Who would have thought that playing video games could actually be … good for you. Dr. Joseph Kahn from Mills College spoke at SFSU about using video games tor further civic involvement, specifically for our nations youth. His lecture was very engaging because this is a topic that seems to contradict what most adults complain about the younger generation.
Dr. Joseph Kahn made some interesting points about how video games actually reinforce proactive behavior through the use of leadership, strategic thinking, and working in teams. In a game like Sim City, you create your own world, which requires town planning and project managing. Most of the games involve communicating with other players and collaborating to conquer certain goals. Surprisingly, there is a lot of collaboration and leadership involved in World of War Craft. Sure, we are all familiar with the hard core players who scream “Die! Die! Die you filthy scum!” and possibly other profound language . People like that are always going to be around and are probably just as much of a jerk out in the real world as they are in the gaming world but that doesn’t mean that all gamers act that way.
Using video games in eduction has often been misunderstood as using video games in place of education. Just the word “game” doesn’t sound educational at all because education is “not suppose to be fun”. Games are a “waste of time”. Education requires “hard work”. What the education system needs to understand is that using games help reach out to a variety of personality and learning types and are great tools for assessment and reinforcement. Math was never my best subject but I loved to play “Number Crunchers”, which helped me improve my speed of calculating equations.
In the use of civic engagement, if an individual is practicing town planning, collaboration with other gamers, and initiatives of leadership, then that individual is more motivated to use those skills in the real world. That sounds about right, but on the other hand, I don’t think the word “motivation” is the right word to use. Dr. Joseph Kahn showed us several slides of a survey he did on students about the amount of time they spend on video games and the amount of time they spend involved in civic engagements, such as volunteering. His results that showed that there was no significant difference between gamers and non gamers. In fact, gamers spent more time doing extra curricular activities. Now I think about myself in that kid’s shoes who filled out that survey. Are they really going to admit that they do nothing except play video games as soon as they get home from school? If they had a choice to play video games or volunteer would they really be out finding opportunities to help their community? I highly doubt that. I do think that Joseph Kahn has a great thesis, but it is something that is very difficult to measure. Using games as another tool for learning is a wonderful idea, but to argue that games encourage our youth to be proactive may need some stronger evidence to validate that argument.
Nevertheless, I really enjoyed Dr. Kahn’s lecture and I’d love to read more of his case studies. I also want to thank Dr. Wagner for introducing these guest speakers to our class and providing us with great resources. Thursdays…are…awesome.
