"Any game that you love...there is a transferable benefit. The confidence that you can build, in 'I can learn anything', I can teach myself, I can get better, I develop new skills, even if I'm terrible at this the first time I tried it. Any game, that's designed to be challenging is going to give you that benefit."
Gaming.
This is a topic that's been on my "to learn" list. "To become an expert" list. "To write about" list. As I learn about it, I've avoided "learning out loud", for fear of showing how much I don't know about it. How little I understand about it.
I want to avoid getting it wrong. I don't want it to fail out of the gate.
Really that's every reason I should write about it here in this space. Learning out loud, right?
Quite honestly, I wonder if a gaming mentality might help, redirect, or even keep education relevant through the 2020's? Don't misunderstand me, if I'm coming across as an alarmist. Educators today are amazing and are doing better than we think. We also know can always do better.
As long as we focus on learning. And that doesn't just go for the students in our schools.
Jane McGonigal, PhD, according to her website, is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. View her TED Talk. Search and listen to her appearances on reputable podcasts. She speaks, not only of the future, but if we proceed with intention, of how education can be.
While I'd love to devote a thousand (or thousands) of words to what I've learned and am learning from her perspective and others like her, I will identify a few in this post.
The significance of this topic, in this post?
As I ship on my 100th consecutive day, I can't help by think, I am one of the players in my own game. Like the video games of old (Pong or Tetris) or of new (Roblox and Minecraft), today feels a little bit like, I'm advancing to "the next level".
The benefits of games are significant, according to McGonigal. Several she speaks to:
You get better at learning new things, and at dealing with systems that are frustrating.
You adapt to new rules and new interfaces, that are designed to frustrate.
You build confidence in your ability to get better.
In the podcast interview with Shane Parrish (linked above), McGonigal encourages game playing, and with specific parameters that yield specific outcomes.
Specific to family life, there are parameters to adhere to, for maximum benefits. In the meantime, for adults to learn more about how to draw out these benefits, like anything else we want to know, we've got to be in conversation with our kids around what they're playing.
She suggests asking them:
What does it take to be good at this game? What skills does it require? What kind of personality or temperament does it require?
What have you gotten better at since you started playing this game?
What's the hardest thing you've accomplished in this game? How did you do it? What did you have to do to meet this challenge?
I admit, when I ask myself these questions on day 100 of my 365 day personal writing challenge, I'm amazed to realize what I'm learning. (Another post for another time.)
And I can't help but wonder, what answers would we get, what would we learn, if we (as parents) asked our children or if we (as educators) asked our students, these questions.
Only, we'd swap out the topic of gaming, in exchange for learning.
What might we learn about them, about ourselves, and about what we're doing?
Well for starters, we may come to realize, gaming and learning are closer than we think.
