Gaming as a Pedagogical Tool: What Educators Can Learn from Student Gamers
I taught high school English for seven years, and while doing this, I noticed a trend among the students who played Japanese RPGs (JRPGs) that set them apart from the rest of the students. While I didn’t conduct a study, I noticed essay JRPG players had better writing. They had better and wider sentence variety, more extensive vocabularies, and showed improved narrative flow. It was still a surprise when she explained that she had been reading game dialogue since she was about 10, and that by age 16 she had read more narrative writing than the average adult would in a lifetime.
Research on gameplay and literacy development supports my observations. Reading a text and having visual stimuli while reading provides a motivation that is different from the reading of an isolated text, and if that text is assigned, even for the purpose of comprehension. The motivation is the driving factor and engages the reader.
Many of the learning experiences in Japanese RPGs (Role Playing Games) are built around mathematics in different categories like damage calculation, random encounter probabilities, critical damage strike hit calculations, and math optimization. Students learn how to play RPG’s and pretend fun, but when learning the damage value of a weapon, it IS math and applied statistics. Learning and enjoyment should blend seamlessly; this is what educational game design aims to accomplish.
The RPG system of character advancement rewards the player and illustrates the concept of a growth (positive) mindset, which has its most reinforcement in a role playing game. Characters start weak and become powerful and over the process of playing and getting better (leveling up) actually makes them unbeatably strong. Failure is temporary, recoverable, and inevitable. Skills in the game improve through practice and repetition. All of this is a players’ hands via the game, whereas positive mindset speeches and motivational posters rely on pure hope to achieve the same goal. When a player goes through the process of being persistent, it leaves a powerful internal imprint.
While learning a piece of software is a component of digital literacy, it is a shallow understanding of digital literacy. Being digital literate means understanding how to evaluate, critique, and engage in communities (social media) responsibly. All of these components are found in gaming communities, where it is easy to learn them. Evaluating online strategies as a source of information in a game is as much of a skill as doing academic research, and it is a skill that should be practiced. The lower stakes conflict presented in game guides should be done with the higher stakes conflict of research. All of the same cognitive processes are used in both in the same way.
Websites such as https://icicledisaster.com/ provide good examples of how niche, digital, content can fulfill a pedagogical need. The site offers coverage of JRPGs in the form of reviews, rankings, and analyses. This style of writing exemplifies the sorts of evidence-based writing educators want students to produce. For instance, in a review when a game is said to succeed or fail because of particular design features and the effect those features have (or do not have) on the player, that is a demonstration of analytical writing. Students can create their own analytical writing products after reading and studying examples of this type of work.
Gaming as a means of developing cultural competency is a worthwhile endeavor. JRPGs provide an opportunity to engage with Japanese culture, history, philosophy, and societal norms. If a student plays a game that incorporates Shinto mythology and researches it, that is an example of cultural learning. Games that incorporate fictional representations of historical periods can stimulate interest in that actual period. The knowledge gained through gaming may be informal, but it is often deep and of considerable length.
Gamers will also develop their time management skills through play. Long JRPGs require scheduling and prioritizing. Students who are able to balance gaming with academics have developed time management skills in a context that is meaningful to them. A student who decides to stop gaming and study for a test the next day is demonstrating self-control. A student who plays until midnight and comes to school tired demonstrates poor time management. Outcomes like these help build executive function skills.
Educational practices benefit from the emotional intelligence that narrative video games stimulate. Empathy, emotional reasoning, and perspective taking (among other things) are trained when characters are written with depth. Problems posed by role playing games (RPGs) with emotionally conflicting needs (i.e. players must choose to help one of two characters) involve the consideration, prediction, and evaluation of the feelings and emotional responses of the characters (outcomes) as the player engages with the game. Such scenarios help players hone the often-taught skills to help people, as they won’t be able to engage with people as much during the game.
Narrative video games are a rich resource for writing instruction. Analytical essays about the game, comparative reviews of the game mechanics, reflective journals of the gaming experience, and other assignments centered the game narrative help students write in an authentic voice. Students are often more engaged to write about their video games more than they are about nearly any other topic, which leads to improved writing quality. Writing assignments that involve video games often produce higher quality work as well as improved argumentation and revision.
Generally, screen time is considered negative in education, which ignores the complexity involved. In addition, not all screen time is identical. Unlike mindless video scrolling, two hours of playing a JRPG (role playing game) exercises the player’s sustained attention and decision making as well as working memory.
Education institutions trying to implement game-based learning initiatives must consider which games to include but also how the initiative will be structured. Factors such as the professional development of the staff, how the game’s mechanics align to the stated learning goals, how learning will be assessed, and how to communicate effectively with parents all require planning. There is a wealth of games to choose from and they are being offered at a lower price point, however planning out the proposal to create a strong foundation for game-based learning is the more critical still resource. If done properly, game-based learning still adds to the toolbox of skills that the more traditional methods do not address, and does not replace anything in the existing toolbox.
The most significant obstacles left to be overcome is how a game-based learning initiative is assessed as the games will need to be evaluated in a non-standardized way. If game-based learning is to be the core premise of education in the future, assessment will need to evolve. The current state of educational assessment will not be able to make the level of change demanded for the assessment structure to evolve. This will be the case with educational assessments that revolve around competency-based evaluations as stated in the assessments.
Game-based learning initiatives must include parents in the process. Schools that provide education to parents about the game-based learning and its educational merits succeed more because the learnards educate the parents how the initiative meets educational metrics and the parents will then support the initiative.
Gaming breaks down subject barriers and makes learning possible in ways that traditional education cannot. For example, one JRPG can motivate students to do literary analysis, use math, understand history, grapple with ethics, and appreciate art. This type of learning integrated learning is how knowledge works in the real world. Problems do not fit neatly into one subject. Games and gaming experiences are educational because they go against the traditions of segmented learning in formal education.
