Video games used to be bad, didn’t they? I mean, not so long ago, few people would have argued that video games are actually good for us. The dominant tune was rather: Video games make youngsters more aggressive, less able to focus on extended tasks and deep thoughts and in any case are just a colossal waste of time — at the expense of more useful activities.
Indeed, children today will have spent an average of 10,000 hours on video games by the time they reach 21. That’s about the same number of classroom hours in all of middle and high school. And each day, people around the world rack up more than a billion hours of video gaming. That can only be bad, right?
But in the last couple of months, I noticed a new theme emerging about video games. A recent BBC Horizon documentary was titled ‘Are video games really that bad?’ Earlier, Education World published an article titled ‘Are video games the future of education?’ And just a few weeks ago, Kentaro Toyama, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, published an article titled ‘The looming gamification of higher ed’ in the highly respected and influential Chronicle of Higher Education.
It turns out that the exculpation of gaming had been under way for several years now. In 2011, Jane McGonigal, the chief advocate for video games, published Reality Is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. In 2015, she published SuperBetter: A revolutionary approach to getting stronger, happier, braver and more resilient, which has been described as “a marriage of positive psychology with pioneering insights from cutting-edge game design”.
McGonigal has argued that recent research not only exonerates video games from their reputation of eliciting various bad tendencies in children (impatience, trivialisation of violence, addictiveness, etc.), but they actually make people better. According to her (and research she cites), video games increase gamers’ attention, speed, multi-tasking ability and creativity. Moreover, they teach children how to manage difficult situations and emotions, such as fear and anger. When old people play them, games help ward off dementia. And, she adds, when parents play video games with their children, they develop better relationships, better moods, higher grades and fewer behavioural problems.
McGonigal explains why video games can have such positive effects: They, like no other experience in life, can instantly produce some of the highest-sought human emotions, such as pride, ecstasy, surprise, excitement, awe and wonder — not to mention feelings of special attachment to other players. Indeed, she asks, what else can produce for us such deep emotions with just a few clicks. She points out that this can have therapeutic applications, for example with children who have to undergo medical procedures or spend some time at a hospital.
This is all fine and good — as long as gaming remains reasonable and doesn’t turn into an addiction, which we all know is a big risk and a frequent outcome. Gaming experts, however, are not too disturbed by such risks. In fact, confident that video games are becoming respectable and legit, they have introduced the concept of ‘gamification’ as a new approach in various areas of life, from communication to education.
Courses are now being “gamified” in various ways and at various levels. Toyama reports that in his own university department, several courses have gone that way. McGonigal mentions a school in New York, Quest to Learn, where the entire curriculum has been gamified. Jason Papallo, the author of Are video games the future of education? tells us that “[a]lmost three in four elementary and middle school teachers [use] video games in their classes ...” And textbook publishers are now introducing video games as part of the learning “package”.
But what does it mean to “gamify” a course? And why should we do that? Essentially, it amounts to turning the learning process into a video game scenario: Adventures, battles, quests, earning points, advancing to higher stages. We are told that this is now needed because today’s students are different; they are digital and video “natives”. Their attention spans are short; they seek instant gratification; they are constantly connected and networked; etc.
Proponents of gaming also argue that even in traditional education, we actually do use basic ideas of gamification: Don’t we score students on their tests and assignments? Don’t students earn points through various learning activities and seek to advance to higher levels? But quests and rewards have always been part of the human experience in many/most areas of life; this doesn’t mean that everything can be turned into a game.
The problem with gamification, especially in education, is that instead of nurturing in students the capacity and skill of slow learning and steady progress, it gives in to the fast pace and instant reward of video games. Furthermore, it kills the important aptitude to reflect, quietly and for extended periods. It also develops in youngsters the reflex of seeking emotions and well-being in artificial constructs.
We must not let ourselves be driven by flashy, fascinating and entrancing digital worlds. All that glitters is not gold. Let us all slow down and use digital tools in well-considered and far-sighted ways.
Nidhal Guessoum is a professor at the American University of Sharjah. You can follow him on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/@NidhalGuessoum
