Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance

Gee covered a lot of ground in this chapter, but I think the main thing is that there are some games that don’t really require professional knowledge.  For instance, in the vampire game, Castlevania, the player does not need any professional knowledge about hunting vampires in order to beat the game.  Instead, the player just uses basic maneuvers such as: walk, run, jump, attack (much like Mario Bros. but with a different setting).  However, if you look at the army game, Full Spectrum Warrior, it contains a professional knowledge and skill that the player has to acquire before he or she can beat the game.   This professional knowledge and skill is also programed into the virtual characters.  Teaching its players some of the attitudes, values, practices, strategies, and skills of a professional officer commanding a squad of soldiers is this games design.  Gee explains, “A game like Full Spectrum Warrior requires more than generic gamer knowledge and skills; it requires professional knowledge and skills as well.  But this professional military knowledge is parceled out, shared between, the virtual characters and the play, each of whom knows some things in common, but different things as well” (p.104).

This distributed knowledge shared between the virtual character and the player leads to the eventual expertise of the player if he or she sticks with the game long enough.  Gee clarifies his use of the words professional and expert saying, “Authentic professionals have special knowledge and distinctive values tied to specific skills gained through a good deal of effort and experience” (p. 105).   

Gee argues that the doctrine in the game, Full Spectrum Warrior, allows the player to have a basis for their decisions and to construct knowledge.  He goes on to make a comparison between the game and education saying, “[In liberal education, students] are immersed in rich activities—for example, doing or talking about science—but with no guidance as to what are good choices, decisions, or problem solutions.  The idea is, perhaps, that they will learn by making mistakes, but with so many choices available and so little basis for telling them apart, it is more likely they will go down (however creative) garden paths, wasting their time….  If liberals often leave children too much to their own devices, conservatives often forestall their opportunities for learning to build good simulations to prepare themselves for fruitful action in a domain (like physics) by immersing them in facts, information, and tests detached from an meaningful contexts of action” (p. 109). 

So, are you teaching your students basic skills, like to walk, run, jump, attack?  …or are you teaching them to really think?  Well, let’s see… Can they just perform certain skills or can they determine when and why they need to use those skills?   Do they just complete a worksheet you put in front of them, or are they allowed to look at a situation and plan their best course of action?  Can they reevaluate that course of action if they experience negative consequences?   This thinking can be applied in all content areas.