Learning to Play

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Learning To PlayTen Ways to Measure the Potential Educational Benets of Video Games


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Table of Contents

I. Executive Summarya. Break down: Ten ways to measure the potential educational benet of

video games.

1. Identication2. Interaction

3. Intention

4. Creation

5. Well-Ordered Problems

6. Contextualized & Situated Meanings

7. Systemic Thinking8. Performance Based Environment

9. Emotional Impact

10. Embedded Assessment

II. Learning To Play: Full Research

a. Abstract

b. Research


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Break Down: Ten Ways to Measure the Potential

Educational Benet of Video Games

Learning to Play, a study by NYU Professor Liel Leibovitz, commissioned by kidsapp developer TabTale, is designed to help parents understand what educationallybenecial traits they should be looking for in the games their kids play. here are theten traits that can make games not only fun, but educationally important, as wellas some examples of the concepts at work in games many parents will recognize.

1. IDENTIFICATION

The Concept: This is when the player connects emotionally with the character that

he or she is controlling.

Where Youve Seen It: In Angry Birds, the game opens with a short scene that ex -plains the backstory of the games heroes (the birds) and thus allows the player to

understand the purpose of the game through the characters perspective.

Why Its Educational: In learning to think outside their own perspective, children

are able to apply this mode of thinking in real life as they consider situations from a

point of view different from their own.

2. INTERACTION

The Concept: Perhaps the most familiar component of games, interaction is the

term for when video games provide a degree of freedom to learn and explore.

Where Youve Seen It: In Minecraft, a very popular world building game, the play-er is given one object: to survive as long as possible. Within an open world with

day and night cycles the player can explore the world to nd raw materials to build

homes, weaspons, and other ways to extend their time in the game world. The

variety of options avilable teaches the player that there are multiple ways to attain

an objective and that there is no one solution to a problem.

Why Its Educational: Allows children to develop the idea of combining several

strategies and skills to attain their goals and solve problems within the classroom.

3. INTENTIONThe Concept: Like it sounds, intention is the element that allows players to feel like

results of game play stems from their will, not from a feature of the game design.Where Youve Seen It: In Plants Versus Zombies the player has complete freedom

with regards to the plants he or she will use in order to protect his house from the

zombies, allowing the player to feel like they themselves came up with the strategy.

Why Its Educational: Lends children condence to apply this notion of freedom to

their own learning and feel that they have control over the outcome of educational

problems.


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4. CREATIONThe Concept: Allowing the player to act on the game environment in an aesthetic or me -

chanical way creates a space where the player is encouraged to experiment and create

their own story or character in the game.

Where Youve Seen It: The myriad of dress up games available to children allows them todesign, dress, and style characters to their choosing with endless options.

Why Its Educational: Allowing players to take part in a creative process positively rein-

forces the players sense that they can create something themselves.

The Concept: Progressive difculty keeps players engaged in a game. Rising difculty

levels are there to keep the players on their toes, keep them interested and engaged in

a system that they they have not yet bested. If a game stagnates in terms of difculty,

or becomes easier, it prevents the player from rening the strategies that he or she may

have developed to cope with a task.

5. WELL-ORDERED PROBLEMS

Where Youve Seen It: In the racing game Temple Run, users are kept on their toes byincreasingly difcult challenges as they progress in the route. Players must be able to

adapt to the changes in order to keep running and beat their previous high-scores.

Why Its Educational: This idea of progression and increasing difculty is easily trans-

posed in learning in schools; dealing with new subjects or more complex levels of pre-

vious subjects. The underlying mental uscle that copes with dealing with more complex

tasks is trained further by playing games that have increasing difculty levels.

6. CONTEXTUALIZED AND SITUATED MEANINGThe Concept: For players to use tools in a creative way to solve problems, these tools

need to be introduced at the moment where their main attributes are necessary to prog-

ress.Where Youve Seen It: In the app that makes farming fun, Hay Day, players must solve

problems around the farm with new tools and challenges. Without adapting to these dif-

ferences, players risk failure at the farm.Why Its Educational: Facts learned in this fashion give teh player a sense of self-con-

dence and offer real usefulness to information needed to solve problems. This makes

them harder to forget than concepts that are not of use fo the player at the moment

theyre introduced.

6. SYSTEMIC THINKINGThe Concept: In good games, the player does not learn only how to deal with one aspect

independent of the rest of the game, but learns how to identify the patterns and anticipate

them in the future.Where Youve Seen It: After a few games of Tetris, the player can recognize situations

where a certain shape would be a good t in the game and when it would be detrimental.

Why Its Educational: In other contexts this helps the player train in pattern recognition,

allowing them to identify patterns with greater ease and gure out which course of action

will resolve the problem in the most efcient manner.


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8. PERFORMANCE-BASED ENVIRONMENT

The Concept: Gaming gets rid of real life consequences for actions and thus allows

the player to delve into action and understand the underlying actions behind perform-ing.

Where Youve Seen It: In conjunction with some informed learning tools, these games

can provide a way to develop skills in areas like math (Lost In Space: Math Adven-

ture) and, on a high level, fast-paced decision making (StarCraft).

Why Its Educational: Without fear of failure with serious consequence, games that

have this characteristic teach children to experiment in their learning more and to take

greater, though often successful, risks.

9. EMOTIONAL IMPACT

The Concept: Video games allow the player to inhabit the character as a catalyst for

the games emotional and social state.Where Youve Seen It: In an app spin-off of the movie Despicable Me, the game

Despicable Me: Minion Rush allows the player to adopt the universally adored minion

character. In assuming this role, children can identify with an already established bond

to the character and enhances the need to succeed in the game

Why Its Educational: Intelligent games allow a player to understand that the world is

not all smiles but also prizes the fact that there are people who are trustwrothy and

both intellectually and emotionally intelligent.

10. EMBEDDED ASSESSMENT

The Concept: You cannot learn without feedback, and just attempting to solve a prob-lem is not learning, the problem has to be solved correctly. Games that give the play-

ers a breakdown of their performance after a game session allow them to see how

they could have done better compared to their average or best scores.

Where Youve Seen It: In the fun trivia game Geo Quiz, players are not only tested on

their geography knowledge, but also given feedback at the end of the game on time

taken to respond to each question and total questions correct and incorrect. These

kinds of statistics aid the users in improving in future rounds.

Why Its Educational: Many games feature online scoreboards called leaderboards

that place the players performance in a global context. Fostering competition can

lead to a desire to better oneself in order to improve.


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Learning to Play

Ten Ways to Measure the Potential Educational

Benet of Video Games

By Liel Leibovitz, Ph.D.

September 2013


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Abstract

The purpose of this brief paper is to provide an introductory survey of prevalent approaches to and

attitudes towards video games as tools of teaching and learning, and to identify design criteria likely to facilitate

learning. Rather than engaging in a comprehensive discussion of educational games, this paper seeks instead

to provide a rudimentary tool to assess the inux of casual games now available on the market, in an effort

to ascertain what, if any, are the necessary requirements to assess whether a given game delivers not only

entertainment but also a modicum of educational enhancement, here dened as a constructive cognitive process

conducive to learning. Ten such criteria are identied and explored.


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Ever since their introduction in the late 1970s, video games have risen to prominence as an entertainment

medium, eventually rivaling the prominence and popularity of movies and television. Initially derided as having

little if any redeeming qualities, video games are increasingly recognized for their potential as educational tools

The purpose of this brief paper is to provide a theoretical background to the applications of games in teaching

and learning, as well as to compose a list of key characteristics that endow games with an educational value.

As scholars of both gaming and education agree, both pursuits are primarily practices that require the

acquisition of skill before any real mastery can be obtained. To that end, it is worthwhile to follow the model

set forth by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus assumed Maurice Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of

Perception as his point of departure, and focused his own model around two of Merleau-Pontys key concepts:

The intentional arc and the desire for or the drive towards maximal grip. The intentional arc concept argues

that as an individual, or an agent, acquires a particular subset of knowledge or skills, those skills are retained

not as ideated representations stored in the agents mind and awaiting some contextual reawakening, but rather

as increasingly ne-tuned inclinations to respond to the callings of increasingly ne-tuned perceptions of any

given situation to which they relate. The life of consciousness, wrote Merleau-Ponty, cognitive life, the life

of desire or perceptual life - is subtended by an intentional arc which projects round about us our past, our

future, our human setting,


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our physical, ideological and moral situation. In other words, Merleau-Ponty claims that as we acquire skills,

or, in his language, habits, we are likely to encounter a growing number of temptations, invitations and

solicitations to immerse ourselves in situations that require our acquired habits. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty uses

the term maximum grip to describe the bodys tendency to respond to such invitations in a way, in Dreyfuss

words, that would bring the current situation closer to the agents sense of an optimal gestalt.

Drawing on the work of J.J. Gibson, the renowned psychologist of visual perception, Dreyfus added one

more component to those constructing the intentional arc, namely a priori acquaintance with or knowledge of

cultural expectations. In his The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson argues that it is not only

natural components that dictate our perception of and regulate the interaction with objectsnamely the shape

and qualities of things and our physical capacities to interact with thembut also a more complex network

of preexisting knowledge. Seeing a mailbox and a letter, he argues, is, in and of itself, not a sufcient clue to

deciphering their usage; while they possess the physical qualities that make them compatible (the mailbox

having a slot, the letter being of a size correlating to that of the space in the mailbox), and while we are certainly

capable of picking up the letter and sliding it through the mailboxs slot, we must be familiar with the postal

system and its machinations if we wish to successfully interact with these two objects.

This tripartite structure exists clearly in Merleau-Pontys own concept of embodiment:


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The body is our general medium for having a world. Sometimes it is restricted to the actions necessary fothe conservation of life, and accordingly it posits around us a biological world; at other times, elaborating

upon these primary actions and moving from their literal to a gurative meaning, it manifests through

them a core of new signicance: this is true of motor habits [sic] such as dancing. Sometimes, nally, the

meaning aimed at cannot be achieved by the bodys natural means; it must then build itself an instrument

and it projects thereby around itself a cultural world.

Merleau-Ponty remains true to his formulation even when considering the acquisition of mental, rather

than physical, habits, as the two are necessarily intertwined, as the body, to him, is the focal point of habit-

acquiring, and therefore of any learning. The analysis of motor habit as an extension of existence leads, he

wrote, to an analysis of perceptual habit as the coming into possession of a world. Conversely, every perceptu

habit is still a motor habit and here equally the process of grasping a meaning is performed by the body.

That being the case, most scholars agree that the question of identication between the player, whose

physical body is operating the game and determining its actions, and the avatar, whose virtual body represents

these same actions on screen, is crucial to understanding games as instruments of learning. The rst studies

concerning the correlation between identity development and communication processes can be traced to the

1930s, and particularly to the work of psychologist G.H. Mead. In his Mind, Self and Society, he argued that

communication was the prism through which an individual becomes conscious of both others and himself.

According to Mead, the process of identication with the other is achieved as the self takes on the role of the

other, an


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undertaking, he suggested, that is accomplished via communications and that instills in the self the ability to

develop empathy for the other and at the same time a clear perception of the self. And while such a process,

Mead argued, was once limited to direct experience, mass media now enabled anyone to take on the role of even

distant or non-existent other and thereby become integrated into society. A similar thread thrived with the advent

of television, when several studies suggested viewers strongly identied with the ctional characters on screen,

often resorting to role playing when the identication was particularly strong. The eld of study of identication

with television characters is rich and vast; a few other notable works are those by Ellis, Streeter and

Engelbrecht, who found that identication with television characters extended beyond the viewing experience,

often prompting people to compose their own views according to views they thought might be held by their

favorite television characters; and by Reeves and Nass, who found that peoples interactions with media were

guided by the same principles as would govern interpersonal interactions, such as an expectation of civility, the

maintenance of personal space and so on.

As McDonald and Kim suggested in their own study of identication, when identication studies

migrated from television to video games in the late 1980s, attention was paid mainly to measuring time

invested in playing video games versus that devoted to watching television. Yet those few studies that looked at

identication with characters found, in McDonald and Kims words, different effects from those associated

with


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television. Gary Selnow, in an early study of video games that, sadly, has not been paralleled or expanded since

it was written two decades ago, claimed that video games interactivity allowed players to become a member

of the cast of the game, thereby creating a different, and stronger, identication with the games characters than

television viewers were likely to develop with the characters in their programs. McDonald and Kim themselves

studied the subject of identication in relation to video games, providing questionnaires containing both closed-

and open-ended questions to 303 elementary and high school students from New York State. In one case, the

students were asked to describe their ideal selves, their actual selves, and their favorite video game characters.

Below are their results:

Figure 1. McDonald and Kim: Self, Ideal Self and Favorite Game Character

Source: McDonald and Kim, When I Die, I Feel Small: Electronic Game Characters and the Social Self, 251.

To quote McDonald and Kim, The highest peaks throughout the sample are associated with ideal self

game character comparisons, suggesting some support for the notion that these concepts are somewhat similar

in the players minds. Still, McDonald and Kims study, as well as Selnows and virtually any other of the

studies on the subject, approached the question of identity from the perspective of the social self rather than

exploring the dynamics of agency and the ne mechanics of the interaction between player and character.


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A cautious step in that direction was taken by James Paul Gee, perhaps the most prominent scholar of games

and education; in his chapter titled Learning and Identity: What Does it Mean to Be A Half-Elf? he described

his experience playing a character named Bead Bead in a role-playing game called Arcanum. The play

experience, he claimed, immediately constructs three distinct yet intertwined identities, which he called the

virtual, the real and the projective. In the rst case, he wrote, the stress is on the virtual character Bead Bead

acting in the virtual world of Arcanum (though I am playing/developing her). The second, respectively,

stressed the real-world character James Paul Gee playing Arcanum as a game in real time (though Bead Bead

is the tool through which I operate the game). Finally, the third identity, labeled projective to connote both

Gees projecting of his values and desires into the virtual character of Bead Bead and his perception of Bead

Bead as ones own project in the making, emphasized the interface betweenthe interactions betweenthe

real world person and the virtual character. As is suggested by the title of her article, Who Am We?, Sherry

Turkle suggested a similar approach, speaking of a multiple but integrated identity.

A second and equally important direction of research concerns the ways in which the aforementioned

integration occurs. While video games are frequently portrayed as sedentary media, and are discussed primarily

in terms of the audiovisual stimulations they offer players, they are, in fact, largely physical activities that

involve more parts of the body than are usually consideredthe extremities, as well as a variety of muscles, are


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all involved in the play experience, which itself largely depends on manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination

As such, the process of skill acquisition in games resembles that practices in baseball, basketball, or piloting

aircraft. In all cases of skill acquisition, expert participants were distinguished from others of less considerable

prociency by an ability to recall at will a great number of patterns, and then automatically translate the

recollection into action. Or, as psychologists Calderwood, Klein and Crandall described that which sets a chess

master apart from other players, a central feature of a chess-masters skill is his ability to access an extensive

set of recognizable chess patterns, or chunks.

Players master a game, then, when they are able to recognize a pattern whenever it appears, summoning

the correct chunk into mind and immediately translating the stored knowledge into concrete, manual action.

While such a process may appear, at rst glance, to be purely cognitive, two points are worth considering: First

of all, the process of culling the required information in order to create such convenient chunks occurs, for

the most part, through repeated motion rather than contemplation. Similarly, and second of all, a video game

players chunks consist mainly of pre-registered combinations of button-pressing, stick-moving etc., and

his or her recollection, therefore, is as much a bodily function as a cognitive one. Furthermore, as Dreyfuss

experiment with master chess players showed, a chess master was able to perform growingly complex

calculations at great speed while still holding his own in a game of chess against


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a less skilled but still procient player. This suggests that the recollection that characterizes the master is only

partially, if at all, representational.

Armed with these insights, it is time to identify the key characteristics that enable games to facilitate

and enhance learning experiences. It should be noted that the purpose of this brief paper is not to analyze the

mechanics applied in educational games per sefor more on that subject, see the work of Jan Plass at New

York Universitybut rather to try and sketch out more general guidelines that may be applied when assessing

he overall value of casual gaming. While many entries in the rapidly ascending casual market have little

ntention or aspiration to be regarded as possessing of an educational platform, some nonetheless feature design

elements likely to facilitate learning. A few key criteria come to mind, drawing heavily on the work of James

Paul Gee:

dentication: As discussed above, players differ from television viewers, say, or book readers in as much as

hey construct an integrated identity that weds their physical and virtual personae. Whether this is achieved

by building an individual character or by stepping into an existing one matters less; this key design element

equires that games enable players to inhabit a character and view it not only as a platform for the execution of

actions but also as a strong and empathic entity in and of itself. This is often achieved by way of non-playable

cutaway scenes; a famous example would be the introductory animation of Angry Birds, in which the games


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stolen the birds eggsis presented, subjecting the action that follows to its resonant tenor.

Interaction: While games are comprised of algorithmic sequences, and as such offer considerably less

interaction than is commonly believed, well-designed games still afford players what designer Eric Zimmerman

calls the space of possibility, namely sufcient room for individual exploration based on interaction with the

games world and its rules.

Intention: Dened by game designer Doug Church as making an implementable plan of ones own creation

in response to the current situation in the game world and ones understanding of the game play options, this

category expands on the mere demand for interaction by suggesting that optimal experiences are made possible

when players are allowed to interact with the world in a way that leads not only to problem-solving, but to

problem-solving that feels to have emanated from a plan of the players own making. This excludes solutions

that are too obvious or, alternatively, random and divorced of clearly observable causality.

Creation: Increasingly, games, and particularly games with an educational bend, perceive of the players role not

only as a passive construct but as a proactive one, a participant in writing and shaping the games experience.

This may involve allowing stand-alone level design, character customization, or a number of other possibilities

allowing players a greater say in the games progression.

Well-Ordered Problems: As Gee wrote in his paper, Good Video Games and Good


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Learning, research shows that when learners are left free to roam in a complex problem spaceas they

sometimes are in permissive hands-on environmentsthey tend to hit on creative solutions to complex

problems, but these solutions do not lead to good hypotheses about how to solve later, even easier problems.

Good games, then, present players with ordered problems, so that the earlier ones are well built to lead players

to form hypotheses that work well for later, harder problems. It matters how the problem space is organized

that is why games have levels. A hierarchical and logical structure must be observed, allowing players to

progress according to escalating and interdependent levels of difculty.

Contextualized and Situated Meanings: To direct players to desirable outcomes, games must present information

in a contextualized and situated way, so that the uses and applications of game mechanics are well understood.

For example, if a player is expected to use a boomerang in a game, the object must rst be introduced in

a way that makes its uses within the games context abundantly clear. Here, some scholars argue, games

have an inherent advantage over the traditional mode of teaching, which frequently prizes the recitation of

decontextualized facts that are then easily forgotten as they are not situated in any experience or environment a

player is likely to retain.

Systemic Thinking: Games, by denition, are closed systems governed by rules, and thus succeed best when

they reward players for thinking laterally and about relationships rather than focusing on a succession of spot

occurrences. This observation, of course, is


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not without its educational ramications, as good pedagogy similarly prizes the ability to identify and anticipate

patterns.

Performance-Based Environment: Good video games, Gee wrote in his essay, operate by a principle just the

reverse of most schools: performance before competence. Players can perform before they are competent,

supported by the design of the game, the smart tools that the game offers, and often, too, the support of other,

more advanced players. Language acquisition itself works this way. However, schools frequently do not.

They often demand that students gain competence through reading texts before they can perform in the domain

that they are learning.

Emotional Impact: As games and education alike are primarily experiential undertakings, they must be

experienced not only intellectually but emotionally as well. The range of emotions, of course, varies, from the

mild and pleasant frustration of solving a difcult riddle to considerably more stirring occasions that accompany

strong content. Therefore, while games are at their purest incarnations as learning tools when emphasizing skill

acquisition, they mustnt abandon the commitment to empathic storytelling.

Embedded Assessment: As players progress through the game, they must be provided with constant indicators

of progress, enabling them to measure their performance, identify weak spots, and plot future corrections.


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When all or most of these criteria are observed, one may argue that a game, despite not directly attempting

to convey educational content, is nonetheless not without its educational merits. And while further research

is needed in the eld of educational-minded game design, the aforementioned criteria provide us with a good

yardstick by which to measure the torrent of existing offerings.

Hubert Dreyfus, A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition as the basis for a Merleau-Pontian Non-representationalistCognitive Science (2001), HYPERLINK http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/MerleauPontySkillCogSci.pdf

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/MerleauPontySkillCogSci.pdf.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

Ibid., 136.

Dreyfus, A Phenomenology of Skill Acquisition as the basis for a Merleau-Pontian Non-representationalist Cognitive

Science, 1.

James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hilldside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986).

Ibid.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 146.

Ibid., 153.

George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1967).

See Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at

a Distance, Psychiatry 19 (1956): 215-29; also Donald Horton and Anselm Strauss, Interaction in audience pArticipation

shows, American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 579-587.

G.J. Ellis, S.K. Streeter and J.D. Engelbrecht, J. D., Television characters as signicant others and the process of

vicarious role taking, Journal of Family Issues 4 (1983): 367-384.

Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television and New Media Like

Real People and Places (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1996).

Daniel McDonald and Hyeok Kim, When I Die, I Feel Small: Electronic Game Characters and the Social Self, Journal

of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 45, no. 2 (2001): 241-258.

Ibid.

Gary Selnow, The Fall and Rise of Video Games, The Journal of Popular Culture 21, no. 1 (Summer 1987): 58.

McDonald and Kim, ibid., 250.

James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2004): 51-73.

Ibid., 54.


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Ibid.

Sherry Turkle, Who Am We? Wired 4, no. 1, January 1996. HYPERLINK http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/turkle.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/turkle.html

H.L. Chiesi, G.J. Spilich and J.P. Voss, Acquisition of domain-related information in relation to high and low domain

knowledge, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18 (1979): 275-290.

F. Allard and N. Burnett, Skill in Sport, Canadian Journal of Psychology 39 (1985): 294-312.

S.E. Dreyfus and H.C. Dreyfus (1979). The scope, limits and training implications of three models of pilot emergency

response behavior. ORC 79-2 (AFOSR-78-3594). Bolling, AFB, Washington, DC. Air Force Ofce of Scientic

Research. United States Air Force.

B. Calderwood, G.A. Klein, and B.W. Crandall, Time pressure, skill, and move quality in chess, American Journal of

Psychology 101 (1988): 482.

H.L. Dreyfus and S.E. Dreyfus, Mind over machine: The Power of Human

Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: Free Press, 1986).

Doug Church, Formal Abstract Design Tools, in Gamasutra, available online at: HYPERLINK http://www.gamasutra

com/view/feature/3357/formal_abstract_design_tools.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3357/formal_

abstract_design_tools.php.

James Paul Gee, Good Video Games and Good Learning, in Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Vol. 85 No. 2.


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Learning to Play