Jane McGonigal’s Thoughts on Gaming

Global gamers

On February 3rd, Jane McGonigal appeared on The Colbert Report. This woman has an opinion that you might be interested in. Because it is weird. Count. Er. Intu. Itive. Interesting. Weird. She is a game designer and wants the world to play more games and thinks that if people play more, this will contribute to solving the world’s problems. Let’s unwrap this a bit, starting with some statistics she points out in her TED talk of March, 2010.

People in the world play 3 billion hours of games each week.

World of Warcraft players have logged in 5.93 million years of game play to date. The average WoW player plays for 21 hours a week.

The average young person “in countries with strong gaming cultures” will spend 10,000 hours of time playing games by the age of 21.

Let that soak in for a moment. Then think about this: 10,000 hours roughly equals the total amount of time we spend in school K-12. Gaming, she says, represents “a parallel track of education.” And 10,000 hours is a term widely being used as a rough estimate of how many hours of effortful study are required for mastery of a skill (I first heard of it in Scientific American’s The Expert Mind written by Philip Ross in August 2006, but if you Google “10,000 hours of effortful study”, you’ll see how widely used this number has become).

Back to Jane. She says, gamers are getting good at or have developed a bond with 4 things:

  • Urgent optimism (or extreme self-motivation to tackle obstacles immediately, coupled with a belief in success)
  • Weaving a tight social fabric (playing games together builds trust)
  • Blissful productivity (gaming is actually “hard work” and gamers are willing to do it)
  • Epic meaning (the feeling of working towards meaningful goals–i.e., save the world)

Gaming creates “super-empowered hopeful individuals.” How can these people and this energy, this time, and this skill be put to use in improving the world? That is her question. She thinks it is possible and she is working on it now. By getting people to play games about life-connected issues, you can effect change. She thinks that challenging immersive experiences can be life-changing. Here is her TED talk. And here is Evoke, one of the games she helped develop.

Jane McGonigal’s blog

Edward Castronova’s blog (Indiana University professor of Telecommunications with a focus on games and social issues)

Better Mood, Better Learning

A study recently published in Psychological Science suggests, unsurprisingly, that people in a happier mood (after listening to peppy music or watching a funny video of a baby) perform better on tests that asked them to classify stimuli from rule-described categories. Positive moods also had a beneficial effect on strategy selection. According to the journalist take on the study, creativity is enhanced by watching viral videos, which may be why workers are so prone to dash off to YouTube land so regularly while at work… The researchers actually made use of YouTube videos for the study, but I think the implications of this go much deeper. Interest (Hidi & Ainley, 2008) and mood are important for learning. They are important for motivation and they seem to have an effect on cognitive processing. The results of this research may point to one of the reasons that people rate their learning higher in entertaining classrooms.

This paper was a product of the Catagorization Lab (Mindalab) at my old alma mater the University of Western Ontario. Some of their other interesting papers can be found here.

January 4th 2011 update:  Another  paper mentioned in the year-end issue of the Economist, showed similar effects. Oswald, Proto and Sgroi (2010) (available online via Andrew Oswald’s  page) showed both the positive effects of positive affect and the negative effects of being sad or depressed. The positive affect boost to productivity was 12%.

March 2013 update: More and more I keep running across articles on positive affect and learning. Here is a nice one I saw recently that not only explains why it is important, but gives some practical advice for creating a better, more positive community in the classroom. The four essentials that Ms. Alber lists are well worth putting into practice.

Another March 2013 update: Here is a nice blog post titled Emotions and Humor in Learning and Memory. It does a nice job explaining why some learners really benefit from increased use of humor and affect in lessons, and it links to lots of resources.

 

Nadler, R.T., Rabi, R., & Minda, J.P. (2010). Better mood and better performance: learning rule-described categories is enhanced by positive mood. Psychological Science, 21 (12).

Free Online Games for Meaningful Language Practice

There are many massive multi-player online games available. I’ve introduced some in the past and I think they represent a very interesting language use/learning option for many learners in Japan. They are usually not cheap, however, often in the range of 1500 yen per month. Recently though, several games have drastically lowered their fees or even made the games free to use. Here is a list of some games that might be good (and cheap) for language learners:

For Older Learners
EverQuest II Extended
Pirates of the Caribbean

For Younger Learners
Free Realms
Wizard 101

Web Games with a Little Twist: Academic Skill Builders

I have often introduced games in this space before. But recently I found a site that has two types of educational games. One type is single-player games, the sort of Flash or Shockwave games that are very common on the web. The other type is multi-player games that any learner visiting the site can access. With these games, learners can play competitively with 2 or 3 other players. The games that would be of interest to language learners are mostly spelling and easy grammar games found on the Language Arts page. There are also games for other subjects.

froggame