Getting a student into the zone of proximal development is a tricky business. If students don’t have sufficient background knowledge and skill in what they’re learning, they tend to switch off. This often shows as distraction, disengagement and disinterest. In extreme cases students become disruptive, knocking others who might be on the cusp of their ZPD out of a learning opportunity. This seems to be happening more often in classrooms, I have an idea why…
That disruptive approach is common in online gaming. It might be useful to look at how raging, trolling and ‘Umad‘ online interaction points to a foreign set of values that many students are familiar and comfortable with. The vast majority of educators have no experience or knowledge of gaming culture. When a student in the class room acts on values they’ve learned while gaming, shock ensues.
In a player versus player game, game balance and the opportunity for everyone to participate in a maximal way (in their ZPD) depends on the players all having sufficient skill to make a game of it. In a randomly generated game, it’s common for a team of n00bs to get pwned by a more skilled team. This is often accompanied by flaming with the intent to anger your opponents to such a degree that they quit (ideally vocally angry, allowing you to throw in a umad? before they storm off). In gaming, ‘schooling‘ your opponents is a vital part of the learning process. It’s the clearest way to state your superiority in skill over an opponent. The goal is to make it so clear to a weaker player that they are out of their league (way outside their ZPD) that they give up in anger. This is going to sound very foreign to the overly compassionate, no-bullying, we’re all to be treated as equals approach found in education, but this is where many students spend hours of their time when not in the manufactured environment of their school.
A gamer who is forced out of a game in this fashion is very angry in the moment, and quits the game, usually to pick up another game immediately. In this game, if they are within their ZPD in terms of their gaming skills (which involves knowledge of the game environment, hand eye coordination, strategy and cooperative play, among others), they are immediately re-engaged. Their recent failure does not hurt them or follow them in any way, and the adrenaline burst of anger has prompted them to intensively refocus on the game. I suspect the stats for a player in a post-rage situation improve due to the residual anger and energy released. They increase their skill with this hyper focus and rage less often.
When you meet a master player, they tend to shy away from the trash talk and simply demonstrate their skill, rather than yapping about it. This kind of mastery is every player’s goal. When they get there, they often adopt the degree of awesomeness Jane McGonigal talks about in her TEDtalk. As nice as it is to see someone recognizing gaming awesomeness, it’s also important to recognize that gaming intensity requires accessing a full range of emotional response in players. These responses can often seem cruel or unusual to non-gamers.
Gaming’s all-in philosophy is completely counter to the risk-averse, failure-follows you approach of education. Rather than being allow to epically fail, suffer and re-engage, education does everything it can to ensure that epic failures (or failures of any kind) never occur. Failure is increasingly impossible to achieve in the class room, and the result moves students further and further away from the culture of one of their richest learning environments.
If you want intense engagement then you need to offer access to a full spectrum of emotion, and a real and meaningful opportunity for failure, but you can’t be an ass about it and hang that failure around a learner’s neck forever. Until we grasp this simple truth found in the forge of intense gaming, we’re going to appear increasingly foreign to our students, and they are going to keep learning more from World of Warcraft than they ever will from a teacher.
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html (lies debunked about gaming)
http://janemcgonigal.com/: a great look at the positive power gaming can produce (I’m arguing here about how it’s negative aspects still offer useful truths too)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/genX.html: an interesting summary of the gamer generation
http://www.avantgame.com/: recognizing the power of gaming