Blogs | Games and Playable Media @ UCSC. What Games Have to Teach Us About Teaching and Learning: Game Design as a Model for Course and Curricular Development | Currents in Electronic Literacy. Kimon Keramidas If you are at all interested in the idea of games as a part of education and learning then you have probably come across James Gee’s What Do Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
Gee’s book is an important text because he is able to quantify the way people learn and apply what they learn in video games. This is compelling material for the many teachers in search of new pedagogical methods that harness the recent increase in popularity of video games. There is a problem however in Gee’s argument. While he explains the learning processes of gamers, he doesn’t in fact provide any road maps as to how exactly one should go about using video games to teach. He makes a convincing argument that video games have the capacity to help us reexamine how we learn, but he doesn’t tell us how to make games that students will want to play and will also learn from.
I must admit that when I first went through the book this shortcoming disappointed me. 1) Rules. Rules Play. Gamifying Education.org | Home. Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog. Brainy Gamer. The term 'genre' eventually becomes pejorative because you're referring to something that's so codified and ritualized it ceases to have the power and meaning it had when it first started.
--Christopher Nolan Here's what we think we know about genre: it limits creativity. It binds artists to tried-and-true formulas and encourages derivative work. A creator must be free to follow her muse, unhindered by prescriptive rules. Genres are agents of ideological closure; they limit the meaning-potential of a given text. Artists aren't the only victims. Some artists try hard to avoid genre influences on their work. So it's worth asking: what artist worth his salt would self-impose such constraints? My name is John Ford, and I make Westerns. Lots of gifted artists have been drawn to genre because of its formulaic nature, and many of our greatest artistic treasures are clear expressions of genre inspiration. Film Noir? That's where video games come in. So why should we care about genre?