based learning in a collaborative,
game setting. Learning is individualized based on the locality, interests, and
lifestyle of the players. A farmer, soldier, college student, and auto worker
all have very different experiences. Together their narratives and reflections
build a larger simulated reality. McGonigal explores why individuals would
participate in a game based on a negative forecast rather than an escapist fantasy.
She discovered, "By turning a real problem into a voluntary obstacle, we
activated more genuine interest, curiosity, motivation, effort, and optimism
than we would have otherwise. We can change our real-life behaviors in the
context of a fictional game precisely because there isn't any negative pressure
surrounding the decision to change. We are motivated purely by positive stress
and by our own desire to engage with a game in more satisfying, successful,
social, and meaningful ways" (311).
Nick
Dyer-Witheford connects the pooling the intelligence through gaming environments
to Marx's concept of general intellect. In Grundrisse, Marx predicts a turn in
capitalism whereas wealth will come to depend on social knowledge due to
automation and communication and transportation networks. Dyer-Whitford discusses
the complexity of general intellect in the post-fordist world: "Read sympathetically, 'general
intellect' can be seen as a prescient glimpse of today's knowledge economy,
with production teams, innovation milieux and university-corporate research
partnerships yielding the "fixed capital" of robotic factories and
global computer networks. The dialectical prediction of "classical"
Marxism was that "general intellect," though generated by the world
market, would destroy and supersede it... The assertion of neoliberalism, although phrased in very
different terms, is that the world market is completely compatible with general
intellect. The concept of "the new economy" is a marriage made in
heaven between high-technology systems and the commodity form, a perfect union
of Net and Market: "friction free capitalism." However, within gaming
environments, Dyer-Witheford sees potential for resistance. Players are asked
constantly to shape the reality of their virtual environments, making narrative
choices, designing avatars, and managing populations. This ability to imagine
alternatives as well as to plan to strategies can be applied to social
problems.
