Untitled

WHAT VIDEO GAMES

HAVE TO TEACH US ABOUT

LEARNING AND LITERACY

James Paul Gee

WHAT VIDEO GAMES

HAVE TO TEACH US ABOUT

LEARNING AND LITERACY

JAMES PAUL GEE

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WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO TEACH US ABOUT LEARNING AND

LITERACY

manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief

quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published in hardcover in 2003 by Palgrave Macmillan

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ISBN 1-4039-6538-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gee, James Paul.

What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy / James Paul

Gee.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-4039-6538-2

1. Video games—Psychological aspects. 2. Computer games—

Psychological aspects. 3. Learning, Psychology of. 4. Visual literacy.

5. Video games and children. I. Title: What video games have to teach us

about learning and literacy. II. Title.

GV1469.3 .G44 2003

794.8’01’9—dc21

2002038153

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design by Letra Libre.

First PALGRAVE MACMILLAN paperback edition: May 2004

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Printed in the United States of America.

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I dedicate this book to my six-year-old son, Sam. I originally tried

to play his computer games so I could teach him how to play

them, but in the end, things worked out just the reverse and he

taught me how to play. More, he taught me to take learning and

playing games seriously, all the while having fun. I also dedicate

the book to my twenty-two-year-old son, Justin. He didn’t play

computer or video games much as a kid, though he had no trou-

ble thoroughly trouncing me when we last visited an arcade.

Justin’s early fascination with StarWars was my ﬁrst guide, Sam’s

with Pokemon, my second guide, to the powerful and creative

learning people can bring to the aspects of “popular culture” with

which they choose to identify and which they often choose to

transform for their own ends. The children, teenagers, and

neotenic adults, including my identical twin brother, and now

myself, who play computer and video games were my third.

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CONTENTS

1. Introduction: 36 Ways to Learn a Video Game 1

2. Semiotic Domains:

Is Playing Video Games a “Waste of Time”? 13

3. Learning and Identity:

What Does It Mean to Be a Half-Elf? 51

4. Situated Meaning and Learning:

What Should You Do After You Have

Destroyed the Global Conspiracy? 73

5. Telling and Doing:

Why Doesn’t Lara Croft Obey Professor Von Croy? 113

6. Cultural Models:

Do You Want to Be the Blue Sonic or the Dark Sonic? 139

7. The Social Mind:

How Do You Get Your Corpse Back After You’ve Died? 169

8. Conclusion: Duped or Not? 199

Appendix: The 36 Learning Principles 207

References 213

Index 221

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INTRODUCTION:

36 WAYS TO LEARN A VIDEO GAME

WANT TO TALK ABOUT VIDEO GAMES

—

YES

EVEN VIOLENT VIDEO

games—and say some positive things about them. By “video games” I mean

both games played on game platforms (such as the Sony PlayStation 2, the

Nintendo GameCube, or Microsoft’s XBox) and games played on comput-

ers. So as not to keep saying “video and computer games” all the time, I will

just say “video games.” I am mainly concerned with the sorts of video

games in which the player takes on the role of a fantasy character moving

through an elaborate world, solving various problems (violently or not), or

in which the player builds and maintains some complex entity, like an army,

a city, or even a whole civilization. There are, of course, lots of other types

of video games.

But, ﬁrst, I need to say something about my previous work and how and

why I arrived here to discuss video games. In two earlier books, Social Linguis-

tics and Literacies and The Social Mind, I argued that two things that, at ﬁrst

sight, look to be “mental” achievements, namely literacy and thinking, are, in

reality, also and primarily social achievements. (See the Bibliographic Note at

the end of this chapter for references to the literature relevant to this chapter.)

When you read, you are always reading something in some way. You are never

just reading “in general” but not reading anything in particular. For example,

you can read the Bible as history or literature or as a self-help guide or in many

other ways. So, too, with any other text, whether legal tract, comic book, essay,

or novel. Different people can interpret each type of text differently.

When you think, you must think about something in some way. You are

never just thinking “in general” but not thinking anything in particular. The

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argument about thinking is, in fact, the same as the argument about reading.

For example, you can think about people who kill themselves to set off a

bomb, in pursuit of some cause they believe in, as suicide bombers, murder-

ers, terrorists, freedom ﬁghters, heroes, psychotics, or in many other differ-

ent ways. Different people can read the world differently just as they can read

different types of texts differently.

So, then, what determines how you read or think about some particular

thing? Certainly not random chemicals or electrical events in your brain, al-

though you do most certainly need a brain to read or think. Rather, what de-

termines this is your own experiences in interacting with other people who

are members of various sorts of social groups, whether these are biblical

scholars, radical lawyers, peace activists, family members, fellow ethnic group

or church members, or whatever. These groups work, through their various

social practices, to encourage people to read and think in certain ways, and

not others, about certain sorts of texts and things.

Does this mean you are not “free” to read and think as you like? No—

you can always align yourself with new people and new groups—there is no

shortage. But it does mean you cannot read or think outside of any group

whatsoever. You cannot assign asocial and private meanings to texts and

things, meanings that only you are privy to and that you cannot even be sure

you remember correctly from occasion to occasion as you read or think about

the same thing, since as a social isolate (at least in regard to meaning) you

cannot, in fact, check your memory with anyone else. The philosopher Lud-

wig Wittgenstein made this case long ago in his famous argument against the

possibility of “private languages.” There are no “private minds” either.

Does all this mean that “anything goes” and “nothing is true”? Of course

not. We humans have goals and purposes, and for some goals and purposes

some groups’ ways of reading and thinking work better than do others. But it

does mean that things are not “true” apart from any purpose or goal whatso-

ever. In the world of physics, as an academic area, if you have pushed your

stalled car until you are dripping with sweat but the car has not budged, you

have done no “work” (given how physicists use this word), but in the world of

“everyday” people, people not attempting at the moment to be physicists or

do physics, you have worked very hard indeed. Neither meaning is right or

wrong. Each belongs to a different social world. However, if you want to do

physics—for good or ill—it’s best to use the word “work” the way physicists

do. In that case, they are “right.”

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These viewpoints seem obvious to me. They will seem so to some read-

ers as well. Nonetheless, they occasion great controversy. Furthermore, they

are not the views about reading and thinking on which most of our schools

today operate. Take reading, for instance. We know a great deal about the

psycholinguistics of reading—that is, about reading as a mental act taking

part in an individual’s head. These views strongly inform how reading is

taught in school. And there is nothing wrong with this, save that psycholin-

guistics is only part—in my view the smaller part—of the reading picture. We

know much less about reading as a social achievement and as part and parcel

of a great many different social practices connected to a great many different

social groups that contest how things should be read and thought about.

The same is true of thinking. Cognitive science has taught us a great deal

about thinking as a mental act taking part in an individual’s head. For various

reasons, however, these views less strongly inform how teaching and learning

work in today’s schools than they used to. This is so, in part, because the

views about thinking current in cognitive science stress the importance of ac-

tive inquiry and deep conceptual understanding, things that are not politi-

cally popular any longer in schools, driven as they are today by standardized

tests and skill-and-drill curricula devoted to “the basics.”

Nonetheless, it is true that we know much less about thinking as a social

achievement and as part and parcel of a great many different social practices

connected to a great many different social groups that contest how things

should be read and thought about. For example, it turns out that botanists

and landscape architects classify and think about trees quite differently. Their

different contexts, social practices, and purposes shape their thinking (and

reading) in different ways. Neither way is “right” or “wrong” in general. We

know little about how social groups, social practices, and institutions shape

and norm thinking as a social achievement, that is, about how they shape

human minds when those minds are being botanists or landscape architects,

though not when these same people are being other things.

And this last point is crucial. Since reading and thinking are social

achievements connected to social groups, we can all read and think in differ-

ent ways when we read and think as members (or as if we are members) of dif-

ferent groups. I, for one, know well what it is like to read the Bible differently

as theology, as literature, and as a religious skeptic, thanks to different experi-

ences and affiliations in my life thus far. Any speciﬁc way of reading and think-

ing is, in fact, a way of being in the world, a way of being a certain “kind of

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person,” a way of taking on a certain sort of identity. In that sense, each of us

has multiple identities. Even a priest can read the Bible “as a priest,” “as a lit-

erary critic,” “as a historian,” even “as a male” or “ as an African American”

(priest, literary critic, historian, or ethnic group member), even if he chooses

to privilege one way of reading—one identity—over another.

This does not mean we all have multiple personality disorder. We each

have a core identity that relates to all our other identities (as a woman, femi-

nist, wife, ethnic of a certain sort, biologist, Catholic, etc.). We have this core

identity thanks to being in one and the same body over time and thanks to

being able to tell ourselves a reasonably (but only reasonably) coherent life

story in which we are the “hero” (or, at least, central character). But as we

take on new identities or transform old ones, this core identity changes and

transforms as well. We are ﬂuid creatures in the making, since we make our-

selves socially through participation with others in various groups. Social

practices and social groups are always changing, some slowly, some at a faster

pace (and the pace of change, for many social practices and groups, gets faster

and faster in our contemporary high-tech global world).

Although the viewpoints I have sketched above may (or may not) seem

obvious, they have taken me a lot of time to work on and, in the act, I have

become if not “old,” then “older,” what we might call a late-middle-age

“baby boomer.” I was born in 1948. So, for heaven’s sake, what I am doing

playing video games and, worse yet, writing about it? The short answer, but

not really the whole answer, since I came to this desire after playing the

games, was that I wanted to say about learning just what I have said above

about reading and thinking.

The longer answer is this: When my six-year-old was four, I used to sit

next to him as he played video games, starting with Winnie the Pooh and mov-

ing on to Freddy Fish, Pajama Sam, and Spy Fox. I was intrigued. One day I

decided I wanted to help my child play Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When

It’s Dark Outside. This is a game where the player (as the comic book super-

hero “Pajama Sam”—a character who is “just” the small boy Sam pretending

to be a superhero in order to increase his courage) must solve problems in the

“Land of Darkness” to meet “Darkness” and tame him, so that the player

(Sam) need no longer be afraid of the dark. A typical problem in the game is

deciding how to convince a talking wooden boat that wood ﬂoats, so that the

boat, which is afraid of water, can feel free to go “boating” on the water and

take Pajama Sam where he needs to go. I decided to play through the game

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by myself so I could “coach” my child as he played. (Now he charges me a

dollar any time I attempt to “coach” him when he is playing a video game—

he calls it “bossing him around” and “telling him what to do when he can ﬁg-

ure it out for himself.”)

When I played the game I was quite surprised to ﬁnd out it was fairly

long and pretty challenging, even for an adult. Yet a four-year-old was willing

to put in this time and face this challenge—and enjoy it, to boot. I thought, as

someone who has worked in the second half of his career in education (the

ﬁrst half was devoted to theoretical linguistics), “Wouldn’t it be great if kids

were willing to put in this much time on task on such challenging material in

school and enjoy it so much?”

So I decided to buy and play an adult game (“adult” here means the game

is played by teenagers on up; video-game players tend to be anywhere be-

tween 3 years old and 39). I somewhat arbitrarily picked the game The New

Adventures of the Time Machine, a game involving adventure, problem solving,

and shooting (based loosely on H. G. Wells), knowing nearly nothing about

video games. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. This game,

like nearly all such games, takes a great many hours to play. Many good video

games can take 50 to 100 hours to win, even for good players. Furthermore,

it was—for me—profoundly difficult.

In fact, this was my ﬁrst revelation. This game—and this turned out to

be true of video games more generally—requires the player to learn and

think in ways in which I am not adept. Suddenly all my baby-boomer ways of

learning and thinking, for which I had heretofore received ample rewards,

did not work.

My second realization came soon after, when at the end of a day in which

I had played Time Machine for eight straight hours, I found myself at a party,

with a splitting headache from too much video motion, sitting next to a 300-

pound plasma physicist. I heard myself telling the physicist that I found play-

ing Time Machine a “life-enhancing experience,” without even knowing what

I meant by that. Fortunately, plasma physicists are extremely tolerant of

human variation. (The plasma that physicists deal with is not, as he told me, a

product from blood but a state of matter; when I asked him why he had not

brought any to the party, he explained to me that plasma is so unstable and

dangerous that if he had brought any, there would have been no party.)

Oddly enough, then, confronting what was, for me, a new form of learn-

ing and thinking was both frustrating and life enhancing. This was a state

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that I could remember from my days in graduate school and earlier in my ca-

reer (and when I changed careers midstream). Having long routinized my

ways of learning and thinking, however, I had forgotten this state. It brought

back home to me, forcefully, that learning is or should be both frustrating

and life enhancing. The key is ﬁnding ways to make hard things life enhanc-

ing so that people keep going and don’t fall back on learning and thinking

only what is simple and easy.

My third realization followed from these other two. I eventually ﬁnished

The New Adventures of the Time Machine and moved onto Deus Ex, a game I

chose because it had won Game of the Year on many Internet game sites. Deus

Ex is yet longer and harder than Time Machine. I found myself asking the fol-

lowing question: “How, in heaven’s name, do they sell many of these games

when they are so long and hard?” I soon discovered, of course, that good

video games (like Deus Ex) sell millions of copies. Indeed, the video-game in-

dustry makes as much or more money each year than the ﬁlm industry.

So here we have something that is long, hard, and challenging. However,

you cannot play a game if you cannot learn it. If no one plays a game, it does

not sell, and the company that makes it goes broke. Of course, designers

could keep making the games shorter and simpler to facilitate learning.

That’s often what schools do. But no, in this case, game designers keep mak-

ing the games longer and more challenging (and introduce new things in new

ones), and still manage to get them learned. How?

If you think about it, you see a Darwinian sort of thing going on here. If

a game, for whatever reason, has good principles of learning built into its de-

sign—that is, if it facilitates learning in good ways—then it gets played and

can sell a lot of copies, if it is otherwise good as well. Other games can build

on these principles and, perhaps, do them one step better. If a game has poor

learning principles built into its design, then it won’t get learned or played

and won’t sell well. Its designers will seek work elsewhere. In the end, then,

video games represent a process, thanks to what Marx called the “creativity of

capitalism,” that leads to better and better designs for good learning and, in-

deed, good learning of hard and challenging things.

It would seem intriguing, then, to investigate what these principles of

learning are. How are good video games designed to enhance getting them-

selves learned—learned well and quickly so people can play and enjoy them

even when they are long and hard? What we are really looking for here is

this: the theory of human learning built into good video games.

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Of course, there is an academic ﬁeld devoted to studying how human be-

ings learn best and well, namely the ﬁeld of cognitive science. So we can,

then, compare the theory of learning in good video games to theories of

learning in cognitive science. Who’s got the best theory? Well, it turns out

that the theory of learning in good video games is close to what I believe are

the best theories of learning in cognitive science. And this is not because

game designers read academic texts on learning. Most of them don’t. They

spent too much of their time in high school and beyond playing with com-

puters and playing games.

And, too, there is a key place—though hardly the only one—where

learning takes place: school. So, we also can ask how the theory of learning in

good video games compares to how teaching and learning work in school.

Here we face a mixed bag, indeed. On one hand, the theory of learning in

good video games ﬁts well with what are I believe to be the best sorts of sci-

ence instruction in school. On the other hand, this sort of science instruction

is rare and getting yet rarer as testing and skill-and-drill retake our schools.

In turn, the theories of learning one would infer from looking at schools

today comport very poorly with the theory of learning in good video games.

If the principles of learning in good video games are good, then better

theories of learning are embedded in the video games many children in ele-

mentary and particularly in high school play than in the schools they attend.

Furthermore, the theory of learning in good video games ﬁts better with the

modern, high-tech, global world today’s children and teenagers live in than

do the theories (and practices) of learning that they see in school. Today’s

world is very different from the world baby boomers like me grew up in and

on which we have based many of our theories. Is it a wonder, then, that by

high school, very often both good students and bad ones, rich ones and poor

ones, don’t much like school?

This book discusses 36 principles of learning (individually in each chap-

ter and listed together in the appendix) that I argue are built into good video

games. From the way I opened this introduction, you already know that,

while this book deals with learning, it will most certainly deal with learners

(players) embedded in a material and social world. How could it be other-

wise? After all, they are playing a game. Video games—like many other

games—are inherently social, though, in video games, sometimes the other

players are fantasy creatures endowed, by the computer, with artiﬁcial intelli-

gence and sometimes they are real people playing out fantasy roles.

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However, this book has another goal as well. It seeks to use the discus-

sion of video games to introduce the reader to three important areas of cur-

rent research and to relate these areas together. One of these areas is work on

“situated cognition” (i.e., thinking as tied to a body that has experiences in

the world). This work argues that human learning is not just a matter of what

goes on inside people’s heads but is fully embedded in (situated within) a ma-

terial, social, and cultural world. Another one of these areas is the so-called

New Literacy Studies, a body of work that argues that reading and writing

should be viewed not only as mental achievements going on inside people’s

heads but also as social and cultural practices with economic, historical, and

political implications.

Obviously, these two bodies of work have much in common, though their

advocates often disagree with each other over details. People in New Literacy

Studies often distrust psychology more than people working in the area of sit-

uated cognition. And, too, people working in New Literacy Studies tend to be

more “political” than people working in the area of situated cognition.

The third area is work on so-called connectionism, a view that stresses the

ways in which human beings are powerful pattern-recognizers. This body of

work argues that humans don’t often think best when they attempt to reason

via logic and general abstract principles detached from experience. Rather,

they think best when they reason on the basis of patterns they have picked up

through their actual experiences in the world, patterns that, over time, can be-

come generalized but that are still rooted in speciﬁc areas of experience.

This view of the mind is obviously one way to spell out what it means to

say thinking and reasoning are “situated.” I argue that it is one way to spell

out how and why reading, writing, and thinking are inextricably linked to so-

cial and cultural practices. I don’t actually use the term “connectionism” in

the book; instead I simply talk about what it means to discover patterns in

our experience and what it means to be “networked” with other people and

with various tools and technologies (like computers and the Internet) so that

one can behave “smarter” than one actually is.

None of these three areas—work on situated cognition, New Literacy

Studies, and a pattern-recognition view of the mind—represents a viewpoint

that is universally agreed on. Many disagree with each one and, indeed, all

three. Furthermore, my “introduction” to these areas, via video games, is

highly selective. People who know little about these areas will pick up only

the big picture. People who know a lot about them will quickly realize that I

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am developing my own perspectives in each of these areas, while many other

perspectives exist as well. Nonetheless, I believe that these three areas cap-

ture central truths about the human mind and human learning and that these

truths are well represented in the ways in which good video games are

learned and played.

These truths are often less well represented in today’s schools. And this

book is about schools as well. It is a plea to build schooling on better princi-

ples of learning. If we have to learn this from video games, and not from a

ﬁeld with as boring a name as cognitive science, then so be it. I know that

many people, especially on the right wing of the political spectrum, will ﬁnd

this idea absurd. So be that as well. (My book The New Work Order, written

with Glynda Hull and Colin Lankshear, is, in part, about why the old distinc-

tions between “right” and “left” don’t make much sense anymore in the mod-

ern global world of the so-called new capitalism.)

Let me end this introduction with a few short points. First, while I talk a

good deal about actual video games, I really intend to discuss the potential of

video games. The games get better and more sophisticated all the time and at

a rapid pace. Much of what I have to say here will simply get “truer” as the

games get even better. This is my consolation for the fact that any games I

mention will be, for some players, “out of date,” replaced by newer ones by

the time anyone reads this book.

Second, I am aware that many readers will not have played—or will not

currently be playing—video games, especially the type I discuss. I will try to

be as clear and explicit as I can about the games, so that all readers can form a

picture of what I am talking about.

Readers who want to explore the many types of video games, see pictures

from them, even download demonstrations of various games, and otherwise

ﬁnd out more about them can log on to a wide array of Internet sites devoted

to video games. Any game I mention in this book can be thoroughly investi-

gated in this way. Here are some sites I can recommend, though there are

many others: gamezone.com, gamedex.com, pcgamer.com, gamepro.com,

gamespot.com, ign.com, MrFixitOnline.com, womengamers.com, and game-

critics.com. Joystick101.org offers up-to-the-minute articles and critical per-

spectives, beyond reviews, about games and controversial issues about games.

Third, I am not, in this book, meaning to imply that I think “old” baby

boomers like me ought to run out and start playing video games. Many will

ﬁnd the games too hard and frustrating, without the personal payoff that

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makes for continued practice. Nonetheless, we can learn a lot from those

young people who play games, if only we take them and their games seri-

ously. And, indeed, I am always struck by how many people, even some of the

liberal advocates of multiculturalism, readily decry and seek to override peo-

ple’s cultures when these cultures are popular peer-based ones centered

around things like video games. Let it be said, too, having mentioned multi-

culturalism, that a great many African Americans love video games, just as do

a great many Anglo Americans and everyone else in between. And, yes, poor

children and teenagers do play video games, even if they have to ﬁnd a com-

puter or game console at school, in a library, or community center, or at a

friend’s house. There are important issues of equity here, though, and I dis-

cuss these at the end of the book.

Finally, there is this: Two issues have taken up the vast majority of writ-

ing about video games: violence (e.g., shooting and killing in games, depic-

tions of crime) and gender (e.g., whether and how much girls play, whether

and how video games depict women poorly). I have nothing whatsoever to

say about these issues in this book. They are well discussed elsewhere. I do,

however, discuss, in chapter 6, some very heated social and political issues

that arise when considering video games at a time when, thanks to free pow-

erful software, almost any group can design a sophisticated 3-D video game

to represent its own values and interests.

Though they are not important for the basic argument of this book, my

own views on the violence and gender issues are as follows: The issue of vio-

lence and video games is widely overblown (especially in a world where real

people are regularly really killing real people in wars across the world that we

watch on television). Debate over violence in video games is one more way in

which we want to talk about technology (or drugs, for that matter) doing

things to people rather than talking about the implications of people’s overall

social and economic contexts.

In any case, shooting is an easy form of social interaction (!) to program.

As realistic forms of conversation become more computationally possible (a

very hard task), I predict that shooting will be less important and talking

more important in many games, even shooter games. Even now, many shoot-

ing games stress stealth, story, and social interaction more than they used to.

Furthermore, there are many categories of very sophisticated video

games—simulations and some strategy games—that do not involve any vio-

lence at all. Nonetheless, I base my arguments in this book in part on shooter

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games, precisely because they are the “hardest” case. It’s pretty clear that a

simulation game (like SimCity) involves important learning principles, if only

because many scientists themselves use such simulation techniques. How-

ever, it is easier to miss and dismiss the learning principles in other sorts of

games. But they are very much there, nonetheless.

As to gender: I have no doubt that video games, like most other popular

cultural forms, overstress young, buxom, and beautiful women in their con-

tent. Furthermore, with several major exceptions, these woman are often not

the main characters in the games. However, as more girls and women play

games, this will change. And, indeed, in role-playing games, you can design

your own character. In a game I am playing at the present time (Dungeon

Siege), I am an African American female, though I could only make my skin

light black and my body fairly shapely; wider choices will, I am sure, be avail-

able as time goes on. (I personally don’t want to play in a fantasy world as a

balding, overweight, aging white male, since I get plenty of opportunity to do

that in the real world, but, then, my identical twin was upset, when he was

designing his character for the game that he could not design such a charac-

ter as the hero.) Games, of course, reﬂect the culture we live in—a culture we

can change.

As to the issue of girls and women playing games, they are quickly catch-

ing up with the boys and men, though they often play different games (e.g.,

The Sims). Nevertheless, there are Internet sites devoted to women who play

the sorts of shooter games more commonly associated with males. When we

academics feel our interests deﬁne the world, we should keep in mind the fol-

lowing fact: The largest category of video-game players are middle-age

women playing video card games alone and together on the Internet. I have

nothing here to say about card games. That just shows that we academics still

have much to learn about the “real” world. I guess that’s why we keep trying.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In order not to clutter the text with references, I will not insert references directly

into the text of each chapter but will instead give citations to the literature in a biblio-

graphical note at the end of each chapter.

Poole 2000 and Herz 1996 are good analyses of the design of video games and

their role in our culture. Poole 2000 discusses the statistics on who plays what video

games, as well as the fact that the video game industry makes more money in a given

year than does the movie industry. Kent 2001 is an entertaining history of video

games. Greenfield 1984 and Loftus and Loftus 1983 are good early discussions of

the role of learning and thinking in v

ideo games. King 2002, prepared for a

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museum exhibit on video games, contains a wide array of interesting articles on all

aspects of the games.

Pinker 1999 is a good, basic introduction to cognitive science. For more on cog-

nitive science, especially as it applies to schools and learning, see Bransford, Brown, &

Cocking 1999; Bruer 1993; Gardner 1991; and Pelligrino, Chudowksy, & Glaser

2001. These sources discuss work on situated cognition, as well as a number of other

areas. For additional work on situated cognition, see Brooks 2002; Brown, Collins, &

Dugid 1989; Clark 1997; Gee 1996; Lave 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991; Rogoff 1990;

and Tomasello 1999

. The fact that botanists and landscape architects classify and

think about trees differently is taken from Medlin, Lynch, & Coley 1997.

For a discussion of good, conceptually based science instruction in schools, see

Bruer 1993; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt 1997; and diSessa 2000.

For introductions to the New Literacy Studies, see Barton 1994; Gee 1996; and

Street 1995. For work on connectionism and the human mind as a pattern recognizer,

see Clark 1989, 1993; Gee 1996; Margolis 1987, 1993; and Rumelhart, McClelland,

& the PDP Research Group 1986.

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SEMIOTIC DOMAINS:

IS PLAYING VIDEO GAMES

A “WASTE OF TIME”?

LITERACY AND SEMIOTIC DOMAINS

HEN PEOPLE LEARN TO PLAY VIDEO GAMES

THEY ARE LEARNING

a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word “literacy” is normally

used. Traditionally, people think of literacy as the ability to read and write.

Why, then, should we think of literacy more broadly, in regard to video

games or anything else, for that matter? There are two reasons.

First, in the modern world, language is not the only important commu-

nicational system. Today images, symbols, graphs, diagrams, artifacts, and

many other visual symbols are particularly signiﬁcant. Thus, the idea of dif-

ferent types of “visual literacy” would seem to be an important one. For ex-

ample, being able to “read” the images in advertising is one type of visual

literacy. And, of course, there are different ways to read such images, ways

that are more or less aligned with the intentions and interests of the advertis-

ers. Knowing how to read interior designs in homes, modernist art in muse-

ums, and videos on MTV are other forms of visual literacy.

Furthermore, very often today words and images of various sorts are jux-

taposed and integrated in a variety of ways. In newspaper and magazines as

well as in textbooks, images take up more and more of the space alongside

words. In fact, in many modern high school and college textbooks in the sci-

ences images not only take up more space, they now carry meanings that are

independent of the words in the text. If you can’t read these images, you will

not be able to recover their meanings from the words in the text as was more

usual in the past.

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In such multimodal texts (texts that mix words and images), the images

often communicate different things from the words. And the combination of

the two modes communicates things that neither of the modes does sepa-

rately. Thus, the idea of different sorts of multimodal literacy seems an im-

portant one. Both modes and multimodality go far beyond images and words

to include sounds, music, movement, bodily sensations, and smells.

None of this news today, of course. We very obviously live in a world

awash with images. It is our ﬁrst answer to the question why we should think

of literacy more broadly. The second answer is this: Even though reading and

writing seem so central to what literacy means traditionally, reading and writ-

ing are not such general and obvious matters as they might at ﬁrst seem.

After all, we never just read or write; rather, we always read or write something

in some way.

There are many different ways of reading and writing. We don’t read or

write newspapers, legal tracts, essays in literary criticism, poetry, rap songs,

and on through a nearly endless list in the same way. Each of these domains

has its own rules and requirements. Each is a culturally and historically sepa-

rate way of reading and writing, and, in that sense, a different literacy. Fur-

thermore, in each case, if we want to “break the rules” and read against the

grain of the text—for the purposes of critique, for instance—we have to do so

in different ways, usually with some relatively deep knowledge of how to read

such texts “according to the rules.”

So there are different ways to read different types of texts. Literacy is

multiple, then, in the sense that the legal literacy needed for reading law

books is not the same as the literacy needed for reading physics texts or su-

perhero comic books. And we should not be too quick to dismiss the latter

form of literacy. Many a superhero comic is replete with post-Freudian irony

of a sort that would make a modern literary critic’s heart beat fast and confuse

any otherwise normal adult. Literacy, then, even as traditionally conceived to

involve only print, is not a unitary thing but a multiple matter. There are,

even in regard to printed texts and even leaving aside images and multimodal

texts, different “literacies.”

Once we see this multiplicity of literacy (literacies), we realize that when

we think about reading and writing, we have to think beyond print. Reading

and writing in any domain, whether it is law, rap songs, academic essays, su-

perhero comics, or whatever, are not just ways of decoding print, they are

also caught up with and in social practices. Literacy in any domain is actually

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not worth much if one knows nothing about the social practices of which that

literacy is but a part. And, of course, these social practices involve much more

than just an engagement with print.

One can know a good deal about a social practice—such as arguing be-

fore the Supreme Court, carrying out an experiment in nuclear physics, or

memorializing an event in gang history through graffiti—without actually

being able to participate in the social practice. But knowing about a social

practice always involves recognizing various distinctive ways of acting, inter-

acting, valuing, feeling, knowing, and using various objects and technologies

that constitute the social practice.

Ta k e s o m e t h ing so simple as the following sentence about basketball:

“The guard dribbled down court, held up two ﬁngers, and passed to the open

man.” You may very well know what every word in this sentence means in

terms of dictionary deﬁnitions, but you cannot read the sentence with any real

worthwhile understanding unless you can recognize, in some sense (perhaps

only in simulations in your mind), guards, dribbling, basketballs, open men,

and basketball courts. But to be able to recognize these things is already to

know a good deal about basketball as a game, that is, as a particular sort of so-

cial practice. The same thing is equally true about any sentence or text about

the law, comic books, a branch of science, or anything else for that matter.

We can go further. One’s understanding of the sentence “The guard

dribbled down court, held up two ﬁngers, and passed to the open man” is dif-

ferent—in some sense, deeper and better—the more one knows and can rec-

ognize about the social practice (game) of basketball. For example, if you

know a good bit about basketball, you may see that one possible meaning of

this sentence is that the guard signaled a particular play by holding up two

ﬁngers and then passed to the player the play left momentarily unguarded.

But then this brings us to another important point. While you don’t need

to be able to enact a particular social practice (e.g., play basketball or argue

before a court) to be able to understand texts from or about that social prac-

tice, you can potentially give deeper meanings to those texts if you can. This

claim amounts to arguing that producers (people who can actually engage in

a social practice) potentially make better consumers (people who can read or

understand texts from or about the social practice).

A corollary of this claim is this: Writers (in the sense of people who can

write texts that are recognizably part of a particular social practice) potentially

make better readers (people who can understand texts from or about a given

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social practice). Note that by “writers” here I do not mean people who can

just write down words appropriate to a particular practice such as ﬁeld biol-

ogy. I mean people who can write a text that ﬁeld biologists would recognize

as an acceptable text within their family of social practices.

Why do I say “potentially” here? Because there is a paradox about pro-

ducers. On one hand, producers are deeply enough embedded in their social

practices that they can understand the texts associated with those practices

quite well. On the other hand, producers are often so deeply embedded in

their social practices that they take the meanings and values of the texts asso-

ciated with those practices for granted in an unquestioning way. One key

question for deep learning and good education, then, is how to get producer-

like learning and knowledge, but in a reﬂective and critical way.

All these claims are pretty obvious. It is, thus, fascinating that they are so

often ignored in schools. In school, many times children are expected to read

texts with little or no knowledge about any social practices within which those

texts are used. They are rarely allowed to engage in an actual social practice in

ways that are recognizable to “insiders” (e.g., ﬁeld biologists) as meaningful

and acceptable, before and as they read texts relevant to the practice.

Indeed, children are regularly given reading tests that ask general, fac-

tual, and dictionarylike questions about various texts with no regard for the

fact that these texts fall into different genres (i.e., they are different kinds of

texts) connected to different sorts of social practices. Children often can an-

swer such questions, but they learn and know nothing about the genres and

social practices that are, in the end, the heart and soul of literacy.

Schools will continue to operate this way until they (and reading tests)

move beyond ﬁxating on reading as silently saying the sounds of letters and

words and being able to answer general, factual, and dictionarylike questions

about written texts. You do have to silently say the sounds of letters and

words when you read (or, at least, this greatly speeds up reading). You do

have do be able to answer general, factual, and dictionarylike questions about

what you read: This means you know the “literal” meaning of the text. But

what so many people—unfortunately so many educators and policymakers—

fail to see is that if this is all you can do, then you can’t really read. You will fail

to be able to read well and appropriately in contexts associated with speciﬁc

types of texts and speciﬁc types of social practices.

For example, consider once again our sentence about basketball: “The

guard dribbled down court, held up two ﬁngers, and passed to the open

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man.” A typical reading test would ask a question like this: “What did the

guard do to the ball?” and give “bounce it” as one of the choices. Unfortu-

nately, you can answer such general, factual, dictionarylike questions and re-

ally have no idea what the sentence means in the domain of basketball. When

we see that the same thing applies to sentences from science or any other

school subject, we immediately see why so many children pass early reading

tests but cannot learn later on in the subject areas.

This phenomenon is so pervasive that it has been given a name by re-

searchers: “the fourth-grade slump.” It is called this because, in the past, the

ﬁrst three years of school were largely devoted to learning to read (in the

sense of being able to decode print and get the literal meanings of texts), and

fourth grade was where children began to read to learn (in the subject areas).

However, very often today children are being asked to read to learn things like

science and math from ﬁrst or second grade on, at least in affluent schools.

However, let’s leave school aside, and return to our main question as to

why we should be willing to broaden how we talk about literacy. I can now

note that talking about literacy and literacies in this expanded, nontraditional

way (as multiple and connected to social practices) leads us at once to an in-

teresting dilemma: What do we want to say of someone, for instance, who

can understand and even compose rap songs (words and music), but cannot

read or write language or musical notation?

Of course, in traditional terms, this person is illiterate in terms of both

language and musical notation. But yet he or she is able to understand and

compose in a language style that is distinctively different from everyday lan-

guage and in a musical form that is distinctively different from other forms of

music. We might want to say that the person is literate in the domain of rap

songs (as a distinctive domain combining language and music in certain char-

acteristic ways), though the person is not print literate or musical-notation

literate.

Cases like this display the limitations of thinking about literacy ﬁrst and

foremost in terms of print. We need, rather, to think ﬁrst in terms of what I

call semiotic domains and only then get to literacy in the more traditional

terms of print literacy. “Semiotic” here is just a fancy way of saying we want

to talk about all sorts of different things that can take on meaning, such as

images, sounds, gestures, movements, graphs, diagrams, equations, objects,

even people like babies, midwives, and mothers, and not just words. All of

these things are signs (symbols, representations, whatever term you want to

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use) that “stand for” (take on) different meanings in different situations, con-

texts, practices, cultures, and historical periods. For example, the image of a

cross means Christ (or Christ’s death) in the context of Christian social prac-

tices, and it means the four points of the compass (north, south, west, and

east) in the context of other social practices (e.g., in some African religions).

By a semiotic domain I mean any set of practices that recruits one or

more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols,

sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of

meanings. Here are some examples of semiotic domains: cellular biology,

postmodern literary criticism, ﬁrst-person-shooter video games, high-fash-

ion advertisements, Roman Catholic theology, modernist painting, mid-

wifery, rap music, wine connoisseurship—through a nearly endless, motley,

and ever-changing list.

Our sentence about basketball—“The guard dribbled down court, held

up two ﬁngers, and passed to the open man”—is a sentence from the semiotic

domain of basketball. It might seen odd to call basketball a semiotic domain.

However, in basketball, particular words, actions, objects, and images take on

distinctive meanings. In basketball, “dribble” does not mean drool; a pick (an

action where an offensive player positions him or herself so as to block a de-

fensive player guarding one of his or her teammates) means that some defen-

sive player must quickly switch to guard the now-unguarded offensive player;

and the wide circle on each end of the court means that players who shoot

from beyond it get three points instead of two if they score a basket.

If you don’t know these meanings—cannot read these signs—then you

can’t “read” (understand) basketball. The matter seems fairly inconsequential

when we are talking about basketball. However, it quickly seems more conse-

quential when we are talking about the semiotic domain of some type of sci-

ence being studied in school. Equally here, if you don’t know how to read the

distinctive signs (words, actions, objects, and images), you can’t read (under-

stand) that sort of science.

If we think ﬁrst in terms of semiotic domains and not in terms of reading

and writing as traditionally conceived, we can say that people are (or are not)

literate (partially or fully) in a domain if they can recognize (the equivalent of

“reading”) and/or produce (the equivalent of “writing”) meanings in the do-

main. We can reserve the term “print literate” for talking about people who

can read and/or write a language like English or Russian, though here, still,

we will want to insist that there are different ways to read and write different

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things connected to different social practices so, in that sense, there are mul-

tiple print literacies. Thus, the rap artist who could understand and compose

rap songs but not read print or musical notation is literate in the semiotic do-

main of rap music but not print literate.

In the modern world, print literacy is not enough. People need to be lit-

erate in a great variety of different semiotic domains. If these domains in-

volve print, people often need the print bits, of course. However, the vast

majority of domains involve semiotic (symbolic, representational) resources

besides print and some don’t involve print as a resource at all. Furthermore,

and more important, people need to be able to learn to be literate in new

semiotic domains throughout their lives. If our modern, global, high-tech,

and science-driven world does anything, it certainly gives rise to new semi-

otic domains and transforms old ones at an ever faster rate.

This book deals with video games as a semiotic domain, actually as a

family of related, but different domains, since there are different types or

genres of video games (e.g., ﬁrst-person shooter games, fantasy role-playing

games, real-time strategy games, simulation games, etc.). People can be liter-

ate, or not, in one or more of these video-game semiotic domains. However,

in talking about learning and literacy in regard to video games, I hope to de-

velop, as well, a perspective on learning, literacy, and semiotic domains that

applies more generally to domains beyond video games.

However, if we want to take video games seriously as a family of semiotic

domains in which one can learn to be literate, we face an immediate problem.

Many people who don’t play video games, especially older people, are sure to

say that playing video games is “a waste of time.” In the next section, I sketch

out one version of what I think this claim often amounts to, using a speciﬁc

example involving a six year old child.

LEARNING AND THE PROBLEM OF CONTENT

To spell out what I think the claim that playing video games is a waste of time

often means, I need ﬁrst to tell you about the game the six-year-old boy was

playing, a game called “Pikmin.” Pikmin is a game for the Nintendo Game-

Cube, rated “E,” a game acceptable for all ages.

In Pikmin, the player takes on the role of Captain Olimar, a small (he’s

about the size of an American quarter), bald, big-eared, bulbous-nosed space-

man who crashes into an unfamiliar planet when a comet hits his spaceship.

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Captain Olimar (i.e., the player) must collect the spaceship’s lost parts, scat-

tered throughout the planet, while relying on his spacesuit to protect him

from the planet’s poisonous atmosphere. Thus, the player must carefully

monitor the damage done to Captain Olimar’s suit and repair it when

needed. To make matters more complicated, the spacesuit’s life support will

fail after 30 days, so the captain (the player) must ﬁnd all the missing parts in

30 days (each day is 15 minutes of game-time play). So the game is a race

against time and represents the rare case of a game that one can play to the

end and still “lose.”

However, Captain Olimar gets help. Soon after arriving on the strange

planet, he comes upon native life that is willing to aid him. Sprouts dispensed

from a large onionlike creature yield tiny (they’re even smaller than Captain

Olimar) cute creatures that Olimar names “Pikmin” after a carrot from his

home planet. These little creatures appear to be quite taken with Olimar and

follow his directions without question. Captain Olimar learns to raise Pikmin

of three different colors (red, yellow, and blue), each of which has different

skills. He learns, as well, to train them so that each Pikmin, regardless of

color, can grow through three different ever stronger forms: Pikmin sprout-

ing a leaf, a bud, or a ﬂower from their heads.

His colorful Pikmin following him as his army, Captain Olimar uses them

to attack dangerous creatures, tear down stone walls, build bridges, and explore

a great many areas of the strange planet in search of the missing parts to his

spaceship. While Captain Olimar can replace killed Pikmin from remaining

Pikmin, he must, however, ensure that at no point do all his Pikmin perish—an

event called, by the game and by the child player, “an extinction event.”

It is quite a sight to watch a six-year-old, as Captain Olimar, lead a multi-

colored army of little Pikmin to ﬁght, build, grow more Pikmin, and explore

a strange landscape, all the while solving multiple problems to discover and

get to the locations of the spaceship’s missing parts. The child then orders his

Pikmin to carry the heavy parts back to the ship. When this child’s grandfa-

ther watched him play the game for several hours, the grandfather made the

following remark, which I think captures at least one of the common mean-

ings of the playing video games is a waste of time theme: “While it may be

good for his hand-eye coordination, it’s a waste of time, because there isn’t

any content he’s learning.” I call this the problem of content.

The problem of content is, I believe, based on common attitudes toward

school, schooling, learning, and knowledge. These attitudes are compelling,

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in part because they are so deeply rooted in the history of western thought,

but, nonetheless, I think they are wrong. The idea is this: Important knowl-

edge (now usually gained in school) is content in the sense of information

rooted in, or, at least, related to, intellectual domains or academic disciplines

like physics, history, art, or literature. Work that does not involve such learn-

ing is “meaningless.” Activities that are entertaining but that themselves do

not involve such learning are just “meaningless play.” Of course, video games

fall into this category.

A form of this viewpoint has long existed in western culture. It is akin to

the viewpoint, held by Plato and Aristotle, for example, that knowledge, in

something like the sense of content above, is good in and of itself. Other pur-

suits, including making practical use of such knowledge—pursuits that do not

involve learning and reﬂecting on such content in and of itself outside the

realm of practical applications—are lesser; in some sense, mundane and triv-

ial. Such a view, of course, makes the grandfather’s remark about the child

playing Pikmin seem obvious.

The problem with the content view is that an academic discipline, or any

other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense

of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing

set of distinctive social practices. It is in these social practices that “content”

is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of think-

ing, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.

No one would want to treat basketball as “content” apart from the

game itself. Imagine a textbook that contained all the facts and rules about

basketball read by students who never played or watched the game. How

well do you think they would understand this textbook? How motivated to

understand it do you think they would be? But we do this sort of thing all

the time in school with areas like math and sci ence. We even have politi-

cians and educators who condemn doing math and science in the classroom

instead of drilling-and-skilling on math and science facts (“content”) as

“permissive.”

There is, however, an alternative way to think about learning and know-

ing that makes the content view seem less obvious and natural. I turn to de-

veloping this viewpoint in the following sections. Under this alternative

perspective it will become less clear that playing video games is necessarily a

“a waste of time,” though it will be a while until I can return to that claim and

answer it directly.

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AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE

ON LEARNING AND KNOWING

The alternative perspective starts with the claim that there really is no such

thing as learning “in general.” We always learn something. And that some-

thing is always connected, in some way, to some semiotic domain or other.

Therefore, if we are concerned with whether something is worth learn-

ing or not, whether it is a waste of time or not—video games or anything

else—we should start with questions like the following: What semiotic do-

main is being entered through this learning? Is it a valuable domain or not?

In what sense? Is the learner learning simply to understand (“read”) parts of

the domain or also to participate more fully in the domain by learning to pro-

duce (“write”) meanings in the domain? And we need to keep in mind that in

the modern world, there are a great many more potentially important semi-

otic domains than just those that show up in typical schools. I return to these

questions later in regard to the child playing Pikmin.

Once we learn to start with such questions, we ﬁnd that it is often a

tricky question as to what semiotic domain is being entered when someone is

learning or has learned something. For example, consider college freshmen

who have taken their ﬁrst college-level physics class, passed it with good

grades, and can write down Newton’s laws of motion. What domain have

they entered? It will not do to say “physics” and leave the matter at that,

though the content view would take this position.

Lots of studies have shown that many such students, students who can

write down Newton’s laws of motion, if asked so simple a question as “How

many forces are acting on a coin when it has been thrown up into the air?”

(the answer to which can actually be deduced from Newton’s laws) get the

answer wrong. Leaving aside friction, they claim that two forces are operat-

ing on the coin, gravity and “impetus,” the force the hand has transferred to

the coin. Gravity exists as a force and, according to Newton’s laws, is the sole

force acting on the coin when it is in the air (aside from air friction). Impetus,

in the sense above, however, does not exist, though Aristotle thought it did

and people in their everyday lives tend to view force and motion in such

terms quite naturally.

So these students have entered the semiotic domain of physics as passive

content but not as something in terms of which they can actually see and oper-

ate on their world in new ways. There may be nothing essentially wrong with

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this, since their knowledge of such passive content might help them know, at

some level, what physics, an important enterprise in modern life, is “about.” I

tend to doubt this, however. Be that as it may, these students cannot produce

meanings in physics or understand them in producerlike ways.

They have not learned to experience the world in a new way. They have

not learned to experience the world in a way in which the natural inclination to

think in terms of the hand transmitting a force to the coin, a force that the coin

stores up and uses up (“impetus”), is not part of one’s way of seeing and operat-

ing on the world (for a time and place, i.e., when doing modern physics).

When we learn a new semiotic domain in a more active way, not as pas-

sive content, three things are at stake:

1. We learn to experience (see, feel, and operate on) the world in new

ways.

2. Since semiotic domains usually are shared by groups of people who

carry them on as distinctive social practices, we gain the potential to

join this social group, to become affiliated with such kinds of people

(even though we may never see all of them, or any of them, face to

face).

3. We gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solv-

ing in the domain and, perhaps, more important, in related domains.

Three things, then, are involved in active learning: experiencing the world in

new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning.

This is “active learning.” However, such learning is not yet what I call

“critical learning.” For learning to be critical as well as active, one addi-

tional feature is needed. The learner needs to learn not only how to un-

derstand and produce meanings in a particular semiotic domain that are

recognizable to those affiliated with the domain, but, in addition, how to

think about the domain at a “meta” level as a complex system of interre-

lated parts. The learner also needs to learn how to i nnovate in the

domain—how to produce meanings that, while recognizable, are seen as

somehow novel or unpredictable.

To get at what all this really means, though, I need to discuss semiotic

domains a bit more. This will allow me to clarify what I mean by critical

learning and to explicate the notions of experiencing the world in new ways,

forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning a bit more.

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MORE ON SEMIOTIC DOMAINS:

DESIGN GRAMMARS

Semiotic domains have what I call design grammars. Each domain has an inter-

nal and an external design grammar. By an internal design grammar, I mean

the principles and patterns in terms of which one can recognize what is and

what is not acceptable or typical content in a semiotic domain. By an external

design grammar, I mean the principles and patterns in terms of which one can

recognize what is and what is not an acceptable or typical social practice and

identity in regard to the affinity group associated with a semiotic domain.

Do you know what counts as a modernist piece of architecture? What sort

of building counts as typical or untypical of modernist architecture ? If you do,

then you know, consciously or unconsciously, the internal design grammar of

the semiotic domain of modernist architecture (as a ﬁeld of interest).

If all you know is a list of all the modernist buildings ever built, then you

don’t know the internal design grammar of the domain. Why? Because if you

know the design grammar—that is, the underlying principles and patterns

that determine what counts and what doesn’t count as a piece of modernist

architecture—you can make judgments about buildings you have never seen

before or even ones never actually built, but only modeled in cardboard. If all

you have is a list, you can’t make any judgments about anything that isn’t on

your list.

Do you know what counts as thinking, acting, interacting, and valuing

like someone who is “into” modernist architecture? Can you recognize the

sorts of identities such people take on when they are in their domain? Can

you recognize what count as valued social practices to the members of the

affinity group associated with the semiotic domain of modernist architecture

and what counts as behaving appropriately in these social practices? If the an-

swer to these questions is “yes,” then you know, consciously or uncon-

sciously, the external design grammar of the semiotic domain.

Do you understand what counts and what doesn’t count as a possible

piece of content in theoretical linguistics? Do you know that claims like “All

languages are equal” (in one speciﬁc meaning) and “The basic syntactic rules

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in the core grammar of any language are optimal” count as possible claims in

theoretical linguistics and that claims like “God breathed life into the word”

and “Nominalizations are very effective communicative devices in science”

don’t? Do you know why this is so, how it follows from the ways in which the

elements of the content of theoretical linguistics relate to each other as a com-

plex system? If you do, you know the internal design grammar of theoretical

linguistics. If all you know is a list of facts from the domain, you will never

know whether a claim not on your list should or shouldn’t count or even

whether the matter is open to debate or not. You can’t “go on” in the domain.

Are you aware that theoretical linguists don’t value work on the social as-

pects of language as much as they do work on the structural aspects of gram-

mar? Do you know that even when they are assessing work in the social

sciences and humanities, they tend to value logical deductive structure and

abstract theories in these domains over richly descriptive but less abstract and

less theoretical studies? Are you aware that the term “descriptive” is (or, at

least, used to be) a term of insult and “explanatory” a term of praise when

such people are talking about academic work inside and outside their ﬁeld?

Do you know why? If you know things like this, you know the external de-

sign grammar of the semiotic domain of theoretical linguistics. You ﬁnd cer-

tain ways of thinking, acting, and valuing expectable in the affinity group

associated with the domain, others not.

Of course, the internal and external grammars of a domain change

through time. For example, it was once common to ﬁnd linguists who saw

studying issues germane to the translation of the Bible, for example into Na-

tive American languages, as a core part of their academic work and identity as

linguists. They hoped to facilitate the work of missionaries to the speakers of

these languages. They saw no conﬂict between doing linguistics and serving

their religious purposes at the same time. Other linguists, not involved in

Bible translation, did not necessarily dispute this at the time and often did

not withhold professional respect from such religious linguists. The external

grammar of the domain (and this was certainly inﬂuenced by the wider cul-

ture at the time) allowed a connection between linguistic work as science and

religious commitments as an overt part of that work.

To d a y m o s t l inguists, theoretical and otherwise, would be skeptical of any

connection between linguistic work and religion. They would not see translat-

ing the Bible into languages connected to cultures without the Bible, to facili-

tate the work of missionaries, as a central part of any branch of linguistics.

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To d a y t h e e x t e r n a l d e s ign grammar of the ﬁeld does not readily allow for a

connection between work as a linguist and religion, for identities as a linguist

that are formed around this connection or for social practices germane to it.

So why I am being so perverse as to use the term “design grammar” for

these matters? Because I want us to think about the fact that for any semiotic

domain, whether it is ﬁrst-person shooter games or theoretical linguistics,

that domain, internally and externally, was and is designed by someone. But

who was/is this someone who designed the semiotic domains of ﬁrst-person

shooter games and theoretical linguistics?

Obviously real game designers and producers determine what counts as

recognizable content for ﬁrst-person shooter games by actually making such

games. Over time, as they apply certain principles, patterns, and procedures

to the construction of such games, the content of ﬁrst-person shooter games

comes to have a recognizable shape such that people not only say things like

“Oh, yeah, that’s a ﬁrst-person shooter game” or “No, that’s not a ﬁrst-per-

son shooter” but also “Oh, yeah, that a typical ﬁrst-person shooter game” or

“Oh, no, that’s a groundbreaking ﬁrst-person shooter game.”

Yet these designers and producers are only part of the people who pro-

duce the external grammar of ﬁrst-person shooter games. People who play,

review, and discuss such games, as well as those who design and produce

them, shape the external design grammar of the semiotic domain of ﬁrst-per-

son shooter games through their ongoing social interactions. It is their ongo-

ing social interactions that determine the principles and patterns through

which people in the domain can recognize and judge thinking, talking, read-

ing, writing, acting, interacting, valuing, and believing characteristic of peo-

ple who are in the affinity group associated with ﬁrst-person shooter games.

And, of course, the acts of people helping to design the domain exter-

nally as a set of social practices and typical identities rebound on the acts of

those helping to design the domain internally as content, since that content

must “please” the members of the affinity group associated with the domain

as well as recruit newcomers to the domain. At the same time, the acts of

those helping to design the domain internally in terms of content rebound on

the acts of those helping to design the domain externally as a set of social

practices and identities, since that content shapes and transforms those prac-

tices and identities.

Just the same things can be said about those who design the semiotic do-

main of theoretical linguistics, internally and externally. Linguists who write

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and publish and give talks at conferences shape the internal design grammar

of the domain through their research. They shape and transform the princi-

ples and patterns that determine what counts as the content of theoretical

linguistics.

All linguists shape the external grammar of the domain through their so-

cial interactions and the identities they take on in those interactions. It is

their ongoing social interactions and related identity work that determine the

principles and patterns through which people in the domain can recognize

and judge thinking, talking, reading, writing, acting, interacting, valuing, and

believing characteristic of people who are in the affinity group associated

with theoretical linguistics.

It is crucial, as I have pointed out, to see that the internal and external

grammars and designs of semiotic domains interrelate with each other, mutu-

ally supporting and transforming each other. Let me exemplify this point, and

further clarify the notion of design grammars, by returning to video games.

Some people play video games on game platforms like the Playstation (X

or 2), the Nintendo GameCube, or the Xbox. Some people play them on

computers like the one on which I am typing this book. When people play

video games on game platforms, they use a handheld controller with various

buttons and often a little built-in joystick or two. They never use the sort of

keyboard associated with a computer.

It is part of the external design of the semiotic domain of video games for

game platforms that games and handheld controllers go together and part of

the design of the semiotic domain of video games on computers that games

and keyboards or handheld controllers go together, since some players do, in

fact, plug handheld controllers into their computers to replace the keyboard.

So far this just seems to be a matter of brute technological facts. But

things work in the world in certain ways because people make them do so or,

at the very least, are willing to accept them as such. Then, when they work

that way, people come to expect them to do so and build values and norms

around them working that way.

One could conceivably get a keyboard to work with a game platform. At

the very least, it would be easy for designers to modify a platform so that it

would work with a keyboard. However, you don’t understand the external de-

sign grammar of the domain of platform-based video-game playing if you

don’t realize that doing this would “break the rules.” It would be a serious de-

parture from what the affinity group associated with this domain expects,

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wants, and values. Many platform-game players think keyboards are a bad

way to play video games, while some computer-game players think they are a

good way. In turn, these matters are connected to their identities as game

players (e.g., the editors of PC Gamer magazine regularly “apologize” when

they have spent time playing games on a game platform and not on a com-

puter, and look down on the enterprise).

When Microsoft’s Xbox came out in 2002, it was the ﬁrst game platform

to contain a computerlike hard drive. Hard drives allow games to be saved at

any point. Heretofore, games played on game platforms, thanks to the tech-

nological limitations of the platforms, could be saved much less regularly

than computer games. Players on typical game platforms, for example, can

save only at the end of a level or when they have found a special save symbol

in the game. This means that in an action game, they have to stay alive long

enough to get to the end of the level or ﬁnd the save symbol, no matter how

long they already have been playing.

In a computer game, thanks to the computer’s hard drive, players can

save their progress at any time they wish. (There are some games made for

computers in which this is not true). This can make a difference in the strate-

gies one uses. When playing on a computer, the player can save after a partic-

ularly hard battle and not ever have to repeat that battle. If the player dies a

bit later, he or she starts again from the game that was saved after the big bat-

tle was already won.

On a game platform, if there was no save symbol after the big battle or if

the battle was not the end of a level, the player could not save and must move

on. If he or she dies, the big battle will have to be fought again, since the

game will reload from an earlier saved game that did not contain that battle.

Indeed, the last save could have been quite far in the past, and the player may

be required to repeat a good deal of the game.

However, again, these are not just technological matters. Platform users

do not necessarily see being unable to save whenever they want as a limita-

tion. Many of them see it as a virtue; they say it adds more excitement and

challenge to a game. Computer-game players who save after each big battle

or dangerous jump might be thought of as “wimps” who can’t last any length

of time against rigorous challenges. Furthermore, in my experience, many

platform users do not see playing large parts of a game over and over again as

repetition in the way in which I do. They see it an opportunity to perfect

their skills and get more play out of a game they enjoy.

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So we see here the ways in which external technological and material

facts become social facts and values. The Xbox’s coming out with a hard drive

led to a debate that anyone who understands the external design grammar of

the platform domain could have predicted. Was the Xbox really a game plat-

form? Could a real game platform have a hard drive? Perhaps the Xbox is re-

ally a computer in disguise. This is a debate over the very external design

grammar of the domain: Is the pattern “video game, game platform, hard

drive” acceptable within the external design grammar of the domain? Does it

count as an acceptable part of valued social practices and identities in the do-

main? Should it?

It is not surprising, either, that of the games Microsoft initially brought

out for the Xbox some used the hard drive to allow players to save whenever

and wherever they wanted (e.g., Max Payne) and others did not and func-

tioned like a “proper” platform game (e.g., Nightcaster). The company obvi-

ously wanted to entice both platform players and computer-game players

onto its system, though this can, in some cases, be a bit like enticing cats and

dogs to play ball together.

A good number of people play both platform games and computer

games, of course. Nonetheless, somewhat different affinity groups, with dif-

ferent attitudes and values, have arisen around each domain, with lots of

overlap in between. There are people who play in both domains but have

strong opinions about what sorts of games are best played on platforms and

what sorts are best played on computers. All this is typical: Semiotic domains

and affinity groups often don’t have sharp boundaries (though some do), and

in any case the boundaries are often ﬂuid and changing.

Since the Xbox has the capacity to break the pattern that associates game

platforms and limited saves while still retaining some of the other patterns

typical of game platforms, it has the potential to create a new affinity group

and/or to transform old ones. In the act, it and the social interactions of peo-

ple around it might eventually create a new semiotic domain within the big-

ger domain of video-game playing, a new domain with a new external design

grammar determining new social practices and identities. Indeed, the matter

is already in progress, as the Xbox has already generated (with the help of

Microsoft, of course) its own magazines, Internet sites, and aﬁcionados.

But all this transformation and change in the external design grammar

will rebound on and change the internal design grammar. Designers and pro-

ducers will use the hard drive on the Xbox together with its more typical

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platform features to design new games. Hybrids between typical platform

games and typical computer games will arise. The distinction in content be-

tween platform games (which tended to stress fast action) and computer

games (which can store more information and stress deeper stories) may blur.

As new content arises and new principles and patterns regarding the accept-

able content of various different types of games also arise, the affinity groups

associated with those different types of games will change their social inter-

actions, values, and identities, and so, too, the external design grammar of

their respective domains.

Some of these changes will be small, some large. But that is the way of all

semiotic domains in the world. They are made, internally and externally, by

humans and changed by them as these humans take up technological and ma-

terial circumstances in certain ways and not others and as they shape and re-

shape their social interactions with each other.

LIFEWORLDS

Our talk about semiotic domains may lead some to think that everything said

thus far only applies to “specialist” areas like video games, theoretical linguis-

tics, law, or the workings of urban gangs, not “everyday,” “ordinary” life.

However, “everyday,” “ordinary” life is itself a semiotic domain. In fact, it is a

domain in which all of us have lots and lots of experience. It is what I call the

lifeworld domain.

By the lifeworld domain I mean those occasions when we are operating

(making sense to each other and to ourselves) as “everyday” people, not as

members of more specialist or technical semiotic domains. Not everyone

does physics or plays video games, but everyone spends lots of time in his or

her lifeworld domain. And, of course, people move quite readily between

specialist domains and their lifeworld domain. For example, a group of physi-

cists at a dinner meeting might, at one moment, be discussing physics as spe-

cialists in physics and, at the next moment, be discussing the weather or

movies as “everyday” nonspecialists. (Of course, there are people who can

and do discuss the weather or movies as specialists in a specialist semiotic do-

main devoted to the weather or movies.)

Lifeworld domains are culturally variable; that is, different cultural

groups have, more or less, different ways of being, doing, feeling, valuing,

and talking as “everyday people.” Thus there are many lifeworld domains,

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though they overlap enough to allow for, better or worse, communication

across cultures,

If we look at lifeworld domains internally, we can say that their content is

just the wide range of nonspecialist experiences of the world that people share

with other people with whom they share various group memberships, up to

and including the human race. Once a group has carved out an area of this ex-

perience (whether this is playing in the guise of video games or dealing with

the weather as a science) and created “specialist” ways of talking and thinking

about it (“policed” by themselves as “insiders,” who determine what is accept-

able and what not, who is adept and who is not), then they have left the life-

world (and the rest of us behind) and created a specialist semiotic domain.

If we look at lifeworld domains externally, we can ask about the ways of

thinking, talking, acting, interacting, valuing, and, in some cases, writing and

reading that allow a particular culturally distinctive group of people to recog-

nize each other as being, at a time and place, “everyday” or “ordinary” nonspe-

cialist people. For example, how do you know when a friend of yours who is a

theoretical linguist (and you are not) is talking to you and engaging with you

not as a specialist linguist but just as an “everyday” nonspecialist person? How

do you know this even when, in fact, you happen to be talking about language?

And, of course, these matters will differ if you and the linguist are from

quite different cultures—say you are an African American and the linguist is a

Russian. But, again, I caution against assuming too much variation across

human beings. People can and very often do recognize “normal” human be-

havior across cultural groups, however problematic this sometimes may be

(even to the point of leading to violence).

It is important to realize that meanings are no more general—they are

just as situated—in lifeworld domains as they are in any other semiotic do-

main. For example, in different situations, even such a mundane word as

“coffee” has different situated meanings. Consider, for instance, what hap-

pens in your head when I say “The coffee spilled, get a mop” versus “The

coffee spilled, get a broom.” In different situations, the word “coffee” can

mean a liquid, grains, beans, tins, or a ﬂavor. It can mean yet other things in

other situations, and sometimes we have to come up with novel meanings for

the word; for example in a sentence like “Her coffee skin glistened in the

bright sunshine,” “coffee” names a skin color.

For another example, think of the different situated meanings of the

word “light” in everyday interactions in these sentences: Turn the light on.

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This light isn’t giving much light. I can see a far off light. I am just bathing in

this light. The effects of light in this part of the county are wonderful. The

last thing I saw was a bright light. Of course, when we consider, in the con-

text of lifeworld domains, words like “truth,” “good,” “democracy,” “fair-

ness,” “honesty,” and so forth, things get yet more variable, more deeply

rooted in speciﬁc situations in speciﬁc culturally relative lifeworld domains.

There are a number of important points to make about lifeworld do-

mains. First, we are all used to making claims to know things based not on

any specialist knowledge we have but just as “everyday” human beings. How-

ever, in the modern world, specialist domains are taking more and more

space away from lifeworld domains wherein people can make nonspecialist

claims to know things and not face a challenge from a specialist.

For example, I once lived in Los Angeles. Every nonspecialist in Los An-

geles “knows” the air is polluted and dangerous, and they are usually willing

to say so. Nonetheless, it was not at all uncommon to read in the newspaper,

say, that “lay people” didn’t really know what they were talking about (and

choking on). Specialists in the matter claimed that there was no technical

“evidence” that the air was particularly unsafe. Tobacco companies tried the

same thing for years in regard to the dangers of smoking. Companies that

pollute ground and water often engage in the same tactic when people in

their areas of operation claim to feel sick (or drop dead) from their pollution.

Helping students learn how to think about the contrasting claims of vari-

ous specialists against each other and against lifeworld claims to know certainly

ought to be a key job for schools. To do this, students would have to investigate

specialist domains and different culturally distinctive lifeworlds, internally in

terms of content and externally in terms of social practices and identities.

A second point to be made about lifeworld domains is this: In the mod-

ern world, we are used to having to face the fact that children, including our

own, are specialists when and where we are not. Many children are adept at

the semiotic domain of computers—sometimes because they play video

games and that interest has led them to learn more about computers—when

the adults in the house are intimidated by computers.

Kids have turned video games, roller-blading, skateboarding, and snow-

boarding into specialist domains that internally in terms of content and ex-

ternally in terms of social practices bewilder adults. Many children have

learned through the Internet and television more about stock trading or even

law than many of the adults around them could ever imagine knowing. (One

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teenager had the top rating for legal advice on a legal Internet site in which

many of the others on the highly ranked list were professional lawyers.)

Adults are getting used to the fact that they are “immigrants” in many a

domain where their own children are “natives” (specialists). The lifeworld—

the domain in which people can claim to know and understand things as

“everyday” people and not as specialists—is shrinking, not just under the at-

tack of specialist domains like science but because our children are creating

and mastering so many specialist domains themselves.

A third point I want to make is this: I ﬁrmly believe we need to protect

lifeworld domains from the assaults of specialists (yes, even our own children).

We need to understand and value people’s “everyday” knowledge and under-

standings. At the same time, I believe it is crucial, particularly in the contem-

porary world, that all of us, regardless of our cultural affiliations, be able to

operate in a wide variety of semiotic domains outside our lifeworld domains.

It is very often in these non-lifeworld domains that people form affilia-

tions with others outside their own cultural groups and transcend the limita-

tions of any one person’s culture and lifeworld domain. Of course, it is

important not to insult anyone’s culture or lifeworld domain; it is important,

as well, to build bridges to these when introducing people to new semiotic

domains. But in my view, it is a poor form of respect for anyone to leave peo-

ple trapped in their own culture and lifeworld as the whole and sole space

within which they can move in the modern world. If this view comports

poorly with some versions of multiculturalism, so be it.

BACK TO PIKMIN: CRITICAL LEARNING

If learning is to be active, it must involve experiencing the world in new ways.

I have spelled this out in terms of learning new ways to situate the meanings

of words, images, symbols, artifacts, and so forth when operating within spe-

ciﬁc situations in new semiotic domains. Active learning must also involve

forming new affiliations. I have explained this in terms of learners joining

new affinity groups associated with new semiotic domains.

Active learning in a domain also involves preparation for future learning

within the domain and within related domains. I will deal with this issue

below, when I draw a comparison between the sorts of learning that take place

when playing good video games and the sorts of learning that take place in

good science classrooms and when I discuss the notion of precursor domains.

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However, as I said earlier, critical learning involves yet another step. For

active learning, the learner must, at least unconsciously, understand and oper-

ate within the internal and external design grammars of the semiotic domain

he or she is learning. But for critical learning, the learner must be able con-

sciously to attend to, reﬂect on, critique, and manipulate those design gram-

mars at a metalevel. That is, the learner must see and appreciate the semiotic

domain as a design space, internally as a system of interrelated elements making

up the possible content of the domain and externally as ways of thinking, act-

ing, interacting, and valuing that constitute the identities of those people who

are members of the affinity group associated with the domain.

Let me return to the child playing Pikmin for a speciﬁc example of what I

mean. What does it take just to play a game as an active learner? To do this

the player must understand and produce situated meanings in the semiotic

domain that this game, and games like it, constitutes. Elements in the con-

tent of Pikmin—for example, a yellow Pikmin—do not have just one general

meaning or signiﬁcance in the game world. Learners must learn to situate

different meanings for such elements within different speciﬁc situations

within the domain.

For example, when a player is faced with a rock wall, his yellow Pikmin

(who can throw bomb rocks) take on the situated meaning the type of Pikmin

who can use bombs (unlike red and blue Pikmin), since a good strategy for de-

stroying walls in the game is to have yellow Pikmin throw bombs at them.

However, when attacking a fat, sleeping, dangerous spotted creature (a

Spotty Bulborb) found throughout the ﬁrst levels of the game, the yellow

Pikmin take on the situated meaning the sorts of Pikmin who can be thrown far-

ther than other sorts of Pikmin, since a good strategy when ﬁghting big crea-

tures like these is to have Captain Olimar tell the red Pikmin to run up and

attack from the rear, while he throws the yellow Pikmin onto their backs to

attack from up top.

Additionally, players need to know what patterns or combinations of ele-

ments the game’s internal design grammar allows. They need to know, given

the situated meanings they have given to each element in the pattern or com-

bination, what the whole pattern or combination means in a situated way

useful for action.

For example, the internal design grammar of Pikmin allows the player to

bring together (by moving Captain Olimar and his Pikmin) the combination

of Pikmin, a rock wall, and a small tin can laying near the wall, containing lit-

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tle rock bombs. Of course, the game did not need to allow this pattern or

combination to be able to occur; its design grammar could have been built

differently. Even given that the design grammar does allow this combination,

players still have to build a situated meaning for this combination out of the

situated meanings they have given to each element in the game based on the

situation they take themselves to be in and their own goals.

If this is a point in the game where the player needs to get past the wall,

and given the fact that he or she can build a situated meaning for yellow Pik-

min like the type of Pikmin that can throw bombs, the player can build a situated

meaning for this combination something like: Equip the yellow Pikmin with the

rock bombs and have them use the bombs to blow up the wall.

Here is another example from Pikmin of a combination of elements al-

lowable by the internal design grammar of the game. The player often ﬁnds a

Spotty Bulborb—a creature with big teeth and jaws suitable for swallowing

Pikmin whole—sleeping peacefully in a fairly exposed space. So the design

grammar of the domain allows the combination: Spotty Bulborb, sleeping, in

exposed area. Depending on what situation the player takes him- or herself

to be in, this combination can be assigned several different situated mean-

ings. For instance, it could be taken to mean: Attack the Spotty Bulborb care-

fully from the rear before it wakes up; or it could be taken to mean: Sneak quietly

by the Spotty Bulborb to get where you want to go without trouble. Nothing stops

the player from assigning the combination a more unexpected situated mean-

ing, perhaps something like: Wake the Spotty Bulborb up so you can get a more

exciting (and fair?) ﬁght.

Since the child can successfully break down rock walls and attack Spotty

Bulborbs, he can understand (“read”) and produce (“write”) appropriate situ-

ated meanings for elements and combinations of elements in the domain

(game). But all of this is “just” playing the game in a proactive way—that is,

using situated meanings and the design grammar of the game to understand

and produce meanings and actions (which are a type of meaning in the do-

main). Of course, one could just ritualize one’s response to the game and try

pretty much the same strategy in every situation, but this would not be a

proactive way to play and learn.

All these meanings and actions are a product of what I have called active

learning, but they are not yet critical learning that leverages the design gram-

mar at a metalevel in a reﬂective way that can lead to critique, novel mean-

ings, or transformation of the domain. However, the child is learning to do

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this as well—that is, his process of learning the game is not only active, it is

increasingly critical.

When the child had recovered 5 of the spaceship’s 30 missing parts, he

was able to search in a new area called The Forest’s Navel. This area had a

much harsher and more dangerous-looking landscape than the previous areas

the child had been in. It had different dangerous creatures, including a num-

ber of closely grouped creatures that breathed ﬁre. And the background

music had changed considerably. Since the player has already found ﬁve

parts, the game assumes that he is now more adept than when he began the

game; thus, the landscape and creatures are getting harder to deal with, offer-

ing a bigger challenge. At the same time, these changes in features communi-

cate a new mood, changing the tone of the game from a cute fairy tale to a

somewhat darker struggle for survival.

The child was able to think about and comment on these changes. He

said that the music was now “scary” and the landscape much harsher-looking

than the ones he had previously been in. He knew that this signaled that

things were going to get harder. Furthermore, he was aware that the changes

signaled that he needed to rethink some of his strategies as well his relation-

ship to the game. He was even able to comment on the fact that the earlier

parts of the game made it appear more appropriate for a child his age than

did the Forest Navel area and considered whether the game was now “too

scary” or not. He decided on a strategy of exploring the new area only a little

bit at a time, avoiding the ﬁre-breathing creatures, and returning to old areas

with the new resources (e.g., blue Pikmin) he got in the Forest Navel area to

ﬁnd more parts there more quickly and easily (remember, the player has only

30 game days to get all the parts and so wants to get some of them quickly

and easily.)

What we are dealing with here is talk and thinking about the (internal)

design of the game, about the game as a complex system of interrelated parts

meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways. This is met-

alevel thinking, thinking about the game as a system and a designed space,

and not just playing within the game moment by moment. Such thinking can

open up critique of the game. It can also lead to novel moves and strategies,

sometimes ones that the game makers never anticipated. This is what I mean

by critical learning and thinking. Of course, the six-year-old is only begin-

ning the process of critical learning in regard to Pikmin and other video

games, but he is well begun.

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The child is learning to think reﬂectively about the internal design

grammar (the grammar of content) of Pikmin and games like it. As he inter-

acts with others, he will have opportunities to reﬂect on the external design

grammar (the grammar of social practices and identities) too. For example,

he has already learned that he can search the Internet for helpful tips about

playing the game, including what are called Easter Eggs (little surprises play-

ers can ﬁnd in a game if they know where and how to look for them). He

considers these tips part of playing the game. On the other hand, he charac-

terizes advice about how to play as “bossing him around” and claims he can

“do his own thinking.”

These are early moments in the child’s induction into the affinity groups

associated with video-game playing, their characteristic social practices, and

the sorts of identities people take on within these groups and practices. If he

is to engage with these external aspects of game playing critically, he will

need to reﬂect in an overt way on the patterns and possibilities he does and

does not ﬁnd in these social practices and identities. Doing this is to reﬂect

on the external design grammar of the domain.

Critical learning, as I am deﬁning it here, involves learning to think of

semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us (if I can use this term

without necessary negative connotations) in certain ways and that we can ma-

nipulate in certain ways. The child has much more to learn about Pikmin as a

design space (internally and externally). He also has much more to learn

about not just the single game Pikmin but the genre (family) of games into

which Pikmin falls (adventure strategy games) as a design space. And he has

much more to learn about not just this genre but about video games in gen-

eral (a larger and more loosely connected family) as a design space.

Then there is the crucial matter of learning how these design spaces re-

late to each other and to other sorts of semiotic domains, some more closely

related to video games as semiotic domains, some less closely related. That is,

the child can learn how to think about, and act on, semiotic domains as a

larger design space composed of clusters (families) of more or less closely re-

lated semiotic domains.

So, then, why do I call learning and thinking at a metalevel about semiotic

domains (alone and in relation to each other) as design spaces critical learning

and thinking? For this reason: Semiotic systems are human cultural and histor-

ical creations that are designed to engage and manipulate people in certain

ways. They attempt through their content and social practices to recruit people

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to think, act, interact, value, and feel in certain speciﬁc ways. In this sense, they

attempt to get people to learn and take on certain sorts of new identities, to be-

come, for a time and place, certain types of people. In fact, society as a whole is

simply the web of these many different sorts of identities and their characteris-

tic associated activities and practices.

Some of these identities constitute, within certain institutions or for cer-

tain social groups in the society, social goods. By a “social good” I mean any-

thing that a group in society, or society as a whole, sees as bringing one status,

respect, power, freedom, or other such socially valued things. Some people

have more or less access to valued or desired semiotic domains and their con-

comitant identities. Furthermore, some identities connected to some semiotic

domains may come, as one understands the domain more reﬂectively, to seem

less (or more) good or valuable than one had previously thought.

Finally, one might come to see that a given identity associated with a

given semiotic domain relates poorly (or well)—in terms of one’s vision of

ethics, morality, or a valued life—with one’s other identities associated with

other semiotic domains. For example, a person might come to see that a

given semiotic domain is designed so as to invite one to take on an identity

that revels in a disdain for life or in a way of thinking about race, class, or

gender that the person, in terms of other identities he or she takes on in

other semiotic domains, does not, on reﬂection, wish to continue. In this

sense, then, semiotic domains are inherently political (and here I am using

the term “political” in the sense of any practices where the distribution of so-

cial goods in a society is at stake).

Let me make this discussion more concrete. A game like Pikmin recruits

from the our six-year-old a complex identity composed of various related

traits. The game encourages him to think of himself an active problem solver,

one who persists in trying to solve problems even after making mistakes; one

who, in fact, does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reﬂec-

tion and learning. It encourages him to be the sort of problem solver who,

rather than ritualizing the solutions to problems, leaves himself open to un-

doing former mastery and ﬁnding new ways to solve new problems in new

situations.

At the same time, the boy is encouraged to see himself as solving prob-

lems from the perspective of a particular fantasy creature (Captain Olimar)

and his faithful helpers (the Pikmin) and, thus, to get outside his “real” iden-

tity and play with the notions of perspectives and identities themselves. He is

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also encouraged to focus on the problem-solving and fantasy aspects of his

new identity and not, say, his worries about killing (virtual) “living” creatures,

however odd they may be, though he can choose to avoid killing some of the

creatures by running from them or sneaking around them. The learner, in this

case, gets to customize the identity the game offers him to a certain extent—

this, in fact, is an important feature of good video games.

The identity that Pikmin invites the player to take on relates in a variety

of ways to other identities he takes on in other domains. I believe, for exam-

ple, that the identity Pikmin recruits relates rather well to the sort of identity

a learner is called on to assume in the best active science learning in schools

and other sites.

If this is true, then our six-year-old is privileged in this respect over chil-

dren who do not have the opportunity to play such games (in an active and

critical way). An issue of social justice is at stake here in regard to the distri-

bution of, and access to, this identity, whether through video games or sci-

ence. We can note, as well, that the boy is using the video game to practice

this identity, for many hours, at an early age, outside of science instruction in

school, which may very well take up very little of the school day. Other chil-

dren may get to practice this identity only during the limited amount of time

their school devotes to active and critical learning in science of the sort that

lets children take on the virtual identity of being and doing science rather

than memorizing lists of facts—which often is no time at all.

VIDEO GAMES: A WASTE OF TIME?

I have now discussed a perspective on learning that stresses active and critical

learning within speciﬁc semiotic domains. So, let me now return to the

grandfather’s remark that playing video games is a waste of time because the

child is learning no “content.”

If children (or adults) are playing video games in such a way as to learn

actively and critically then they are:

1. Learning to experience (see and act on) the world in a new way

2. Gaining the potential to join and collaborate with a new affinity

group

3. Developing resources for future learning and problem solving in the

semiotic domains to which the game is related

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4. Learning how to think about semiotic domains as design spaces that

engage and manipulate people in certain ways and, in turn, help cre-

ate certain relationships in society among people and groups of peo-

ple, some of which have important implications for social justice

These, of course, are just the four things one learns when engaging actively

and critically with any new semiotic domain. So the questions in regard to

any speciﬁc semiotic domain become: Are these good or valuable ways to ex-

perience the world? Is this a good or valuable affinity group to join? Are

these resources for future learning applicable to other good and valued semi-

otic domains? Is this domain leading the learner to reﬂect on design spaces

(and the concomitant identities they help create), and their intricate relation-

ships to each other, in ways that potentially can lead to critique, innovation,

and good or valued thinking and acting in society?

The answers to these questions will vary along a variety of parameters.

But they show that a great deal more is at stake than “content” in the grandfa-

ther’s sense. This book offers a positive answer to these questions in regard to

a good many (certainly not all) video games, as long as people are playing

them in ways that involve active and critical learning. Video games have the

potential to lead to active and critical learning. In fact, I believe that they often

have a greater potential than much learning in school (even though school

learning may involve learning “content”). Indeed, I hope my discussion of the

child playing Pikmin already suggests some of the lines of my argument.

What ensures that a person plays video games in a way that involves ac-

tive and critical learning and thinking? Nothing, of course, can ensure such a

thing. Obviously, people differ in a variety of ways, including how much they

are willing to challenge themselves, and they play video games for a great va-

riety of different purposes. But two things help to lead to active and critical

learning in playing video games.

One is the internal design of the game itself. Good games—and the

games get better in this respect all the time—are crafted in ways that encour-

age and facilitate active and critical learning and thinking (which is not to say

that every player will take up this offer). The other is the people around the

learner, other players and nonplayers. If these people encourage reﬂective

metatalk, thinking, and actions in regard to the design of the game, of video

games more generally, and of other semiotic domains and their complex in-

terrelationships, then this, too, can encourage and facilitate active and critical

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learning and thinking (though, again, the offer may not be taken up). And,

indeed, the affinity groups connected to video games do often encourage

metareﬂective thinking about design, as a look at Internet game sites will

readily attest.

This last point—that other people can encourage in the learner metareﬂec-

tive talk, thinking, and actions in regard to a semiotic domain as a design

space—leads to another point: Often it is critical learning—focusing on the

semiotic domain one is learning as a design space in a reﬂective way—that actu-

ally encourages and pushes active learning. One can learn actively without much

critical learning, but one cannot really learn much critically without a good deal

of active learning in a semiotic domain. The critical is not a later add-on. It

should be central to the process of active learning from the beginning.

There is another important issue here that bears on deciding whether a

given semiotic domain—like video games—is valuable or not: Semiotic do-

mains in society are connected to other semiotic domains in a myriad of

complex ways. One of these is that a given domain can be a good precursor

for learning another one. Because mastering the meaning-making skills in,

and taking on the identity associated with, the precursor domain facilitates

learning in the other domain. Facilitation can also happen because being (or

having been) a member of the affinity group associated with the precursor

domain facilitates becoming a member of the affinity group associated with

the other domain, because the values, norms, goals, or practices of the pre-

cursor group resemble in some ways the other group’s values, norms, goals,

or practices.

Let me give a concrete example of such connections. In the larger semi-

otic domain of video games, ﬁrst- and third-person shooter games are a well-

deﬁned subdomain. However, such games often have elements that are

similar to features found in arcade games, games (like Space Invaders, Pacman,

and Frogger) that involve a good deal of fast hand-eye coordination to move

and respond quickly. (In fact, one of the original ﬁrst-person shooter games,

a game that helped start the genre—Wolfenstein 3D—operates very much like

an arcade game.) Thus, someone who has mastered the domain of arcade

games has mastered a precursor domain for shooter games, though such

games now contain many other elements, as well.

On the other hand, fantasy role-playing games are another well-deﬁned

subdomain of the video-game domain. People who have earlier played and

mastered the Dungeons and Dragons semiotic domain (as make-believe play or

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with books and cards) are advantaged when they play fantasy role-playing

games, since such games developed out of Dungeons and Dragons, though they

now contain a good many additional elements.

Both the shooter domain and the fantasy role-playing domain have other

precursor domains, and they share some precursor domains (e.g., make-be-

lieve play wherein one is willing to take on different identities—a domain

that some cultures and social groups do not encourage in children or adults).

Some of these video-game (sub-) domains may well serve as precursor do-

mains for other semiotic domains. For example, it may well be that the popu-

lar (sub-) domain of simulation games (so-called god games, like SimCity, The

Sims, Railroad Tycoon, and Tropico) could be, for some children, a precursor

domain for those sciences that heavily trade in computer-based simulations

as a method of inquiry (e.g., some types of biology and cognitive science).

In interviews my research team and I have conducted with video-game

players, we have found a number of young people who have used the domain

of video games as a fruitful precursor domain for mastering other semiotic

domains tied to computers and related technologies. Indeed, several of these

young people plan to go to college and major in computer science or related

areas.

So we can ask: Can various subdomains in the larger domain of video-

game playing serve as precursor domains facilitating later learning in and out

of school?. I believe that the sorts of active and critical learning about de-

sign—and the type of problem-solving identity—that a game like Pikmin can

involve may well relate to later learning in domains like science, at least when

we are talking about teaching and learning science as an active process of in-

quiry and not the memorization of passive facts.

I am convinced that playing video games actively and critically is not “a

waste of time.” And people playing video games are indeed (pace the six-year-

old’s grandfather), learning “content,” albeit usually not the passive content

of school-based facts. (Many games, such as the Civilization games, do con-

tain a good number of facts.) The content of video games, when they are

played actively and critically, is something like this: They situate meaning in a

multimodal space through embodied experiences to solve problems and reﬂect on the

intricacies of the design of imagined worlds and the design of both real and imagined

social relationships and identities in the modern world. That’s not at all that bad—

and people get wildly entertained to boot. No wonder it is hard for today’s

schools to compete.

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LEARNING PRINCIPLES

The discussion in this chapter suggests a variety of learning principles that

are built into good video games, games like Pikmin, as will the discussion in

each of the following chapters. Some of the learning principles suggested in

this chapter are a bit more general than are those in later chapters. Here I

bring together these principles to start a list that will continue in subsequent

chapters.

I state only ﬁve very basic principles, since quite a number of other

principles that are implicated in the earlier discussion will be discussed in

greater detail later. The order of the principles is not important. All the

principles are equally important, or nearly so. Some of the principles over-

lap and, in actuality, reﬂect different aspects of much the same general

theme. Furthermore, these principles are not claims about all and any video

games played in any old fashion. Rather, they are claims about the potential

of good video games played in environments that encourage overt reﬂec-

tion. (While good video games do indeed encourage overt reﬂection, this

feature can be greatly enhanced by the presence of others, both players and

viewers.)

I state each principle in a way that is intended to be equally relevant to

learning in video games and learning in content areas in classrooms.

1. Active, Critical Learning Principle

All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which

the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encour-

age active and critical, not passive, learning.

2. Design Principle

Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design princi-

ples is core to the learning experience.

3. Semiotic Principle

Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and

across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, arti-

facts, etc.) as a complex system is core to the learning experience.

4. Semiotic Domains Principle

Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and

being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups

connected to them.

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5. Metalevel Thinking about Semiotic Domains Principle

Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships

of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

See Kress 1985, 1996, and Kress & van Leeuwen 1996, 2001 for insightful discussions

on reading images and multimodal texts, that is, texts that mix words and images. For

work on literacy as involving multiple literacies, see the citations to the New Literacy

Studies at the end of chapter 1 as well as Cope & Kalantzis 2000; Heath 1983; Scollon

& Scollon 1981; and Street 1984.

The discussion of physics students who know Newton’s laws of motion but can-

not apply them to a speciﬁc situation is taken from Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser 1981.

For further discussion, see Gardner 1991 and Mayer 1992.

On the nature of reading tests, see Hill & Larsen’

s 2000 superb analyses of actual

test items in relationship to different ways of reading. On reading more generally, see

Adams 1990; Coles 1998; Gee 1991; Snow, Burns, & Griffin 1998; see Pearson 1999

for discussion of the range of controversy in the area. The “fourth-grade slump” is

discussed in Gee 1999a; see Chall 1967 for an early and inﬂuential discussion.

On Noam Chomsky’s work, see McGilvray 1999. For C. S. Peirce’s work, see

Kloesel & Houser 1992.

On semiotics and content learning, especially in regard to science education, see

Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis 2001; Lemke 1990; and Ogborn, Kress, Martins,

& McGillicuddy 1996. On the notion of affiliation and affinity groups, see Beck 1992,

1994; Gee 2000–2001; Rifkin 2000; and Taylor 1994. For the idea of preparation for

future learning, see Bransford & Schwartz 1999, a very important and illuminating

paper for anyone interested in learning. On the notion of design and design gram-

mars, see New London Group 1996, a “manifesto” written by an international group

of scholars (a group of which I was a member) working in the area of language and lit-

eracy studies.

My notion of critical learning combines work on situated cognition (see bibl

io-

graphic note for chapter 4), especially work on metacognition—see, for example

Bereiter & Scardamalia 1989; Bruer 1993: pp. 67–99; Pellegrino, Chudowsky, &

Glaser 2001; Schon 1987; and Paulo Freire’s 1995 work on critical thinking and liter-

acy as “reading the world” and not just “reading the word.” On the concept of the

lifeworld, see Habermas 1984.

For discussions of game design relevant to the concerns of this chapter, see Bates

2002 and Rouse 2001.

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LEARNING AND IDENTITY:

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A HALF-ELF?

ARCANUM: LEARNING AND IDENTITY

HE LAST CHAPTER ARGUED THAT SEMIOTIC DOMAINS ENCOURAGE

people new to them to take on and play with new identities. I discussed the

sort of identity as an exploratory problem solver of a certain type that the

game Pikmin encouraged the six-year-old to take on. All learning in all semi-

otic domains requires identity work. It requires taking on a new identity and

forming bridges from one’s old identities to the new one.

For example, a child in a science classroom engaged in real inquiry, and

not passive learning, must be willing to take on an identity as a certain type of

scientiﬁc thinker, problem solver, and doer. The child must see and make

connections between this new identity and other identities he or she has al-

ready formed. Certainly the child will be at a disadvantage if he or she has

one or more identities that do not ﬁt with, are opposed to, or are threatened

by the identity recruited in the science classroom (e.g., his or her identity as

someone who is bad at learning technical matters, as someone who dislikes

school, or as someone from a family that is not “into” science or school—not

to mention cases like creationist Christians in biology classes).

This chapter uses learning to play video games as a crucial example of

how identities work in learning, an example that illuminates how active and

critical learning works in any semiotic domain, including in school. Video

games recruit identities and encourage identity work and reﬂection on iden-

tities in clear and powerful ways. If schools worked in similar ways, learning

in school would be more successful and powerful because it would become

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the sorts of active and critical learning discussed in the last chapter. To make

the discussion concrete, I base it on one particular video game, a fantasy role-

playing game called Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

I ﬁrst discuss this game and the sorts of identity work it recruits. Then I

turn to learning in school, making comparisons and contrasts with learning

in Arcanum and games like it. Finally, I continue the list of learning principles

that are embedded in good video games, principles that are important for

powerful learning in any domain. Let us turn, then, to Arcanum.

Arcanum takes place in a massive world called Arcanum, a world made up

of a great many countries and towns. Once upon a time magic (“magick”)

held sway throughout Arcanum. But now technology has arrived, and Ar-

canum has become a place of both ancient runes and industrial steamworks, a

land where magic and machines coexist in a tension-ﬁlled and uneasy bal-

ance. A variety of races—Humans, Elves, Gnomes, Dwarves, Orcs, and

Ogres, as well as Half-Elves, Half-Orcs, and Half-Ogres (each of which have

one Human parent)—cohabit this world, each orienting to the conﬂicts be-

tween magic and technology in different ways.

Before you start playing Arcanum, you must construct your character.

Each race and gender has different natural characteristics. For example, I

chose to be a female Half-Elf, whom I named “Bead Bead.” Half-Elves, like

all other races, have their own unique degrees of strength, constitution, dex-

terity, beauty, intelligence, willpower, perception, and charisma. Each of

these traits will affect how your character—that is, you—carries out dialogue

and action in the world of Arcanum and how other characters in the world

respond to you (e.g., if you are not strong enough to ﬁght in a given situa-

tion, you better be intelligent enough to think your way out of the problem,

or beautiful or charismatic enough to get others to want to help you).

Yo u ca n a l so initially choose from a wide variety of unique backgrounds—

things that happened in your character’s past. For example, your character

might have been a rich debutante who developed strong social skills in her

youth suitable now for recruiting help from others or might have been a child

of a hero, a parent who has given you extra-special skills with a sword, but

whose reputation for goodness you must now live up to, and so on through

many other choices.

When the game starts you get ﬁve “points” that you can choose to dis-

tribute, in any way you wish, to your character, thereby changing his or her

“natural” state. For example, Bead Bead, as a female Half-Elf, had a natural

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LEARNING AND

DENTITY

strength of 7, but I used one of my ﬁve points to make her stronger. As the

game progresses and you gain more worldly experience, you gain yet more

points to distribute, thereby allowing your character to develop in certain

ways and not others.

Yo u c a n d istribute these initial and subsequent points to your character’s

primary traits, such as strength, dexterity, intelligence, and so forth, but you

can also use them to build up a wide variety of other skills, such as ability with

a bow and arrow, skill with picking locks, or persuasive skills; ability to cast a

wide variety of magic spells or to build a wide variety of technological appara-

tuses, including weapons; or the ability to heal better or get less fatigued as

your character engages in effortful tasks. You can choose to have a character

primarily oriented to magic or technology or some mixture of the two.

During game play you talk and interact with a great many other charac-

ters in the world of Arcanum. Your actions gain you a reputation as good or

evil. Various other characters will join you or not, depending on their own

alignments as good or evil and also depending on things like your persuasive-

ness, beauty, and charisma. Throughout the game, you can get gold and buy

clothing, armor, and equipment for yourself and any of your followers, who

may run off with your purchases and leave you if you don’t treat please them.

For example, one of my followers, a rather self-righteous human, kept

threatening to leave me if I continued to attempt to pick people’s pockets.

Rather than quit picking pockets (though I did lay off a bit, at least when he

was looking), I reassured him by giving money to poor street beggars, some-

thing of which he approved.

Your adventures in Arcanum start with a catastrophe. Your character is a

passenger on the Zephyr, a large blimp. Two quite odd ﬂying vessels appear

and attack the Zephyr, destroying themselves in the process. The Zephyr

bursts into ﬂame and smashes into the ground. Only your character and a

dying old man survive the crash. The old man musters just enough strength

to give you an engraved ring along with a cryptic message. He pleads with

you to take his ring and bring it to “the boy,” telling you that a great evil is

coming back to destroy everything. After assuring you that the boy “will

know what to do,” he dies. You are left as the sole survivor of the crash,

though you soon meet a mysterious follower of one of Arcanum’s religions, a

man named Virgil, who, if you wish, will follow and help you.

Thus, your quest begins. The game involves not only the main quest of

carrying out the dead man’s wishes, a quest that eventually leads to a great

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many sub-quests that are part of the main quest. It also has lots of side quests,

given to you by characters you meet throughout Arcanum, which you can

choose to do or ignore. (Though you can gain experience and, thus, more ex-

perience points to distribute to your character if you do them.) By the time

you ﬁnish, your character is very different from the characters other players

would have built, and the game you have played is very different from what it

would have been had you built your character differently initially and

throughout the game.

THREE IDENTITIES:

VIRTUAL, REAL, AND PROJECTIVE

A game like Arcanum involves playing with identities in very interesting and

important ways. When one plays Arcanum, and role-playing games like it,

three different identities are at stake. All are aspects of the relationship: “A

real person (here James Paul Gee) as a virtual character (here Bead Bead).”

They operate all together, at once, as a larger whole.

First, there is a virtual identity: one’s identity as a virtual character in the

virtual world of Arcanum—in my case the Half-Elf Bead Bead. I will repre-

sent this identity as “James Paul Gee as Bead Bead,” where Bead Bead is itali-

cized to indicate that, in this identity, the stress is on the virtual character

Bead Bead acting in the virtual world of Arcanum (though I am “playing/de-

veloping” her).

In the virtual world of Arcanum, given the sort of creature Bead Bead is

(a female Half-Elf) and how I have developed her thus far, there are, at any

point, things she can do and things she cannot do. For example, at a certain

place in the game, Bead Bead wants to persuade a town meeting to fund the

building of a monument to please the town’s mayor. To do this, she needs to

be intelligent and persuasive. Half-Elves are, by nature, pretty intelligent,

and I had built up Bead Bead to be persuasive during the game (i.e., given her

points in this area). Thus, she was able to pull off the task at the town meet-

ing (something I very much doubt a Half-Orc could have done, though Half-

Orcs have other talents). These traits (her intelligence and persuasive skills)

and her accomplishment at the town meeting—for which she received ample

praise—are part of my virtual identity as Bead Bead.

The successes and failures of the virtual being Bead Bead (me in my vir-

tual identity) are a delicious blend of my doing and not my doing. After all, I

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made Bead Bead and developed her, so I deserve—partly, at least—praise for

her successes and blame for her failures. Yet Bead Bead is who she is—a fe-

male Half-Elf—and must move through the world of Arcanum and be

formed, in part, by it, a world I did not create. Thus I am, in this sense, not

responsible for her successes or her failures. I suppose this is how many a par-

ent feels about his or her child, save that in this case, I (James Paul Gee) am

my own child (Bead Bead).

A second identity that is at stake in playing a game like Arcanum is a real-

world identity: namely, my own identity as “James Paul Gee,” a nonvirtual

person playing a computer game. I will represent this identity as “James Paul

Gee as Bead Bead,” where James Paul Gee is italicized to indicate that, in this

identity, the stress is on the real-world character James Paul Gee playing Ar-

canum as a game in real time (though Bead Bead is the tool through which I

operate the game).

Of course, in the real world I have a good many different nonvirtual

identities. I am a professor, a linguist, an Anglo American, a middle-age male

baby boomer, a parent, an avid reader, a middle-class person initially raised

outside the middle class, a former devout Catholic, a lover of movies, and so

on through a great many other identities (most of which need not be men-

tioned here). Of course, these identities become relevant only as they affect

and are ﬁltered through my identity as a video-game player playing Arcanum.

And, indeed, any one of my real-world identities can be so engaged whenever

I am playing Arcanum. Which of these identities, for instance, was at play—

positively or negatively—when I got such joy at having Bead Bead pick rich

people’s pockets? When I chose to be a female Half-Elf in the ﬁrst place?

When I chose to use my points to make her as strong and good as a male at

melee ﬁghting with a sword?

A third identity that is at stake in playing a game like Arcanum is what I

will call a projective identity, playing on two senses of the word “project,”

meaning both “to project one’s values and desires onto the virtual character”

(Bead Bead, in this case) and “seeing the virtual character as one’s own proj-

ect in the making, a creature whom I imbue with a certain trajectory through

time deﬁned by my aspirations for what I want that character to be and be-

come (within the limitations of her capacities, of course).” This is the hardest

identity to describe but the most important one for understanding the power

of games like Arcanum. I will represent this identity as “James Paul Gee as

Bead Bead,” where the word “as” is italicized to indicate that, in this identity,

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the stress is on the interface between—the interactions between—the real-

world person and the virtual character.

A game like Arcanum allows me, the player, certain degrees of freedom

(choices) in forming my virtual character and developing her throughout the

game. In my projective identity I worry about what sort of “person” I want

her to be, what type of history I want her to have had by the time I am done

playing the game. I want this person and history to reﬂect my values, though

I have to think reﬂectively and critically about them, since I have never had

to project a Half-Elf onto the world before. But this person and history also

reﬂect what I have learned from playing the game and being Bead Bead in

the land of Arcanum. A good role-playing video game makes me think new

thoughts about what I value and what I do not.

I, the real-world person, James Paul Gee, a creature with multiple identi-

ties, face the fact that I am ﬁxed in certain ways. Though I am, like all human

beings, ever changing, at the moment I am who I am (I wish I had more hair,

but I don’t; I wish I was thinner, but I am not; I wish I was a better game player,

but I am not). At least for the moment, I must live with my limitations. Bead

Bead, my virtual alter-ego, is a creature who is, at any moment in the game,

also ﬁxed in certain ways—she is skilled in certain areas, not others (e.g., while

she was pretty good at picking pockets, she was lousy at picking locks). At least

for the given moment in the game, I/she must live with her limitations.

The kind of person I want Bead Bead to be, the kind of history I want

her to have, the kind of person and history I am trying to build in and

through her is what I mean by a projective identity. Since these aspirations

are my desires for Bead Bead, the projective identity is both mine and hers,

and it is a space in which I can transcend both her limitations and my own.

To see more clearly what I mean by a projective identity and how it dif-

fers from the virtual identity of being Bead Bead and the real-world identity

of being James Paul Gee (however myriad a thing that is), consider that each

of the three identities I am talking about can fail (or, for that matter, succeed)

in different sorts of ways.

The virtual character Bead Bead (my alter-ego) can fail to defeat another

character in battle because, as a Half-Elf, at that point in the game, she just is

not strong enough to win. This is a limitation I have to live with if I want to

be Bead Bead. Of course, I can mediate on what it feels like—in my role as

Bead Bead—to be unable to get what I need or want at a certain point be-

cause I am physically too powerless to get it.

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The real-world person (James Paul Gee) can fail to use the game controls

in an effective way, thereby causing Bead Bead to lose a ﬁght against a weaker

creature she could have otherwise beaten; he can fail to save the game at a

good time and place (e.g., saving in the middle of a battle that cannot be won

is a bad move); he can fail to ﬁnd his (Bead Bead’s) way in a maze because he

has poor spatial abilities (a trait Bead Bead therefore inherits). He can even re-

alize that his former Catholic inhibitions will not let Bead Bead take up a

madam’s offer of a free trip to her (female) brothel. (This is just an example:

there is such a brothel in Arcanum, but my former Catholic inhibitions, very

real in the real world, did not, in fact, deny Bead Bead a well-deserved night of

forbidden pleasure, though, it turns out, she fainted in the middle of things.)

These are limitations in the real-world me as a game player (an identity

intersected by a good many other identities), limitations I have to live with if

I want to play and eventually get better at games. One sort of limitation video

games certainly bring up to real-world baby boomers like me is that they do

not reward—in fact, they punish—some of my most cherished ways of learn-

ing and thinking (e.g., being too quick to want to get to a goal without en-

gaging in sufficient prior nonlinear exploration).

The projective identity of Bead Bead as a project (mine) in the making

can fail because I (the real-world James Paul Gee) have caused Bead Bead

(the virtual me) to do something in the game that the character I want Bead

Bead to be would not or should not do. For example, on my ﬁrst try at the

game, early on I had Bead Bead sell the ring the old man had given her. This

is not a mistake at playing the game (thus not a failure of the real me to play

the game properly). It’s a move allowed by the internal design grammar of

the game and one for which I would have suffered no bad consequences in

the game world. It is also not something that Half-Elves can’t do or are, for

that matter, necessarily too principled or ungreedy to want to do. Thus it is

not necessarily a violation of Bead Bead as a virtual identity.

However, the act just seemed wrong for the creature I wanted Bead Bead

to be (or to have become, however partially, by the end of the game). I felt

when I (Bead Bead) had sold the ring that I was forming a history for Bead

Bead that was not the one she should have. I wanted her to be a creature who

acted more intelligently and more cautiously, a creature who could eventually

look back on the history of her acts without regret. I felt I had “let her down”

and started the game all over again. Thus, in my projective identity—Bead

Bead as my project—I am attributing feelings and motives to Bead Bead that

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go beyond the conﬁnes of the game world and enter the realm of a world of

my own creation.

It is not uncommon, even when young people are playing ﬁrst-person

shooter games featuring a superhuman hero (like Master Chief in Halo, a

game for the Xbox)—a character that, unlike Bead Bead, they usually cannot

choose or develop but must take as is—that they will redo a given ﬁght scene

because they feel they have “let their character down.” They want to pull off

the victory more spectacularly as beﬁts a superhero. They feel responsible to

and for the character. They are projecting an identity as to who the character

ought to be and what the trajectory of his or her acts in the virtual world

ought, at the end of the day, to look like.

Likewise, while some young people will let a superhero ﬁrst-person

shooter character kill “civilians” and not just enemies, a good many others

will not, since they feel that it just isn’t ﬁtting for such a superperson—that is,

the person they are projecting into the world—to do such a thing. In fact, I

once had remorse when I let/made Bead Bead kill a pesky chicken, an action

for which she was also suitably castigated by the self-righteous follower I

mentioned earlier. Players are projecting an identity onto their virtual char-

acter based both on their own values and on what the game has taught them

about what such a character should or might be and become.

This tripartite play of identities (a virtual identity, a real-world identity,

and a projective identity) in the relationship “player as virtual character” is

quite powerful. It transcends identiﬁcation with characters in novels or

movies, for instance, because it is both active (the player actively does things)

and reﬂexive, in the sense that once the player has made some choices about

the virtual character, the virtual character is now developed in a way that sets

certain parameters about what the player can do. The virtual character re-

dounds back on the player and affects his or her future actions.

As a player, I was proud of Bead Bead at the end of the game in a way in

which I have never been proud of a character in a novel or movie, however

much I had identiﬁed with him or her. I can identify with the pride characters

in a novel or movie must or should feel, given what they have done or how

far they have come. But my satisfaction with Bead Bead is tinged with pride

(or, it could have been regret had things turned out differently), at various

levels, in and with myself. This feeling is not (just) selﬁsh. In a sense, it is also

selﬂess, since it is pride at things that have transcended—taken me outside

of—my real-world self (selves), if I am playing the game reﬂectively.

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IDENTITY AND LEARNING

The theme of this book is that good video games reﬂect, in their design,

good principles of learning. We turn directly to some of these principles in

the next section and in following chapters. Now I want to discuss how and

why the sort of play with identities at work in Arcanum is relevant to learning

outside video games.

A game like Arcanum is powerfully caught up with playing with identi-

ties. However, all deep learning—that is, active, critical learning—is inextri-

cably caught up with identity in a variety of different ways. People cannot

learn in a deep way within a semiotic domain if they are not willing to com-

mit themselves fully to the learning in terms of time, effort, and active en-

gagement. Such a commitment requires that they are willing to see

themselves in terms of a new identity, that is, to see themselves as the kind of

person who can learn, use, and value the new semiotic domain. In turn, they

need to believe that, if they are successful learners in the domain, they will be

valued and accepted by others committed to that domain—that is, by people

in the affinity group associated with the domain.

It has been argued that some poor urban African-American children and

teenagers resist learning literacy in school because they see school-based lit-

eracy as “white,” as associated with people who disregard them and others

like them. They don’t believe that a society that they view as racist will ever

allow them to gain a good job, status, and power, even if they do succeed at

school-based literacy. Thus they will not envisage themselves in the new

identity that success in school-based literacy requires—that is, as the “kind of

person” who learns, values, and uses such literacy and gets valued and re-

spected for doing so. Without such an identity commitment, no deep learn-

ing can occur. The students will not invest the time, effort, and personally

committed engagement that active, critical learning requires. In fact, they re-

sist learning in school in the name of another identity that they see such

learning as putting at risk.

The tripartite play of identities that a game like Arcanum recruits is at

the root of active and critical learning in many other semiotic domains, in-

cluding learning content actively and critically in school. Let’s take good

school science learning as an example.

First, let’s consider virtual identities. In a good science classroom, a virtual

identity is at stake. Learners need to be able to engage in words, interactions,

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and actions that allow them to take on the identity of a “scientist.” But what

does this mean? There are many different sciences and types of scientists. The

teacher must put into motion, in his or her classroom, a set of values, beliefs,

and ways with words, deeds, and interactions that represent, for the teacher

and the students, what it means to be a particular kind of scientist in this class-

room. Doing this means taking up a speciﬁc viewpoint on a speciﬁc branch of

science as a set of cognitive and social practices. Of course, the students are

not “real” scientists and are not going to become real scientists any time soon.

What is being created here is a virtual identity (“student as scientist”).

As I did with Bead Bead in Arcanum, learners in a science classroom should

see the virtual identity (being a particular type of scientist) as partly ﬁxed by the

history and workings of the (scientiﬁc) semiotic domain being learned and

partly open to some choices (compatible, of course, with the domain) that they

themselves get to make about this virtual identity. For example, in one fourth-

grade classroom in which I have worked, the children did experiments on fast-

growing plants, mentored, in part, by the scientist who actually invented such

plants (a man with strong views about how scientists ought to think, value, and

act) as well as by their teacher (a teacher with strong views about how she wants

her students to think, value, and act when they are learning science). In this

classroom, the children were expected to act, interact, and use language in ways

that were recognizable, in terms of the norms set up in this classroom, as scien-

tists doing science. However, the children could also choose a particular style

of carrying out their virtual identities as scientists.

For example, the children chose what questions they wanted to ask and

what sort of experiments they wanted to carry out to help answer those ques-

tions. Some worked in closer collaborations with other children than others

did. Some studied texts more thoroughly before experimentation, some more

thoroughly afterward. Some experimented to check on the results of previous

experiments they found suspicious; others chose to try something for the ﬁrst

time. Some used African American Vernacular English phonology, some did

not, though they all used the lexicon and syntax of scientiﬁc language about

plants when they needed to, which was an important norm in the classroom.

Second, let’s consider real-world identities. In good science classrooms,

the learners’ real-world identities are involved (“learner as scientist”). All

learners in a science classroom bring to that room their real-world identities.

As was the case with me playing Arcanum, each learner has multiple real-

world identities: A given child might be middle-class, male, African Ameri-

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can, a Pokemon fanatic, adept at rap music, and have a good many other

identities as well. But, too, like me playing Arcanum, where these multiple

identities are all ﬁltered through my identity as a game player, the multiple

real-world identities of learners in a science classroom are ﬁltered through

their real-world identities as a learner, a school learner, and a school science

learner learning science here and now.

If a child brings to science learning a real-world identity as a learner, a

school learner, or a school science learner who is already damaged—and a

good many children do—then this identity needs to be repaired before any

active, critical learning can occur here and now. Imagine how successful you

would be learning to play Arcanum if you started with the assumption that

you are a failure at learning to play video games and role-playing games in

particular. This, in fact, is what has happened to me when I tried to learn

real-time strategy games (e.g., Age of Empires, Star Wars: Galactic Battle-

grounds, or WarCraft III). I am intimated by anything that is a race against

time, and so, thus far, I have been a failure at playing real-time strategy

games well and with enjoyment. Some repair work needs to be done.

Furthermore, if children cannot or will not make bridges between one or

more of their real-world identities and the virtual identity at stake in the

classroom (here, a particular type of scientist)—or if teachers or others de-

stroy or don’t help build such bridges—then, once again, learning is imper-

iled. Children who, for instance, see themselves as members of families that

are adept at technical learning have an advantage, since they can build a pow-

erful bridge between one of their real-world identities (“people like us learn

technical stuff well—it’s no big deal”) and the virtual identity at stake in the

science classroom (“scientists in the sort of semiotic domain being created in

this classroom do not fear or put off technical learning”). If a child cannot or

will not build such bridges, then, again, repair works needs to be done.

But how can such repair work be done? It is no easy matter. In fact, often

this is what good teaching, especially in socially and culturally diverse class-

rooms, amounts to. However, good repair work is just a more intense version

of good teaching and learning for all types of students, including those who

have no need of any particular repair work.

Such teaching and learning is, in my view, a matter of three things:

1. The learner must be enticed to try, even if he or she already has good

grounds to be afraid to try.

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2. The learner must be enticed to put in lots of effort even if he or she be-

gins with little motivation to do so.

3. The learner must achieve some meaningful success when he or she has

expended this effort.

There are three principles here because people will not put in effort if they

are not even willing to try in a domain; success without effort is not reward-

ing; and effort with little success is equally unrewarding.

These three things seem pretty basic. Nonetheless, they are left out of

most of the current debates about education, which tend not to engage with

issues about the identities learners bring to school and how these identities

relate to motivation and effort (or their lack) in relation to speciﬁc sorts of

pedagogies.

Video games are particularly good at these three things, at least for some

types of learners. For instance, when I started playing video games, I cer-

tainly brought a fearful and damaged identity as a game player to the task. I

had never been good at such things in the past, and my identical twin brother

always beat me when we played the early video games. And I felt too old now

to have any success. Furthermore, initially I could not conceive of which of

my multiple real-world identities could possibly serve as bridge to the sorts

of virtual worlds and identities video games set up (e.g., blasting Aliens—I’ve

always liked Aliens).

What enticed me to try in the ﬁrst place, then? Well, I watched my son

play video games, starting with Winnie the Pooh, moving on to Pajama Sam,

Freddy Fish, Putt-Putt, and Spy Fox. I played some of the games myself (“just

to help him”). I tried a more adult game, one I picked “randomly” at the

store, the little-known game The New Adventures of the Time Machine. Of

course, its tie to literature (H. G. Wells’s book The Time Machine) piqued my

interest and made playing a video game seem more acceptable, in terms of

some of my real-world identities. My engagement with games through my

child taught me there was some level at which I could enter this semiotic do-

main in which I could achieve enough initial success to keep on practicing

and getting better. To repair damaged learners in any domain, there must be

some such story, though the stories will be as various as the learners.

Even more important, I learned that video games create what the psychol-

ogist Eric Erickson has called a psychosocial moratorium—that is, a learning space

in which the learner can take risks where real-world consequences are lowered.

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After all, you can save the game and start back at the save point when you fail.

Often you can customize the game to a level of difficulty you can cope with ini-

tially. And, of course, you can choose the game you want to play. Although you

have to put out a good deal of effort to play any good video game, there is a rel-

atively low cost of failure and high reward for success. None of this is to say

that it does not bother or even frustrate players when they die or do not play

part of a game well. It does indeed. Of course they care about how well they

do—but the cost of caring is not prohibitive, as it so often is in school.

What made me, once I was enticed to try, willing to put in lots of effort

and practice with video games? When you have chosen a video game well,

the virtual world it allows you to live in is quite compelling. I found the vir-

tual world of The New Adventures of the Time Machine simply amazing. I par-

ticularly liked how, when a certain wave of light went through the world, all

adult characters in the game changed to their child selves and all children

changed to their adult selves, so that sometimes the virtual character you are

playing, Brendan Wales, is a boy, sometimes a man. What makes a game

compelling to me might not make it so to you. Indeed, what made a game

compelling to me when I started to play is not what makes a game com-

pelling to me now. But if the virtual world and virtual identity at stake in

learning is not compelling to the learner, at some level, then little deep learn-

ing is liable to occur, in part because the learner is going to be unwilling to

put in the effort and practice demanded for mastering the domain.

What made The New Adventures of the Time Machine compelling to me

was initially the way in which I could bridge some of my real-world identities

to the virtual character I played in the game and the virtual world in which

he/I moved. For example, there were the ties to literature (books); academics

(Wales is a scientist); problem solving (another tie, at least initially, to my ac-

ademic identity); a medieval but futuristic world (I once lived for real in the

medieval world, though we don’t need to pursue the matter further here);

and fantasy worlds (I have always been a willing escapee from reality, which is

why I have always loved movies and have nothing against Ivory Towers).

Once these ties had drawn me into the game and made me put in lots of ef-

fort, it would have been disappointing in the extreme to experience no success.

However, it would have been equally disappointing to get the sorts of rewards

that much better players get. This would have made me believe the domain

was not very deep and rich. So how does one build in success for effort, success

that is earned, not given away, but nonetheless ensured, given the effort?

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Good computer games are designed so that they adjust to different levels

of play and reward each sort of player, if the player is putting in effort, with

some appropriate degree of success. For example, in a shooter game, after

much exploration, I may uncover a spiffy riﬂe that I am just thrilled with,

since it is so much better than the crowbar I have been using to fend off ene-

mies, while you, much better at the game than I, may have found a tank.

Of course, video games offer players a feeling of achievement in a num-

ber of different ways. First of all, they operate according to a very powerful

learning principle, a principle we can call the “ampliﬁcation of input princi-

ple.” When systems operate according to this principle, they give, for a little

input, a lot of output. (Driving a car is a good example: You press a little

pedal and off you zoom.) In a video game, you press some buttons in the real

world and a whole interactive virtual world comes to life. Ampliﬁcation of

input is highly motivating for learning.

By the way, in the real world, science often operates by the ampliﬁcation

of input principle. In a chemistry experiment, you mix a few chemicals and

make a major discovery, cure cancer, or blow up the lab. Think, too, of the

monk Mendel and his peas: He putters (in the right way) in the garden and

unlocks the key to the origins and development of species on earth. Think

even of Newton’s laws of motion: Such simple and elegant principles cover so

much ground and give so much insight into so many things that one is simply

amazed. None of this is to say that great effort is not required. Mendel

worked for years (and, by the way, failed his exam to become a high school

biology teacher, which was why he was stuck in the garden). It is just to say

that there is something very satisfying when what one actually does seems so

small compared to what one gets. It’s like a miracle.

Video games also offer other rewards than the powerfully amplified

outputs they give. When I was enticed to put in effort on The New Adven-

tures of the Time Machine, new compelling elements quickly arose, beyond

those connected to my real-world identities and the amplification of input

I experienced. I discovered that this game, like many other good video

games, encourages new ways of learning and thinking for an old baby

boomer like me. I discovered new powers in myself. I felt the dawning of a

new identity growing, one to be added to my other real-world identities.

Of course this is true of all good learning—we gain a new valued identity

that gives us new powers; it’s the final hook where the repair work is fi-

nally done.

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This discussion suggests that good science instruction—or good instruc-

tion in any content area—must accomplish the same three goals. The learner

must be enticed to try. This is done through building bridges to his or her

real-world identities and by creating a psychosocial moratorium.

The learner must be enticed to put in lots of effort. This is done by mak-

ing the virtual world and virtual identity (e.g., being/doing a particular type

of scientists in the classroom) at stake in the learning compelling to the

learner on his or her own terms. The learner needs to be sucked in.

And, ﬁnally, this effort must issue in success at an appropriate level, cus-

tomized to the learner’s stage of development in the semiotic domain being

learned. Success for effort at different levels needs to be built in, letting

learners know all the while that there will be yet greater successes for yet

greater effort. Ampliﬁcation of input needs to be designed into the teaching

and learning. And to ensure the deepest sort of success, the virtual world

needs to be built in such a way that learners discover new powers and feel the

dawning of new valued identities.

Let us turn to projective identities (“the learner as scientist”). If learners are

to take on projective identities in the science classroom, they must come to

project their own values and desires onto the virtual identity of “being a sci-

entist of a certain sort” in this classroom. They also must come to see this

virtual identity as their own project in the making, an identity they take on

that entails a certain trajectory through time deﬁned by their own values, de-

sires, choices, goals, and actions. This is what creates ownership.

When learners take on a projective identity, they want the scientist they

are “playing” to be a certain sort of person and to have had a certain sort of

history in the learning trajectory of this classroom. They have aspirations for

this scientist, just as I had aspirations for Bead Bead when I played Arcanum.

Perhaps they want their scientist to have had a history of having been persist-

ent, resilient in the face of failure, collaborative, risk taking, skeptical, and

creative. They want their scientist to become this sort of person, whether or

not they are themselves anything like this in their “everyday” lives. In good

science learning, learners are not just role-playing being a scientist of a cer-

tain sort (their virtual identity). They are also proactively building that vir-

tual person as a certain kind of person with a certain kind of history. They are

projecting their own hopes and desires onto that person.

The learner’s hopes, values, and aspirations for the “character” (the vir-

tual scientist)—and the project the learner makes of that character, the history

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he or she builds for that character—have their source not just in the learner’s

real-world identities, though they most certainly partially have their source

there as the learner reﬂects on his or her values, desires, aspirations, and goals.

They also have their source in what the learner is learning about the virtual

identity and the virtual world (what it means to be a scientist in this class-

room). Remember that the projective identity is the interface between one’s

real-world identities and the virtual identity (e.g., between the real me and the

virtual Bead Bead). The projective identity is the space in which the learner

can transcend the limitations both of the virtual identity and the learner’s own

real-world identity.

If learners in classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective

identity, something magic happens—a magic that cannot take place in quite

the same way when playing a video game. The learner comes to know that he

or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual identity as a real

world identity. However much I might want to do, I myself, in the real world,

have no capacity to become the sort of female Half-Elf I wanted and built

Bead Bead to be (though I can still adopt some of her persona). But learners

in a good science classroom come to feel what it is like to have the capacity to

be the sort of scientist (and person) they have wanted and built their “charac-

ter” in the classroom to be.

Learners do not, of course, have to realize this capacity in actuality and

become scientists. They don’t even have to feel they could become particu-

larly good scientists—after all, in the projective identity you also learn about

your own limitations. Often it is enough that they have sensed new powers in

themselves. They will, possibly for a lifetime, be able to empathize with, affil-

iate with, learn more about, and even critique science as a valued but vulner-

able human enterprise.

This is why it is important for teachers to pick the semiotic domains they

will teach—and the particular virtual identities and worlds they will create in

their classrooms—carefully. If children are learning deeply, they will learn,

through their projective identities, new values and new ways of being in the

world based on the powerful juxtaposition of their real-world identities (“So,

that’s what I really feel, think, and value”) and the virtual identity at stake in

the learning (“So, these are the ways of feeling, thinking, and valuing open to

a scientist”). This juxtaposition is the ground on which their projective work

has been done. (“So, I want, for this time and place, to have been this type of

scientist and person and not that type.”)

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LEARNING PRINCIPLES

The discussion has suggested more learning principles that are built into

good video games. In this section, I bring these together to continue the list

started in chapter 2. After listing principles we have already discussed, I dis-

cuss a few others that are related to them:

6. “Psychosocial Moratorium” Principle

Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are

lowered.

7. Committed Learning Principle

Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and

practice) as extensions of their real-world identities in relation to a

virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual

world that they ﬁnd compelling.

8. Identity Principle

Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way

that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity)

and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new

identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learn-

ers relate, and reﬂect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual

identity, and a projective identity.

9. Self-Knowledge Principle

The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not

only about the domain but about themselves and their current and

potential capacities.

10. Ampliﬁcation of Input Principle

For a little input, learners get a lot of output.

11. Achievement Principle

For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the

beginning, customized to each learner’s level, effort, and growing

mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements.

Because good video games are built in such a way that they operate by

these learning principles, several other principles also come into play. One

thing that designers of video games realize, but that many schools seem

not to, is that learning for human beings is, in large part, a practice effect.

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Humans need to practice what they are learning a good deal before they

master it. Furthermore, they tend to lose a good deal of their learning—

including school learning—when they cease to practice the skills associ-

ated with this learni ng in their daily lives. This is why it is easy to discover

many adults who are no longer very good with school-based science, math,

or literacy if they do not, in their work or home lives, practice these on a

regular basis.

The fact that human learning is a practice effect can create a good deal of

difficulty for learning in school. Children cannot learn in a deep way if they

have no opportunities to practice what they are learning. They cannot learn

deeply only by being told things outside the context of embodied actions. Yet

at the same time, children must be motivated to engage in a good deal of

practice if they are to master what is to be learned. However, if this practice is

boring, they will resist it.

Good video games involve the player in a compelling world of action and

interaction, a world to which the learner has made an identity commitment,

in the sense of engaging in the sort of play with identities we have discussed.

Thanks to this fact, the player practices a myriad of skills, over and over

again, relevant to playing the game, often without realizing that he or she is

engaging in such extended practice sessions. For example, the six-year-old we

discussed in the last chapter has grouped and regrouped his Pikmin a thou-

sand times. And I have practiced, in the midst of battle, switching Bead Bead

to a magic spell and away from her sword in a timely fashion a good many

times. The player’s sights are set on his or her aspirations and goals in the vir-

tual world of the game, not on the level of practicing skills outside meaning-

ful, goal-driven contexts.

Educators often bemoan the fact that video games are compelling and

school is not. They say that children must learn to practice skills (“skill and

drill”) outside of meaningful contexts and outside their own goals: It’s too

bad, but that’s just the way school and, indeed, life is, they claim. Unfortu-

nately, if human learning works best in a certain way, given the sorts of bio-

logical creatures we are, then it is not going to work well in another way just

because educators, policymakers, and politicians want it to.

The fact is that there are some children who learn well in skill-and-drill

contexts. However, in my experience, these children do ﬁnd this sort of in-

struction meaningful and compelling, usually because they trust that it will

lead them to accomplish their goals and have success later in life. In turn,

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they believe this thanks to their trust in various authority ﬁgures around

them (family and teachers) who have told them this. Other children have no

such trust. Nor do I.

In any case, I have already made my own position clear: Passive learning—

rather than active, critical learning—will not lead to much power and empow-

erment in the contemporary world, however much it may suit one for a

low-level service job. Mastering literacy or math as a set of routinized proce-

dures without being able to use these procedures proactively within activities

that one understands and for the accomplishment of one’s own goals will not

lead to learners who can learn quickly and well as they face new semiotic do-

mains, as they will throughout their lives.

Learning how to operate the controls of a computer game outside any

understanding of the meaningful activities the controls are used to accom-

plish in the virtual world of the game and outside one’s own goals in that

world leads, in a shooter game or a realistic military game, for example, to a

quick demise (and, thus, not all that much practice, save at dying again and

again). In my view, the same is true—metaphorically speaking—in school.

The achievement principle above (Principle 11) tells us that good

video games reward all players who put in effort but reward players at dif-

ferent skill levels differently. But there is more to this matter: Good video

games give players better and deeper rewards as (and if) they continue to

learn new things as they play (or replay) the game. This means that, in a

good video game, the distinction between learner and master is vague (at

whatever level of mastery one thinks one has arrived). If players have just

routinized their behaviors (i.e., if they operate on “automatic pilot” and

keep reacting to problems in the same now well-practiced way), a level of

the game will be reached at which the game will realize this and disreward

these behaviors. This fact forces players to think about the routinized

mastery they have achieved and to undo this routinization to achieve a

new and higher level of skill. This higher level of skill will itself, thanks to

the large amount of practice that video games allow, become routinized

(automatic) as the player perfects it, only to be undone later in the game,

or in the same game played a second time at a higher level of difficulty, or

in a new game.

Several educators have argued that this cycle of automatization of skills

through practice, rethinking this automatization when faced with new condi-

tions in order to learn new skills and transform old ones, and then perfecting

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these new skills through further practice that once again leads to automatiza-

tion is the very foundation of intelligent practice in the world. Automatization

is good and necessary if one is to engage in ﬂuent and masterful practice.

However, it gets in the way of new learning if it does not change and adapt in

the face of novel conditions and new opportunities to learn, which requires

the learner to bring back to conscious awareness skills that have become un-

conscious and taken for granted and to think anew about these skills and how

they relate to speciﬁc sorts of problems. A cycle of automatization, adaptation,

new learning, and new automatization is a sine qua non of learning for those

who want to survive as active thinkers and actors in a fast changing world that

requires the mastery of ever newer semiotic domains. Video games are quite

adept at creating and sustaining this cycle.

Finally, all the design features discussed so far work to ensure that a good

video game operates within the learner’s “regime of competence.” By this I

mean that the game often operates within, but at the outer edge of, the

learner’s resources, so that at many points the game is felt as challenging but

not “undoable.” If learning always operates well within the learner’s re-

sources, then all that happens is that the learner’s behaviors get more and

more routinized, as the learner continues to experience success by doing the

same things. This is good, as we have seen, for learning and practicing ﬂuent

and masterful performance (which is, indeed, necessary), but it is not good

for developing newer and higher skills. However, if learning operates outside

one’s resources, the learner is simply frustrated and gives up.

While good video games offer players ample opportunity to practice and

even automatize their skills at various levels, they also always build in many

opportunities for learners to operate at the outer edge of their regime of

competence, thereby causing them to rethink their routinized mastery and

move, within the game and within themselves, to a new level. Indeed, for

many learners it is these times, when they are operating at the edge of their

regime of competence, when learning is most exciting and rewarding. Sadly

in school, many so-called advantaged learners rarely get to operate at the

edge of their regime of competence as they coast along in a curriculum that

makes few real demands on them. At the same time, less advantaged learners

are repeatedly asked to operate outside their regime of competence.

Additional learning principles follow. These are principles found in good

video games, but ones that are hallmarks of deep (active and critical) learning

beyond video games as well.

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12. Practice Principle

Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is

not boring (i.e., in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on

their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success).

They spend lots of time on task.

13. Ongoing Learning Principle

The distinction between learner and master is vague, since learners,

thanks to the operation of the “regime of competence” principle

listed next, must, at higher and higher levels, undo their routinized

mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of

new learning, automatization, undoing automatization, and new re-

organized automatization.

14. “Regime of Competence” Principle

The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the

outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are

felt as challenging but not “undoable.”

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

There is a massive amount of work on socially situated identities and how they are

changing in the modern world. For work compatible with my approach in this chap-

ter, see Alvermann, Moon, & Hagood 1999; Bauman 2000; Beck, Giddens, & Lash

1994; Castells 1996; Foucault 1980; Gee 2000–2001; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear 1996;

Giddens 1991, 1992; Hacking 1995, 1998; Martin 1995; Mishler 2000; Rifkin 2000;

Sternberg & Grigorenko 1999; Taylor 1989, 1992, 1994. For an early, but brilliant

work on socially situated identities, specially relevant to science, see Fleck 1979, orig-

inally 1935.

For a discussion of the advantages of many middle- and upper-middle-class stu-

dents in our schools and the disadvantages of many minori

ty and lower socioeco-

nomic students, see Finn 1999; Gee 1996; Heath 1983; Miller 1995; Varenne &

McDermott 1998.

For Erikson’s notion of a psychosocial moratorium, see Erikson 1968. Several of

the learning principles in this chapter relate closely to principles developed in current

accounts of efficacious learning in cognitive science; see, for example, Bransford,

Brown, & Cocking 1999 and Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser 2001. Several of the

principles ﬁt very well with Bereiter and Scardamelia’s 1989 important discussion of

learning and expertise. The i

mportance of gaining and undoing automatization, and

its connection to the ongoing learning principle, is well discussed in Bereiter and

Scardamelia’s book. The practice principle is discussed in sociocultural terms in

Scribner and Cole’s famous 1981 study. The regime of competence is discussed in

diSessa 2000 and is related to Vygotsky’s well-known notion of the zone of proximal

development; see Vygotsky 1978. diSessa 2000 also discusses ampliﬁcation of input

and contains an extended and i

mportant discussion of committed learning.

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SITUATED MEANING AND LEARNING:

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO AFTER YOU HAVE

DESTROYED THE GLOBAL CONSPIRACY?

LEARNING AND EXPERIENCE

RADITIONAL VIEWS OF LEARNING STRESS THE MIND AND NOT THE

body. Learning is held to be a matter of grand generalizations, principles, rules,

abstractions, and logical computations. This view treats the human mind as if it

is pretty much like a digital computer. Digital computers operate by rules that

tell them how to manipulate symbols, symbols that have no real meanings to

the computer beyond the manipulations the computer carries out on them.

Another view of learning holds that human learning and thinking does

not, in fact, always work this way and often does not work this way when hu-

mans are thinking at their best. This view holds, rather, that humans learn,

think, and solve problems by reﬂecting on their previous embodied experi-

ences in the world. That is, humans have experiences, store these experi-

ences, and make connections or associations among them.

Of course, humans don’t just store these experiences in their minds “as

is.” Rather, they edit them according to their interests, values, goals, and so-

ciocultural memberships. This editing process helps them structure the ways

in which they pay attention to their experiences, foregrounding some things

in them and backgrounding others. Furthermore, it is the connections or as-

sociations that people make among their experiences that are crucial to learn-

ing, thinking, and problem solving.

When people are faced with a new situation in the world, aspects or ele-

ments of this situation remind them of aspects or elements of experiences

they have had in the past. They use these elements of past experience to think

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about the new situation. Sometimes they can just apply past experience pretty

much as is to the new situation. Other times they have to adapt past experi-

ence, more or less, to apply it, in the process learning something new that

can, in turn, be applied to future situations.

Let me give you an overly simpliﬁed but instructive example of the contrast

between learning and thinking as using grand generalizations and learning and

thinking as using one’s embodied experiences in the world. Let’s say that you

have experienced in the past a number of white, middle-age, professors who

were born outside the middle class but who are now in the middle class. In each

case, say, these people displayed a good deal of “class conﬂict,”—that is, they

displayed a certain discomfort with their middle-class identities and associates.

Now consider two ways this information could be stored in your mind.

One way would be as verbal generalization, something like:

(Some? many?) white, middle-age, professors born outside the middle class,

but now in the middle class, display a good deal of class conﬂict.

The other way you could store your experiences of such people in your mind

is as a set of more or less strong connections or associations among all the ele-

ments that compose the experiences. That is, you would associate or connect

“being middle age,” more or less strongly, with each other element in the experi-

ences, namely, “being a professor,” “having been born outside the middle class,”

“being now middle class,” and “displaying a good deal of class conﬂict.” The

same is true of all the other elements, each of which must be associated with each

other element, more or less strongly. Perhaps you associate “being a professor”

strongly with “being middle class”; strongly, but somewhat less strongly, with

“being white”; and weakly with “having been born outside the middle class.”

You must form such links or associations between any and all of the ele-

ments that compose your experiences of these sorts of professors. Doing this

makes for complicated diagrams on paper, though the brain realizes such

things by forming more or less strong connections among (sets of) neurons in

terms of which notions like “being a professor” activate or remind you, more

or less strongly, of other notions like “being middle class” or “displaying class

conﬂict.” What we are talking about here, in reality, is patterns you are dis-

covering in your experiences and storing in your mind.

Now consider what happens when you are faced with an African Ameri-

can, middle-age, professor who was born outside the middle class but who is

now in the middle class. What do you conclude? If your mind has stored the

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verbal generalization above, you conclude nothing, since this person, being

African American, does not fall under the generalization, which was, after all,

about white professors. A digital computer that has stored this generalization

as a set of symbols, confronted with the symbol “African American,” will sim-

ply not apply the generalization.

On the other hand, if you have stored the sorts of associations or links

between elements of your experiences just discussed, then, many of the fea-

tures or elements of this person’s situation will activate or remind you of

those associations. For example, the fact that this African American is a pro-

fessor but was born outside the middle class will bring to mind the likelihood

that he or she will display a good deal of class conﬂict. This is so because your

mind associates (fairly strongly) the combination of being a professor and

having been born outside the middle class with displaying class conﬂict.

While you may also associate being a professor with “being white,” you do

not use this association, since in this case you know the person is not white.

You suppress it and go with the others that lead you to predict you might ﬁnd

this person displaying some degree of class conﬂict.

Of course, you might turn out to be wrong. Perhaps this African Ameri-

can professor is quite comfortable with his or her middle-class status. But one

has to make guesses and hypotheses to think, act, and problem-solve in the

world at all. All the cavepeople who stored the generalization “Tigers are

dangerous” and refused to apply it to even the ﬁrst lion they saw probably

died without many offspring. The ones who let the many features lions share

with tigers trigger the association between these elements and danger passed

on a great many more genes.

If you turn out to be wrong, you will, perhaps, store a negative associa-

tion between “being African American” and “class conﬂict” and strengthen

your associations between “white” and “class conﬂict.” You will adjust a num-

ber of other associations, as well, though all rather tentatively, since so far

you have only one case to go on. If you experience many other cases of con-

tent middle-class African American professors born outside the middle class,

eventually you will revise your associations more conﬁdently.

I pointed out that the view of the mind and learning that favors rules, ab-

stractions, and generalizations is connected to the digital computer as a

metaphor for how human thinking and learning work. The view of the mind

and learning that favors associations among the elements of our actual (and

vicarious) embodied experiences is itself connected to another sort of com-

puter: a so-called connectionist or parallel distributed network computer.

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One of several sources of rich evidence that human thinking is deeply

rooted in embodied experience of the world comes from studies of human

languages. In all human languages, very often abstract notions are encoded in

words and phrases that constitute metaphors based in concrete, embodied ex-

perience of a material world. For example, consider how we talk about the

mind and thinking. We say things like “Why can’t you get this into your

head,” “Keep this in mind,” or “I can’t get the idea out of my head.” In all the

cases we treat the mind as a container that things can go in and out of.

For another example, consider how we talk about argumentation. We say

things like “He destroyed your point,” “She defended her own perspective,”

“She marshaled her arguments,” or “You need to challenge his basic premises,”

where we treat argumentation as a form of ﬁghting or combat. Or, for a ﬁnal

example, note how we talk about consciousness: “He came back to conscious-

ness,” “He lost consciousness,” “He went unconscious,” or “Try to bring the

experience back to conscious awareness;” here we treat consciousness as a sort

of place we can come to and leave.

There are, of course, a great many more such examples. The argument is

that just as language builds abstractions on the basis of concrete images from

embodied experience of a material world, so, too, does human learning and

thinking. One good way to make people look stupid is to ask them to learn

and think in terms of words and abstractions that they cannot connect in any

useful way to images or situations in their embodied experiences in the

world. Unfortunately, we regularly do this in schools.

In this chapter I discuss the ways in which video games encourage and

recruit situated, experiential, and embodied forms of learning and thinking.

In this respect good video games incorporate quite good perspectives on how

learning, thinking, and problem solving work in the world and should work

in schools. I base my discussion, for concreteness, around a particular game,

the game Deus Ex.

DEUS EX

Deus Ex combines two different genres. It is a ﬁrst-person shooter in which

you ﬁght a variety of enemies from a ﬁrst-person perspective. It is also a role-

playing game in which, like Arcanum, you have choices about how to build

and develop your character. Before you start playing the game, you choose

the name and look of your character. (Your character can be black or white,

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for instance.) Whatever real name you choose, your character’s code name is

“J. C. Denton.” J.C. is a covert special operative for UNATCO, the United

Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. Note that this game came out well before

the events of September 11, 2001. In fact, the game raises interesting issues

about who is and who is not a “terrorist” and under what circumstances.

J. C. Denton is not fully human. He and his brother, Paul, have been

“augmented” via a technology that allows them to leverage advanced abilities

through the use of “nanite organisms” placed in their blood. Nanites are ro-

bots so tiny that they can ﬁt inside individual cells. (They have been said to

be the future of robotics, tiny devices that could be used for things like clean-

ing out clogged arteries or performing other sorts of surgery inside the

body—however, I have no idea how far such technology has gone, or will go,

in the “real” world.) In this case, nanites have been injected into J.C. Den-

ton’s body. This gives him (you) the capacity to gain superhuman powers of

various sorts in the game world.

After choosing a real name and look for J.C. Denton, you get a certain

number of points with which you can increase his (your) skills. There are 11

skills (computers, electronics, environmental training, lock picking, medi-

cine, swimming, and skills with weapons of different types, including demoli-

tion devices, heavy weapons, low-tech weapons, pistols, and riﬂes). Each of

these skills has four levels of mastery (Untrained, Trained, Advanced, and

Master). You begin the game with each skill at Untrained Level, except for

skill with pistols, which begins at Trained Level. You use your initial points to

increase J. C.’s (your) training level in some of the other areas, though you

only have enough initial points to increase a few skills a bit. As you play the

game, you earn additional points with which you can further increase J. C.’s

(your) skills.

Enhancing certain skills and not others, at the beginning and throughout

the game, directly affects how you play. For example, if you are at the Expert

Level as a lock picker, then you can easily get into places you wouldn’t be able

to get into otherwise, unless you have found a key. If your Demolition

Weapons skills are no good, then you are quite likely to die if you try to dis-

arm a bomb. If your Computer skills are good, you can hack more easily into

the myriad of computational devices you ﬁnd in the world of Deus Ex; other-

wise you have to gain such information through other sources, if you can.

When I played the game, toward the end, at a point where I knew I was

about to face a great many powerful robots and other enemies, I found a very

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large gun in a dark corner of a military base, quite suitable for blowing robots

off the face of the earth. Alas, I did not have any great skill at Heavy

Weapons, so stealth and more subtle ﬁghting strategies were the order of the

day. (Truth be told, I used the experience points I gained using these more

subtle strategies to increase my Heavy Weapons training, went back and got

the gun, and had great fun blasting robots with a single shot.)

But choosing J. C’s skill levels is not the only way in which you can develop

him. As I said above, he is “nano-augmented.” In fact, he has slots for nano-

augmentations distributed around his body. You begin the game with three

nano-augmentations already installed: an Infolink that allows J.C. to receive

real-time neural communications from commanders and allies; an IFF (Identi-

ﬁcation: Friend or Foe) system that analyzes people and tells J.C. whether they

are hostile or not; and a Light that runs off J. C.’s own biological system.

You can ﬁll the unﬁlled slots as you ﬁnd special augmentation canisters

in the game world. Canisters contain blueprints for two special abilities, such

as having the strength to lift a truck or the ability to see through concrete

walls. When you install a canister into the appropriate slot on J. C.’s body,

thereby releasing its nanite organisms into his bloodstream, you must choose

one, and only one, of the two special abilities associated with that particular

canister. Once you ﬁll a slot, that augmentation is permanently installed, and

the second option is gone forever. So you must choose wisely. The augmen-

tations you select greatly affect how you (J. C. Denton) develop in the game

world and what strategies will be most advantageous against different foes

and challenges. You can also ﬁnd upgrade canisters that allow you to upgrade

any augmentations you have already installed, thereby making them stronger

or more efficient.

Besides developing J. C.’s skills and nano-augmentations, there are other

ways in which the player’s decisions affect how the game will unfold. In your

role as J.C. Denton, you have conversations with a number of other charac-

ters. You can choose different things to say and different ways to respond.

How you have carried out a conversation with a given character will affect

what that character thinks of you, how he or she reacts to you, and what he or

she will later do or not do for or against you. Furthermore, you face other

sorts of consequential choices in the world of Deus Ex, and how you make

such choices affects what happens later in the game.

When you start the game, you enter a futuristic world that has fallen on

hard times. Crime, terrorism, and disease are out of all control. No single

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government or agency can react fast or efficiently enough to control the

worldwide devastation. In particular, a horrible plague, known as the Grey

Death, is sweeping through cities and countries around the world over,

killing millions. There is only one known cure for the disease, a vaccine

called Ambrosia, a product that is in short supply and manufactured by the

U.S. corporation VersaLife.

One of UNATCO’s duties is to administer this cure for the Grey Death.

However, the general public does not know that the cure exists. It is kept a

secret and given only to politicians, dignitaries, and billionaires to ensure that

the world’s economy does not crash. Or so the rich and powerful claim.

Nothing is ever as it seems at ﬁrst in Deus Ex.

J. C. Denton’s ﬁrst mission takes place on Liberty Island, New York, site

of the Statue of Liberty. Inside the statue, a terrorist group knows as the NSF

is holding an UNATCO agent hostage. J.C. (you) soon discovers that the

NSF is aware of Ambrosia and intends to replicate it and release it to the

public. This begins a wild adventure in which you move to various sites and

cities across the world (all rendered in great futuristic detail, based on actual

architectural maps), uncovering plots and conspiracies, solving a great many

problems, and ﬁghting enemies of all sorts.

Deus Ex involves a good many moral dilemmas. For example, you dis-

cover, fairly early on, that the NSF are not really the “bad guys” and you and

your fellow UNATCO soldiers are not really the “good guys.” Yet you have

already killed a number of NSF soldiers. If you have been too enthusiastically

gung ho in this enterprise, you are left with a very real sense of guilt. In fact,

when I returned to the UNATCO base from one of my ﬁrst missions and

told the munitions officer, a seasoned veteran, how I had performed, he told

me that I was not a real soldier, because I too readily killed the enemy rather

than attempting to sneak past them when I could. He refused to give me

more ammunition, telling me to use what I had left more carefully and hu-

manely. Thus, when I discovered that the NSF troops were not really the ter-

rorists UNATCO claimed, I felt all the more guilty.

Later in the game you are forced to choose whether to save your badly

wounded brother, Paul, now ﬁghting at your side against UNATCO, or to

escape and let him die in order to go on ﬁghting for your current cause. (In-

deed, Paul urges you to go on and leave him to protect your retreat.) If you

save your brother (and survive yourself, of course), he plays a role later in the

story; if you don’t, he doesn’t, though you later see his body in one of your

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enemies’ bases. When I played Deus Ex, I let Paul die and have regretted it

ever since. (At the time, I didn’t feel I had the requisite game-playing skills to

save him—but perhaps that was just a lame self-exonerating excuse.)

By the time Deus Ex ends, you know a great deal more than you did at

the beginning. You have discovered that the world is, in fact, run by a small

number of rich global elites, elites who hide behind and control forces like

the U.S. government, many members of which don’t themselves fully under-

stand who is actually pulling the strings in the global world. These elites have

helped bring on all the devastation in the world, and they beneﬁt by it. At the

conclusion of the game, three opposing ﬁgures (each of whom has been help-

ing you) try to convince you to engage in a different set of speciﬁc ﬁnal ac-

tions that will end the game in three different ways.

One ﬁgure tells you the world will always be run by a small elite, though

the current ones are selﬁsh, evil, and corrupt. He tells you that you and he

and his allies should replace this ruling elite and that all of you will behave

more humanely, because you are better people. If you do what he suggests,

you will become one of the elite rulers of the world—and, indeed, you (J. C.

Denton) are a moral force and incorruptible force, are you not?

Another ﬁgure tells you that the world will always be run by a small elite as

long as there is a global world tied together through global networked commu-

nications. This ﬁgure encourages you to engage in actions that will destroy this

global communicational infrastructure, returning the world to small and tech-

nologically primitive villages that will not be closely connected to each other in

any larger system. This, he claims, is the only moral and humane future.

The last ﬁgure agrees that the world will always be run by a small elite,

especially if the world is a globally interconnected into one big system, as it

is. But this ﬁgure, who happens to be not a human but a massive and sophis-

ticated artiﬁcial intelligence, tells you that the only moral and humane way

forward is to have him—a completely dispassionate and rational being—run

the world, not human beings, any of whom will simply be corrupted by their

passions and by power. Humans have failed, over all of history, to institute a

nonviolent, humane world for everyone. Only a purely rational and logical

being can make good decisions. The artiﬁcial intelligence device tells you to

engage in actions that will allow it to rule.

You must choose which ending to bring on. Yourself as an incorruptible

elite? Return to small villages? Rational rule by artiﬁcial intelligence? I must

admit, I was thrilled at the end of Deus Ex as I (J. C. Denton) ran from the

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ruins of the massive global communicational infrastructure collapsing all

around me after what I had just done and returned the world to a plethora of

small villages. You might have decided otherwise.

Deus Ex has one feature that is characteristic of good video games,

though the feature is stronger in this game than in many others: There are

nearly always multiple solutions to any given problem. Players can choose

strategies that ﬁt with their style of learning, thinking, and acting. This, of

course, is highly motivating both for learning and for playing the game and a

rich source for reﬂecting on one’s own styles of learning and problem solving

(and, perhaps, experimenting with new ones).

STORYING AND LIVING IN

THE VIRTUAL WORLD OF A VIDEO GAME

Deus Ex has a rich, ever-twisting and turning story line. However, story in Deus

Ex, and other video games with rich stories, functions quite differently than it

does in books or movies. A book or movie can tell its story from ﬁrst episode to

last or it can begin in the middle of the action and only later get to the initial

events in the story. In either case, the reader or viewer knows someone else (the

“author”) has determined the order in which events in the story will be encoun-

tered. This “author” (which, of course, can be multiple people) also determines

the sources through which the reader or viewer gains crucial information. For

example, a crucial piece of information may be in a conversation between two

lovers rather than in a hidden diary. In a video game, on the other hand, some

players will gain such information one way and others in another way.

In Deus Ex, the player uncovers the story bit by bit as he or she discovers

documents, hacks into computers, overhears or engages in conversations, or

sees things happen. Different players ﬁnd different things and discover infor-

mation relevant to the story line in a different order. Furthermore, the player

him- or herself engages in actions that are themselves part of the story line

and different players will engage in different actions or the same ones in a

different order.

The story line in a video game is a mixture of four things:

1. The game designers’ (“author’s”) choices

2. How you, the player, have caused these choices to unfold in your spe-

ciﬁc case by the order in which you have found things

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3. The actions you as one of the central characters in the story carry out

(since in good video games there is a good deal of choice as to what to

do, when to do it, and in what order to do it)

4. Your own imaginative projection about the characters, plot, and

world of the story

The ﬁrst and fourth of these items are true of books and movies, as well, but

items 2 and 3 are true of video games only.

Thus, in video games like Deus Ex, stories are embodied in the player’s

own choices and actions in a way they cannot be in books and movies. Let’s

just call them, for short, “embodied stories.” When I use the term “embod-

ied,” I mean to include the mind as a part of the body. So “embodied” means,

for me, “in the body” and/or “in the mind.” It’s too bad there is no word

“emminded” to go alongside “embodied.” When I talk about a person’s em-

bodied experiences in the world (virtual or real), I mean to cover all the per-

ceptions, actions, choices, and mental simulations of action or dialogue.

This is not to say that stories in video games are better or worse than sto-

ries in books and movies. Each form has its own advantages and disadvantages.

For example, since stories in video games are embodied in you the player, you

(i.e., the character you are playing) cannot die and stay dead (you can die, but

then you start the game again from a saved point or from the beginning). Oth-

erwise, the game would be over before its “ending.” In a book or movie, you

can get quite sad and upset when a character you empathize with dies (you

know that the character probably won’t being coming back, unless it’s a super-

natural story, and when characters we like do come back in books and movies,

we sometimes cry because it is such a rare, unreal, and special event).

When the character you are playing dies in video game (and it is always,

of course, a main character), you can get sad and upset, but you also usually

get “pissed” that you (the player) have failed. Perhaps you even feel that you

have failed your character. And then you start again, usually from a saved

game, motivated to do better. This is part of what it means to call these

video-game stories embodied stories. The emotional investments you have in

a video-game story are entirely different from the emotional investments you

have in a book or movie.

There are all sorts of reasons why stories in video games cannot (yet?) be,

in a sense, as deep or rich as stories in good books and movies. For example, a

video game must work out different futures based on choices different players

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have made and different things they have done earlier in the game. This creates

a computational problem that books and movies do not face, since in a book or

movie the designer always knows what choices have been made earlier. (Al-

though quite simple “choose your own adventure” books are available.) Fur-

thermore, real conversation is beyond the current computational power of a

video game, since human beings can make so many different responses to any-

thing said to them. A game like Deus Ex carries out conversations by giving the

player a choice among several different things to say. Again, creating ﬂexible,

unpredictable conversations is a computational problem that books and movies

do not face, since they simply script speciﬁc set dialogue.

Video games compensate for these limitations by creating what I have

called embodied stories, stories that involve and motivate the player in a dif-

ferent way than do the stories in books and movies. One intriguing thing I

have found about video-game stories is that I am so involved at the level of ac-

tion—worrying about where I am, what’s to be found there, what I am doing,

what good or bad things might happen to me, what needs doing right now—

that the larger story line often seems to ﬂoat somewhat vaguely above me. I

can’t quite pull all the pieces together, since I’m too busy right now and, in

any case, some of the pieces I discovered long ago are a bit hazy now. I can, of

course, later (in a safe place) stop and try to put the pieces together, and I can

then also usually look things up in notes games often keep for players.

Thus, although every once in a while in playing a game I do pause to

consider the bigger picture—I certainly had to, at the end of the game, be-

fore I decided to send the world back to small villages—there is also a deli-

cious feeling of being in the midst of things, looking at the world from the

ground up and not from a God’s-eye perspective. I suppose this is, again, part

of what it means to call these stories “embodied stories.” But it is also a whole

lot like what “real” life is like. (Also, it is a lot like what it feels like to engage

in an academic discipline when one does research and doesn’t just study

things after they have become all cut and dried.)

Again, video-game stories are not better or worse than stories in books and

movies. They are different. They offer different pleasures and frustrations.

SITUATED AND EMBODIED MEANINGS

The embodied nature of video-game stories brings out a crucial feature. In

video games, meaning (sense, signi ﬁcance) is itself situation-speciﬁc and

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embodied. In the chapter 2 I argued that this is how meaning operates when

people actually know what they are doing in a domai n and can do more than

mindlessly repeat words and other symbols that they cannot situate inside

any real practice. Video games are particularly good examples of how learn-

ing and thinking work in any semiotic domain when learning and thinking

are powerful and effective, not passive and inert.

In games like Deus Ex, the meaning of any event, object, artifact, conver-

sation, written note, or any other potentially meaningful sign is up for grabs.

You don’t really know what it means unless and until you can give it a speciﬁc

meaning in terms of the world through which you are moving as a character

or the actual actions you carry out in that world. Furthermore, as that world

and your actions in it change, the meanings of things you have seen or dis-

covered can change as well. That is, meanings in video games are always spe-

ciﬁc to speciﬁc situations. They are always actively assembled (or changed)

by the player, on the spot, in terms of images, materials, and embodied ac-

tions in the virtual world being mutually created by the game and the player.

In other words, meanings in video games are what I called, in chapter 2, “sit-

uated meanings” or “situation-speciﬁc meanings,” not just general ones.

Take something as simple as a numerical code—say ﬁve numbers—that

you ﬁnd on a desk or hack from a computer while playing Deus Ex. It’s pretty

clear that this code is nearly meaningless—not completely so, of course, since

you know that it’s a code of some sort. The code, at this point, just has a de-

contextualized, general meaning, the meaning “code of some sort.” This

code means nothing until you ﬁnd something (e.g., a safe, a locked door, a

computer) that it can be used on to some good effect. Then the numbers take

on the situated, embodied, action-oriented meaning “opens this safe.”

There is a wonderful moment in Deus Ex when a completely evil and

powerful cyborg woman at the UNATCO command center, a creature who

has threatened me (J. C. Denton) throughout a large part of the game, is

about to kill me when I have switched sides away from UNATCO. She ex-

pects an all-out ﬁght at which I am quite likely to lose badly. But I have

found—unbeknownst to her—a code word in a computer that will cause her

cyborgian mechanisms to self-destruct should I utter it in her presence.

Those who have not found the code must ﬁght her. I, on the other hand,

utter the code word and experience a delicious moment of wonderfully em-

bodied and situated meaning (much as I did when I ﬁrst realized that fractal

equations lead to marvelous patterns when you feed them into a computer or

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actually graph them on a piece of paper, rather than learn just to repeat them

and verbally list their numerical properties).

What I have said about a set of numbers found on a discarded note in

Deus Ex is true, too, of any written note or diary you ﬁnd in the game. It’s

true of any words you hear as well. To make sense of them you must ﬁt them

into the emerging plot and virtual world you are discovering and helping to

build. And you must do this actively, since you have choices about where to

go and what to do. Every potentially meaningful sign in a game like Deus

Ex—whether word, deed, artifact, or action—is a particular sort of invitation

to embodied action (action actually carried out or simulated in the mind). And

the nature of that invitation changes as you experience new situations and en-

gage in new actions in the virtual world of the game.

Even something that seems to have a set and general meaning—a lock

pick, for example—takes on different meanings in different situations. For

example, at a certain point you may have but one lock pick left. Then that

lock pick comes to mean something like: try other ways into doors, use this lock

pick as last resort, because there may be more important doors coming up. Notice

that if you don’t assemble some useful meaning for the lock pick, bad effects

can happen to you in the virtual world of the game. There is a price to be

paid for not thinking at a situation-speciﬁc level and in terms of embodied

actions in the game.

Of course, one might now say, “Well, that’s just how meaning works in

video games—it isn’t and shouldn’t be that way outside of games, say, in

school.” You already know from the discussion in chapter 2 that I disagree

with this view. General, purely verbal meanings, meanings that a person has

no ability to customize for speciﬁc situations and that offer the person no in-

vitations for embodied actions in different situations, are useless (save for

passing tests in school).

This theory of meaning as situated and embodied ﬁts well with some

current work that I believe to be at the cutting edge of psychological research

on how comprehension of oral and written language works when it works ef-

fectively. For example, consider these two remarks:

... comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare

agents for situated action.

... to a particular person, the meaning of an object, event, or sentence is

what that person can do with the object, event, or sentence.

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While video games actively encourage such situated and embodied

thinking and doing, school often does not. In school, words and meanings

usually ﬂoat free of material conditions and embodied actions. They take on

only general, so-called decontextualized meanings. Their meanings just

amount to spelling out a word or phrase in terms of still other words and

phrases, themselves with only general meanings. People (like the college

physics students discussed in the chapter 2) cannot actually do anything with

these words. (They cannot even simulate or carry out a conversation with

these meanings, a conversation in which what they know is used ﬂexibly and

adapted differently to speciﬁc situations being discussed.)

Imagine you were to design a video game in which the player, a student

of architecture, had to learn a new 3-D architectural drafting system, a quite

complicated symbol system. (Such a game does exist, though I have not

played it.) Certainly learning such a system is equivalent in complexity to tak-

ing a class on a new language or a new academic area in school. If this game

operated like a good video game, then the player’s understandings of this new

system—all its words, symbols, and procedures—would have to be embodied

in materials, images, and actions in the game’s virtual world. Furthermore,

the player’s understandings would have to change and transform in new and

different situations. Additionally, the player would have to actively assemble

these understandings on the spot and face real consequences in the virtual

world for these assemblies. In fact, it is these consequences that allow the

player to test whether the situation- and action-speciﬁc meanings he or she

has constructed are viable or not.

Compare this to sitting these students down and having them read books,

listen to lectures, and discuss these matters apart from any real consequences.

In this case, the students would have only general and/or verbal meanings, not

embodied ones that they can customize to and for different situations of actual

practice. I am not saying that we need to teach these architecture students—or

any others—via video games. Good classrooms can teach people how to situ-

ate and embody meanings in a variety of different ways, though this may in-

volve getting out of the classroom from time to time.

I suppose we are unlikely to teach people new to drafting via just reading

and telling. (Though we do often try to teach adults who already know some-

thing about an older drafting system a new one via this route—it works as

well as you’d expect, which is not well at all.) But we do routinely try to teach

children things like science and math this way in our schools.

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Now someone’s sure to say: “But we cannot teach children everything

they need to learn in school, things like science and math, in ways that

make sense in terms of situated meanings and embodied actions. There

just isn’t enough time, and, after all, they’re not all going to become scien-

tists.” There is a sort of good common sense in this remark, but the prob-

lem is this: There really is no other way to make sense. If all you know—in

any domain—are general meanings, then you really don’t know anything

that makes sense to you.

Of course, students in a science classroom do not need to know how to

situate meanings in all the contexts a “real” scientist does. And they don’t

need to be experts at situating meanings in the sort of science they are study-

ing. But they do need to know how some important and central situated

meanings work in the semiotic domain—to have some embodied feel for the

matter. Otherwise they have, in reality, no idea how or why words and other

sorts of signs in the domain make sense.

Imagine a person who claims to know what the word “democracy”

means, because she can give you a dictionary deﬁnition of the word or, per-

haps, a deﬁnition she has gotten out of a social studies textbook. However,

faced with the following claim, she can make no intelligent response that

speaks in any situated way to the situation the claim is about (i.e., the impact

of wealth on elections in some countries):

A country is not a democracy when candidates must take contributions from

wealthy people in order to run for office, since then only wealthy people de-

termine the slate of candidates.

The responder does not have to agree with this claim. But he or she

surely has to see the sort of situated meaning being given to “democracy” in

the claim. Further, he or she must then either accept that situated meaning or

counter it with another situated meaning customized for (i.e., situationally

relevant) to the situation the claim is dealing with. This is dialogue as en-

gaged action. If you can’t use “democracy” in a situation-speciﬁc way in such

dialogues, then the word does not make sense to you, no matter how well you

can repeat a dictionary deﬁnition for the word.

Let me give one more example, again taking a rather mundane word. A

faculty colleague of mine who is an avid proponent of phonics instruction in

the early grades said to me once, “Kids are coming to college unable to read

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the books I assign.” He blamed this situation on a lack of early phonics in-

struction. (The students were victims, he claimed, of Whole Language.)

Thus, he was giving the word “read” the situated meaning: able to decode print,

that is, translate letters into sounds.

However, this situated meaning, in fact, does not work well for the very

situation the faculty member was describing. These students can almost cer-

tainly decode print, and many can decode it quite well. This is a matter that

can be checked quite easily (by asking them to decode complex nonsense

words out of context). The problem these students have—if they do indeed

have a problem—is that they cannot comprehend the complex academic lan-

guage of college textbooks well. Such language is quite different from “every-

day” colloquial language and requires students to have heard and read a good

bit of it before they are very adept at doing so. The faculty member’s claim

has a chance of being true only if the word “read” is given a situated meaning

something like: able to understand text at a level that goes beyond mere decoding

and knowledge of the literal meanings of everyday words and phrases to an under-

standing of the specialist language of writing that is more technical than everyday

language.

Let me end this discussion of situated meaning with an example relevant

to science education, an example that will take us away from words toward

situated and embodied meanings for other sorts of symbols. The science edu-

cator Andrea diSessa has successfully taught children in sixth grade and be-

yond the algebra behind Galileo’s principles of motion (principles related to

Newton’s laws) by teaching them a speciﬁc computer programming language

called Boxer.

The students write into the computer a set of discrete steps in the pro-

gramming language. For example, the ﬁrst command in a little program

meant to represent uniform motion might tell the computer to set the speed

of a moving object at one meter per second. The second step might tell the

computer to move the object. And a third step might tell the computer to re-

peat the second step over and over again. Once the program starts running,

the student will see a graphical object move one meter each second repeat-

edly, a form of uniform motion.

Now the student can elaborate the model in various ways. For example,

the student might add a fourth step that tells the computer to add a value a to

the speed of the moving object after each movement the object has taken (let

us just say, for convenience, that a adds one more meter per second at each

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step). So now, after the ﬁrst movement on the screen (when the object has

moved at the speed of one meter per second), the computer will set the speed

of the object at two meters per second (adding one meter), and, then, on the

next movement, the object will move at the speed of two meters per second.

After this the computer will add another meter per second to the speed, and

on the next movement the object will move at the speed of three meters per

second. And so forth forever, unless the student has added a step that tells the

computer when to stop repeating the movements. This process is obviously

modeling the concept of acceleration. And, of course, you can set a to be a

negative number instead of a positive one, and watch what happens to the

moving object over time instead.

The student can keep elaborating the program and watch what happens

at every stage. In this process, the student, with the guidance of a good

teacher, can discover a good deal about Galileo’s principles of motion

through his or her actions in writing the program, watching what happens,

and changing the program. What the student is doing here is seeing in an

embodied way, tied to action, how a representational system that is less ab-

stract than algebra or calculus (namely, the computer programming lan-

guage, which is actually composed of a set of boxes) “cashes out” in terms of

motion in a virtual world on the computer screen.

An algebraic representation of Galileo’s principles is more general, basi-

cally a set of numbers and variables that do not directly tie to actions or

movements as material things. As diSessa points out, algebra doesn’t distin-

guish effectively “among motion (d = rt), converting meters to inches (i =

39.37 x m), deﬁning coordinates of a straight line (y = mx) or a host of other

conceptually varied situations.” They all just look alike. He goes on to point

out that “[d]istinguishing these contexts is critical in learning, although it is

probably nearly irrelevant in ﬂuid, routine work for experts,” who, of course,

have already had many embodied experiences in using algebra for a variety of

different purposes of their own.

Once learners have experienced the meanings of Galileo’s principles

about motion in a situated and embodied way, they have understood one of

the situated meanings for the algebraic equations that capture these princi-

ples at a more abstract level. Now these equations are beginning to take on a

real meaning in terms of embodied understandings. As learners see algebra

spelled out in more such speciﬁc material situations, they will come to master

it in an active and critical way, not just as a set of symbols to be repeated in a

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passive and rote manner on tests. As diSessa puts it: “Programming turns

analysis into experience and allows a connection between analytic forms and

their experiential implications that algebra and even calculus can’t touch.”

diSessa knows what good video games know, but schools often don’t:

Meaning is material, situated, and embodied if and when it is useful. Abstract

systems originally got their meanings through such embodied experiences

for those who really understand them. Abstraction rises gradually out of the

ground of situated meaning and practice and returns there from time to time,

or it is meaningless to most human beings.

THE PROBE, HYPOTHESIZE,

REPROBE, RETHINK CYCLE

Because video games so nicely exemplify the nature of meaning as situated

and embodied, they are also capable of capturing—and allowing players to

practice—a process that is the hallmark of “reﬂective practice” in areas like

law, medicine, teaching, art, or any other area where there are expert practi-

tioners. Playing a good video game like Deus Ex well requires the player to

engage in the following four-step process:

1. The player must probe the virtual world (which involves looking

around the current environment, clicking on something, or engaging

in a certain action).

2. Based on reﬂection while probing and afterward, the player must

form a hypothesis about what something (a text, object, artifact, event,

or action) might mean in a usefully situated way.

3. The player reprobes the world with that hypothesis in mind, seeing

what effect he or she gets.

4. The player treats this effect as feedback from the world and accepts

or rethinks his or her original hypothesis.

In fact, if you don’t engage in this four-step process, you won’t get very

far in a good video game. For example, in a good but rather standard shooter

game (like, say, Return to Castle Wolfenstein), you can run around shooting at

things a bit without engaging in this process, but soon you will run out of

ammo and health and die, probably in the wrong place, all too close to where

you started. In a good video game you have to try lots of different things and

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then you have to think about the results you get, try to make sense of what

they mean for you and your progress through the virtual world of the game.

In fact, you can’t get very far in any real-world practice either if you don’t en-

gage in this four-step process (say, in being a good teacher, musician, artist,

architect, businessperson, or athlete).

Some consider this four-step process to be the basis of expert reﬂective

practice in any complex semiotic domain. But it is also how children learn,

even very young children, when they are not learning in school. It is how

children initially build their minds and learn their cultures as they develop

early in life. In other words, this four-step process is central to how humans,

as biological creatures of a certain sort, learn things when learning is essential

for survival and for thriving in the world.

The human mind is a powerful pattern recognizer. In fact, humans are

quite adept at finding complex patterns where none actually exists (witness

astrology), a problem I will deal with in the next chapter. The young child

does something (this is the probe); for example, he or she tries to crush a

soft cloth book lying on the floor. The child, usually unconsciously, re-

flects on what he or she is doing while acting (“reflection-in-action”) and

after having acted (“reflection-on-action”). Such reflection involves listen-

ing to the world as it “talks back” to your action, giving you feedback

about the success or failure of that action in terms of your own goals and

desires.

Based on this feedback, the child forms a hypothesis (a guess) about a

pattern that may exist (a set of relationships), say: “Books are soft, they

squish, but don’t break.” His or her next action (the reprobe) is treated as a

test of this pattern—do things really work this way or not? Perhaps the child

now tries to crush a book made of paper laying next to the cloth book on the

ﬂoor and ﬁnds that it doesn’t squish, but rips and tears. Based on this test, the

child reﬂects again in and on action, accepting or re-forming his or her hy-

pothesis about what the pattern is (say, now, hypothesizing, that cloth books

squish and paper ones tear).

The child, through action and reﬂection, becomes a “self-teacher,”

“training” his or her own mental networks of associations (the patterns the

mind stores). Here the network of associations is something like: book—

cloth—squish; book—paper—tear, a larger pattern made up of two smaller

subpatterns. Note that the child’s pattern already captures the fact that there

are two types of book. Indeed, the child may already have another subpattern

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for book that is something like: book—cardboard—bends, doesn’t break, ex-

emplifying yet another category of book.

As the child forms more associations around the node book (e.g., with

things like fun, pictures, being read to by his or her parents, etc.), the child

builds up an interlocking set of patterns (call this all the “book pattern”) and

subpatterns (elements like book—cloth—squish, or book—parent—being

read to—feeling loved). Of course, subpatterns in the book pattern are also

subpatterns in other larger patterns to which they are linked. For example,

the subpattern book—cloth—squish is also a subpattern in the larger “squish

pattern” (the pattern that captures how squishiness works in the world).

This forming of associations is crucial not just to the development of the

child’s mind. It also constitutes aspects of the child’s emerging identity as a

cultured being of a certain sort connected to a certain sort of family, social

group, and community. For example, the six-year-old playing Pikmin in

chapter 2, when he was two, took his ﬁrst hike in a forest. He saw a chipmunk

on a fallen tree and said “Henry’s forest,” referring to a chipmunk in a

Thomas the Tank Engine book he had at home, a book devoted to an animated

railroad engine named Henry who is helping to reforest an area after it has

burned in a forest ﬁre.

What is happening here is that, as part and parcel of his embodied expe-

rience in the world, this child is creating a link (association) in his mental

networks (patterns) between “real” chipmunks and “book” chipmunks, be-

tween the real world and the world of books. If such episodes continue (and

they did, of course), the real world and books become integrally linked into

the same sets of associations or patterns for such a child. Books and the real

world don’t stand apart or opposed.

Since the initial patterns we form in life are a basis on which we form all

the rest of our later patterns (because they determine the hypotheses we orig-

inally make and revise, setting a certain trajectory to our mental develop-

ment), children like this have links between the real world and books as a

foundational part of who they are in mind, body, and culture. It is not sur-

prising that they often orient to books and literacy when they go to school in

powerfully different ways from children who have formed quite different pat-

terns of association and built their viewpoints on the world on that basis.

Of course, there is no simple deterministic story to be told here. People

can transform their mental associations when sufficiently powerful learning

experiences encourage them to do so. What I am referring to here is a certain

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“set” or “direction” given to a child’s cognitive, social, and cultural develop-

ment. Nonetheless, for some children, who have failed to interlink literacy

into their embodied experiences of the world and their social groups, power-

ful learning experiences may be required in school to set some new directions

in respect to literacy. Unfortunately, such children are often the ones who get

literacy in school completely detached from anything otherwise meaningful

to them, as they are skilled-and-drilled to death on things like phonics.

As children build up their concepts—like their concept of book—as a set

of complexly interlinked patterns and subpatterns, they use these patterns to

situate meanings that are appropriate to speciﬁc situations. They pull out the

subpatterns that are appropriate (useful) for the situation they are in, adapt-

ing them to the current situation. If no such subpattern exists already, they

cobble together a new subpattern from bits and pieces of existing ones and

adapt this to the current situation.

For example, if a child wants something hard and ﬂat to draw or color

on, he or she will situate a meaning for book something like hard ﬂat surface

good for supporting a piece of paper, drawing on a pattern like “book—paper

pages—hard covers—covers won’t bend,” and others, and adapting them to

the current need. Of course, such adaptations, based on experiences in the

world, in turn form new subpatterns in the child’s mind. Our experiences in

the world build patterns in our mind, and then the mind shapes our experi-

ence of the world (and the actions we take in it), which, in turn, reshapes our

mind. Concepts are never set and ﬁnished. They are like a large tree that al-

ways seeks to rise higher (i.e., attain more generality) but that must always

send into the ground deeper roots (i.e., return to embodied experience).

This view of the mind, as I pointed out earlier, is quite different from the

traditional one in psychology. In the traditional view, concepts are like gen-

eral deﬁnitions in the mind (like deﬁnitions for words in dictionaries). In the

traditional view, the mind thinks through stored “facts” and grand general-

izations that are like statements in logic (like “All books have covers”). In the

view I am developing here, the mind thinks and acts on the basis of some-

thing like stored images (simulations) of experience, images that are com-

plexly interlinked with each other (thereby attaining some generality) but

that are always adapted to new experiences in ways that keep them tied to the

ground of embodied experience and action in the world.

These two viewpoints on the mind have different consequences for how

people think schools should operate. If you believe the traditional view, you

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think schools should teach children to memorize facts and should overtly tell

them important generalizations. If you believe the other view, you think

schools must give children embodied experiences in and through which they

can form networks of associations that must continually be rechecked against

the world. Of course, as I show in the next chapter, in this view, children still

need active teachers who are guiding the hypotheses they make and the pat-

terns they form from their embodied experience. Otherwise children, ever

creative beings, may very well hit on wonderful patterns that, in the end,

don’t work in the semiotic domains to which they are exposed in school.

The four-stage probe/hypothesize/reprobe/rethink process that under-

lies the formation of the child’s mind is not different in kind from the process

by which expert practitioners operate. This four-stage process is, of course,

basic to good science, whether carried out by children in a good science

classrooms or “real” scientists in a lab, since science is one important form of

expert practice. Ironically, though, the process that is basic to young chil-

dren’s learning and to adult’s expert practice is usually discounted and unused

in school learning.

For example, it is currently fashionable, in some circles, to teach young

children to decode print via scripted direct instruction (so-called DI). This is a

return to a pedagogy that was popular in the 1960s. In this sort of instruction,

the teacher reads a written script and overtly tells children what they need to

know about decoding. The children repeat the script over and over, drilling

on phonics. Though it may not sound like it, this sort of thing can be done

with enthusiasm, and children can learn to decode this way. There are now

even calls for such scripted direct instruction in areas like science and math.

The problem is this: Children in these sorts of pedagogies are not learn-

ing to discover and test patterns for themselves (which still, of course, re-

quires the guidance of a good teacher). They are learning to store discrete

facts and elements of knowledge, not deeper patterns. If all people have in

their minds is a list of facts, then, when they are faced with a new situation,

and nothing on the list applies, they must simply memorize another fact.

This fact, in turn, will apply, like all the others they have stored, only to situ-

ations just like the one that triggered it in the ﬁrst place. If people have a pat-

tern in their mind, however, when they are faced with a new situation, they

can reﬂect on how this pattern can be revised to cover the new situation.

Now they have a new and more powerful pattern in mind, one that might ac-

tually cover novel situations the person has not yet encountered.

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Let me give an example of this contrast between a list and a pattern,

though the discussion of a child building up the concept of a book already

makes much the same point. Say you knew that a bedroom could contain the

following things: a bed, lamps, tables, a chest of drawers, a carpet, and pic-

tures. What you have is a list. Now, say you see or hear about a bedroom used

by a college student with a hot plate and small refrigerator in it (perhaps it’s a

room in a large house rented by a group of students). If all you have is a list,

you just add this to the list: bedrooms can also have hot plates and small re-

frigerators in them. There is no real need to think about the matter, since

lists are, in any case, indeﬁnitely extendable.

But, now, say that you start not with a list but with a pattern, a visual pic-

ture of a typical bedroom. Patterns in the mind are not actually pictures, of

course. They are systems of neural elements standing for things like beds,

carpets, lamps, and the like, systems that are associated with each other

through stronger or weaker links in terms of which each system (e.g., the one

standing for beds) more or less strongly activates the others (e.g., the systems

standing for chests of drawers and night tables). But mental patterns operate,

for our purposes, enough like pictures to make the point.

To make our mental pictures a bit more like neural patterns in the mind,

let’s imagine that elements in the picture can be more or less clearly focused

depending on how strongly or weakly they are associated with the main items

in the picture. So we could imagine that in the typical bedroom picture, the

bed is in clear and sharp focus, but there is a rather less well focused plant in

the room, thereby noting that plants are less strongly associated with typical

bedrooms than are beds. Perhaps, in your picture, a television is somewhere

in between in focus between the bed (very clearly focused) and the plant (not

so clearly focused).

If you have such a picture in mind when you see the college student’s bed-

room with a hot plate and small refrigerator in it, you have to revise your picture.

Perhaps you change your original picture to be one not of a typical bedroom but

the bedroom of a working adult. This amounts to associating “working adult”

with the other elements in your picture. Note, too, that this picture is not, like a

list, indeﬁnitely extendable—it now can’t have a hot plate and small refrigerator

in it. Further, you create a new picture of a typical bedroom of a college student,

a picture that does have a hot plate and refrigerator in it.

If later you come across a similar bedroom, another one with a hot plate

and refrigerator, but now one used by a working adult, you will ﬁnd that your

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college student bedroom picture, by and large, ﬁts. You need revise it only a

bit to be the picture of a ﬁnancially strapped person, rather than just a college

student. You will then also revise your picture of the typical bedroom of a

working adult to be the picture of the typical bedroom of a middle-class-

working adult. You might even reﬂect on the fact that college students often

live like ﬁnancially strapped persons even when they come from well-off

homes, a reﬂection that can lead to further mediation on the ways in which

class, age, and institutions interact in our society. Patterns prepare you for fu-

ture learning in a way that lists don’t.

What’s really happening here is that you are creating pictures (patterns),

subdividing them, and adding and subtracting things from them (and refo-

cusing items) as you confront new situations. You are, in reality, learning how

to situate the meaning of the word or concept “bedroom” to ﬁt different situ-

ations, including situations you may not have seen before. Lists require no

such thinking and learning. Patterns are experiential theories (here a theory of

bedrooms) that we change with more experience, more probing and reprob-

ing of the world. Lists are just get bigger with time, taking more effort to re-

member, and making less and less real sense at any deep explanatory level.

APPRECIATIVE SYSTEMS

So far I have argued that the probe/hypothesize/reprobe/rethink cycle is typ-

ical of how both young children and professional practitioners learn and

think, though not necessarily how students learn and think in schools. But

what differentiates the young child learning from the expert practitioner

learning? What differentiates them, I believe, is the way what I call their ap-

preciative systems work.

When the child acts and reﬂects, probes the world and gets a result, on

what basis does the child determine the “signiﬁcance” and the “acceptability”

of the result? The very form of this question makes it clear that children must

evaluate the answer coming back from the world, must determine whether

they “like” it or not, whether it is “good” or not from their perspective. Oth-

erwise, why use the answer in their reﬂections and subsequent interactions

with the world and, indeed, in their own minds as they build up their mental

networks of associations?

Children can determine what they “like,” what is a “good” result, only in

terms of an appreciative system, that is, their set of goals, desires, feelings, and

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values in respect to the domain being engaged with. The appreciative system

is where affect and cognition merge and come together. The children revise

the hypotheses they have formed based on the goals, desires, feelings, and

values encapsulated in their appreciative system. Young children who are

thrilled by their power to destroy things will evaluate the tear of the brittle

page of a book as a good result and seek other brittle things to tear.

Expert practitioners in a given semiotic domain—whether teaching, sci-

ence, law, business, architecture, art, or what have you—have to form an ap-

preciative system relevant to that domain in terms of which they can evaluate

action (probes) in the domain. That is, they must form the sorts of goals, de-

sires, feelings, and values that “insiders” in that domain recognize as the sorts

members of that domain (the affinity group associated with that domain) typ-

ically have. This process is much more specialized than the everyday learning

a small child does. Furthermore, if learning in the domain is to be active and

critical, the learning process and the appreciative system to which it gives rise

must be open to a good deal more conscious reﬂection and critique than is typ-

ical of small children mastering their early worlds.

This is not to say that individuals do not merge and color these “social”

goals, desires, feelings, and values (stemming from the affinity group associ-

ated with the semiotic domain) with their own personal idiosyncratic goals,

desires, feelings, and values. They most certainly do. They also merge and

color them with those connected to other semiotic domains of which they are

members and other identities, including cultural identities that they have in

the real world. The appreciative system, then, is the place where not only the

affective and cognitive merge and come together, it is the place where the so-

cial, cultural, and the personal merge and come together as well.

Nonetheless, the affinity group connected to the semiotic domain being

learned norms and disciplines what counts as an “acceptable” and “recogniz-

able” and “competent” appreciative system in the domain and what does not.

The newcomer learns what counts as competent goals, desires, feelings, and

values in the domain in terms of which he or she can properly evaluate the

results of his or her probes within the world of the domain. In a sense, the

learner is forming what we might call “taste” in the domain.

In any domain—whether playing video games or learning some branch

of science—the learner can learn in such a way that no real appreciative sys-

tem is operative. In this case, the learner just does what he or she is told in a

rote way. On the other hand, the learner can be actively enough involved in

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learning the domain to form an appreciative system that norms and guides

his or her thought and action in the domain, but this system can remain

largely unconscious and not reﬂected on in any very overt way. This is active

but not yet critical learning.

In critical learning, the learner comes not just to form an appreciative

system through practice and interaction with the affinity group associated

with the domain but to reﬂect overtly on the goals, values, feelings, and de-

sires that compose this system, to compare and contrast this appreciative sys-

tem to others, and to make active and critical choices about the system. Of

course, these choices must either remain within the conﬁnes of what the

affinity group associated with the domain will recognize as acceptable or

transform what the group ﬁnds acceptable. In either case, the learner is tak-

ing on a projective identity—actively, reﬂectively, and critically interfacing, at

a metalevel, his or her real-world identities with the new identity being

formed in the new semiotic domain.

When a player plays a video game like Deus Ex actively and critically, the

player forms a viewpoint on what counts as playing well or not. It is not just a

matter of getting through a crisis or solving a problem, of just surviving to

get to the end of the game. The player cares about how his or her character

(his or her virtual self) has fared. As I played more and more of Deus Ex and

got better at the game, I found myself repeatedly playing scenes to do them

better—to have my character look better and to be able myself to look back

on the history of that character’s interaction in the virtual world with a cer-

tain pride (pride that I could feel both in terms of my virtual identity as the

character and my real identity as a player).

I was forming an appreciative system, one on which I could overtly re-

ﬂect if and when I wished to. When I did engage in such overt reﬂection, ask-

ing myself why I cared about this or that outcome and what exactly my values

in the game world were, I learned a good deal about myself, about the virtual

world of the game, and about the design of this and other related games.

People do not usually form appreciative systems by themselves. Even in

my case, where I was playing alone and not in a multiplayer game, I formed

my appreciative system through multiple routes that went beyond my private

play. As I got into the game (one of the ﬁrst I played), I read about it on a va-

riety of Internet sites. I looked at chat room sites devoted to the game and

saw how others talked and felt about playing it and games like it. I eventually

read magazines devoted to video games as well. I consulted several different

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walkthroughs of the game, intrigued both by how the writers had played

through a given part and how they talked about such play.

And, of course, players who play with others, often on teams against

other teams, and often getting on chat rooms to talk about their play, have

their appreciative systems formed even more directly by the affinity group

associated with the game. My appreciative system in regard to games like

Deus Ex has changed and, I think, deepened as I have played more such

games and had more interactions with the affinity group associated with such

games via the Internet, magazines, books, and face-to-face verbal interaction

(e.g., I learned a good deal when I talked about and played the Xbox shooter

Halo with a young lawyer, a member of a generation that grown up playing

video games).

When players not only form but overtly reﬂect on their emerging and

ever-changing appreciative systems, they gain insight into and opinions

about the design of the genres of video games in regard to which they have

formed appreciative systems. It is not uncommon for players to voice these

opinions in reviews and in comments on Internet sites devoted to games. In-

deed, some players use software that often comes with a game to build their

own new extensions to the game or whole new games.

As I play shooter games now—games like Max Payne, Red Faction, Halo,

Return to Castle Wolfenstein—I ﬁnd myself comparing and contrasting them. I

ﬁnd myself, however silently, critiquing elements of the game as “nothing

new,” “nice touch,” “a nostalgic nod to Half-Life” (an earlier, vastly popular

shooter), “brilliant integration of graphics and action,” “problem well-inte-

grated into the plot line, not just a puzzle,” and a great many more (some ex-

pressed in language not printable here—especially in regard to the jumping

in Half-Life). My appreciative system is tied in an important way to knowl-

edge about and perspectives on shooter games as designed entities having their

own sort of “design grammar.” It is a “language” I am beginning to think and

speak, even to think and speak creatively in the sense that I can critique such

games and imagine new and different ones. In the end, then, while I don’t

have the skills to build a game, I think a good deal, while playing (reﬂection

in action) and afterward (reﬂection on action), about what new and better

games “ought to” look like.

It is my contention that active, critical learning in any domain should

lead to learners becoming, in a sense, designers. Some, like the players who

build their own extensions to games, will actually design new things. Others,

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like me, will design in thought and talk and let it inform their play. But there

is no design and designing, in the sense I am talking about, without forming

an appreciative system for a given semiotic domain. And no appreciative sys-

tem is formed without probing, hypothesizing, reprobing, and rethinking

through embodied action in a domain in connection with the affinity group

associated with the domain.

I have said enough already, in this respect, about schools. But let me note

that talk about appreciative systems, design and designing, and reﬂection in

and on embodied action in association with an affinity group are matters that

hardly ever appear in discussions about school or in educational research.

Perhaps that’s one reason why so many young people learn to play complex

video games so much faster and better than they learn anything comparably

complex is school.

WRITTEN TEXTS

With all my talk of situated and embodied meanings, probing the world, and

designing things, some will ask what has happened to good old-fashioned

printed texts. Video games have, I believe, a great deal to teach us about how

reading printed texts actually works when people understand—again, in situ-

ated, embodied, active, and critical ways—what they read.

A game like Deus Ex has a great many texts inside the virtual world it cre-

ates, texts you ﬁnd along the way, like notes, e-mail, diaries, and messages

you have hacked from various computers. These texts help you not only to

piece together the ongoing story but to make decisions about actions you will

or will not take. In some games, such as Clive Barker’s Undying, the number of

extended texts you ﬁnd gets quite large and is a central part of playing (and

enjoying) the game.

However, video games are deeply connected to written texts in a different

way as well. They are surrounded by a great many different types of written

texts. For instance, there are a large number of reviews of games in magazines

and on Internet sites. Furthermore, players often can and do add their own re-

views to the official review written for a particular Internet site (and players

appear to show no deference whatsoever to the official reviewers).

Games come with manuals (often, but not always, fairly small—the one

for Deus Ex is 20 pages). They also often come with a booklet, written as a

diary, or notes, or otherwise set as part of the virtual world of the game, that

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give the back story or background information for that virtual world. For ex-

ample, American McGee’s Alice, a game where Alice has gone insane and re-

turned to a nightmarish Wonderland, comes with a booklet entitled

“Rutledge Private Clinic and Asylum Casebook,” which contains Alice’s

physician’s daily notes on her treatment.

For many games, publishers offer highly colorful and detailed strategy

guides that tell players all about the game (its characters, maps and geography

of the world, weapons, enemies, objects to be found, fruitful strategies to fol-

low, etc.). Such guides also give a complete walkthrough for the game. A num-

ber of Internet sites offer (usually free) a variety of different walkthroughs

written by players themselves. These sites also offer hints from players and

“cheats” for the games. (Cheats are ways to manipulate the game’s program-

ming to do things like give yourself extra life or more ammunition.)

These texts are all integrated into the appreciative systems associated

with the affinity groups connected to video games. Different players and

groups have different views about whether, when, and how to use these texts.

For example, consider walkthroughs. These documents often run to 70 or

more single-spaced pages and are written according to a tight set of rules

about what they should contain and look like (including a list of each date on

which the walkthrough was revised). Some players shun walkthroughs en-

tirely, though they may write them. Others argue that walkthroughs can and

should be used, but only to get a hint when one is thoroughly stuck. Indeed,

the writers of the walkthroughs themselves often recommend that players use

them this way. (Imagine producing a 70-page, single-spaced document and

advising people to look at it only when and where they are stuck.)

Of course, if children had walkthroughs in school when they studied

things like science, we would call it “cheating” (let alone if they had “cheat

codes”). But, then, imagine what a science classroom would look like where

learners wrote extensive walkthroughs according to strict norms and debated

when and how to use them, debates that became part and parcel of the learn-

ers’ growing appreciative systems about what it means to “do science (well).”

And, indeed, in a sense, real scientists do have walkthroughs. They know

(through talk with others and through texts) the case histories of how rele-

vant related discoveries in their ﬁeld were made. They also have opinions

about how closely one should consult or follow these histories.

It is now a piece of folk wisdom that “young people” don’t read things

like manuals but just start playing games. To the extent that this is true, it is

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partly because, I explain in the next chapter, video games are so good at

teaching people to play them by actually starting to play them. Yet I would

argue that these young people are reading and using print in the way it is and

should be used when people actually understand what they read in a useful

and situated way. Baby boomers—perhaps too inﬂuenced by traditional

schooling—often try to do otherwise to their regret and frustration, when

they insist on reading a manual before they have any embodied understand-

ing of what the manual is about.

Very often players quickly look over the instruction booklet that comes

with a new game before starting to play. Experienced players often can tell at

a glance how the controls will work and anything special they may need to

pay attention to as they start to learn to play the game by actually starting to

play it (or doing the game’s on-disk training, if it has one). If the game is a

new genre for them, they may have to pay a bit more attention. But, in any

case, the problem with the texts associated with video game—the instruction

booklets, walkthroughs, and strategy guides—is that they do not make a lot

of sense unless one has already experienced and lived in the game world for a

while. Of course, this lack of lucidity can be made up for if the player has read

similar texts before, but at some point these texts originally made sense be-

cause the player had an embodied world of experience in terms of which to

situate and spell out their meanings.

The same thing is most certainly true of the sorts of texts that show up in

learning content areas like science and math in school, especially in the later

grades, high school, and college. A biology textbook does not make a lot of

sense unless and until one has experienced and lived in the world of biology

as practice for a while. And again, this lack of lucidity is mitigated if the stu-

dent has already read a good many similar texts. However, at some point

these texts also originally made sense because the student had an embodied

world of experience (in reality or, at least, simulated in his or her mind) in

terms of which to situate and spell out their meanings.

When I give talks on video games to teachers, I often show them a man-

ual or strategy guide and ask them how much they understand. Very often

they are frustrated. They have no experience in which to situate the words

and phrases of the texts. All they get is verbal information, which they under-

stand at some literal level, but which does not really hang together. They

cannot visualize this verbal information in any way that makes sense or makes

them want to read on. I tell them that that is how their students often feel

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when confronted with a text or textbook in science or some other academic

area if they have had no experiences in terms of which they can situate the

meanings of the words and phrases. It’s all “just words,” words the “good”

students can repeat on tests and the “bad” ones can’t.

When you have played a video game for a while, something magical hap-

pens to the texts associated with it. All of sudden they seem lucid and clear

and readable. You can’t even recall how confusing they seemed in the ﬁrst

place. At that point, players can use the text in a great variety of ways for dif-

ferent purposes. For instance, they can look up details that enhance their

play. (I recently looked up information on the different guns in Return to Cas-

tle Wolfenstein and discovered I was using a less accurate one than I could have

been using, and I also got a crucial hint on how to keep the better gun from

overheating.) Or they can ﬁll out their knowledge of the places, creatures,

and things in the virtual world in which they are living. They can trou-

bleshoot problems they are having in the game, with the game, or with their

computer. They can get hints or compare their play to how others have done.

Let me take the booklet that comes with Deus Ex as an example of what I

mean by saying that texts associated with video games are not lucid unless

and until one has some embodied game experience in which to “cash out” the

meanings of the text. The book contains 20 small pages, printed in double

columns on each page. In these pages, there are 199 bolded references that

represent headings and subheadings. One small randomly chosen stretch of

headings and subheadings that appears at the end of page 5 and the begin-

ning of page 6 says: Passive Readouts, Damage Monitor, Active Augmentation &

Device Icons, Items-at-Hand, Information Screens, Note, Inventory, Inventory

Management, Stacks, Nanokey ring, Ammunition. Each of these 199 headings

and subheadings is followed by text that gives information relevant to the

topic and relates it to other information throughout the booklet. In addition,

the booklet assigns 53 keys on the computer keyboard to some function in

the game, and these 53 keys are mentioned 82 times in relation to the infor-

mation contained in the 199 headings and subheadings. So, although small,

the booklet is packed with relatively technical information.

Here is a typ

ical piece of language from this booklet:

Your internal nano-processors keep a very detailed record of your condition,

equipment and recent history. You can access this data at any time during

play by hitting F1 to get to the Inventory screen or F2 to get to the

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Goals/Notes screen. Once you have accessed your information screens, you

can move between the screens by clicking on the tabs at the top of the

screen. You can map other information screens to hotkeys using Settings,

Keyboard/Mouse.

This makes perfect sense at a literal level, but that just goes to show how

worthless the literal level is. When you understand this sort of passage at only a

literal level, you have only an illusion of understanding, one that quickly disap-

pears as you try to relate this information to the hundreds of other important

details in the booklet. First of all, this passage means nothing real to you if you

have no situated idea about what “nano-processors,” “condition,” “equip-

ment,” “history,” “F1,” “Inventory screen,” “F2,” “Goals/Notes screen” (and,

of course, “Goals” and “Notes”), “information screens,” “clicking,” “tabs,”

“map,” “hotkeys,” and “Settings, Keyboard/Mouse” mean in and for playing

games like Deus Ex.

Second, though you know literally what each sentence means, together

they raise a plethora of questions if you have no situated understandings of

this game or games like it. For instance: Is the same data (condition, equip-

ment, and history) on both the Inventory screen and the Goals/Notes

screen? If so, why is it on two different screens? If not, which type of infor-

mation is on which screen and why? The fact that I can move between the

screens by clicking on the tabs (but what do these tabs look like; will I recog-

nize them?) suggests that some of this information is on one screen and some

on the other. But, then, is my “condition” part of my Inventory or my

Goals/Notes—it doesn’t seem to be either, but, then, what is my “condition”

anyway? If I can map other information screens (and what are these?) to

hotkeys using “Setting, Keyboard/Mouse,” does this mean there is no other

way to access them? How will I access them in the ﬁrst place to assign them

to my own chosen hotkeys? Can I click between them and the Inventory

screen and the Goals/Notes screens by pressing on “tabs”? And so on—20

pages is beginning to seem like a lot; remember, there are 199 different head-

ings under which information like this is given.

Of course, all these terms and questions can be deﬁned and answered if

you closely check and cross-check information over and over again through

the little booklet. You can constantly turn the pages backward and forward.

But once you have one set of links relating various items and actions in mind,

another drops out just as you need it and you’re back to turning pages. Is the

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booklet poorly written? Not at all. It is written just as well or as poorly as—

just like, in fact—any of a myriad of school-based texts in the content areas. It

is, outside the practices in the semiotic domain from which it comes, just as

meaningless, however much one could garner literal meanings from it with

which to verbally repeat things or pass tests.

Of course, you can say, “Oh, yeah, you click on F1 to get to the Inven-

tory screen and F2 to get to the Goals/Notes screen” and sound like you

know something. The trouble is this: In the actual game, you can click on F2

and meditate on the screen you see at your leisure. Nothing bad will happen

to you. However, very often you have to click on F1 and do something

quickly in the midst of a heated battle. There’s no “at your leisure” here. The

two commands really don’t function the same way in the game—they actually

mean different things in terms of embodied and situated action—and they

never really just mean “click F1, get screen.” That’s their general meaning,

the one with which you really can’t do anything useful until you know how to

spell it out further in situation-speciﬁc terms in the game.

When you can spell out such information in situation-speciﬁc terms in the

game, then the relationships of this information to the other hundreds of pieces

of information in the booklet become clear and meaningful. And, of course, it is

these relationships that are what really count if you are to understand the game

as a system and, thus, play it at all well. Now you can read the book if you need to

to piece in missing bits of information, check on your understandings, or solve a

particular problem or answer a particular question you have.

When I ﬁrst read this booklet before playing Deus Ex (and having played

only one other shooter game, a very different one), I was sorely tempted to put

the game on a shelf and forget about it. I was simply overwhelmed with details,

questions, and confusions. When I started the game, I kept trying to look up

stuff. But I understood none of it well enough to ﬁnd things easily without

searching for the same information over and over again. In the end, you have

to just actively play the game and explore and try everything. Then, at last, the

booklet makes good sense, but by then you don’t need it all that much.

There is much discussion these days about how many children fail in

school—especially children from poor homes—because they have not been

taught phonics well or correctly in their early years. But the truth of the matter

is that a great many more children fail in school because, while they can decode

print, they cannot handle the progressively more complex demands school lan-

guage makes on them as they move up in the grades and on to high school.

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School requires, in respect to both oral and written language, forms or

styles of language that are different from and, in some respects, more com-

plex than everyday oral language used in informal face-to-face conversations.

The forms of language used in texts and discussions in science, math, social

studies classes, and other content areas, go by the general name of “academic

language,” though different varieties of academic language are associated

with different content areas in school.

Academic language, like the language in the Deus Ex booklet, is not re-

ally lucid or meaningful if one has no embodied experiences within which to

situate its meanings in speciﬁc ways. For example, consider this academic-

language quote from a high school science textbook:

The destruction of a land surface by the combined effects of abrasion and

removal of weathered material by transporting agents is called erosion....

The production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical

changes is called weathering.

Again, one can certainly understand this at some literal word-by-word,

sentence-by-sentence way. However, this is not “everyday” language. No one

speaks this way at home around the table or at a bar having drinks with

friends. But this language is ﬁlled with all the same problems the language of

the Deus Ex booklet was for me when I had not lived through any experiences

in terms of which I could situate its meanings. Without embodied experi-

ences with which to cash out its meanings, all the above academic text will

do—as the Deus Ex booklet did to me initially—is ﬁll one with questions,

confusion, and, perhaps, anger.

For example: I have no idea what the difference is between “abrasion”

and “removal of weathered material by transporting agents,” which I would

have thought was one form of abrasion. What’s a “transporting agent”?

What’s a “mechanical process”? I am not really clear on the difference be-

tween “mechanical processes,” especially in regard to weather, and “chemical

changes.” And what chemicals are we talking about here—stuff in rain?

Since the ﬁrst sentence is about “erosion” and the second about “weath-

ering,” I suppose these two things are connected in some important way—

but how? They must be two forms of “destruction of a land surface,” given

that this is the subject of the ﬁrst sentence. But, then, I would have thought

that producing “rock waste” was a way of building, not just destroying, land,

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since rock waste eventually turns into dirt (doesn’t it?) and thus, I would have

supposed, eventually into potentially fertile land. But this is a geology text,

and they don’t care about fertile land (or do they?). The word “land” here has

a different range of possible situated meanings than I am familiar with.

Of course, I can turn the pages of the book back and forth clarifying all

these points. After all, these two sentences are meant to be deﬁnitions—

though not of the words “erosion” and “weathering” in everyday terms but in

specialist terms in a particular semiotic domain.) And, of course, I do need to

know that they are deﬁnitions, and I may not even know that if I have had lit-

tle experience of specialists trying to deﬁne terms in explicit and operational

ways so as to lessen the sort of ambiguity and vagueness that is more typical

of everyday talk. Since they are deﬁnitions, they are linked and cross-linked

to a myriad of other terms, descriptions, and explanations throughout the

book, and I can follow this tangled trail across the pages, back and forth, los-

ing bits of the connections just as I need them and page turning yet again.

However, once I have experienced the sorts of embodied images, actions,

and tasks that engage geologists—including their ways of talking and debating,

their reasons for doing so, their interests, norms, and values—then the text is

lucid and useful. Confusion, frustration, and anger disappear. Given such under-

standing, everybody would pass the test and we couldn’t fail half the class and

reward a small set of “winners,”—people who can repeat back verbal details they

remember well when they don’t fully understand them in any practical way.

MORE LEARNING PRINCIPLES

Let me conclude this discussion by listing further learning principles that our

discussion of learning and thinking in video games in this chapter has impli-

cated. Once again, in this list, I intend each principle to be relevant both to

learning in video games and learning in content areas in classrooms. After

listing principles we have already discussed pretty thoroughly, I discuss a few

others that are related to them.

15. Probing Principle

Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reﬂect-

ing in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypo-

thesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accept-

ing or rethinking the hypothesis.

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16. Multiple Routes Principle

There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This al-

lows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles

of learning and problem solving, while also exploring alternative

styles.

17. Situated Meaning Principle

The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols,

texts, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not

general or decontextulized. Whatever generality meanings come to

have is discovered bottom up via embodied experiences.

18. Text Principle

Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e., only in terms of the

deﬁnitions of the words in the text and their text-internal relation-

ships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experi-

ences. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied

experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading texts apart

from embodied action) comes only when learners have had enough

embodied experience in the domain and ample experiences with sim-

ilar texts.

Now let us turn to four related learning principles, which are implicated

in the discussion of video games and learning in this chapter although they

were not discussed directly. The Intertextual Principle is concerned with the

fact that after players have dealt a good bit with a certain type or genre of

video game and the texts associated with them, they can begin to see these

texts themselves as a family or genre of related texts. They understand any

one such text (say a strategy guide for a fantasy role-playing game) intertex-

tually in relationship to other related texts they have read connected to such

games. Now they are “cashing out” texts not just in terms of embodied action

in the games they have played (they are most certainly doing that as well) but

also in terms of other texts they have read in the family or genre. Reading

“new” texts becomes easy.

The Multimodal Principle is concerned with the fact—clear in all of the

discussion about video games in this book so far—that, in video games, mean-

ing, thinking, and learning are linked to multiple modalities (words, images,

actions, sounds, etc.) and not just to words. Sometimes, at a particular point in

a game, multiple modalities support each other to communicate similar mean-

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ings (e.g., “go in this direction”); sometimes they communicate different mean-

ings, each of which ﬁts together to form a bigger, more meaningful and satisfy-

ing whole (e.g., “I have just entered an evil place, better be real careful”).

The “Material Intelligence” Principle is really a subpart of the Multimodal

Principle. In a video game, objects and artifacts store some of the thinking and

knowledge a player gains. So, in fact, does the environment the player moves

through. For example, in Deus Ex if you haven’t got a lock pick, you may have

to think a great deal to get into a given door. If you have a lock pick, the lock

pick stores your knowledge of how to get in the door, and you don’t need to

store the knowledge yourself. You can devote your thinking and problem-solv-

ing skills to other matters, thereby powerfully extending the amount of overall

thinking and problem solving that is being accomplished, since the lock pick is

doing some of it, along with lots of other “potent” material items.

In video games players soon learn how to “read” the physical environ-

ments they are in to gain clues about how to proceed through them. The

shapes and contours of the physical environment, and the objects lying

around, come to guide the player (of course, one can be fooled from time to

time) in making good guesses about how to proceed. For instance, at one

point in American McGee’s Alice, you (playing as Alice) are lost among rocks

and wild streams. However, you can see far off at the top of a mountain a bit

of a mansion. Furthermore, the environment contains some contours of

rocks and hills that suggest ways up. And ﬁnally, shining on a few rocks ahead

of you are red jewels that you have already learned give you more health if

you pick them up. Their placement clearly suggests moving toward them.

The whole layout of the environment, then, helps you guess intelligently

about how to proceed.

It is certainly good you get this help from the material environment and

objects in it—good that the material environment and objects in it are part of

your intelligence—because all along the way you have more than enough to do

thinking about how to ﬁght Wonderland’s now-deranged characters who want

to stop your progress (and about how to solve a good many other problems).

Of course, in good science instruction in classrooms, children should

come to see that, in science, too, objects, artifacts, and the ways in which the

environment is set up can store knowledge and power. This, in turn, can allow

them to think about other things and solve other problems that, when com-

bined with the knowledge and power stored in the material objects and envi-

ronment, truly extends their reach. Indeed, good teachers set up scientiﬁc

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environments that guide learners and surround them with empowering ob-

jects that extend their individual efforts.

For example, just staring at and playing with pendulums in the real world

is not actually a good way to “discover” the laws of the pendulum’s move-

ment. Galileo actually discovered these laws not by staring at a swinging

chandelier, as the myth has it, but by using geometry and drawing, on paper,

arcs and circles and paths of movement along them and ﬁguring our their

geometrical properties. Geometry is a powerful tool that stores much knowl-

edge and skill that the learner does not have to invent for him- or herself. So,

too, is the computer program diSessa uses to teach students Galileo’s theo-

rems about motion. Of course, we often expect children to learn science

without the tools, artifacts, and material guidance that actual scientists have

and have gained from the history of their science. There is real intelligence

built into geometry and diSessa’s Boxer program, as there is “player intelli-

gence” built into the objects and environments in American McGee’s Alice.

Finally, the Intuitive (Tacit) Knowledge Principle is concerned with the

fact that video games honor not just the explicit and verbal knowledge play-

ers have about how to play but also the intuitive or tacit knowledge—built

into their movements, bodies, and unconscious ways of thinking—they have

built up through repeated practice with a family or genre of games. It is com-

mon today for research on modern workplaces to point out that in today’s

high-tech and fast-changing world, the most valuable knowledge a business

has is the tacit knowledge its workers gain through continually working with

others in a “community of practice” that adapts to speciﬁc situations and

changes “on the ground” as they happen. Such knowledge cannot always be

verbalized. Even when it can be verbalized and placed in a training manual,

by that time it is often out of date.

Of course, conscious knowledge is important for critical learning, as I

have pointed out several times already. But, too often, unlike video games and

good workplaces, schools do not honor the tacit and embodied knowledge

people build up through practice and adaptation to change “on the spot” as it

happens amid practice (and not in pure speculation). Yet such knowledge is

crucial in a great many domains and is a large part of why learners feel compe-

tent in a domain and feel as if they share real membership with the affinity

group associated with a domain. The child learning science who has built up

no tacit knowledge—no “craft knowledge”—cannot really feel competent ei-

ther. But the child who has built up such knowledge is liable to be turned off

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by school when such knowledge is not valued and mindlessly repeating facts

and numbers that one understands in no embodied way gains one an A.

I once helped run an after-school science club for middle-school students

who were quite unaffiliated with school and school-based learning and literacy.

We taught these children how to do science and how to talk about what they

were doing and discovering with each other. We taught them to act and talk

like knowers, not just passive observers. When we checked up on one of the

young boys who had ﬂourished in our club (had even won a prize in his school’s

science fair), his high school teacher told us something quite interesting: “It’s

funny, he is really good at actually doing the science when we run an experi-

ment or do other things, but he has a bad grade, because he keeps failing my

multiple-choice tests.” This teacher did not value how much science this child

knew in a tacit way tied to practice. He could hardly leverage this knowledge—

and bring some of it to conscious and critical awareness—if he did not honor it.

When proﬁt is on the line, good businesses no longer make this mistake.

Next I list the principles we have just discussed.

19. Intertextual Principle

The learner understands texts as a family (“genre”) of related texts

and understands any one such text in relation to others in the family,

but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some

texts. Understanding a group of texts as a family (genre) of texts is a

large part of what helps the learner make sense of such texts.

20. Multimodal Principle

Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (im-

ages, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not

just words.

21. “Material Intelligence” Principle

Thinking, problem solving, and knowledge are “stored” in material

objects and the environment. This frees learners to engage their

minds with other things while combining the results of their own

thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the envi-

ronment to achieve yet more powerful effects.

22. Intuitive Knowledge Principle

Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experi-

ence, often in association with an affinity group, counts a great deal

and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The discussion in this chapter about thinking as founded in pattern recognition from

our embodied experiences of the world draws broadly on so-called connectionist

views of the mind. See P. M. Churchland 1989; P. S. Churchland 1987; P. S. Church-

land & Sejnowski 1992; Clark 1989, 1993, 1997; Margolis 1987, 1993; Rumelhart,

McClelland, and the PDP Research Group 1986. For related work that has deeply in-

ﬂuenced me, see Barsalou 1999a, b; Glenberg 1997; Glenberg & Robertson 1999;

Hutchins 1995; Nolan 1994. The quote about comprehension being grounded in

perceptual simulations is from Barsalou 1999, p. 77. The quote about mean

ing being

about what a person can do is from Glenberg 1997, p. 3.

For the idea that abstract notions are rooted in metaphors for embodied experi-

ence, see Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980. On situated and embodied meanings,

see Brooks 2002; Brown, Collins, & Dugid 1989; Clancey 1997; Clark 1997; Gee

1996, 1999b; Lave 1988; Lave & Wenger 1991; Rogoff 1990; and Tomasello 1999.

For Galileo’s use of geometry to solve the problem of pendulums and how chil-

dren are asked to engage in an actually harder task in school when they must solve the

same problem without geometry, see Edwards & Mercer 1987. For diSessa’s work and

a discussion of Boxer, see diSessa 2000, quotes are from pp. 32–33, 33, 34. The probe,

hypothesize, reprobe, rethink cycle is deeply related to Donald Schon’s work, see

Schon 1987; see also Gee 1997. The discuss

ion of “appreciative systems” (a term

Schon uses) was inspired by Schon’s work. On the idea that learners ought to be de-

signers, see New London Group 1996. The quote about the destruction of land sur-

faces is taken from a textbook quoted in Martin 1990.

Intertextuality is a major theme in Bakhtin’s inﬂuential work; see especially

Bakhtin 1986. Material relevant to the material intelligence principle and the intuitive

knowledge principle is discussed in diSessa 2000; the intuitive knowledge princ

iple is

also much discussed in terms of how knowledge functions in modern workplaces; see

Gee, Hull, & Lankshear 1996. For multimodality, see Kress & van Leeuwen 1996,

2001.

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TELLING AND DOING:

WHY DOESN’T LARA CROFT

OBEY PROFESSOR VON CROY?

OVERT INFORMATION

AND IMMERSION IN PRACTICE

N TERMS OF HUMAN LEARNING

INFORMATION IS A VEXED THING

On one hand, humans are quite poor at learning from lots of overt informa-

tion given to them outside the sorts of contexts in which this information can

be used. This problem can be mitigated if the learners have already had lots

of experience of such contexts and can simulate the contexts in their minds as

they listen to or read information. Humans tend to have a very hard time

processing information for which they cannot supply such simulations. They

also tend readily to forget information they have received outside contexts of

actual use, especially if they cannot imagine such contexts.

On the other hand, humans don’t learn well when they are just left to

their own devices to operate within complex contexts about which they know

very little. Children who know no physics and have no mathematical tools

but who are nonetheless left to discover Galileo’s principles of motion on

their own by mucking around with ramps and balls are likely only to be an-

gered and frustrated. In fact, since Galileo used his deep knowledge of geom-

etry to discover these principles, the children are actually being asked to

engage in a harder task than the one Galileo (a genius if there ever was one)

faced, since they lack both his prior knowledge and sophisticated tools.

The dilemma then is this: For efficacious learning, humans need overt in-

formation, but they have a hard time handling it. They also need immersion

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in actual contexts of practice, but they can ﬁnd such contexts confusing with-

out overt information and guidance. This is just the dilemma between overt

telling versus immersion in practice that has characterized educational debates

for years. Educators tend to polarize the debate by stressing one thing (telling

or immersion) over the other and not discussing effective ways to balance and

integrate the two. They tend to associate support for overt telling in education

with conservative politics and support for immersion in practice with liberal

politics. Needless to say, they have not solved the problem.

The makers of video games—good capitalists that they are—have no such

luxury. If they don’t solve this problem, no one is going to learn to play their

games. And if no one can learn their games, no one will buy them. If only for

good old “Darwinian” reasons (the survival-of-the-ﬁttest theories of learning on

the market), the games that survive and ﬂourish on the market have solved the

problem. Indeed, different games solve it in different ways. This is just a speciﬁc

example of a point I am trying to make quite generally in this book: Good video

games incorporate good learning principles, because otherwise there would be

no video games, because too few people would have purchased them.

In this chapter—through a discussion of two good video games—I take

up some of the ways in which video games deal with overt information and

guidance on one hand and immersion in practice on the other. Their solution

to our dilemma is to deny there are two hands here and to see overt informa-

tion and immersion in practice as two ﬁngers on the same hand.

LEARNING TO BE LARA CROFT

Lara Croft, the heroine of the Tomb Raider series of games (and now a movie),

is one of the most famous video-game characters in the world. Lara is the

pampered aristocratic daughter of Lord Henshingly Croft, and she has

wanted for nothing in her (virtual) life. When Lara was a young girl, a lecture

by the noted archaeologist Professor Werner Von Croy triggered in her a

lifelong desire for travel to remote places in search of adventure. Some time

after hearing that lecture, when Lara was 16 and away at boarding school, she

came across a copy of National Geographic magazine that featured an article

by Von Croy. From the article, Lara learned that he was preparing for a new

archaeological tour across Asia.

Lara showed the article to her parents and demanded to accompany Von

Croy on his expedition. Lord Henshingly then wrote Von Croy offering him

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ﬁnancial assistance if he would let Lara join him. Von Croy replied that he

remembered Lara’s incessant but insightful questions at his earlier lecture.

Her company as an assistant was welcomed, as was the offer of ﬁnancial sup-

port. Thus, Von Croy became Lara’s mentor. Tomb Raider games depict Lara

as an adult using the skills she learned as a young girl from Von Croy and

pursuing danger, knowledge, and adventure across the world.

Lara—one of the few female lead characters in video games—is one of the

most physically agile characters in the world of such games. The player can

manipulate Lara to engage in more physical maneuvers than most other he-

roes in adventure and shooter games. She can walk, run, do both standing and

running jumps, jump back, crouch, duck, roll, climb, cling to ledges and ma-

neuver along them, and even jump and swing on vines and branches. She (the

player) uses all these skills to defeat enemies and to explore the treacherous

landscapes of ancient tombs and temples, deserts, jungles, and foreign cities.

So far what I have described—the story of Von Croy and Lara—is only

back story, a story that gamers are told (in the booklet that comes with a

game or in bits and pieces they have learned while playing the games) but

haven’t experienced for themselves. However, Tomb Raider: The Last Revela-

tion, a game late in the series, returns to this back story as part of the game.

The ﬁrst episode in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation shows Lara as a 16-year-

old being trained by Professor Von Croy after they have just broken into an

ancient and sacred royal tomb in Cambodia. The player now actually gets to

live and play Lara’s apprenticeship when she was a girl.

This ﬁrst episode is a real part of the game. (An episode is like a chapter

in a book.) The player must search for treasures and avoid many pitfalls and

dangers, just as in any other episode, though things are easier here than they

are in the later episodes. At the same time, however, this episode is also

meant as a training module where the player is explicitly coached on how to

play the game. This coaching is done in a fascinating way. As Von Croy trains

Lara to be an adventurer, he is also simultaneously training the player to op-

erate the computer controls and play the game. While similar things appear

in other games, they are handled here in a particularly nice way.

After an opening video showing Von Croy bursting into the ancient

Cambodian tomb (a very large building with many levels and twisting paths)

and a display of the words “Cambodia 1984,” we hear Von Croy say, “And so

we breech the sanctum of the ancients, the ﬁrst footfalls in this tomb for cen-

turies.” We then immediately see the young Lara next to him, looking

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around in awe, and hear her say, “This place gives me the creeps, [pause]

after you.” This sort of not-so-respectful patter is typical of Lara, a rather

spoiled and self-satisﬁed young girl.

Von Croy proceeds to tell Lara to be careful, that not all is as it seems.

Concealed traps and pitfalls are everywhere. She is to stay close to him and

follow his instructions. Since good men have died for the information con-

tained in this tomb—and bad ones have “bartered the information for their

own ends”—Von Croy insists that “[f]or this we must respect it, we will not

deviate from its route and you will not deviate from my instruction.” Alto-

gether, Von Croy comes across as an intimidating and dominating professor.

But, of course, Lara is not cowered by him. She has, after all, just said that

he gives her the creeps even more than the old tomb itself. The game encour-

ages the player not to be too deferential to Von Croy either. Even though Von

Croy has told Lara (the player) to stay close and not deviate from the straight

route ahead, the only way that the player (Lara) can ﬁnd hidden treasures (like

golden skulls) is to wander away from him and explore things a bit. In fact, as

Von Croy is commanding Lara to stay close, a willful player (as Lara) is prob-

ably looking behind a group of pillars to see if they hide anything interesting.

If players are not willful in this way, by the end of the episode they will have

missed lots of good stuff and probably will play it over again.

The player is placed, by the very design of the game, in the same psycho-

logical space as Lara—learning from Von Croy but not subordinating oneself

entirely to his old-fashioned professorial need for dominance. The game’s

design encourages the player to take on a certain sort of attitude and rela-

tionship with Von Croy—and, more generally, a certain sort of personality—

that represents, in fact, just the sort of person that Lara is.

When I played the game, I was a bit intimidated by Von Croy. Based prob-

ably on a lifetime of (trying to look as if I am) following the orders of authority

ﬁgures like deans, I found myself wanting to follow his orders to the T. But I

also wanted the treasures and found myself guiltily sneaking down paths off

Von Croy’s route and thereby becoming more like Lara and less like myself.

The game has a neat way to ensure that even inept players will dis-

cover that they can find good things if they are willing to disobey the pro-

fessor. For example, when I was playing the game, at one point Von Croy

ordered Lara to jump across a cavern; in doing so, she fell in the water

below, due to my ineptness in controlling her (vi a the computer’s keys).

She can climb back up again and try the jump again (indeed, she needs to

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do this to follow Von Croy and eventually complete the episode). But, low

and behold, as I (Lara) swam toward land, I (Lara) discovered a golden

skull in the water. A player cannot help but think: What if I purposely dis-

obey orders and jump and climb other than where I am told? What other

good things will I find? Soon one is just a bit more like the willful and

spoiled Lara herself (and practicing yet more jumps and climbs). In such

video games, players get practice in trying out new identities that chal-

lenge some of their assumptions about themselves and the world. A good

science class should do the same.

STRANGE LANGUAGE:

VON CROY TEACHES LARA

HOW TO PLAY A VIDEO GAME

After Von Croy has told Lara to follow closely and has pushed a hidden stone

in a wall to lower a ﬂoor-full of sharp spikes ahead, they come to a small ob-

stacle. Von Croy says, “The ﬁrst obstacle, a small hop to test your—how do

you say—pluck. Press and hold walk, now push forward.”

Now this is, if you think about it, a strange thing to say. However, it

does not seem the least bit strange when one is actually playing the episode.

Von Croy is talking to the vi rtual character Lara, a character who walks and

jumps in the virtual world but has no computer whose keys she can press,

push, or hold. However, the player who is playing as the character Lara does

have a computer and must learn to manipulate its keys to make Lara come

alive. (I played To m b R a i d e r : T h e L a s t R e v e l a t i o n on a computer, but To m b

Raider games are also available, and probably more often played on, game

platforms, which, of course, have controls of their own—controls on a hand-

held controller—that the player needs to learn.) Thus, Von C roy’s remark

perfectly melds and integrates talk to Lara and talk to the player. This meld-

ing is part of what marries the player’s real-world identity as a player and his

or her virtual identity as Lara.

But things are even yet more interesting here. When Von Croy says,

“Press and hold walk,” he means for the player to press and hold the Shift

key on the computer, which is the key that makes Lara walk rather than

run. (When she walks she automatically stops at ledges; when she runs, she

runs past them and falls. It is easier to have her walk up to dangerous

ledges than to run up to them.) When Von Croy continues with “now

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push forward,” he means for the player, who is now holding down the

Shift key, to press the Arrow key pointing up on the computer, which is

the key that moves Lara forward. When the player does this combination

of keystrokes, Lara walks up to the obstacle and automatically stops at its

edge. She is now ready to jump.

At this point Von Croy says, “Come, come, child, do not fear, this is

merely an appetizer for the perils ahead. Push forward and jump together.”

This tells the player to press the Up Arrow key (move forward) and the Alt

key (the key that makes Lara jump) together. When the player does so, Lara

easily jumps over the obstacle.

Here Von Croy is using the functional names for the keys, the actions

they carry out in the virtual world, actions like “walk,” “forward,” and

“jump,” rather than the computer names for the keys, things like “Shift key,”

“Up Arrow key,” and “Alt key.” So, then, how does the player know what

keys to press? A player knows this in three ways.

1. The player can do as I did and look in the booklet that comes with

the game. This means that when the player is listening to Von Croy,

he or she is simultaneously looking up the computer key equivalents

of his commands (another way in which the virtual and real worlds

are married).

2. The player can make intelligent guesses from having played other

Tomb Raider games or games like them.

3. The player can do as my child does in similar circumstances and press

all the keys until he or she gets the right result and thereby ﬁnds the

right key.

Throughout the first episode, Von Croy continues to talk this way,

telling the player (Lara) about even more complicated actions that he or

she (and Lara) can do, saying things like: “This gap is wider and the edge

is treacherous. First walk to the edge. Then press forward and jump to-

gether. When you are in midair, press and hold action. You will grab the

outcrop.” By the end of the episode, the player has both finished the first

episode of the game (and i t’s a very long game, like most good video

games) and learned how to operate the basic controls. The player also has

learned some basic strategies of how to explore the virtual world and avoid

certain dangers.

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LARA AND LEARNING

Why is this “strange” language not actually strange when one is playing the

game? In a good many video games, players hear such language, language

that “confuses” the virtual world (e.g., “walk”) and the real world of the

player at the computer (e.g., “press the walk key”). Such language, in fact,

represents a very basic and crucial learning principle, one regularly ignored

in schools. Learners cannot do much with lots of overt information that a

teacher has explicitly told them outside the context of immersion in actual

practice. At the same time, learners cannot learn without some overt infor-

mation; they cannot discover everything for themselves.

The solution is to give information in context and to couch it in ways

that make sense in the context of embodied action. Consider a simple real-

world example. Telling someone “When your car is skidding, turn the wheel

in the direction of the skid” works less well than saying “When your car is

skidding, look in the direction of the skid.” (Of course, when the driver looks

in that direction, he or she will turn the wheel in that direction.) The latter

formulation couches the information in a way that allows it to be integrated

with embodied action both in the learner’s mental simulation and in actual

action on the spot.

In good classroom science instruction, an instructor does not lecture for

an extended period and then tell the learners to go off and apply what they

have learned in a group science activity. The learners won’t remember most

of what they have heard. And, in any case, none of it will have made much

sense in a situated and embodied way that is actually usable. Yet good science

instructors don’t just turn learners loose to engage in activities with no help

at all.

Rather, as group members are discovering things through their own ac-

tivity, the good science instructor comes up, assesses the progress they are

making and the fruitfulness of the paths down which they are proceeding in

their inquiry, and then gives overt information that is, at that point, usable.

The instructor gives group members information that facilitates their further

movement down a fruitful path they are already on, or sends them down a re-

lated but more fruitful path than the one on which they have hit, or gets

them to think about an aspect of the phenomenon they are investigating that

they have not yet considered but for which they are ready and ripe. And, in-

deed, after such embodied inquiry, there are even times when learners need

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and are ready for lectures. They are now able to give a good many of the

words and phrases in the lecture situated and embodied meanings through

the their own mental simulations of former and future actions.

However, there is more at stake in Von Croy’s “mixed” language—lan-

guage that mixes talk to Lara about the virtual world and to the player about

the game’s controls. Such language is one among many devices in a good

video game that encourages the player to relate, juxtapose, and meld his or

her real-world identity (actually, multiple real-world identities) and the vir-

tual identity of the character he or she is playing in the virtual world of the

game. Such a process also encourages the player to adopt what I called in

chapter 3 a projective identity.

I argued earlier that projective identities are the heart and soul of active

and critical learning. Children who take responsibility for the sort of class-

room virtual scientist they are and will become throughout the school year

and relate this proactively to their real-world identities (some of which may

have started as virtual identities in other play or school domains) are engaged

in real learning, learning as a refashioning of self. Of course, no child can do

this if no such virtual identity and world—a world of imagined scientists and

science enacted in words, deeds, and texts—is present in the classroom.

But let me return to our game. As is typical of training modules in good

video games, this ﬁrst training episode of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation

does not tell the player everything he or she needs to know and do in order to

play the rest of game. All the episode does is give the player enough informa-

tion and skill to play and learn from the subsequent episodes. Since each

episode gets more difficult, the player is, in fact, always both playing and

learning. Indeed, the distinction between playing (doing the actual activity)

and learning is blurred in a video game, as is the distinction between master

and beginner, since players always willingly face new challenges as a game

progresses (games get harder as they progress) and as new games do new

things, make new demands, and get better and better at challenging players

in creative ways.

When the second episode of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation begins, Von

Croy challenges Lara (you) to put your newly acquired skills to the test in a

race against him through unfamiliar territory to grab a sacred stone in an-

other part of the temple. Unfortunately, after he says, “We will race for the

Iris, on the count of three: one, two,” he takes off without saying “three,” giv-

ing himself a good head start.

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If you’ve found and collected all eight golden skulls in the ﬁrst episode,

Von Croy chooses the Path of the Heretical, a more difficult test. If you

haven’t found all the skulls, then he chooses the Path of the Virtuous, an eas-

ier test. This is typical of good video games and represents several of the

learning principles discussed earlier: A good video game adapts to the level of

the player, rewards different players differently (but rewards them all), and

often stays at the edge of the player’s regime of competence.

It is also interesting and an important fact that the game rewards the

player for ﬁnding the golden skulls. Finding them requires the player to dis-

regard Von Croy’s commands to stay close and follow his every command.

The player is encouraged by the very design of the game to be more Lara-

like—playful and willful—leaving behind his or her own fears and hesitations

about authority and the risks of exploration.

LEARNING IN A SUBDOMAIN

OF THE FULL DOMAIN

The third episode of the game starts with Lara, now an adult, off adventuring

in Egypt. Von Croy, older as well, returns from time to time in the story. By

now the player has learned and lived through Lara’s back story—even learned

where and how she got her famous backpack (indeed, the player playing Lara

as a teenager has picked it up). So, are the ﬁrst two episodes “training”

(“learning”) or a “real” part of the game? They are, of course, both. In a good

video game, the player learns to play the game by playing in a “subdomain”

of the real game. This is an important learning principle and, again, one reg-

ularly ignored in school.

Many video games have an explicitly labeled training module. For exam-

ple, many shooter games (like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, Half-Life, Deus Ex, or

Max Payne) have such modules where instructors—sometimes sergeants

shouting at you, sometimes more gentle instructors, even peaceful-looking

female holograms as in the training module for Half-Life—talk to the player

just as Von Croy talked to Lara (you). These modules are not episodes in the

game, but the player moves through the same sorts of landscapes, performs

the same sorts of actions, and engages with the same sorts of artifacts as in

the “real” game (except the only way you can get killed in the training mod-

ule is by blowing yourself up while trying to learn how to use dynamite and

similar items, something I have done on more than one occasion).

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Once the game proper starts, the ﬁrst episode (sometimes several early

episodes) is almost always something of a training module, even though it

may not be labeled explicitly as such. In this episode, things are less hectic

and demanding than they will get later on. (This is not to say that things

aren’t hectic and demanding, enough to provide a feel for the game world

and what is to come). System Shock 2 provides a particularly good example of

this sort of ﬁrst episode.

In the ﬁrst episode, the player is rarely under any sort of time pressure and

generally pays only a small price for mistakes. Usually no demanding enemies—

often none at all—attack the player. Furthermore, this episode usually offers a

concentrated sample of the most basic and important actions, artifacts, and in-

teractions that the player will need to deal with throughout the game.

Nonetheless, these early episodes are very much part of the game and its

story. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation combines the training module and the

early episodes as places where demands are lowered enough so that lots of

fundamental learning can be done “on site” in the “real” world (i.e., in this

case, the “real virtual world”) of the game (and not, say, in books or through

lots of overt instruction out of context).

By saying that in a good video game, players learn to play the game by

playing in a “subdomain” of the real game, I mean that training modules and

early episodes, where fundamental learning gets done, are built as simpliﬁed

versions of the same world in which the player will live, play, and learn

throughout the game. Learning is not started in a separate place (e.g., a class-

room or textbook) outside the domain in which the learning is going to oper-

ate. At the same time, the learner is not thrown into the “real” thing—the full

game—and left to swim or drown.

Because good video games have training modules, early episodes as fur-

ther training in the fundamentals, and more advanced learning throughout as

one is ready, all done in the game’s virtual world, something interesting hap-

pens to the learner. Let me tell you a little story to make the point: Once

when I was giving a talk about video games and learning, there were two ex-

cellent game players (and computer experts) in their mid-20s in the audi-

ence—dragged to the talk by the academic whose research they assisted.

After my talk, this academic asked them publicly what they thought about

what I had said. Were the sorts of learning principles I had talked about re-

ally operating in these games? The two players both said that, yes, they were

aware that such principles were at work when they were playing video and

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computer games, but that they had never thought of what they were doing as

“learning.”

This is what is magical about learning in good video games—and in good

classrooms, too—learners are not always overtly aware of the fact that that

are “learning,” how much they are learning, or how difficult it is. Learners

are embedded in a domain (a semiotic domain like a branch of science or a

good video game) where, even when they are learning (and since the domain

gets progressively harder, they are always learning), they are still in the do-

main, still a member of the team (affinity group), still actually playing the

game, even if only as a “newbie.”

TRANSFER AND BEYOND IN VIDEO GAMES

Of course, there are times in a video game where players recognize that they

are learning. These are the times—and, as the game progresses, such times

become more common—where learners see that their now-routinized mas-

tery, developed earlier in the game and in playing similar games, breaks

down. They face a new challenge for which their now-routinized skills don’t

work. In cases like this, a form of learning happens that is just the sort we

want to encourage in school but often have little success doing: transfer of

prior knowledge mixed with innovation. Let me make this point with an ex-

tended example from my own game playing.

By the end of the ﬁrst-person shooter game Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I

had learned a strategy for killing Nazi “Super Soldiers” (robotlike, mechanically

and biologically enhanced beings who can take and give a great deal of damage)

of which I was quite proud. In fact, I had gotten quite good at this strategy.

Here is what I did: I positioned myself quite far from a Super Soldier, be-

hind good cover, and then sniped at him using a long-distance riﬂe with a

good scope, ducking below cover each time the Super Soldier ﬁred back.

After many shots, the Super Soldier died, and I had suffered little or no dam-

age. Suffering little or no damage is important—it does little good to win a

battle but have so few health points left that you will easily die in the next

battle, even with a weak opponent, before you can ﬁnd a health kit to heal

yourself. In a closer battle with a Super Soldier, even if I won, I tended to

take lots of damage, which left me too weak for the ﬁghts to come. However,

I do know other players who learned good strategies for defeating the Super

Soldiers up close without taking too much damage.

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At the end of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the player (playing U.S. Office

of Secret Actions’ Agent Major B. J. Blazkowitz—a very famous video-game

character, because he originally appeared in one of early ﬁrst-person shooter

games, Wolfenstein 3D, a game some consider the “mother” of all ﬁrst-person

shooter games) must face Heinrich I, an ancient deadly knight the Nazis have

risen from his grave through dark mysterious rituals. Heinrich is one heck of

a Super Soldier. He can cause zombies to rise from the ground to attack you

(Blazkowitz). Furthermore, he can cause a myriad of spirits to ﬂy through the

air, ﬁnd you wherever you are trying to hide, and attack you. If you get close

to Heinrich, he can cause rocks from surrounding pillars and arches to fall on

you; he can pull you in closer to him by swiping his sword on the ground; and

he can easily kill you with one blow of his massive sword.

Tr y ing to hide behind cover and snipe Heinrich does not work—trust

me, I tried it many times. The ﬂying spirits ﬁnd you every time and kill you.

So, I discovered that my routinized strategy was no good. At this point, the

game forced me—at its very end, to boot—to try other things and learn

something new, or not ﬁnish it.

Of course, in such a situation, players can call on experiences they have

had in other games, adapting them to the current circumstances, or they can

try something entirely new. The ﬁrst strategy, calling on previous experience,

is an example of what learning theorists call “transfer.” An example of trans-

fer at work would be a case where a student applies something he or she has

learned about reasoning in biology to a new problem faced in a social studies

class. Transfer does not always work and can be dangerous. (Maybe social

studies is better off not being done in the style of biological thinking; then

again, maybe not.) Transfer requires active learning and, if it is not to be dan-

gerous, critical learning.

At one time, cognitive psychologists considered transfer to be a fairly easy

phenomenon. Then they went through a stage of thinking that people were,

in fact, quite bad at transfer and it was, for all practical purposes, impossible to

trigger transfer in school learning. Now they believe transfer is crucial to

learning but not at all easy to trigger in learners, especially in school. Getting

transfer to happen typically requires making the learners overtly aware of how

two different problems or domains share certain properties at a deeper level.

That is, it requires thinking at a design level, thinking about how two prob-

lems or domains are structured or “designed” in similar ways, ways that may

be obscured by the more superﬁcial features of the problems or domains.

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Facing Heinrich, and having failed many times, I decided to call on what

I had learned in playing other video games. I tried a strategy I had learned

from American McGee’s Alice when trying to kill “bosses” (particularly power-

ful enemies). I moved wildly around, zigzagging around and away from

Heinrich, stopping only quickly to shoot him a couple of times with my most

powerful weapons, moving again to avoid his ﬁre and the zombies and spirits

he sent after me, all the while frantically searching for health kits laying

among the fallen rocks and rubble that would repair the damage I was taking.

This strategy had worked to kill bosses like the Duchess, the Centipede,

and the Queen of Hearts in Alice. It almost worked here. I survived longer

than I had in all my other attempts. But, alas, Heinrich got me in the end. I

went down with more pride and dignity (remember, in my projective identity,

I care about such things), but I went down nonetheless.

Since some of the Alice strategy seemed to work, I needed to think about

what in it to keep and what in it to change. Here is where transfer marries in-

novation. In this type of situation, the player has to think of something new

(new to the player, at least; others may have already hit on it) in the context of

keeping what is useful from past experience. This is a key moment for active

and potentially critical learning. It is the place where previous experience is,

at one and the same time, recruited and transformed, giving rise to newer ex-

periences that can be used and transformed in the future.

Here is what I did. First I used another instance of transfer and did

something I have done in a good many shooter games: I ran out of a tunnel I

was in, quickly pounded Heinrich with four rockets from my rocket gun, and

then ran quickly back into my tunnel. Often in shooter games some of your

enemies will follow you into the tunnel or other such narrow space, and they

become easier targets, since they are not all spread out and you see them

coming at you in a direct line. Some of Heinrich’s key helpers (three Dread

Knights and the Nazi who had brought him back to life) ran after me, and I

easily killed them.

Heinrich was momentarily without helpers, though that would soon

change. Now I knew I had to run out and face him—he was not about to fol-

low me back to the tunnel and would have killed me there, in any case, by

sending his spirits at me from afar (his version of my sniping strategy). The

Alice strategy wasn’t going to work without some serious modiﬁcation. What

to do? There is, of course, only one way to proceed: Think and try some-

thing. If you die, you go back to the drawing board.

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I ﬁgured that I had to do my wild moving-around strategy from Alice, but

closer in to Heinrich. If I stayed close, the ﬂying spirits ﬂew over my head for

the most part (since they are really a device to stop people from trying to kill

Heinrich from a distance). Yet if I stayed too close, he would draw me into

him by hitting the ground with his sword and then, as I ﬂew toward him, he

would slay me with one blow. What seemed to be called for was a more con-

strained version of the Alice strategy, stressing moving toward and quickly

away from Heinrich in straight lines more than the wider and more circular

motion I had used in Alice. (Other players have had success with circular

straﬁng when ﬁghting Heinrich, but I am no good at tightly controlled circu-

lar movements.)

I ran out of my tunnel and tried my new part-transfer, part-innovation

strategy. After four direct battles with Heinrich, interrupted by wild runs to

ﬁnd health kits to repair my damage, I had him seriously weakened. Things

appeared to be working and I had gotten farther than ever before. But by

then I had just less than half my health, even after I had used the last health

kit to be found.

Then something happened that can be added to transfer and innovation

as a learning strategy: a lucky discovery. As I used the last health kit, I realized

I was out of ammunition for my Venom gun and switched to my Telsa gun,

which ﬁres electric rays. I had found the last health kit behind some boxes

and, as I stood behind them, I noticed that the rather slow-moving Heinrich

was moving toward the boxes to ﬁnish me off. Thus, I ran quickly around the

boxes and around behind Heinrich, who was now staring over the boxes at

where I had been standing. His back momentarily turned to me, I ran right

up to him and blasted him from behind with the Telsa.

It was risky, but he had already taken enough damage that this ﬁnished

him off. He died in a rage and I immediately saw a cut scene (a short video).

The Super Soldier project and the Heinrich project had been Himmler ba-

bies. In the cut scene I saw Himmler looking through binoculars. He had ob-

viously been watching my battle with Heinrich from atop a far away hill.

Himmler says with dismay, “This American, he has ruined everything.” His

aide then says, “Herr Himmler, the plane is waiting to take you back to Berlin.”

Himmler is reluctant to go; he obviously does not want to have to explain his

failure to Hitler. The aide pushes him: “Sir, the Fuehrer is expecting your ar-

rival.” Himmler walks very slowly back to the car. It’s quite satisfying to have

ﬁnished off Heinrich and to have pissed off Himmler at one and the same time.

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Though this example may seem trivial—with its talk of Super Soldiers

and risen dead—it represents several components of one very important type

of active learning.

1. The learner realizes that a more or less routinized strategy does not

work and quits using it.

2. The learner transfers skills and strategies from previous experience

by seeing underlying similarities between that experience and the

current problem (American McGee’s Alice and Return to Castle Wolfen-

stein are, at the surface level, quite different games, though both are

shooter games—Alice is a third-person shooter and Wolfenstein is a

ﬁrst-person shooter.)

3. The learner learns that, while school sometimes sets up problems so

that earlier solutions transfer directly to later ones, this rarely hap-

pens in real life. The learner adapts and transforms the earlier experi-

ence to be transferred to the new problem through creativity and

innovation.

4. The learner also uses (and is prepared to use) what he or she discovers—

often “by accident”—on the spot, on the ground of practice, while im-

plementing the new transformed strategy (as I did when I circled behind

Heinrich looking for me over the boxes). This requires reﬂection not

after or before action but in the midst of action. The learner remains

ﬂexible, adapting performance in action.

SYSTEM SHOCK 2

System Shock 2, like Deus Ex, combines elements of a role-playing game with

a ﬁrst-person shooter. As a story, it also combines genres, combining the sci-

ence ﬁction of star travel, the action of a war movie, and the horror of a

movie like Alien. System Shock 2 takes place in the same ﬁctional world as the

original System Shock did, a universe in which humans have already colonized

the solar system. In the ﬁrst game, a super-powerful artiﬁcial intelligence sys-

tem called SHODAN went crazy and killed many people onboard the

Citadel Space Station.

After SHODAN was stopped by the intrepid efforts of whoever played the

ﬁrst game, the governments of Earth came together in the United National

Nominate (UNN). The UNN has struggled to control the megacorporations

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that have held power for a long time—the largest of which, the TriOptimum

Corporation, was responsible for SHODAN’s creation. This power struggle

between government and the corporations has resulted in an uneasy truce in

which the UNN holds power officially, but the corporations still hold a great

deal of de facto power through their own armies and police forces.

Into this already tension-ﬁlled situation comes a new source of potential

problems: TriOptimum, despite government efforts to keep corporations out

of such projects, has built a new spaceship, the Von Braun, capable of faster-

than-light travel. Indeed, the Von Braun is making its maiden voyage far be-

yond the solar system. The new technologies aboard the Von Braun have not

been well tested and don’t work as they should. The major problem is the

ship’s central computer, XERXES. XERXES is quite “buggy” and is having

all sorts of problems (shades of SHODAN). Furthermore, the crew, made up

of both UNN and TriOptimum personnel, has separated into two warring

factions that mistrust and hate each other.

When the Von Braun passes the Tau Ceti star system, it receives, and de-

cides to respond to, a distress call coming from Tau Ceti. At that point,

something goes terribly wrong on the ship. This is the disaster to which you

awake when you—a military officer frozen for the long voyage—are called

out of cyber-slumber to help solve the problem.

When you start playing System Shock 2, you start out a few years before

the Von Braun’s voyage. You arrive at a military recruitment station (in a

ﬁrst-person view, so you can’t see yourself, just the world around you). There

you choose from one of three career paths: the Marines, the Navy, or the

OSA (a special service that teaches psychic powers). This determines the

basic statistics (e.g., how strong you are) and skills (e.g., how good you are at

hacking into computers) with which you will start the game. Marines are

weapon and combat oriented. Navy personnel are less skilled with weapons

and are more oriented toward technology and research. They have skills nec-

essary to hack security programs and to engage in research about the crea-

tures and objects they ﬁnd. OSA personnel are sort of like a psychic CIA and

have developed psychic powers that allow them to do a variety of special

things (e.g., Kinetic Redirection, which allows you to pull distant objects to-

ward you, or Remote Electron Tampering, which deactivates all active secu-

rity alarms).

Overall there are nine different skills and ﬁve different statistics in System

Shock 2. Each character type starts with some of these and not others, differ-

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ent for each type. The nine skills are: Hacking (makes you more effective at

breaking into enemy computers), Repair (allows you to ﬁx broken items),

Modify (lets you add new features to your existing weapons), Maintenance

(helps you keep your weapons in working order), Research (lets you research

new technologies and enemy physiologies), Standard Combat (makes you an

expert in the use of conventional weapons like pistols and shotguns), Energy

Weapons (improves your use of energy weapons like lasers and EMP riﬂes),

Heavy Weapons (helps you use larger weapons like Grenade Launchers and

Fusion Cannons), and Exotic Weapons (gives you more skill with the special

bioweapons you discover during the game). The ﬁve statistics are: Strength,

Endurance, Psionics, Agility, and Cybernetic Affinity.

Having made your choice, you sign up for a four-year hitch. In each of

the ﬁrst three years you are given a choice of different postings, different for

each character type, each of which will enhance your character’s skills and

stats in certain ways. You don’t actually play these initial postings but see

videos and read about what you have gained by each experience you have

chosen. Thus, by the time the game play starts in earnest, your own choices

have shaped the sort of character you are going to be.

Your initial choice of character and the three postings you have chosen

set your initial distribution of skills and stats, the ones with which you will

enter the ﬁrst episodes of the game. Once you get into the game, you ﬁnd

and are sometimes rewarded with (by other characters in the virtual world)

cybernetic modules. You can use these modules at upgrade units to buy im-

provements in your different skills and stats. The higher the skill level you

are attempting to purchase, the more cybernetic modules it costs you.

Since cybernetic modules are hard to come by, you can become a real ex-

pert in only a few areas (whether skills or stats or some combination). Thus,

you must pick intelligently rather than squandering modules on a little of this

and a little of that. Since some of the best items and weapons in the game re-

quire you to get the maximum score you can achieve in a speciﬁc skill or stat

before you can use them, if you spend all of your cybernetic module points

trying to become a generalist, you won’t be able to use these neat items or

weapons by the end of the game.

Once you have completed your ﬁrst three postings, the game proper

starts. You are in your fourth posting and ﬁnd yourself awakened from a

cryo-slumber on the Von Braun with no memory of recent events. You imme-

diately see that things have gone badly wrong. Pipes are broken, debris is all

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over the ﬂoor. Bodies are scattered across the ground and you hear crashing

noises and screams everywhere.

You are soon contacted via e-mail by Dr. Janice Polito, the Senior Sys-

tems Analyst onboard the Von Braun, and told that you have been cyberneti-

cally enhanced so that you can receive messages from her and others on your

built in “PDA” (Personal Data Assistant). Your cyber-enhancements also

allow you to use special skills and tools. She tells you that everything has

gone wrong, though you get no details now. She says only that you need to

reach her as quickly as possible on level four of the ship. It is no easy task get-

ting there, since much of the ship is destroyed and XERXES appears to be

trying to foil your every attempt.

As you travel around the corridors of the ship, there are three ways

you learn more about the situation, and, thus, can begin putti ng the story

together.

1. You occasionally get messages on your PDA from Dr. Polito telling

you about things that have just happened and giving you advice on

what you must do next.

2. You ﬁnd small computer disks scattered around the ship that hold the

log messages of the crew. As you pick these up and read them, the

story slowly unfolds and you also get more information on how to

proceed.

3. The cybernetic system that’s been installed in you can pick up psychic

signals. When your system comes in contact with these, it interprets

them as light and sound. The result is that occasionally, as you move

through the ship, you see “ghosts” of people in the actions they took

prior to their deaths.

Using these clues, you must ﬁgure out what has happened to the crew of the

Von Braun and how you’re going to stop the menace.

Whatever has taken control of the ship has found a way to infect the

crew and turn them into zombies. Other creatures you run into, as you move

through the ship, include giant spiders, cybernetic nursemaids, and stealthy

cyber-assassins. As you get to the higher decks of the ship, you encounter

giant security bots and gun turrets that can mow you down in seconds. All of

these creatures have been designed with AI that allows them each to behave

differently and seemingly intelligently.

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There are many different ways to approach the many ﬁghts and prob-

lems you face in System Shock 2. And, of course, you can play the game as dif-

ferent characters—Marine, Navy, or OSA—each of which can be designed in

different ways by your choices at the beginning and throughout the game.

So, in reality, there are even different types of Marine, Navy, and OSA char-

acters. Each different set of choices gives the game a different feel, so you can

play it a number of times as if it were a different game. While you will, on the

second go-round, know where many of the items are hidden, there’s still a big

difference between a Heavy Weapons expert blowing up whole groups of

foes, a Hacker bypassing security systems and doors rather than ﬁghting, and

a Psi master using mind power to get through problems.

System Shock 2, like all good video games, recruits a number of the learn-

ing principles we have already discussed. Players make choices that allow

them to play the game according to their own favored styles or explore new

ones. There are multiple routes to solve problems. Players get multiple and

multimodal sources of information to enable their own discoveries about the

story, the virtual world, and the problems they face. System Shock 2 also has

training modules and early episodes that, like Tomb Raider: The Last Revela-

tion, exemplify important learning principles.

TRAINING MODULES AND EARLY EPISODES

IN SYSTEM SHOCK 2

When you are at the recruitment station at the beginning of System Shock 2,

you can choose to go into several rooms that constitute the game’s training

modules. Here you hear talk much like the talk that Professor Von Croy ad-

dressed to Lara Croft in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. A disembodied

voice welcomes you when you enter the ﬁrst training room and tells you that

you are about to engage in a virtual training course using a “simulated cyber-

interface identical to an actual military-grade cyber-interface.” The voice

then says: “Move the mouse, see how it changes where you look? That means

you’re in Shoot Mode. Hit the Tab key. This puts you in Use Mode where

you can use your mouse to interact with items in the world.”

Once again we see here a language that mixes references to you as a vir-

tual character in the virtual world of the game (e.g., “actual military-grade

cyber-interface”) and references to the computer in the real world on which

you, a real person, are playing the game. You begin to learn to play the game

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by engaging in a language that already fuses your real-world identity and

your virtual identity. The training modules continue this way until you know

just enough, and not more, to start playing the game “for real” and thereby

continue your learning through actual game play. There is no attempt to

make you remember information ahead of time and outside embodied expe-

rience of speciﬁc situations.

When you start the game proper, you ﬁnd yourself coming awake to a

disaster. Dr. Polito tells you to get out quickly before the chambers you are in

run out of oxygen. Then you must reach her. There is a great deal of commo-

tion all around you. You ﬁnd destruction, smoke, burning steam, loose electri-

cal wires, and dead bodies everywhere as you seek a way out. You feel

panicked, but you come to realize there is no reason for real panic. This ﬁrst

episode—as in many good video games—is both a real part of the game and

part of your training. It is not really timed and nothing very bad can happen to

you. You are meant to learn as you proceed. You get to experience the “feel” of

the game—in this case, the pervasive panic and dread that spreads through-

out—but without any bad consequences that will deter your learning.

One way you learn in this ﬁrst episode and other early episodes of the

game is by coming upon Information Kiosks as you travel through the lower

levels of the Vo n B r au n . Each of these is labeled “Tr iOptimum Information

Te r m inal” along the side and says “A service of the TriOptimum corporation,

presented for your convenience” at the top. When you highlight the kiosk by

placing your mouse cursor on it, a message at the bottom of the screen says:

“right click to use information kiosk.” When you right-click the mouse, the

kiosk opens up a message that gives you information about playing the game

related to where you are at that time and to actions you will need to take at that

point or very soon thereafter. This is just-in-time and on-demand information,

situated in the sorts of contexts in which it makes sense and can be used.

For example, one information kiosk contains the following information:

“Your PDA contains every email, log and info kiosk note you ﬁnd onboard. It

also contains an automatic note-taking utility, which keeps you informed of

pressing tasks while onboard. You can access the PDA by left clicking on the

Log icon on the right info bar.” Very soon after reading this message, you

ﬁnd a log on a nearby body with a code in it that you need to get through the

next door. Thanks to the Information Kiosk, you know how to access the log

and the needed code. During the early episodes, you gain a wide variety of

such situated information from these kiosks, though you can pass them by if

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you feel you don’t need any more information and know how to use the basic

controls of the game. In essence, a game manual has been spread throughout

the early episodes of the game, giving information when it can be best under-

stood and practiced through situated experience.

Dr. Polito’s early messages also give you situated information about how

to play the game, and clues about the basic story. For example, when you

ﬁnd a power cell on the ground, she sends you a message (which you hear

orally, thanks to your cyber-enhancements, and which is also written in a lit-

tle box on the screen) that tells you that the power cell is dead but that there

should be a recharger nearby. She then says, “Just use it and it will recharge

all the power-driven devices in your possession.” After you have recharged

the cell, Dr. Polito tells you that you can open a nearby airlock door by

plugging the recharged power cell into the power unit associated with the

door. She then says, “Be quick about it, the vacuum seals won’t hold up

much longer.” (Since this is the ﬁrst episode, even if you are clumsy and

slow, you will still make it.)

When you do get out of the decompressing chamber—before all the

oxygen is gone—Dr. Polito praises you and rewards you with cybernetic

modules with which you can upgrade your skills and stats. She explains how

to do this at upgrade units that just happen to be in the very next room. She

also tells you to use your cybernetic modules carefully, that they are “hard to

come by.” In fact, she only gives you four modules, and you cannot upgrade

much with these. Thus even at the outset you must choose very carefully

what new skills or stats you want and then build on these.

Dr. Polito then gives you further messages that help you on your way to

ﬁnd her. Of course, things don’t always work out as she says—for example,

XERXES has shut down the main elevator and closed certain exits. In these

cases, you and Dr. Polito have to change strategies and seek for new ways to

proceed. As you move on, things get progressively harder. You eventually

face enemies—zombies—that try to (and can) kill you. You engage in your

ﬁrst ﬁghts, using strategies available to your character type and based on the

choices you have made about skills and statistics.

These early fights are easier than ones to follow, allowing you to ex-

plore different strategies and get better at your chosen strategies, so that

you can handle the more difficult battles. The game stays at the outer edge

of what I called in chapter 3, the player’s “ regime of competence.” Things

are challenging, but not undoable. And, of course, you learn to save the

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game at crucial points, so when you do die, you don’t have to start all over

again, just from the last saved point.

The early episodes of System Shock 2 also engage a number of other

learning principles that are typical of good video games. First of all, such

games order the sorts of situations and problems with which they confront

the player. It’s not just that easier ones come earlier. Even more crucially, ear-

lier situations and problems are designed to lead a player to discover and

practice fruitful patterns and generalizations in regard to skills and strategies.

These patterns and generalizations turn out to be useful ones both for play-

ing the rest of the game and as the basis for more complicated patterns and

generalizations later when one faces more complex situations and problems.

To o o f t e n in school—especially in progressive pedagogies that stress im-

mersing children in rich activities without a good deal of teacher guidance—

children confront cases early in their learning that are not very helpful. Since

the children are in a rich environment with little guidance, nothing stops them

from starting with complex cases rather than easier and more basic ones. Such

complex cases, thanks to the fact that all children are powerful pattern recog-

nizers, often lead children to hit on interesting patterns and generalizations

that are, in fact “garden paths.” Such garden-path patterns and generalizations

are not fruitful for the future, however interesting and even intelligent they are

for the present. In fact, they may very well lead children to miss easier, more

basic and useful patterns and generalizations that would have facilitated ﬁnding

the correct patterns and generalizations later for more complex cases.

The issue here is not starting children (or game players, for that matter)

with easy cases. The issue is starting them with cases that are basic or funda-

mental in the sense that they lead the learner to discover and practice what

are, in fact, fruitful patterns and generalizations. Fruitful patterns and gener-

alizations are ones that allow the learner to make real progress in the domain

and that can serve as the correct basis for more complicated patterns and

generalizations that need to be discovered later by confronting more com-

plex and less basic situations and cases.

To take a simple example from System Shock 2, consider that the ﬁrst en-

emies one confronts are zombies that can be killed by whacking them with a

crowbar. When the player later discovers that more powerful enemies are not

easily killed by using the crowbar, he or she quickly hits on a strategy of using

the crowbar to kill easier enemies, saving better weapons (and weapons wear

out in this game) and ammunition for more powerful ones.

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But now suppose the ﬁrst enemies confronted were, say, the cyber-assas-

sins that leap and jump away from the player and shoot arrows from afar

while hiding behind objects. Not only would this frustrate the player early in

the game before he or she had developed much skill, but the player also

would have to use sophisticated weapons and movements. Should the player

learn how to engage in such tactics and then apply them to zombies—ene-

mies that are less powerful but that, in our current hypothesis, the player is

seeing later, after he or she has learned to deal with the cyber-assassins—then

the player will surely kill them, but will waste weapons and ammunition that

are in short supply. The player will feel successful and powerful. But this

strategy ultimately will lead him or her to a dead end when confronted with

other creatures more powerful than the zombies when the player is low on

good weapons or ammunition.

This is an all-too-simple case. In fact, games like System Shock 2 design

their early situations and problems in a quite sophisticated way to lead to

fruitful learning. When later the player is confronted by harder situations

and problems, he or she has just the right basis on which to make fruitful

guesses about what to do. This is not to say that these situations and prob-

lems are not hard or that the player hits on the “right” answers quickly or

without a good deal of thought and effort. (Remember, in a good video game

there are always several different “right” answers.) It’s just that the harder sit-

uations and problems are not, in fact, impossible, as they too often are in

school when children confront them with no basis or a very misleading one.

(Moral for teachers: Order your cases to subserve fruitful generalizations.)

Good video games do more than order the situations and problems the

player faces in an intelligent way, at least in the early parts of the game. They

also offer the player, in the early episodes, what I call a concentrated sample. By

this I mean that they concentrate in the early parts of the game an ample

number of the most fundamental or basic artifacts and tools the player needs

to learn to use and actions the player needs to learn.

This is much like creating a foreign language classroom in which the

teacher concentrates the most fundamental words, phrases, and grammatical

forms into the early lessons. These words, phrases, and grammatical forms ap-

pear in this classroom sample more often and more concentrated together

than they would be in the “real world.” This allows the learner to overpractice

the most basic and central parts of the language’s vocabulary and grammar,

setting a good foundation for later learning and learning in the real world.

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To take one simple example: Finding and using health kits, or otherwise

getting healed, is an important part of many shooter games. These kits heal

the damage the player’s character has sustained thus far in the game, return-

ing the character to full health or, at least, giving back health. Shooter games

are usually generous with health kits early on, allowing their discovery and

use to become rather routine and allowing the player lots of health with

which to learn by exploring and taking risks in the early part of the game.

Later they become much more scarce, but by then the player has become

adept at ﬁnding and using them.

Many times the early parts of games are replete with things to ﬁnd,

places and situations to explore, and things to do that teach players the range

or types of artifacts to be discovered, places and spaces to be encountered,

and actions to be expected. Players gain a good “feel” for the game and its

controls. By the time they get past the early parts, they are more adept and

ready for more advanced learning. Further, against a background of knowing

what is normal or to be expected, players can assess and reason well about

new and more special cases they encounter later.

What all this means is that good video games have a special way of deal-

ing with what we would call in school the basics. When players start a new

genre of game—say a real-time strategy game after having played only

shooter games—they have no way of knowing what is a basic skill and what is

a more advanced one. They don’t yet know which skills will be used over and

over and combined with others to make more complex skills.

Players discover what are basic skills “bottom up” by playing the game

and others like it. Things they use and do repeatedly and combine in various

ways turn out to be basic skills in the genre—and these things are different in

different genres. Ironically, by the time new players are aware of what are

basic skills in a given type of game—what are the basic elements that are used

repeatedly and combined and often concentrated in the earlier episodes—

they have already mastered them. Players come to realize that basic skills are

simply the most common genre features of a game, learned by playing the

game. For example, the player learns that ﬁnding and using health kits (re-

gardless of what form they take) is a basic skill (and genre feature) in a

shooter game (and does not exist in “realistic” military games, like Operation

Flashpoint, where one shot maims or kills you for good).

But basic skills can be learned by playing the game—and not through de-

contextualized skill and drill—because the games are well designed in the

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ways in which they construct their training modules and early episodes and in

the ways in which they order cases and concentrate their samples early on.

Neither players of games nor children in school can learn by “playing” (i.e.,

immersion in rich activities) if they are forced to operate in poorly designed

spaces.

And the real world—that is, the world without game designers or good

teachers, themselves designers of virtual worlds in classrooms—is not in and

of itself well designed for learning. Leaving children to the mercies of the

real world by just letting them loose to think and explore is not education.

LEARNING PRINCIPLES

The discussion has suggested a variety of learning principles that are built

into good video games. Here I bring these principles together. As in earlier

chapters, the order of the principles is not important. And, once again, I in-

tend each principle to be relevant both to learning in video games and learn-

ing in content areas in classrooms.

23. Subset Principle

Learning even at its start takes place in a (simpliﬁed) subset of the

real domain.

24. Incremental Principle

Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases

lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners

face more complex cases later, the learning space (the number and

type of guesses the learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of

fruitful patterns or generalizations the learner has found earlier.

25. Concentrated Sample Principle

The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of funda-

mental signs and actions than would be the case in a less controlled

sample. Fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early

stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well.

26. Bottom-up Basic Skills Principle

Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what

counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more

and more of the game/domain or game/domains like it. Basic skills

are genre elements of a given type of game/domain.

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27. Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time Principle

The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-

in-time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the in-

formation can best be understood and used in practice.

28. Discovery Principle

Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample

opportunity for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.

29. Transfer Principle

Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for,

transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, includ-

ing problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier

learning.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

On the issue of telling versus immersion, see the discussion and citations in Gee 2001.

For further discussion of this issue in relation to learning in real domains and subdo-

mains of real domains, see Beaufort 1999; Coe, Lingard, & Teslenko 2001; Dias,

Freedman, Medway, & Pare 1999; Dias, Pare, & Farr 2000. These works are also rel-

evant to the bottom-up basic skills principle developed in this chapter.

For accounts of transfer that ﬁt the perspective on learning developed in this

book, see Beach 1999 and Bransford & Schwartz 1999. The incremental learning

principle plays an important role in some connectionist models of learning, see, for

example, Elman 1991a, b; see also Karm

iloff-Smith 1992. The explicit information

“on-demand” and “just-in-time” principle has played a large role in writings on learn-

ing and thinking in modern workplaces, see Gee, Hull, & Lankshear 1996. On the

learning principles in this chapter generally, see Gee 1994 and the citations there.

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CULTURAL MODELS:

DO YOU WANT TO BE THE BLUE SONIC

OR THE DARK SONIC?

CONTENT IN VIDEO GAMES

HAPTER

DISCUSSED A CASE WHERE A GRANDFATHER SAID THAT A

six-year-old playing Pikmin was wasting his time, because he wasn’t learning

any “content.” But, of course, video games do have content. RollerCoaster Ty-

coon, for instance, is about building, maintaining, and making a proﬁt from an

amusement park. Medal of Honor Allied Assault is about World War II and in-

cludes an absolutely hair-raising invasion of Omaha Beach, reminiscent of

the opening scenes of the movie Saving Private Ryan. Civilization III is about

world history and the dynamics of building and defending a society from the

ground up. A great many video games, such as Half-Life, Deus Ex, and Red

Faction, are about conspiracies where powerful and rich people or corpora-

tions seek to control the world through force and deception. In fact, the con-

tent of video games is nearly endless.

One of the things that makes video games so powerful is their ability to

create whole worlds and invite players to take on various identities within

them. When players do this, two things can happen: On one hand, their pre-

supposed perspectives on the world might be reinforced. For example, if

someone thinks war is heroic, Return to Castle Wolfenstein will not disabuse

him or her of this viewpoint. If someone thinks that the quality of life is inte-

grally tied to one’s possessions, The Sims (a best-selling game where you build

and maintain whole families and neighborhoods) will not disabuse him or her

of this perspective, either.

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On the other hand, through their creation of new and different worlds

and characters, video games can challenge players’ taken-for-granted views

about the world. Playing through the invasion of Omaha Beach in Medal of

Honor Allied Assault gives one a whole new perspective on what a full-scale

battle is like. The movie Saving Private Ryan did this as well, but the game

puts the player right in the midst of the action, pinned to the ground, sur-

rounded by deafening noise and wounded, sometimes shell-shocked, soldiers,

and facing the near certainty of a quick death if he or she makes one wrong

move. As players make choices about people, their relationships, and their

lives in The Sims (and sometimes players have made real people, such as their

friends, into virtual characters in the game), they may come to realize at a

conscious level certain values and perspectives they have heretofore taken for

granted and now wish to reﬂect on and question.

This chapter is about the ways in which content in video games either

reinforces or challenges players’ taken-for-granted perspectives on the world.

This is an area where the future potential of video games is perhaps even

more signiﬁcant than their current instantiations. It is also an area where we

enter a realm of great controversy, controversy that will get even more in-

tense as video games come to realize their full potential, for good or ill, for

realizing worlds and identities.

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG AND CULTURAL MODELS

Sonic the Hedgehog—a small, blue, cute hedgehog—is surely the world’s

fastest, most arrogant, and most famous hedgehog. Originally Sonic was the

hero in a set of games for the Sega Dreamcast game platform. However, now

that the Dreamcast has been discontinued, he has shown up on the Nintendo

GameCube in the game Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. Sonic can run really really

fast. He can go even faster—like a blurry blue bomb—when he rolls into a

ball. Either way, he can race around and through obstacles, dash into ene-

mies, and streak through the landscape, leaping high in the air over walls and

barriers.

The back story for Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is that the sinister Dr.

Eggman, while searching the remnants of his grandfather’s laboratory, un-

covers a dark form of his arch-nemesis, Sonic, namely a black hedgehog

named Shadow. Together the two conspire to unleash the Eclipse Cannon, a

weapon of mass destruction. The government, unable to tell the blue Sonic

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from the dark Shadow (they look alike) arrests Sonic for Shadow’s evil do-

ings. Sonic escapes and has to free the world of Dr. Eggman and Shadow’s

evil to clear his name.

Players can play Sonic Adventure 2 Battle in two different ways. They can

be “good” and play as the blue Sonic, or they can be “bad” and play as Sonic’s

look-alike, Shadow. If they choose Sonic, they play as Sonic, together with his

friends Knuckles (a boy echidna) and Tails (a boy squirrel), trying to stop Dr.

Eggman and Shadow from taking over the world. If they choose Shadow, they

play as Shadow, together with his friends Rouge (a girl bat) and Dr. Eggman,

trying to destroy the world. Players can switch back and forth, playing part of

the Sonic quest and then changing to play part of the Shadow quest.

The six-year-old from chapter 2 also plays Sonic Adventure 2 Battle.

When he originally got the game, he ﬁrst played a few episodes from the

Sonic quest and then started playing episodes from the Shadow quest. When

he was playing as Shadow, he commented on the fact that “the bad guy was

the good guy”—an odd remark. What he meant, of course, is that when you

are playing as a virtual character in a video game, that character (you) is the

hero (center) of the story and in that sense the “good guy” no matter how bad

he or she might be from another perspective. This boy had never before

played a game where the hero (himself) was, in terms of the story behind the

virtual world, a bad or evil character.

Of course, video games are just as easy to design to allow you to play a

sinner as a saint. Indeed, this fact has generated a good deal of controversy.

While the video game world is replete with heroes who destroy evil, it also

contains games where you can be a mob boss, a hired assassin, or a car thief.

For example, in the notorious Grand Theft Auto 2, you play a budding young

criminal, striving to make a name for yourself in a near-future world ﬁlled

with drugs, guns, and gang wars. Your city is populated by three different

gangs, each of which runs a different section of the city. Each gang has a set

of pay phones that you can use to take on odd jobs stealing cars. The problem

is that a gang will assign you work only if it respects you. You earn this re-

spect by driving over to a rival gang’s turf and shooting as many of their

members as you can. Here you are certainly not a “good guy” in any tradi-

tional mainstream sense. (Grand Theft Auto 2 was followed by the highly suc-

cessful sequels Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.)

What our six-year-old discovered was that there are (besides still others)

two different models of what counts as being or doing “good.” In one model,

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what counts as being or doing good is determined by a character’s own goals,

purposes, and values, as these are shared with a particular social group to

which he or she belongs. Shadow and his group (Rouge and Dr. Eggman)

have a set of goals, purposes, and values in terms of which destroying the

world is their valued goal.

If you want to play Sonic Adventure 2 Battle from Shadow’s perspective

you must act, think, and value (while playing) from this perspective, a per-

spective that makes Shadow “good” or “the hero.” After all, you are ﬁghting

numerous battles as Shadow and feel delight when winning them and dismay

when losing them. It would be absolutely pointless to play as Shadow but

purposely lose battles because you disapprove of his value system. If you

played that way, Shadow would die quickly in the ﬁrst episode and you’d

never see anything else in the Shadow part of the game.

In the other model, what counts as being and doing good is determined

by a wider perspective than just a character’s own goals, purposes, and values,

as these are shared with a particular social group. Rather, what counts is de-

termined by the values and norms of a “wider society” that contains multiple,

sometimes competing, groups as well as more or less generalized rules and

principles about behavior. In terms of this model, Sonic is ﬁghting for social

order and the survival of the majority, things that are considered good from

the perspective of many different groups and in terms of rather general prin-

ciples of right and wrong.

By “models” of what it means to be and do good, I do not mean “profes-

sional” philosophical positions on ethics or theological ones on morality. I

just mean “everyday” people’s conceptions. The ﬁrst model, which we might

call the group model, can be captured by something like the following: “I am

acting like a good person when I am acting in the interests of some group of

which I am a member and which I value.” The second model, which we

might call the general model, can be captured by something like this: “I am

acting like a good person when I am acting according to some general con-

ception of what is good and bad, a conception that transcends my more nar-

row group memberships.”

These two models regularly come into conﬂict in real life and cause all

sorts of interesting issues and questions to arise. Some people readily believe

that their group interests and values are or ought to be the general good.

Others think that general conceptions of good really just hide the narrow in-

terests of particular groups in a society that has cloaked them as general

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goods. Yet other people believe their interests and values represent future,

rather than present, general conceptions of good and may see going against

current conceptions of good as a necessary evil for a greater future good.

And, of course, there are multiple ideas about what general conceptions of

good and bad are.

The six-year-old, in playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, has been confronted

with these two models. He has realized that when you act in (or think in terms

of) the role of someone else (even a hedgehog), this involves not merely taking

on a new identity but sometimes thinking and valuing from a perspective that

you or others may think “wrong” from a different perspective. He also has

learned that experiencing the world from that perspective (in one’s mind or in

a video game) does not mean that he accepts it in the sense that he wants, in

his real-world identity, to adopt the values and the actions that this perspective

underwrites.

These two models of what it means to be good are examples of what I

will call cultural models. Cultural models are images, story lines, principles, or

metaphors that capture what a particular group ﬁnds “normal” or “typical” in

regard to a given phenomenon. By “group” here I mean to single out any-

thing ranging from small groups to the whole of the human race with every-

thing in between. Cultural models are not true or false. Rather, they capture,

and are meant to capture, only a partial view of reality, one that helps groups

(and humans in general) go about their daily work without a great deal of

preplanning and conscious thought. After all, if many things were not left on

“automatic pilot,” we would spend all our time thinking and never acting.

So, for example, something like “People are good people when they are

acting so as to help their group (family, church, community, ethnic group,

state—pick your group)” is a cultural model for many different groups. It is a

version of what I called the group model of good. Something like “People are

good when they are acting according to general principles of morality (pick

your principles)” is another cultural model that many groups use, though they

may accept different cultural models about what are typical general principles

of morality. This is a version of what I called the general model of good. And,

of course, the two models can and sometimes do come into conﬂict.

Since cultural models are usually not conscious for people and since peo-

ple rarely, if ever, try to formulate them deﬁnitively and once and for all in

words, there is no exactly right way to phrase them. If forced to formulate

them, people will put them into different words in different situations. The

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best researchers can do, then, is study people’s behavior and words when they

are acting as members of a certain sort of group and acting within certain

sorts of situations and eventually conclude that, given what they do and say,

they must accept a certain cultural model for a given phenomenon, a cultural

model we formulate in words the best we can. Of course, when they are act-

ing as members of different groups in different situations they may not act

according to the cultural model we have hypothesized but in terms of an-

other one.

Social groups do not usually pay much overt attention to their cultural

models, unless one is threatened. Of course, when cultural models are chal-

lenged or come into conﬂict with other such models, then they can come to

people’s conscious awareness (even to the conscious awareness of the group

as a whole). If someone comes to think that the actions he or she is taking for

the family’s good conﬂict with general conceptions of morality (not even nec-

essarily the person’s own general conceptions), this can give rise to discom-

fort and conﬂict, discomfort and conﬂict that can be resolved in various ways.

A number of pervasive cultural models about gender have become con-

scious to people thanks to the fact that these models have been openly chal-

lenged in society. For example, a cultural model that holds that unmarried

women are unfulﬁlled “spinsters” because they do not have families has long

been challenged by feminists, single women with children, lesbian couples

with children, and perfectly fulﬁlled single women with good careers with

which they are satisﬁed. Of course, all these people existed before, but as

long as they did not speak out and make themselves visible, they were easily

rendered invisible and marginal by traditional cultural models. Once they did

speak out, those models and the social work they did came to people’s con-

sciousness and had to be overtly defended or changed.

The world is full of an endless array of ever-changing cultural models. For

example, what do you think of a teenage child who tells his or her parents to

“F_ _ _ off?” Perhaps you apply a model like “Normal teenagers rebel against

their parents and other authority ﬁgures” and are not too concerned. Perhaps

you apply a model like “Normal children respect their parents” and conclude

the teenager is out of control. Who is to say what a “normal” or “typical”

teenager is or does? Different cultural models hold different implications.

What do you make of a toddler who throws a tantrum when you, in a

hurry to get your chores done, open a heavy car door that he or she wants to

try to open, no matter how long it takes? Perhaps you apply a cultural model

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like “Young children go through sometimes-difficult ‘stages’ in their urge for

growing self-reliance and independence” and conclude your child and the

situation you are in is quite “normal.” Perhaps you even encourage the child.

Or perhaps you apply a model like “Young children are naturally willful and

selﬁsh and need discipline to learn to get along with and cooperate with oth-

ers.” Again, you would conclude you have a “normal” child, but one in need

of discipline.

When you see a beggar on the street, your ﬁrst reaction might stem from

a cultural model like “People are responsible for themselves and when they

fail it’s their own fault” and go on your way, ignoring the person’s pleas for

money. Or you might apply a model something like “Down-and-out people

are victims of problems that have overwhelmed them in a harshly competi-

tive society” and give the person some money. Or you might apply a model

like “Giving people money just encourages them to seek more help from oth-

ers rather than seek to help themselves” and give the beggar an address of a

foundation that can help him or her get a (probably quite bad) job.

When you have an argument with someone, do you apply a model some-

thing like “Arguments are a sort of verbal conﬂict” (helped along in this case

by metaphors in our language like “I won the argument” or “I defeated her po-

sitions”)? When you are in a romantic relationship, do you apply a model

something like “Relationships are a type of work” (helped along in this case

by metaphors in our language like “I’ve put a lot of work into this relation-

ship” or “He has worked hard to be a good lover”)? When you talk about peo-

ple’s jobs, do you apply a model something like “Working with the mind is

more valuable to society than working with one’s hands” and ﬁnd yourself

valuing even an academic who debates how many angels can sit on the head

of a pin over your plumber? Perhaps the answer is no in all these cases, in

which case you operate, at least sometimes and in some places, with different

cultural models.

There are several important points to be made about cultural models.

They are not just in your head. Of course, you store images and patterns in

your head that represent cultural models, but they are also represented out

there in the world. For example, the cultural model that said that “Young

children go through sometimes-difficult ‘stages’ in their urge for growing

self-reliance and independence” exists in a lot of self-help guides on babies

and childrearing. The words and images of the magazines, newspapers, and

other media all around us represent many cultural models. The models also

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are represented and acted out in the words and deeds of the people with

whom we interact and share memberships in various groups.

Different cultural models are associated with different groups in the

larger society, though some are also shared widely by many, perhaps all,

groups in that society. For instance, the cultural model about children going

through “stages” toward independence is associated more closely (though

not exclusively) with the modern middle class, and the cultural model that

said “Young children are naturally willful and selﬁsh and need discipline to

learn to get along with and cooperate with others” is associated more closely

(though not exclusively) with the traditional working class.

Cultural models, which cannot be stated in one deﬁnitive way, are stories

or images of experience that people can tell themselves or simulate in their

minds, stories and images that represent what they take to be “normal” or

“typical” cases or situations. In this sense, they are like theories, theories

about things like children, childrearing, relationships, friendship, being and

doing good, and everything else. These theories are usually unconscious and

taken for granted. However, like all theories, even overt ones in science, they

are not meant to be detailed, blow-by-blow descriptions of reality. Reality is

too complex to be described accurately in every detail. Rather, cultural mod-

els and formal theories both are meant to capture general patterns in such a

way that we can do things in and with the world, whether this is to accom-

plish a goal with others or to make successful predictions in an experiment.

Cultural models are picked up as part and parcel of acting with others in

the world. We act with others and attempt to make sense of what they are

doing and saying. We interact with the media of our society and attempt to

make sense of what is said and done there, as well. Cultural models are the

tacit, taken-for-granted theories we (usually unconsciously) infer and then

act on in the normal course of events when we want to be like others in our

social groups. People who have no cultural models would have to think

everything out for themselves minute by minute when they attempt to act.

They would be paralyzed. And they certainly would not be social beings,

since part of what makes us social beings is the set of cultural models we

share with those around us.

Cultural models can be used for many different purposes and they can

sometimes conﬂict with each other. For example, the anthropological psy-

chologist Claudia Strauss found that working-class men she studied behaved

in their daily lives according to what she called a bread-winner model. This

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model can be phrased something like this: “Men take care of their families

even if this means sacriﬁcing their own interests.” On the other hand, Strauss

found that many upper-middle class people operate with a cultural model

that stresses their own self-development over the interests of those around

them, including their own families. When such people were faced with mov-

ing to take a new and better job, they often did so, even if this damaged their

families and relationships. The working-class men Strauss studied, when

faced with the same choice, gave up the new career opportunity for the bene-

ﬁt of their families.

These working-class men also used what Strauss and others have called

the success model to judge their own behaviors. This model says something

like “In the United States, anyone can get ahead if they work hard enough.”

The working-class men saw that they did not hold jobs the wider society

considered successful and used this model to condemn themselves, saying

they had not worked hard enough or weren’t smart enough. They used the

success model to judge themselves negatively even though this model exists

in some degree of conﬂict with the bread winner model on which they led

their lives in action, a model that would not let them take the “selﬁsh” steps

often required by the success model.

Since this conﬂict did not surface to consciousness for these men, it did

not come out into the open. They simply felt bad about themselves, at least

when forced to think about themselves in relation to the society as a whole.

In other settings, of course, they may have felt quite differently—remember,

people take on different identities in different situations and all people are

members of many different groups.

Are cultural models, then, “good” or “bad”? They are good in that they

allow us to act and be social in the world without having to constantly reﬂect

and think. They are bad when they operate so as to do harm to ourselves or

others but go unexamined. Certain circumstances can, however, force us to

think overtly and reﬂectively about our cultural models. We certainly don’t

want or need to think overtly about all of them. But we do need to think

about those that, in certain situations or at certain points in our lives, have

the potential to do more harm than good.

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle forced the six-year-old overtly to realize and

confront two different, and sometimes conﬂicting, cultural models of what

constitutes being and doing “good.” Of course, this realization was only be-

ginning. Many other experiences, not the least in video games, will give this

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child other opportunities to think more about these two models. And, in-

deed, they are models that bear a good deal of thinking about, since they have

done and have the potential to do a lot of harm in the world.

UNDER ASH

The sort of thing that the six-year-old experienced can go much further and

deeper. Consider the case of Arab children. After the terrorist attacks of Sep-

tember 11, 2001, a number of video games came out, initially on the Internet

and thereafter as packaged games, featuring U.S. soldiers killing Arabs and

Muslims. These games, for obvious reasons, were not entirely palatable to

Arab children. In response, the Syrian publishing house Dar Al-Fikr de-

signed a video game called Under Ash. Its hero is a young Palestinian named

Ahmed who throws stones to ﬁght Israeli soldiers and settlers. The game, of

course, involves the player deeply in the Palestinian cause and Palestinian

perspectives.

In the game, Ahmed initially must reach Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, an

important Islamic holy site, avoiding or ﬁghting Israeli soldiers and settlers

along the way. Once he reaches the mosque, Ahmed has to help injured

Palestinians, ﬁnd weapons, and expel Israeli soldiers. There are many other

episodes to the game, including ones where Ahmed inﬁltrates a Jewish settle-

ment and where he serves as a guerrilla warrior in southern Lebanon. As is

typical of such video games, Ahmed only attacks those he does not consider

“civilians.” (In this case, occupation forces, settlers, and soldiers do not count

as “civilians.”) “Civilians” (all others) are left unharmed.

Of course, it is clear that in video games who does and does not count as a

“civilian” is based on different perspectives embedded in the game’s virtual

world. I was originally surprised (which shows I was operating with a different

cultural model) that settlers (since they are not in the army) didn’t count as

civilians. But then I realized that this game accepts a cultural model in terms

of which the settlers are seen as the “advance” troops of an occupation army.

The general manager of the company that produced Under Ash, Adnan

Salim, considers the game, one that is violent in just the way many U.S.

shooter games are, “a call for peace.” In an Internet site devoted to the game,

Salim says that “Slaying and shedding blood have been the worst of the

Human’s conducts [sic] since the beginning of creation.” I got Salim’s views

from Google’s (a search engine) cache of www.underash.com/emessage.htm.

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(A cache is a snapshot that the people at Google took of the page as they

“crawled the web.”) This site, like several others devoted to Under Ash, no

longer exits. Opponents of the game have destroyed many sites devoted to it.

I have no idea whether this was true of this site or not. Salim goes on to say

that “[i]n spite of the Human’s endeavor and struggle to get rid of the crime

of murder since he appeared on Earth, Israel has been practicing collective

killing and eradication.”

On the other hand, he claims that:

Under Ash is a call to humanity to stop killing and shedding blood. After all

its awful experience and global destructive wars, the whole world has be-

come aware of the fact that wars never solve problems....

Under Ash is a call to dialogue, coexistence and peace. Justice is the

deeply-rooted human value that God Almighty enjoined ... On the other

hand, nations perish, states stabilize and civilizations collapse according to

the amount of aggression, injustice and harm they practice....

Under Ash is a call to justice, realizing truth, preventing wronging [sic]

and aggression. God made all mankind as equal to each other as the comb

teeth....

Such is the philosophy of Under Ash. The idea on which it was based

repulses violence, injustice, discrimination and murder, and calls for peace,

justice and equality among people.

This idea, accompanied by the best available technology, is still handy

to our youth, trying to dry up their tears; heal their wounds; remove all the

feelings of humiliation, humbleness and wretchedness from their souls, and

draw the smile of hope and the sense of dignity and efficiency on their faces.

If you ﬁnd these remarks odd in regard to a violent video game (remem-

ber that there was no outcry in the United States over shooter games where

the enemies were Arabs), that is because these remarks and the game itself

take for granted a number of cultural models foreign to many Americans (just

as American games and remarks about them take for granted different cul-

tural models). For example, consider that Salim says that, after having experi-

enced the violence of global wars, the world: “turned back to the patient

dialogue around the table of negotiation which resulted in the establishment

of a European Union among nations which previously hated one another and

went on ﬁghting for centuries. Then they agreed to coexist peacefully within

a union under whose authority none is harmed and every one beneﬁts.”

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One cultural model that seems to be at work here is something like this:

“The experience of violence will make people seek peace.” In terms of this

model, we can see the guerrilla ﬁghter as trying to push more powerful enti-

ties (i.e., states), entities that the guerrilla cannot defeat outright, to settle

their differences through negotiation rather than war. A cultural model some-

thing like “The experience of overwhelming violence will make less powerful

entities give up and give in to more powerful entities” seems at play in both

some U.S. video games and much U.S. media devoted to warfare in the mod-

ern world. Note that like all cultural models, these are not “true” or “false.”

(History is replete with examples and counter-examples to both.) They are

meant to help people make sense to themselves and others and to engage in

joint activity with others with whom they share these cultural models.

Now, you might very well not want to play Under Ash. If you did play the

game, you would be placed in a situation where you took on the virtual iden-

tity of a character whose cultural models about many things are different

from yours. If you not only adopted this virtual identity while you played but

took on what I called in chapter 3 a projective identity vis-à-vis your virtual

identity (Ahmed), you would surely come to understand what it feels like to

be among those angry young people who are “trying to dry up their tears;

heal their wounds; remove all the feelings of humiliation, humbleness and

wretchedness from their souls, and draw the smile of hope and the sense of

dignity and efficiency on their faces.”

Would this mean you would, all of a sudden, want to kill Israeli settlers or

even that you would support the Palestinian cause over the Israeli one if you had

not before? Certainly not. But it would mean that, far more interactively that

you could in any novel or movie, you would have experienced the “other” from

the inside. Even more interesting, since the cultural models built into the game

are not yours, you would be able to reﬂect on them in a more overtly conscious

way than young Arabic players for whom the models are taken for granted (as

U.S. game players take for granted different models that ﬁt their own sense of

reality). In turn, this might make you contrast these models to ones you have

taken for granted and bring them to consciousness for reﬂection.

What if Under Ash allowed you to play through the game twice, once as

Ahmed and once as an Israeli settler, just as Sonic Adventure 2 Battle allows

you to be Sonic or Shadow, or Aliens vs. Predator 2 allows you to be a Marine

ﬁghting off the Aliens and Predator or either an Alien or Predator trying to

survive by killing the Marines? My guess is that if you had taken on both the

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projective identity of you as Ahmed and you as Israeli settler, you would ﬁnd

the whole thing much more complex than you do now and would be a bit

more reluctant to take the death of either side for granted. Such complexity

is bad, I admit, for people and states trying to wage war.

Video games have an unmet potential to create complexity by letting

people experience the world from different perspectives. Part of this poten-

tial is that in a video game, you yourself have to act as a given character. As

you act quickly, and not just think leisurely, and as you (while playing) cele-

brate the character’s victories and bemoan his or her defeats, you must live in

a virtual world and make sense of it. This making sense of the virtual world

amid not just thought but also action in the world amounts to experiencing

new and different cultural models. Furthermore, you may experience these

models much more consciously—and render some of your own previous

models conscious by contrast in the process—than is typical of our daily lives

in the real world. In the next section I turn to an example that is less esoteric

for Americans than Under Ash.

I am well aware that this potential of video games—if and when it is more

fully realized—is liable to be very controversial. An Israeli or Palestinian who

has lost a loved one to violence is not going to want to play both sides of my

make-believe Under Ash game. Indeed, the Israeli and Palestinian may each

revel in playing “their” side and getting virtual revenge. Each may think it im-

moral to “play” the other side, to take on such a perspective on the world even

in play. I, too, think that certain perspectives are so repugnant that we should

not take them even in play. But who decides? And if we are willing to take

none but our own side, even in play, then violence would seem inevitable.

We do not have to imagine games that most of us would ﬁnd entirely re-

pugnant, regardless of our political perspectives. Such games actually exist.

For example, a game called Ethnic Cleansing, put out by the Virginia-based

National Alliance, has players killing African Americans, Latinos, and Jews as

they run through gritty ghetto and subway environments. The game is quite

sophisticated technologically. (It was built using free game development soft-

ware called Genesis 3D.) Hate groups like the National Alliance have long

recruited members through the use of web sites, white-power music, and

books and magazines. However, there is concern, for just the reasons we have

discussed, that interactive media like video games are a more powerful device

than such passive media. But if they are, then they are potentially more pow-

erful for both good and ill.

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Whether we like it or not, new technologies make it easy to design real-

istic and sophisticated video games that allow players to be almost any sort of

person or being living in almost in sort of world that any designer can imag-

ine. Eventually this capacity will be used to allow people to live and interact

in worlds where violence plays no role and is replaced by conversation and

other sorts of social interactions. (The Longest Journey, a game whose lead

character is an 18-year-old woman named April Ryan, is one such game;

Siberia, whose protagonist is a female lawyer wandering around a town full of

automatons, is another.)

The same capacity that will allow us to enact new identities and learn to

act according to new cultural models can also allow us to renew our hate or

even learn new models of hate. In the end, who is to decide what identities

you or I can enact and whether enacting them will be a good or bad thing for

us? Publicly the issue usually is couched in terms of children and teens,

where parents surely bear a major responsibility, but the average video-game

player is in his or her late 20s or early 30s. I don’t want politicians dictating

what identities I can enact in a virtual world. At the same time, I worry about

people who play Ethnic Cleansing. But any attempt to stop the ﬂow of identi-

ties that new technologies allow presents the danger of locking everyone into

their most cherished identities, and that has brought us a great deal of ethnic

cleansing of its own. I have no solid answers to offer, only the claim that

video games have the potential to raise many such questions and issues.

GOING TO WAR

Both Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis are

shooter games played out in military settings. Castle Wolfenstein is a ﬁrst-per-

son shooter. (You see only the weapon you are holding, unless you look in

something like a mirror when you then see yourself.) Operation Flashpoint can

be played either in the ﬁrst-person or in the third-person (where you see

your character’s body as if you were just a bit behind him). In Castle Wolfen-

stein you play Major B. J. Blazkowitz in World War II ﬁghting against the

Nazis. In Operation Flashpoint you start the game as Private David Armstrong,

though you (Armstrong) go up in rank during the game. Private Armstrong is

involved as a U.S. soldier representing NATO in a war against a resistance

movement on an island nation.

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While all this makes these two games sound similar, they are in a great

many respects entirely different. In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Major William

J. “B. J.” Blazkowicz is a highly decorated Army Ranger recruited into the Of-

ﬁce of Secret Actions (OSA) and given the task of going to Castle Wolfenstein

to thwart Heinrich, the reincarnation of a tenth-century dark prince, Henry

the Fowler (also known as Heinrich), and an army of genetically engineered

super soldiers.

As in most shooter games, your character (B. J. Blazkowitz) can take a

great deal of damage before he dies. It takes a number of bullets to kill him,

and he can ﬁnd health kits throughout the game to replenish his health.

While he faces tough enemies, the fact that he can dish out a great deal of

damage with special weapons (like a Venom Gun, which ﬁres dozens of bul-

lets at once) and sustain a good deal of damage makes you, the player, feel

like quite a superhero. Indeed, when you have successfully ﬁnished the game,

you see a cut scene (video) where Blazkowitz’s superiors in Washington are

discussing what a great job he has done and how he is currently taking some

well-deserved R and R, imagining him relaxing on some tropical isle. But

then the video cuts away to a dramatic scene where we see Blazkowitz jump-

ing from a ledge, machine gun in hand, entering the fray in yet another battle

against multiple Nazis, a sly grin on his face. This is his form of R and R.

Games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein trade on several pervasive cultural

models that are part of their allure. They play on cultural models that treat

heroes as superhuman people and that see warfare (for the “right” cause) as

heroic. Also they play on a cultural model that is quite pervasive particularly

among males, namely one that sees ﬁghting (and even losing) against all

odds—standing alone against the horde no matter what—as romantic (a

model often triggered when people watch a bad sports team against a good

one). And, of course, they play on cultural models, pervasive particularly in

United States, that romanticize the individual against the group.

There is nothing particularly wrong with thi s. People get pleasure out

of seeing their cultural models conﬁrmed and, in the case of video games,

actually getting to act them out. After all, a good many of these models have

been picked up not so much from one’s actual experiences in the world as

through experiences with books and the media. However, I believe there is

something wrong when these sorts of models are never challenged or

overtly reﬂected on.

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Some modern shooter games have begun to play against these sorts of

pervasive models in interesting ways. Games like Thief: The Dark Project and

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, in their entirety, and parts of Deus Ex and

No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way, and a good many other mod-

ern sophisticated shooter games, stress stealth and cunning over ﬁghting. A

shooter game like Anachronox and many fantasy role-playing games (like Bal-

dur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amin) stress teamwork. At times Anachronox plays to

hilarious effect against cultural models about heroism and individuality.

In fact, these trends are strong enough that games like Duke Nukem and

Serious Sam bill themselves as nostalgic returns to the “good old days” of

shooters where you just rushed in and shot up everything around you. (Duke

Nukem’s motto in his more recent game, Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project, is

“It’s my way or ... Hell—it’s my way.”) In many a modern shooter game

that’s a strategy that will lead quickly to your death. Finally, we can mention

that the very popular No One Lives Forever games star a female James Bond

ﬁgure and parodies (in a very playful way) the conventions of the Bond genre

and 1960s.

But none of this prepares you for a game like Operation Flashpoint: Cold

War Crisis; a realistic military game that quickly disabused me of all the cul-

tural models about warfare I had picked up from books and movies. Its con-

trast with games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein is so stark that a player

cannot help but be confronted consciously with the cultural models heroic

shooter games reinforce.

Operation Flashpoint is set in the Cold War period just as Soviet President

Mikhail Gorbachev is elected into power. The game follows a ﬁctional story

line centered around the battle between a disgruntled rogue Soviet military

group that has seized control of an island community and a NATO peace-

keeping force, sent in at the request of the Soviets. The player assumes the

role of Private David Armstrong in over 30 missions that have you assaulting

small towns as a member of a large squad, commandeering vehicles, launch-

ing sniper attacks, and, later, serving as a squad leader. In the early parts of

the game, you follow a computer AI-controlled leader as you and other squad

members try to survive to later missions, where you move up the ranks, even-

tually becoming a battle-hardened commander.

Operation Flashpoint is fully realistic. One bullet is usually enough to kill

or disable you pretty fully. Opposing soldiers can shoot at you from far away,

can snipe you from hiding places that are hard to discover, and often appear

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as small deadly spots on the horizon, not as larger-than-life foes confronting

you face-to-face. There are no health kits to be found, only the very occa-

sional medic on the battleﬁeld if you are lucky enough to ﬁnd one and get to

him quickly enough. Very often, if you are not very careful, you get shot and

die without even having seen what direction the bullet came from.

Needless to say, if you try to be Rambo in Operation Flashpoint and run

out heroically ﬁring all guns, you will, as a review on gamezilla.com put it,

“ﬁnd yourself in a black body bag being shipped to the USA, next day air.”

Cooperation from and with your computer-controlled squadmates is a must

for survival. Many times there are more of the enemy than there are of you,

and they are well trained. When things go wrong—and they often do—you

can hide from enemies, for example, in bushes, especially when you are in

camouﬂage. But once you ﬁre, there’s a good chance the enemy will hear it

and attack your position, with predictable results. (You die.)

Playing Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis let me experience what it

would be like to have quite different cultural models about warfare. Early on,

I found myself (as Private Armstrong) with my squad following my com-

mander as we skirted the edges of forests and open ﬁelds in search of the

enemy. I really had no idea how I should move. My inclination as an “every-

day” person was to stand up and move forward briskly. I died, shot from afar.

In fact, I never saw the enemy soldier who shot me.

Replaying the game, I watched how my (computer-controlled) squad-

mates moved. Often they moved forward in a crouching position, staying low

to the ground. They rarely moved in straight lines and frequently stopped

and checked the horizons all around them. When they sensed any danger,

they hit the ground and crawled forward for a while. Progress was punish-

ingly slow. You had to develop a sense of possible danger everywhere, know-

ing that the enemy might very well see you before you saw them. For long

periods nothing happened and a sense of boredom overcame me. Then all of

a sudden information would come over my radio or the commander would

shout out orders and there would be ﬁring and mayhem. Often I barely had

time to get excited before I died, having failed to think beforehand of possi-

ble avenues of protection or retreat.

During the game’s early episodes, as I moved (ever more skillfully and

“paranoidly”) with my squad, I went into missions with high expectations and

optimism. After all, we were the “good guys,” weren’t we? We were in a well-

trained professional army with highly qualiﬁed officers (I was, after all, only a

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private), weren’t we? But time and again, things did not go as planned. We

had to change plans, retreat and regroup, or even be evacuated in defeat.

Winning was no simple matter, and every step forward seemed to portend

two possible steps backward. While I often got orders directly from the com-

mander of my squad or over my radio, I didn’t always know what the “big

plan” was, if there was one, only what my group was supposed to accomplish

and that changed under the conditions of the actual battle on the ﬁeld.

Speaking of orders: As I said, I often got them under conditions where I

had to act fast. But many times these orders left me in quandaries. In one

case, for example, an officer got killed only moments after ordering me to

move in a certain direction and take up a certain position. Should I follow the

order now that he just got shot—which, of course, didn’t inspire great conﬁ-

dence? In other cases, there were clearly much safer—and sometimes, from

my perspective, smarter—things for me to do than follow the order to the T.

What to do? How exactly need I follow orders? What room is there for my

own judgment? Sometimes when I hesitated, I got yelled at. At other times, I

was too far away for the officer to observe the details of my behavior.

When we did accomplish our goals in fine fashion, I did not know how

much or how little I had contributed to the “victory.” For example, once we

assaulted an enemy position on the outskirts of a town. I and others were

ordered to move forward under fire, while some of our fellow soldiers

stayed behind sniping at the enemy positions from farther back. I moved

forward, firing my gun and evading return fire. We “won,” but I never

knew if I had disabled any of the enemy or contributed to the task (partly

because I was not the first soldier over the top—see the next paragraph).

The whole squad got praised, but I didn’t know how good (or bad) to feel

about the matter.

Finally, early on, I discovered an important but very uninspiring princi-

ple. I have already pointed out that I learned a good deal by observing my

squadmates—for example, how to move. But I also learned that the safest po-

sition is to move with but behind other squadmates. The people in front have

to make the snap decisions and take the ﬁre ﬁrst. But it felt very “unmanly”

staying behind the others. I particularly liked moving behind (not too close,

though) some of the officers on the ﬁeld who seemed to know the most about

how to proceed and often made the best decisions.

Enough said; this is not war as romantic and heroic. Here are some of

the cultural models I was beginning to pick up about warfare from playing

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this game, none of which is remotely part of the experience of playing Return

to Castle Wolfenstein:

• War is, for the most part, boring.

• Soldiers need to move as if they are constantly paranoid.

• When war is exciting, it is also confusing.

• Following orders is a vexed matter.

• Things don’t go as planned.

•Situations on the ground don’t resemble people’s generalities and

plans about them.

• No one really knows what people at the top know and whether they

really know what they’re doing.

•The guys next to you on the actual battlefield often do know what

they’re doing.It’s hard to know what you can take credit for as an

individual.

• “Manly” behavior often gets you dead quickly, Rambo-type behavior

even quicker.

These are cultural models, because they are images, principles, or story

lines that I don’t really “know” are true. I picked them up from my own expe-

rience, and one’s experience is always limited, local, connected to particular

groups and situations, and never scientiﬁcally “valid.” Such models help or-

ganize and make sense of experience and help one move on and get on with

the job at hand (in this case, staying alive long enough to go on ﬁghting a

war). Of course, people and game players differ. In my case, I have never had

the slightest desire to be a real soldier, and playing Operation Flashpoint cer-

tainly does not inspire me to change my desires in this regard. It does make

me worry about media depictions of war and gives me loads of sympathy for

anyone who has to ﬁght one, especially bottom up in the ranks. (The U. S.

Army has created a massive multiplayer realistic game called America’s Army

but I do not know what effect it has on players, save to say a number have

wanted to sign up.)

CULTURAL MODELS IN SCHOOL

Cultural models play a crucial role in school. Let me give you a speciﬁc ex-

ample from a science classroom. High school students taking a physics class

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were having a discussion about whether a ball rolling on a level plane would

keep moving at constant speed. They had previously heard from their

teacher Galileo’s arguments that under ideal conditions (i.e., leaving out fric-

tion and assuming no force acts to accelerate or retard the ball’s progress) the

ball would keep moving at a constant speed.

During the discussion, one student asks, “What’s making the ball move?”

Another answers, “The forces behind it.” The student who asked the ques-

tion responds, “The force that’s pushing it will make it go.” Yet another stu-

dent says, “Where’d that force come from, because you don’t have a force”

(which, of course, is Galileo’s and modern physics’ assumption), and another

student answers, “No, there is force, the force that’s pushing it, but no other

force that’s slowing it down.” The teacher comments that some students say

there are no forces on the ball, while others say there is “a force that’s moving

it.” One student now says, “There’s an initial force that makes it start, giving

it the energy to move.”

What is happening here—and it happens in many physics classrooms—is

that some (most) of the students are assuming that things in motion stay in

motion either because some force is constantly acting on them (they are

being “pushed” by this force) or because they have stored up energy from

some initial force (a “push”) that acted on them, a stored energy that is a kind

of “impetus” (which itself is like an internal force acting on the object, one

that gradually “runs down”). However, in terms of the semiotic domain of

physics, any object stays at rest or in constant motion unless some force acts

to change its state. When its state is changed, it stays in the new state (in mo-

tion or at rest) until some other force changes this state. In physics, there is

no need to explain why things stay in constant motion or at rest. Thus, there

is no need to appeal to any “impetus” moving objects have stored up (a

“force” that doesn’t exist). We only need to explain the situation when things

in motion accelerate or slow down or things at rest move. In these cases, we

must assume some force has acted on the object.

Of course, in the real world, things rarely stay in constant motion for any

length of time, since forces almost always act on them to change (speed up or

slow down) their motion. And when things stay at rest in the real world,

often it takes a number of forces to keep them that way and oppose forces

that are attempting to change them. Galileo was assuming an ideal world, for

instance a world with no friction between surfaces and nothing in the envi-

ronment to perturb the motion of the ball. Furthermore, the ball is assumed

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to be rolling horizontally on level plane to make the force of gravity irrele-

vant to the problem. (If the ball were falling down it would be accelerating,

thanks to gravity.) He wanted to think about things in a certain idealized way

so that the basic pattern or fundamental principle at work would show itself

clearly, namely, the principle that things at rest stay at rest and things moving

at a constant speed stay moving at a constant speed unless some force acts on

them to change their state.

This is a new and different way of looking at the world. In physics, things

moving at constant speed or at rest don’t need explaining. What needs ex-

plaining is change. In the world of our “everyday” experience, since things

are always changing, what often has to be explained is how certain things re-

sist these changes to remain in a constant state.

Physicists want to think in terms of such ideal worlds so that they can

discover elegant mathematical models that can later be applied to the real

world. When they are applied to the real world, we have to think about

things that were left out of the model (like friction). Such elegant models,

when these other things are added in, make a multitude of correct predic-

tions about the real world.

Most other academic disciplines operate in a similar way. They leave out a

myriad of details to formulate a basic pattern that later can be made more com-

plex to apply in different ways to different situations. For example, some

branches of economics operate with the assumption that people are always ra-

tional when they act within free markets. This lets these economists think

about and discover principles about how markets work in an ideal sense. Of

course, when they want to make predictions about the real world, they have to

add in adjustments for different situations where people display different kinds

of irrational behavior or where markets are not fully free. Their idealized as-

sumption is good if, when they add back in these different adjustments (differ-

ent ones for different situations), they are able to make good predictions.

Ironically, this way of proceeding—i.e., leaving out a lot of details to get to

the basic pattern—is not all that different from how cultural models work. Peo-

ple form cultural models from their experience by leaving out many of the de-

tails to capture what they take to be the typical cases. Scientiﬁc models are

formed through the socially organized process of scientiﬁc investigation (e.g.,

formal research and peer review), not through largely unconscious encounters

with daily life. Furthermore, scientiﬁc models and cultural models exist for dif-

ferent reasons. Scientiﬁc models attempt to explain how some aspect of the

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world works as an answer to a formal and consciously formulated question, and

sometimes the aspects of the world that they deal with are not ones we experi-

ence in our everyday lives (e.g., atoms). Cultural models exist to help us get on

with our “everyday,” less specialized and often less consciously reﬂected on so-

cial and cultural business and our everyday lives in the material world.

In the high school physics class, the cultural models of some students

were in conﬂict with the scientiﬁc models used by physicists. They did not

realize this and could not turn off (for the time being) their conﬂicting cul-

tural models and begin to think and act through the physicists’ models. Let

me discuss for a moment, then, one of the conﬂicting cultural models that

these students were using.

A number of studies in science education have found that students often

bring to the physics classroom, in one form or another, a conception that mo-

tion is caused by force. They believe that if an object is moving, then there must

be a force on it causing that motion. It is common to read in this literature

that this is a “misconception,” a mistake commonly made by people who

don’t know physics. The problem is that often students continue to make this

“mistake” even after they have taken a good deal of physics and learned that

it is a “mistake.”

The reason why the idea that motion is caused by force is so hard to re-

move is that it is not, in reality, a “mistake.” Rather, it is a type of cultural

model, a model built up from our experiences in the material world. Most or

all humans hold a model something like this: “Things keep working because

they are continually supplied with some form of power or agency.” Like all

models, this model is neither wrong nor right. Rather, it works in a lot of sit-

uations. Because it does, we usually can get by perfectly well by assuming it

without much conscious thought. For example, we assume (correctly in this

and the following cases) that a car keeps running because its engine keeps

powering its wheels. Lights keep working because electricity keeps ﬂowing

into them. Humans move because, at one level, they (continuously) “will” it

and, at another level, because the energy reserves from their food fuel their

cells and limbs.

While it is fair to say this is a physical model, it applies to social affairs as

well and, thus, is also a social model. In fact, it is really just a cultural model

that applies both to the physical and the social world. We assume that stu-

dents keep working because something is motivating them or that relation-

ships last because people put effort into them. In general, people do what

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they do and keep doing it, when they do keep doing it, because they are

“agents” empowering themselves (through will or desire or whatever) to do

and keep doing. The model that says, “things keep working because they are

continually supplied with some form of power or agency” is deeply rooted in

our physical and social experience. Of course, different cultural groups have

different cultural models about what sorts of things can or cannot be sources

of power or agency (e.g., spirits).

This cultural model—in its speciﬁc physical instantiation as motion is

caused by force—happens to be wrong in physics, no matter how accurate it may

be in a great many other areas. However, you do not get people to realize it is

wrong in physics and then pick up other models that work better in physics, if

you don’t realize the power of this model or if you abuse people for holding it

(e.g., tell them they are stupid or misguided). You must bring the model to

consciousness and juxtapose it to other ways of thinking appropriate for the

new situation, without implying that the model is wrong in all situations.

You must also make the way physicists think—a way that does not use

this cultural model, at least when they are doing physics—sensible and clear

by letting students understand it not just as words but in terms of embodied

thought and action in the same physical world in which they got their origi-

nal model. After all, just as people’s cultural models come from their everyday

experience of the world, physicists’ scientiﬁc models come from their experi-

ences (in problem solving, thinking, dialoging, and carrying out experiments

in and on the world) within the semiotic domain of physics as it applies to the

world. This domain, like all specialized domains, looks at and operates on the

world in a different way from “everyday” people do, but it operates in and on

the material world nonetheless.

Students bring to their classes a great many cultural models. For exam-

ple, cultural models about what counts as “good English” (e.g., something

like “Educated people speak good or correct English”) cause lots of trouble

when students are trying to learn linguistics and discover that, to a linguist, a

dialect of English that says things like “My puppy be following me every-

where I go” is just as rule governed and “good” as a dialect that doesn’t say

such things. (In fact, this sort of construction, using a form like “be” to mean

that something happens repeatedly or habitually, is not at all uncommon

across the world’s languages.)

However, students also bring to classrooms cultural models about school

subject matter (e.g., what “physics” as a school subject is) and about learning

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(e.g., what learning is or should be like in school). For example, in regard to

physics or other academic domains, many students bring with them a cultural

models that say: “Learning is a matter of mastering a set of facts.” They may

bring, as well, a model that says: “Learning is a matter of memorizing infor-

mation from teachers and books.”

These models are not “wrong”—indeed, a great many schools operate so

as to reinforce them daily. Nonetheless, if you have gotten this far in this

book, you know that I believe they are in many situations unfortunate models

of learning. However, if students are to adopt different models of content

learning in school, teachers need to know that these unfortunate models

exist. Students need to think about them, why they have them, where they do

and do not work, and new and different models and why they might want to

adopt these in word and deed. Of course, the newer models I am advocating

involve the sorts of active and critical learning I have been stressing through-

out this book.

CULTURAL MODELS OF LEARNING

AND VIDEO GAMES

Good video games have a powerful way of making players consciously aware

of some of their previously assumed cultural models about learning itself. In

fact, good video games expose a whole set of generational models of what

constitutes typical ways of learning. Since the baby-boomer models are still

quite prevalent in schools as teachers, administrators, and parents, children

today are most certainly exposed to them and often adopt these models un-

critically and unconsciously, at least when they are at school.

Consider, for instance, the famous game Metal Gear Solid (a game that

has a sequel called Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty). In this game you are

Solid Snake (one of the most famous video game characters of all time), a ge-

netically enhanced antiterrorist, who has been called on to inﬁltrate an

Alaskan military base that has been taken over by terrorists. The terrorists

are also genetically enhanced and some are foes Solid Snake has confronted

in the past (in earlier games), such as his brother Liquid Snake. The terrorists

have ﬁtted a massive robot called “Metal Gear” with nuclear warheads and

are threatening to ﬁre them at the United States if their demands are not

met. As Solid Snake goes about inﬁltrating the military base and ultimately

trying to destroy Metal Gear, he ﬁnds out a great deal about himself and

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about love and loyalty. In fact, in the middle of the game, if Solid Snake does

not give in under torture, his great love and fellow warrior, Meryl, survives,

and they eventually head off into the sunset together at the end of the game.

(If he does give in and ask for the torture to stop, Meryl does not survive and

the game has a different ending.)

Early in the game, you (as Solid Snake in a third-person view) are stand-

ing in the shadows looking at a massive building with many doors and bal-

conies, fronted by a courtyard with many additional rooms coming off it.

There are searchlights ﬁxed atop the building and guards everywhere. You

must sneak past the searchlights, staying in the shadows, get into the build-

ing, and move unseen through it to your goal.

If the player is inclined to move as straightforwardly and efficiently as

possible toward the goal, this game and almost all other video games, will

punish this inclination. The player needs to take the time to explore, even if

this means moving off the main line toward the goal and delaying getting

there. If Snake does not head right to his goal of entering the main building

but instead moves carefully into a side room off the courtyard, he ﬁnds im-

portant items (e.g., weapons, ammunition, tools). When he sneaks into the

back of a truck parked in the courtyard, he not only avoids the searchlights,

he also ﬁnds more good things. As he sneaks around the perimeter of the

courtyard and the edges of the building, he can check out less obvious ways

into the building.

Even when he gets in, lingering over grates in the ﬂoor of an overhead

duct he is moving through allows him to overhear important information and

see various things (including Meryl in a cell with not too many clothes on).

Sneaking to other nooks and crannies in the building allows him to gain crucial

information. All the while Snake is receiving, via a communication device that

only he can hear, orders to move forward and information about how to do so.

When I played the game, I was tempted to rush guards, guns ﬁring, to

clear my path, since they seemed like such clear and straightforward targets.

But, of course, if there were more of them than there was of me, I usually

died or took too much damage. Even when there was only one and he

seemed an obvious and easy target, often an alarm sounded, set off by a hid-

den camera triggered when I had snuck out into the open behind the guard,

an alarm that quickly brought a good many other guards to his rescue.

This and other games have brought home to me that I hold cultural mod-

els about learning something like this: “The ﬁnal goal is important, deﬁnes the

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learning, and good learners move toward it without being distracted by other

things” and “Good learners move quickly and efficiently toward their goal.” I

also hold other models: “There is one right way to get to the goal that the good

learners discover (and the rest of us usually don’t)” and “Learning is a matter of

some people being better or worse than others, and this is important.”

These models all get entrenched in school repeatedly. They are linear mod-

els that stress movement ever forward toward greater skill until one has mas-

tered one’s goal. They are competitive models, as well, that stress better and

worse and sorting people into categories along the lines of better and worse.

Video games tend not to reward these models. They stress both nonlin-

ear movement—exploring all around without necessarily moving forward to-

ward one’s ultimate goal and the mastery deﬁned by that goal—as well as

linear movement, which, of course, eventually happens, greatly deepened,

sometimes transformed, by the horizontal movement. They stress multiple

solutions judged by a variety of different standards, some of which are inter-

nal to the game (different things happen when you take different tacks) and

some of which are set by the player (who wants to solve the problem on his or

her own terms and may play scenes over to solve problems in different ways).

Unless segments of games are timed, and they usually are not (save for

special problems or races within certain games or in some aspects of real-

time strategy games), how quickly you proceed is not a big value, unless you

choose to make it one. (And then you may well miss some of the best stuff in

a game.) Finally, while there are certainly better and worse video-game play-

ers, and players can and do play competitively with each other via the Inter-

net, games are most certainly playable by a wide variety of people who set

their own standards and worry about how well they are doing by those stan-

dards, not by who out there in the world is better or worse than they are at

defeating Liquid Snake in the ﬁght atop the tank.

Video games challenged a number of other cultural models I held about

learning. For one last example, I held a model something like: “When faced

with a problem to solve, good learners solve it quickly, the ﬁrst time they try

or soon thereafter. If you have to try over and over again, this is a sign that

you are not very good at what you are attempting to learn.” All good shooter

games have “bosses,” particularly strong opponents with far more life than

your character. Players regularly spend lots of time and effort trying to kill

these bosses. They have to discover new strategies in their various failed at-

tempts and not give up.

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When players do succeed at killing the bosses, some (after they have

played the game through) set the difficulty level higher, to make getting the

bosses even harder. (Many games can be played at a relatively easy, normal,

hard, or even harder level; the difficulty level determines things like how

many enemies there are and how strong they are.) I once watched a younger

lawyer reﬁght a ﬁnal boss from a PlayStation 2 version of Baldur’s Gate at the

highest level of difficulty. He was a real expert. His character ran up to and

away from the boss (a dragon) repeatedly, moving all around a complex dun-

geon space, hiding here and there, coming out to attack and running away,

coaxing the boss into tight corners or close spaces where it could be better at-

tacked. All the while, the player used various potions and healing spells to

gain stronger arrows and more health. The battle lasted 20 intense minutes.

In the end, with the dragon on its last legs, the lawyer ran out of both magical

arrows and healing potions and he died.

Far from being dismayed at his failure (as a school learner might after

such a struggle), he responded with some nasty language as he died but also

with a big smile on his face. In video games, losing is not losing, and the

point is not winning easily or judging yourself a failure. In playing video

games, hard is not bad and easy is not good. The six-year-old mentioned ear-

lier was once asked whether easy or hard was better in a video game. Without

a pause, he said hard is always good, easy is not. Would that children said

such things about learning science in school.

There is a wonderful moment in Metal Gear Solid, which is a quite diffi-

cult game, where Solid Snake, as he inﬁltrates the military base, is talking via

his built-in communication system to a young Asian woman who is an expert

on mapping and radar systems. She and Solid Snake joke with each other,

and she usually ends each talk session with him with a Chinese proverb that

applies both to his situation in the virtual world of the game and to the player

in the real world. At one point she says to Solid Snake something that is not a

proverb, of course, but is meant to have much the same effect: “Aren’t you

glad that you have the time to play a video game? Relax and enjoy yourself.”

When players hear this, they might very well realize that they are in-

tensely involved in solving quite hard problems and often failing. Yet they are

playing, having fun, enjoying themselves. Wouldn’t it be great if we could say

to children in school when they were struggling mightily with hard problems

in physics: “Aren’t you lucky you have the time and opportunity to do sci-

ence?” and have them smile and nod?

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LEARNING PRINCIPLES

A variety of learning principles are built into good video games, yet there is

still immense potential for future developments. Certain areas—for example,

the ways in which video games allow for the free creation of virtual identities

and worlds—cause a great deal of controversy and will undoubtedly cause a

great deal more in the future.

Some of the learning principles this chapter has implicated follow.

Again, each principle is relevant to both learning in video games and learn-

ing in content areas in classrooms. The cultural models about the world

principle says that learners should have the opportunity to think reflec-

tively about their cultural models about the world (e.g., the ways in which

Operation Flashpoint made me rethink my cultural models of warfare). The

cultural models about learning principle says that learners should have the

opportunity to think reflectively about their cultural models about learning

and themselves as learners (e.g., the ways in which Metal Gear Solid and a

great many other games made me rethink the values of exploration and de-

laying getting to the major goal). The cultural models about semiotic do-

mains principle says that learners should have the opportunity to think

reflectively about their cultural models regarding the nature of semiotic

domains they are trying to learn—for instance, about what a given type of

video game is or should be like, or what makes something a game in the

first place (e.g., Is Under Ash a video game or terrorist training? What

about Ethnic Cleansing?) or what physics is (e.g., A set of facts? A way of

thinking about and acting on the world? A set of social practices in which

certain sorts of people engage?).

30. Cultural Models about the World Principle

Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think con-

sciously and reﬂectively about some of their cultural models regard-

ing the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or

social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may con-

ﬂict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways.

31. Cultural Models about Learning Principle

Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think con-

sciously and reﬂectively about their cultural models of learning and

themselves as learners, without denigration of their identities, abili-

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ties, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learn-

ing and themselves as learners.

32. Cultural Models about Semiotic Domains Principle

Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think con-

sciously and reﬂectively about their cultural models about a particular

semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration of their iden-

tities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new mod-

els about this domain.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Major sources in the literature on cultural models include D’Andrade 1995; D’Andrade

& Strauss 1992; Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain 1998; Holland & Quinn 1987;

Shore 1996; and Strauss & Quinn 1997.

The example from the high school physics class comes from Hammer (1996a).

For the relationships between everyday ways of understanding the world and scien-

tiﬁc ways, and how to bridge between them, see diSessa 2000; Hammer 1996a,b; and

Minstrell 2000.

The review of Operation Flashpoint is dated March 18, 2002 at www.gamezilla.com/

reviews/o/ofp.asp.

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THE SOCIAL MIND:

HOW DO YOU GET YOUR CORPSE

BACK AFTER YOU’VE DIED?

EVERQUEST: LEARNING AS SOCIAL

OFAR

HAVE TALKED ABOUT VIDEO GAMES IN TERMS OF ONE

individual playing the game alone because I wanted to concentrate on learn-

ing principles that primarily had to do with the individual mind and body as

it confronts the world of experience. Nonetheless, I have shown that learn-

ing, even in these individualistic terms, is very much a matter of being situ-

ated in a material, social, and cultural world.

When I and my research assistants interview game players (because of

our interest in schools, they are mostly young, between the ages of 5 and 19),

we ﬁnd that most play video games not alone but with others in three ways.

(Younger players usually do only the ﬁrst, while teens and above engage in all

three modes.)

1. Players can hook multiple controllers into one video-game platform.

2. Players can network a number of computers into a local area network,

so that they can play against each other without having to be in the

same place.

3. The most popular option is for players to log on to special Internet

sites and play certain games with and against sometimes thousands of

other players all over the world.

Some games can only be played online, while many others can be played in

single-player mode or online. (In fact, reviews tend to criticize games that

can only be played in single-player mode.)

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When online play ﬁrst began, players moved through dungeons role-

playing as different types of characters, but the universe through which they

moved was composed entirely of text. Each player read text that told him or

her what was there to be seen or done or what the effects were of various ac-

tions the player had taken. There were no pictures, only words. Now players

move through fully realized, graphically beautiful, three-dimensional worlds.

They can talk to each other by typing in words, though the technology now

exists and is spreading where they can speak their words into a headset and be

heard on the other people’s computers. Players can talk to each other in their

roles as fantasy virtual characters (their “avatars”) or in terms of their real-

world identities or switch between the two.

EverQuest is one of the most popular online games. More than 375,000

players have subscribed to play the game, and servers host more than 90,000

users playing at one time during peak game hours. (A game called Lineage,

now available in the United States, has more than two million subscribers in

South Korea.) EverQuest consists of multiple continents and numerous cities

in which players carry out, alone or in groups, various quests. They run into

other players who can help or, in some circumstances, hurt them (e.g., kill

their fantasy virtual character). Sony Corporation now owns EverQuest,

which was developed and is still run by a company named Verdant. Sony and

Verdant put out new expansions (with new continents and cities) to EverQuest

from time to time.

In the game you can choose to play in an ideal world where the monsters

(not real people, but characters controlled by the computer and endowed

with artiﬁcial intelligence) are the only bad guys and other players cannot kill

you (and you can’t kill them). Or you can choose to play in a world where you

can kill and be killed by other players as well as the creatures that inhabit the

countryside. If you make the latter choice, you become a “player-killer” and

open yourself up to attack by other player-killers.

When you start playing EverQuest, you have to create your character, as in

any role-playing game. There are a nearly endless combination of races, classes,

skills, and abilities with which to create your character. However, character cre-

ation basically breaks down into 14 professions (Bard, Cleric, Druid, Enchanter,

Magician, Monk, Necromancer, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Shadowknight,

Shaman, Warrior, or Wizard) and 12 “races” composed of three human cul-

tures, three cultures of elves, and six others. Each race is limited in which pro-

fessions it may choose, so, for example, you cannot be an Ogre Monk.

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Depending on your race, you are given a number of ability points to dis-

tribute among your seven main statistics (strength, stamina, agility, dexterity,

wisdom, intelligence, and charisma). Then you name your character, pick

your sex, and decide which deity (religion) you wish to follow. Your race,

gender, class, and religion will decide how people deal with you in the

EverQuest world. You can also join a guild, an organization of sometimes

hundreds or thousands of (real) people that support each other and cooperate

in the game (e.g., to kill particularly powerful gods). Your guild membership

also affects how other people react to you in the game.

The EverQuest world is a very complex place with its own economic struc-

ture based on supply and demand. When a certain item becomes scarce (e.g., a

certain piece of armor or certain type of sword), the price goes up. When

something is common, the price drops. In some cases, players of games like

EverQuest and Diablo 2 have gone online to auction sites such as eBay and

bought and sold virtual items in these games (things like gloves that endow

the character with special powers or special sorts of swords) for real money.

Someone recently bought a virtual item to use in Diablo 2 for over $2,000.

EverQuest is different from any single-player game in that it never ends.

The player cannot “beat” the game. There is no ﬁnal goal other than the one

you set for yourself. EverQuest is a persistent world and a game you can, if

you like, play forever (as long as you pay the fee). You can log into the game,

via the Internet, whenever you like and pick up wherever you left off. In most

cases, over 1,000 other people will be playing with you. Indeed, certain places

where there are particularly interesting monsters or valuable items to ﬁnd

can get quite crowded.

In games like EverQuest, sometimes players “ﬂame” each other (say in-

sulting things to each other) and otherwise do regrettable things. For exam-

ple, a more powerful player may intrude on a battle between a less powerful

one and a monster where the less powerful one is attempting to get the valu-

able items the monster owns. The powerful player can use a spell to give the

monster more life, thereby saving it from the less powerful player’s attacks,

then kill it him- or herself and take the good stuff, leaving the less powerful

player with nothing and having to spend time healing from wounds sustained

in the now-wasted battle. Some players try to hack into the program and ﬁnd

a way to “cheat” and give themselves more (virtual) money. At times, this sort

of behavior has led to gross inﬂation in the virtual worlds the players are

playing in, rendering money nearly worthless.

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When people started games like EverQuest, they thought the players

would police themselves and create an ideal world of good behavior. How-

ever, the players created virtual worlds that contained many of the same ﬂaws

our real human worlds do. Game designers have thought up lots of ways to

stop players from ruining the experience for others, such as EverQuest’s world

where you cannot kill or be killed by other players. And, of course, players

who behave badly enough can be disallowed from logging on to the game.

But the designers barely stay one step ahead of very human characteristics

like greed, hunger for power, and the sheer desire to use one’s intelligence to

outwit other players, the game, and computer systems in general. They also

face the fact that many game players get very good at programming, both to

design new games themselves (using free software that often comes with

games to build expansions or to build new games called mods) and to hack

into Internet-based games to transform them in their favor.

As in all role-playing games, in EverQuest, the more you play and the

more you have accomplished, the higher the level of your character in terms

of his or her skills. Higher-level characters can do more and go more places

than can lower-level ones.

In EverQuest, when your character is killed, your corpse drops to the

ground spilling all the valuable objects he or she was carrying (e.g., weapons,

money, potions, armor, magical spells, etc.). However, your character, in a

weaker form and with worse armor and weapons, also comes back alive, but

far away, at the beginning of the area in which you were killed. (Yes, this is

odd; you are both dead and alive. Let’s just say it’s your spirit that has come

back.) You (your spirit) must get back to your corpse as quickly as possible,

before it decays or other players take your possessions (which, if you are at a

fairly high level, are quite valuable).

It’s not easy to get back, since you are far away and weaker and have

worse weapons, and so you must avoid strong enemies who can kill you

again. If you do not get back, you must begin playing again at your lower

level (you go down a couple of levels), ﬁghting monsters to return to your

former level. There is also another way to get back your corpse. If you have a

cleric in your party (remember, players can play in teams with others, each

being different characters with different powers) with the power to resurrect

corpses, the cleric can resurrect your corpse.

Now, to exemplify the centrally social nature of game play and some key

issues in this chapter, let a young man whom I will call Adrian (a pseudonym)

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tell you a story about playing EverQuest and other experiences he has had

with video games. Adrian was 15 when the story took place and he had played

EverQuest a great many hours. After having achieved a quite high level for his

character, his character died.

My character was at a very high level: 46 out of a possible 50 levels. We have

a clan [a small group that plays together and who are part of a much larger

guild] made up of people from across the United States. It takes lots of peo-

ple to kill the gods, so that’s what the guilds are for. I was playing the game

with my clan and we actually found a gate to one of the alter planes, the

Plane of Fear. To get into the Plane of Fear there is a level requirement;

your character has be at least at level 45. We busted into the Plane of Fear

and everybody killed a God of Fear. We killed all these godly characters,

and, then, this hunchback gorilla—the Plane of Fear is like a giant jungle—

this giant gorilla came up behind me and swatted me like a ﬂy and killed me

with two hits. My friends didn’t see it, so they couldn’t protect me.

So I was killed. Whenever you die, you can come back to life, but you

lose experience. I came back to life at level 44—so I lost two levels. It had

taken me about 12 hours of playing the game to gain those two levels. It

would take me 12 more to get them back. I was very upset. I was mad be-

cause I couldn’t go back to the Plane of Fear, since I was now level 44 and

you needed to be at least level 45 to get in.

There are clerics in the game, and when you play with clerics, they can

actually resurrect you. When they resurrect you, you get back all your expe-

rience—so I’d be level 46 when I came back. I was talking [via the Internet]

to people [who were clerics in my guild] and I gave them my home phone

number. I’m like “When you guys ﬁnally ﬁnd my corpse, resurrect it.” But

the game has a timer—if you’re on the computer for three hours, it will wait

for three hours and then it will say that your body is too old to get resur-

rected. I said to my father, “Dad, get the hell off the phone.” [In other

words: There are only three hours in which his corpse can be resurrected. It

will take the clerics time to ﬁght their way to the corpse. Adrian needs to

know the moment the clerics resurrect it, so he can immediately get back

online and retrieve his character and possessions before the three hours are

up. Thus, he is waiting for the crucial phone call, hoping it comes in time.]

There was a limited window of time in which I could be resurrected.

And, if I didn’t get resurrected, then I’d be level 44 and I’d never get my

equipment back. So, I was like “Oh, my god, no.” And then I logged off and I

was like pacing around the room, and I said, “I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die.”

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I mean, I’d invested like tons of time in the character. “I’m gonna die, I’m

gonna die, I’m gonna die.” And then one of my partners—a guy in his 30s—

in my guild called me long distance from Indiana. He called me at like 11:45

. from Indiana, and he told me that they got my corpse. He resurrected

me and then I was back level 46, and then I spent—I think I played until like

four in the morning killing things in the Plane of Fear, and then I went to

sleep. When I woke up, it was like three in the afternoon the next day.

I still talk to the guy from Indiana sometimes. All of us have websites

and message boards to talk on, to keep in contact with each other. Even with

all like the Internet security stuff, we try not to give out our personal infor-

mation, but after you get to know the person for a while, it becomes like sec-

ond nature. I mean, with my character in EverQuest whenever I have gotten

on I would say, “Hey, everyone.” And, then there would be like a stream of

like 40 people saying “Hi” to me, using my login name.

I actually have a website that tells you how to exploit game tips. My site

and sites like it have interesting stuff on them about hackers trying to create a

world where people don’t have to pay to play the game. Not as a way to avoid

paying, but for the challenge. The people who make the game don’t really

like these people at all. But what these people are trying to do is they’re try-

ing to take EverQuest and manipulate the game, even though much of has

been heavily encrypted. They try to decrypt the ﬁles. They try to take the

graphics, and try to take the game engine itself, manipulate it, and then put

all that stuff on their own server, so people can play without pay.

What they’re trying to do is trying to take the game and trying to make

it so everyday people can play it for free. What I try to do on my website is I

try to take people who play on the Internet, and if they don’t like spend-

ing—I told you to get from level 44 to 46 it takes you like 12 hours of work,

and no one has that amount of time—I tell them how they can take short-

cuts in the game to get higher levels, so they can play at the level that other

people play it at. And the game company doesn’t like it, because they want

you to play a lot. They want you to play a lot, and they want your money.

My little brother plays EverQuest now. He spends more time playing

the game, I spend more time trying to crack the game open. To see what

makes it work using hex editors. You can download these off the Internet.

What a hex editor does is it basically breaks up computer code into pretty

much binary code, and on the left side it gives you a bunch of zeros and ones

and, then, on the right side it tells you what the code actually does. And, so,

if you go and look on the right side, you can actually edit it. You don’t learn

this stuff by taking a class on it. It’s just like here and there you pick stuff up.

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You may not be able to learn it all from one place, there’s many sources [e.g.,

other people, chat rooms, websites, texts, etc.].

Actually, the very ﬁrst time I edited a game was when I was playing Civ-

ilization. I played Civilization. I beat Civilization. I was reading down the

credits and I’m like “Okay, that’s pretty cool.” Then, I was like “Okay, that’s

kind of cool, now let’s see—it’d be kinda cool if I was like to experiment. I

wanna see what makes it tick.”

So I went inside and found this like little data ﬁle that’s like called cred-

its.dat. I’m like “Okay, what does this do?” I double-click on it—and it asks

what program I want to use to open it up with. And I click use Picture View

[i.e., tells the computer to try to open the ﬁle credits.dat with the program

named Picture View] and it came up with this jumble of stuff. I’m like

“Okay, so I’m going to close that.” I double-clicked on credits.dat again, and

it asks again what program I want to use to open it with. And I try Internet

Explorer this time, and it showed a bunch of jumbled code again. I’m like

“Hmm. All-right.”

And I try it again and then it’s like, all right, “I’ll use Notepad this

time.” And, I open it up in Notepad and right in front of me there are the

credits for the game. And I was like “Hey that’s kind of cool.” It says “Civi-

lization by Sid Meier.” Okay, and I backspace, I typed in my name—“by

Adrian Name” [his ﬁrst and last name]. And then I saved the ﬁle, I beat the

game again, and when the credits rolled, it said that I had created the game.

I thought, “That’s kinda cool.”

I spend more time now tinkering with games and making games myself

than I do actually playing them. Right now me and my friends aren’t really

playing. We’re playing like Diablo II every now and then, we’re just wasting

time until WarCraft III comes out, and, then all of us are going to get it and

we’re gonna kill each other. When me and my friend talk about the games,

we tell each other like what we think of new games that we’ve got. Essen-

tially we tell each other what the strategy guides tell you.

When Adrian, who is an excellent student, is asked how he likes school,

he has this to say: “School is ﬁne. I don’t live and breathe school, but it’s ﬁne.”

Adrian’s remarks exemplify several themes we have found with a num-

ber of the players we have interviewed. First, play for him is inherently so-

cial, in several different ways. He plays in a team with others. His team is

part of a much larger group to which he belongs. He communicates with

these people both inside the game and outside of it: about the game, about

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games in general, and about a wide variety of other issues. Players have told

us that the people they play with range in age from the early teens to their

30s. One U.S. 15-year-old regularly plays StarCraft with, among others, two

mid-30s Canadian college professors, and man and wife. The 15-year-old

regularly chats with these professors, while playing, both in terms of their

in-game fantasy roles and their real-world identities.

Second, the knowledge and skills Adrian has in regard to playing

EverQuest is “distributed.” It exists in his own head and body. But some of it

exists in other people on whom he can call for help. The clerics who came to

his rescue not only had powers in the game that Adrian’s character did not

have (they were clerics), they were also older and more advanced players who

knew how to handle the situation. (I have left out of the story the fact that the

three-hour limit actually ran out and Adrian and his friends together worked

out a cheat to forestall the clock.)

Third, Adrian’s knowledge and skills are not only distributed across him-

self and other people; some actually reside in various tools and technologies,

like the hex editors he can use to manipulate the code of a game. The knowl-

edge built into the hex editor counts as Adrian’s knowledge because he knows

how to leverage this tool. The real thinking and acting unit become “Adrian

plus tool.”

Fourth, Adrian’s attitude toward games and the computer is itself game-

like and highly metareﬂective. He looks at the game, whether Civilization or

EverQuest, as a space that can be explored and “played with.” He brings to

this metalevel process the same exploratory and reﬂective attitudes that are

required to play the game well in the ﬁrst place. As part of this process, he

greatly extends his knowledge and social connections. He sets up a web page

to help others get to higher levels more quickly in EverQuest. He connects

with a group of hackers who seek to understand the underlying program of

EverQuest so thoroughly that they can actually transfer the game to another

site where people can play the game free. He learns so much about comput-

ers and game design that, a few years later, when he is on his way to major in

computer science and game design in college, he has already mastered most

of the material in many of the courses he will need to take.

When we asked Adrian why he was interested in how hackers could “un-

dermine” the Verdant company’s hold over EverQuest, his reply was that, as

he inspected their programming for the game, especially how they ﬁxed vari-

ous bugs that arose from time to time, he found their programming “inele-

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gant.” They took shortcuts and built programs that worked but weren’t, as

far as Adrian was concerned, optimal, especially at an aesthetic level. (Chap-

ter 4 discussed the importance of developing appreciative systems.) Compa-

nies like Verdant don’t know whether to arrest or hire young people like

Adrian. And, indeed, company staff members regularly “lurk” on websites

and chat rooms devoted to EverQuest and designed by players to learn new

things and use them themselves.

So learning here is social, distributed, and part and parcel of a network

composed of people, tools, technologies, and companies all interconnected

together. Adrian is a node in such a network. and much of his knowledge and

skill ﬂows from his being such a richly interconnected node. Yet schools still

isolate children from such powerful networks—for example, a network built

around some branch of science—and test and assess them as isolated individ-

uals, apart from other people and apart from tools and technologies that they

could leverage to powerful ends.

Adrian’s story also reﬂects a view of the mind current in some important

work in cognitive psychology—a view that we might label “the social mind”

perspective. This is not necessarily the mainstream view, but it is a viewpoint

that, in one guise or another, plays a central role in helping people to think

about learning in our modern, high-tech world—learning in businesses,

communities, and in cutting-edge schools though, sadly, not in many main-

stream schools. I turn to this viewpoint in the next section.

THE SOCIAL MIND

In chapter 4, I argued that human beings think and reason in terms of pat-

terns they have picked up from their experiences in the world and used the

example of how we recognize something as “simple” as a bedroom. Having

seen and been in lots of bedrooms, when you think of a bedroom, something

like an image of a typical bedroom comes to your mind.

Of course, what comes to your mind is not actually a picture. Rather, sys-

tems of neural elements in your brain stand for concepts like beds, carpets,

lamps, and all the other things you associate with bedrooms. These things are

the conceptual elements out of which your larger concept of a bedroom is

composed. These neural systems and, thus, the concepts they encode are as-

sociated with each other through stronger or weaker links in terms of which

each system (e.g., the one standing for beds) more or less strongly activates

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the others (e.g., the systems standing for chests of drawers, night tables,

lamps, etc.).

Thus we can think of a pattern in the mind (e.g., the bedroom pattern) as

a set of nodes (the bed node, the table node, the carpet node, the lamp node,

etc.) linked to each other through stronger or weaker links. When two items

are relatively strongly linked, thinking of one makes a person quite readily

think of the other. For example, if you think of a bed, you probably can also

quite readily bring to mind things like sheets, pillows, and blankets, because

these are strongly linked to or associated with beds for many people. If two

items are less strongly linked, then the one less readily brings to mind the

other. For example, you probably associate books less strongly with beds than

you do sheets, pillows, and blankets, though for some us who read before we

go to bed, there is still some link or association.

So your concept of a bedroom is just all the elements of a typical bed-

room that come to mind when you think of bedrooms and the ways in which

they are more or less strongly linked or associated with each other. However,

this pattern of linked elements (nodes in your mind/brain) is not static. It can

change quickly. As I pointed out in chapter 4, if you have called to mind a

pretty typical middle-class bedroom and I now tell you the bedroom I’m talk-

ing about has a hot plate in it, then you change the elements and their links in

your mind, adding a hot plate and, perhaps, think of all the elements (and the

stronger and weaker links among them) of a typical college student’s bed-

room or perhaps that of a person with minimal ﬁnancial resources.

So we humans often think in terms of patterns. Pattern thinking is very

powerful. It allows us to do two very important things. For one thing it al-

lows us to think and reason by using the experiences we have had in life. We

form our images (patterns) about bedrooms from our experiences in the

world (and virtual experiences in reading and viewing media) with bedrooms

and their elements. We don’t just think in terms of abstract generalizations

untied to our embodied experiences in the world. This is why it is often a bad

thing to denigrate people’s reasoning, in or out of school, since when we den-

igrate their reasoning, we are very often also denigrating their experiences in

life (which are, of course, tied to their social groups and cultures).

Pattern thinking also allows us to make guesses (predictions) about the

world that go beyond our actual experiences. For example, let’s say I have ex-

perienced lots of cases where the following elements are strongly associated:

being a professor, with tenure, in the ﬁeld of physics, in a prestigious college,

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being male, being white. If I hear about someone who is a male tenured pro-

fessor of physics in a prestigious college, I may add in the prediction that he

is white, thanks to the fact that all these other things are, in my experience,

strongly associated with being white.

Or let’s say I hear about a female tenured professor of physics in a presti-

gious college. I may still assume she is white, since the other elements in the

pattern (professor, of physics, with tenure, prestigious college) are strongly

linked to being white in my experience. Even though these four elements are

weakly or even negatively linked to being female and strongly linked to being

male, the fact that the four things are still strongly associated with being

white may swamp this negative link to being female and suggest the hypothe-

sis to me that the person we are talking about is nonetheless white. I may

never have experienced a female physicist, but I can reason about her based

on my actual experiences, predicting that she will be white.

These examples bring out clearly both the power and the problems of

thinking in terms of patterns. On one hand, we could not survive and func-

tion if we did not engage in such pattern thinking. People who know that

massive brown bears (like grizzly bears) are dangerous but quibble over

whether the medium-size black bear running toward them, a bear of a type

they have not seen before, is or is not dangerous, and wait to ﬁnd out, are

dead or badly wounded. Best to ﬁll out the pattern and assume that the link

between bear and dangerous holds even in the absence of the elements brown

and massive, at least when the bear is chasing you.

On the other hand, such pattern thinking can lead not only to good predic-

tions in many cases but to prejudices or stereotypes in other situations. For ex-

ample, the pattern in regard to physicists could lead one to assume that African

Americans cannot do physics, a hurtful and false assumption. This, indeed, is

the problem with restricting things like physics to white males—it leads to pat-

tern thinking that, in this case, is wrong precisely because our experiences in the

world have been artiﬁcially restricted, here by the workings of racism and patri-

archy. (Consider: It used to be assumed African Americans couldn’t play tennis

and golf well, until Arthur Ash and Tiger Woods changed those patterns.)

BIRDS

Why am I discussing concepts and the mind? Because I want to claim that

such a discussion leads us to an important paradox: If the human mind is a

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powerful pattern recognizer—and the evidence very much suggests it is—

then what it most important about thinking is not that it is “mental,” some-

thing happening inside our heads, but rather that it is social, something

attuned to and normed by the social groups to which we belong or seek to

belong. Since this statement so violates our commonsense notions of psy-

chology, let me hasten to explain.

Let’s, for a moment, consider a birdwatching club. Birdwatchers are

good at seeing some elements (features) of birds and quickly extending the

pattern to name a particular type of bird. Thus they may see a ﬂash of gray-

brown and a splash of white under the body as a small bird ﬂits in and out of

tall grass in an open grassland. They will, at least in much of the United

States, conclude they have seen a bobolink, even if they have not seen all the

bird’s other salient features. If they see a ﬂash of brown-brown and a splash of

white under the body of a slightly larger bird ﬂitting among the trees of a

forest, they will conclude they have seen a ﬂicker, a type of woodpecker, even

if they have not seen the bird’s distinctive purple spots and yellow shaft.

The ﬁrst thing a birdwatching club needs to do is ensure that all its

members have had the right experiences in the world to have formed such

patterns and engaged in such ways of ﬁlling them out in the ﬁeld. People can

wander around on their own and experience—and pay attention to—all sorts

of things to do with birds, many of them interesting, but not all that helpful if

you want to be a contributing member of the birdwatching club. Perhaps

every time you have hiked you have never seen birds in open grassland (easy

to happen, unless you are out early in the morning or at dusk, when the birds

are active and often sitting atop a grass stalk or small plant, since otherwise

the birds are on the ground hidden below the tall grass). You conclude that

there are no bird species that live in open grassland. You have formed a

(wrong) pattern in which open grassland is negatively associated with birds.

The bird club will see to it that you get out to some open grassland at the

right time of day so you can see the bobolinks and meadowlarks. Why? Be-

cause they want you to have similar enough experiences as the other club

members so that you can share knowledge with them.

The ﬁrst thing the bird club does is see to it that new members come to

share a lot of experiences of the world of birds and birding with the other

members, so that they will share some common patterns and ways of com-

pleting them when they have seen only some features in a pattern. Then the

members can make lists of all the birds around in the winter in a given part of

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the country or ﬁnd out that birds that live in open grasslands are much more

endangered than the forest songbirds that have received almost all the pub-

licity concerning their supposed decline. Now they also can engage in com-

petition as to who are the best birdwatchers in the sense of being able to

identify the most different species of birds in a given place during a certain

set amount of time, since they are now all adept at the basic practice and

norms of the “game.”

But there is a second thing the bird club must do. Say Mary Smith, a

member in good standing, all of a sudden comes to the club one day and says,

given what she has seen out in the ﬁeld, that she is pretty sure that what she

saw was a dodo, an extinct species of bird. Perhaps, more realistically, Mary

Smith keeps claiming to have seen ivory-billed woodpeckers (which are

probably extinct, but we’re not sure) rather than pileated woodpeckers

(which certainly exist, though they are not horribly common), based on a

ﬂicker of some distinctive features. (She never seems to get a full view of the

bird before it ﬂies off.) Both birds look similar, though ivory-billed wood-

peckers are bigger and have a somewhat different bill. Given how unlikely it

is that anyone will see an ivory-billed woodpecker (though, if they are not ex-

tinct, it is possible), the club will insist that any member who claims to have

seen one has seen it well and very carefully checked the identiﬁcation. (If you

see a big black woodpecker with a red crest that looks a lot like Woody

Woodpecker, it’s almost certainly a pileated woodpecker.)

If, in either case, dodo or ivory-billed woodpecker, Mary Smith persists,

what happens? At ﬁrst, the club refuses to publish her lists in its newsletter.

Eventually, if she persists further, the club kicks her out. What’s going on

here? The club is norming (yes, policing, if you like) its members’ patterns

and ways of ﬁlling them out. If a member deviates too far from the patterns

and ways of ﬁlling them out in the ﬁeld that the club, as a social group, con-

siders normative, then the club “punishes” the member in order to bring him

or her back in line. It’s not that, if ivory-billed woodpeckers still exist, no

member could see one and get it published in the club’s newsletter. But see-

ing an ivory-billed woodpecker, like seeing any bird in the context of bird-

watching as a social practice, is not just a mental event, it’s also a social event.

There are social rules or norms about what counts as having seen an ivory-

billed woodpecker, and, in this case, they are strict.

The point of this diversion about birdwatching is this: The patterns and

ways of ﬁlling them out that count are not really the ones inside the heads of

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the members (though they are there, of course). All the members, as individ-

ual human beings, have a myriad of patterns about birds, and ways of ﬁlling

them out in the ﬁeld, in their heads. But the club, as a social group, has a set

of norms and values that determines certain sorts of patterns and ways of ﬁll-

ing them out in the ﬁeld as “ideal” (central). This ideal might actually not be

what is in anyone’s head. The ideal is an “attractor,” an ideal toward which

individuals in the club gravitate and toward which the social practices (the

“policing”) of the club pushes them when they get too far away from it.

If someone questions what constitutes the “right” pattern in regard to

seeing an ivory billed woodpecker or, more realistically, what are the right pat-

terns in terms of which one can identify the many types of (similar-looking)

sparrows or seagulls, people in the club don’t open up anyone’s head. They

engage in dialogue (negotiation and contestation) with each other, inspect

their practices, read their texts, and, yes, ask certain people what they think,

probably the old-timers or “insiders” and not the newcomers or marginal

members. In the end, if thinking is a matter of pattern reorganization and ﬁll-

ing our patterns, then thinking is at least as much social as it is mental and in-

dividual. Actually, it is more social than mental and individual. Of course, this

idea violates traditional ways of thinking about psychology. So be it.

Even if you are not into birds, you surely have seen many sparrows and

you have formed patterns in your mind in regard to them. You probably asso-

ciate being little and brown with being a type of sparrow very strongly. You

may well associate being in a city or in the yard of a suburban house with

being a sparrow. You may, in terms of the patterns in your mind, recognize a

few different types of sparrows (perhaps you have noticed that some in your

yard have a little yellow cap on their head and some don’t), or maybe you

don’t and see them all as basically the same type of bird. You have a set of el-

ements associated with sparrows in your head, and you associate them more

or less strongly with each other and with being a sparrow.

These sparrow patterns you have in your head, which are perfectly nor-

mal for “everyday” people, will not work for being a “birder.” From the

standpoint of a birdwatching club, they are the wrong patterns, and the club,

should you seek to join it, would help to give you other experiences that

would shift the patterns in your head more toward its ideal. For people who

have been normed by other birdwatchers and their practices and texts, their

heads contain patterns in terms of which there are a great many different

types of sparrows, many of which look quite a bit a like. They associate a

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great many of these with nonurban and nonsuburban settings, and, in fact,

they associate the common house sparrow with ﬁnches and not New World

sparrows at all.

Since the world is replete with features and people are powerful pattern

recognizers, anyone can form almost any sort of interesting pattern in his or

her head—forming all sorts of concepts and subconcepts. None of this is

“right” or “wrong” until we ask which social group helps to norm (or police)

patterns (concepts) in this or that domain that we wish to be part of. If you

want to join a birdwatching club, you have to admit that the patterns in your

head about sparrows are wrong; if you don’t want to join the club, then the

patterns may very well be just ﬁne from the point of view of some other

group, if only your own culture, community, or family. Again, the patterns

are in our heads, but they become meaningful (“right” or “wrong”) only from

the perspective of the workings of social groups that “enforce” certain pat-

terns as ideal norms toward which everyone in that group should orient (even

if the patterns in their heads never resemble the ideal perfectly). Of course,

for some purposes, though perhaps not for others, some groups’ practices

work better than do those of other groups.

What I have said about our birdwatching club is true of any group. We

humans belong to a myriad of social and cultural groups. Some of these

groups are families and communities of various sizes. Some are cultural

groups deﬁned in various ways. Some are what I have called in previous chap-

ters “affinity groups.” (The birdwatching club would be an affinity group.)

Affinity groups are groups wherein people primarily orient toward a com-

mon set of endeavors and social practices in terms of which they attempt to

realize these endeavors. In such groups people orient less towards shared

gender, race, culture, or face-to-face relationships, although all of these can

play a secondary role. People can be in affinity groups where they rarely see

many of the members face-to-face (e.g., the group may communicate in part

at a distance via media, whether it’s print, the Internet, or what have you).

Adrian was part of several different overlapping affinity groups in his work

and play with video games.

Could a person think and reason outside the scope of any group, that is,

with no group serving to norm his or her patterns and ways of ﬁlling them

out? As Wittgenstein pointed out long ago, in a different context, such peo-

ple would have no way to accurately test whether their patterns were veridi-

cal. Of course, the world would speak back when they tried to operate in and

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on it in terms of their patterns. But this would just be more experience of the

world in terms of which their patterns were formed in the ﬁrst place. Only

when others have normed our patterns and ways of ﬁlling them out, so that

we can be fairly conﬁdent that we are not “fooling” ourselves because of our

own self-interest, desires, or idiosyncratic ways, can we trust our patterns in a

particular domain.

Does this mean that no one can think an “original” thought? Of course

not. But all the scientists, for example, who have thought original thoughts

that their fellow scientists have never (eventually) come to see as close to the

ideal patterns in their domain have thought thoughts that, at least of yet, no

one knows about. As of yet, at least, their thoughts don’t “count” as part of

their domain and are not “published” (spread in speech or writing).

And, of course, what counts to a group as an ideal pattern and way of ﬁll-

ing it out in new experiences changes with time. I have already pointed out

that the norms and values of groups are contested and negotiated. They are

no more stable than is our concept of a bedroom (which we can shift when I

link a hot plate to the room), and for the same reason. When the group con-

fronts a new experience (in the world or in ideas), this experience can change

the links (associations) among all the elements in the patterns the group con-

siders ideal or normative, though this change happens through dialogue in

speech and writing, not just via private thoughts.

DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE

So, thinking and reasoning are inherently social. But they are also inher-

ently distributed, and more and more so in our modern technological

world. By this I mean that each of us lets other people and various tools

and technologies do some of our thinking for us. Even in my own field of

linguistics, I certainly do not need to know everything. I can always ask

other linguists about things I am unsure of. I can consult articles and

books. This much is obvious, though not in school. In school we test peo-

ple apart from their thinking tools, which include other people as well as

texts and various sorts of tools and technologi es. We want to know what

they can do all by themselves. But in the modern world—and this is cer-

tainly true of many modern high-tech workplaces—it is equally or more

important to know what people can think and do with others and with var-

ious tools and technologies.

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But this is still too individualistic a way to look at the matter of distrib-

uted thinking and doing. The power of distribution—of storing knowledge

in other people, texts, tools, and technologies—is really in the way in which

all these things are networked together. The really important knowledge is in

the network—that is, in the people, their texts, tools, and technologies and,

crucially, the ways in which they are interconnected—not in any one “node”

(person, text, tool, or technology), but in the network as a whole. Does the

network store lots of powerful knowledge? Does it ensure that this knowl-

edge moves quickly and well to the parts of the system that need it now?

Does it adapt to changed conditions by learning new things quickly and well?

These are the most crucial knowledge questions we can ask in the modern

world. They are hardly reﬂected at all in how we organize schooling and as-

sessment in schooling.

Let me give you a very simple example of a very powerful system work-

ing to distribute knowledge in such a way that a person like myself is made

much smarter than I could ever be by myself. Half-Life is one of the most

renowned ﬁrst-person shooter games of all time. One online review had this

to say about people who have never heard of the game: “If you haven’t heard

of Half-Life by now, you’ve either been stuck in a closet or on some alien

planet for the past year.”

In Half-Life, you play a scientist named Gordon Freeman who works at a

massive top-secret underground facility named Black Mesa. When you show

up to work one day, you realize not all is right. Some of your fellow scientists

are worried about various odd happenings, and the occasional blown electrical

panel around the facility gives you some worries of your own. Your fellow sci-

entists look quite harried when they usher you into the hazardous materials

testing chamber (while they monitor the situation from the outside) to work

on a new sample, giving you assurances that sound anything but reassuring.

In one of the great scenes in any video game, a catastrophic explosion oc-

curs, the air turns green, ﬂashes of light erupt everywhere, and intermittently

aliens of various sorts appear and disappear. Everything starts collapsing

around you, and your fellow scientists, from outside the chamber, tell you to

run for your life as they, quite unsuccessfully for the most part, run for theirs.

Yo u , a s G o r d o n F r e e m a n , a r e l e f t t o ﬁ g u r e o u t w h a t h a s h a p p e n e d a n d t o

try to undo the damage that, once again (it’s a regular occurrence in video

games), science has wrought. At the outset it certainly doesn’t appear you can do

much. Most of your fellow scientists and the security guards at the plant are

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dead. The others are terriﬁed and stunned, though they will open various se-

cured doors for you. As you seek to escape the sprawling underground complex,

you see destruction everywhere and run into aliens, including your fellow scien-

tists turned into zombies by alien head-crabs having fallen on them, trying to

kill you. In the beginning you have no weapon, save a crowbar you have found.

Things get worse. Not long after your problems begin, you discover that

the military is coming into the Black Mesa to contain the situation and rescue

any survivors. When they show up, you quickly realize that they are not there

to rescue anyone but to kill them, thereby eliminating any witnesses to the

catastrophe. This sets you to wondering, as you now seek to avoid both sol-

diers and aliens, why the U.S. government is so intent on covering up a sup-

posed “accident.” Intriguingly, a mysterious man in a suit carrying a briefcase

shows up here and there, one step ahead of you. Who is he?

You (as Gordon) are miles beneath the New Mexico desert. To begin to

solve your problems, you need to make it to the surface and seek help. Even-

tually, after a great many problems and many many hours of play, you cross

into the alien dimension and must kill the alien big boss behind all the other

aliens. This is an epic battle, but leads you back to earth to confront the U.S.

government’s nefarious role in the events. One of the Internet reviews cap-

tures the feel of the game well: “Alarms are sounding, slimy monsters are

drooling, blue-collar security guards are ﬁghting to protect the scientists, and

army goons are mowing down anything that moves. What we need is a hero,

someone to sort out this three-way slug-fest with extra helpings of pump-ac-

tion justice. Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be someone else because you

just ran out of ammo and bent your crowbar on some toothy monster’s skull.

You’ll be lucky to get out of this alive.”

When I played Half-Life, I felt a great sense of accomplishment when I

got to the end of the game and up to the ﬁnal battle with the alien big boss. I

had played for many hours, quite regularly tearing out what little hair I have

left as I faced a myriad of tough ﬁghts and problems. In the ﬁnal battle, I

found myself in a giant cavern. Mysterious bulging circles on the ground

propelled me up into the air when I jumped on them, sometimes allowing me

to land on high-up ledges. It was good that these bulging circles were there,

because ﬂoating high above me, at the cavern’s ceiling, was the alien boss, a

massive head that looked like an alien baby.

The boss sent out waves of light that could kill me in seconds. Further,

he was surrounded by smaller ﬂying aliens that shot destructive rays at me.

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The boss seemed to be able to make ever more of these ﬂying aliens as I

killed them. To keep safe and even have a chance of killing the boss I ran

madly around, hiding behind rock and crystal formations. I madly bounced

in the air using the bulging circles, attempting to get to a high enough ledge

to have a good sighting on the ﬂoating alien boss. To kill him, the player has

to soften him up enough with ﬁre from a particularly powerful weapon and

then, when he opens up his head, shoot directly into his brain.

Alas, after much effort and dying many times (and starting again from a

saved game from the beginning of the battle), I realized that I had come into

the cavern without enough ammunition to do the job. And there was no

going back. I sat atop a high ledge, a good spot, but eventually with no am-

munition and a very angry boss. I knew I could get more ammunition, but

only by jumping to the ground and then climbing far down a large tunnellike

hole. At the bottom of this hole was more ammunition, but then I had to

jump from ledge to ledge back up the hole (it had low gravity) even to get

back to the ground ﬂoor of the cavern and renew the ﬁght. Worse, as I tried

to jump back up the hole, from ledge to ledge, a long long way up, the boss’s

ﬂying alien support staff kept ﬁring at me from above.

Now, I am a very bad jumper in video games. I was yet worse, of course,

with the ﬂying aliens shooting at me and forcing me to try to shoot at them as I

attempted to move up the hole jumping from ledge to ledge. Time and again,

just as I made some progress up the walls of the hole, I fell midjump back to the

bottom. Time and again the ﬂying aliens eventually killed me. I had devoted a

great many hours to this game. Due to my own ineptness at jumping, I could

not ﬁnish it and ﬁnd out the end of the story. (Who is that man in the suit?)

But video-game players can be part of a powerful network, if they so de-

sire and know how. Their own ineptness need not stop them. There is

knowledge they can use, if they know how to leverage it, stored in other peo-

ple and in various tools and technologies. I got on the Internet, looked up

several game sites, and found a cheat code that allowed me to input com-

mands to the game that made me invisible to the ﬂying aliens. This allowed

me to jump without being distracted by their ﬁring at me. When I got back

to the cavern’s ﬂoor, I turned off the cheat code and continued the battle. I

had enough ammunition and, though with great effort, ﬁnished off the alien

boss. Now I know who the man in the suit is.

A cheat is a fairly simple procedure that encodes a great deal of knowl-

edge about designing and programming video games that I don’t personally

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have. For example, here is a cheat code for gaining inﬁnite life (you can’t die)

in the game Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: When the game is running,

press the Shift key and the tilde (“~”) key together. A screen will come up

with a cursor (and some lines of program). Now type “devmapall” and press

the Enter key. Then type “god” and press the Enter key. Finally, press the

Shift key and the tilde key together again. Now you can’t die. Each game has

different sorts of cheat codes, usually designed to be used by people testing

the games when they are in production.

Of course, it is not much fun playing Jedi Outcast without being able to die.

It was, however, quite functional for me to use a cheat code in playing Half-Life.

In using the cheat codes, I could have given myself an inﬁnite amount of ammu-

nition or life, but I wanted to use a code that would simply remedy my ineptness

at jumping and allow me to ﬁnish the rest of the game on my own skills.

The little cheat code, which contains a good deal of programming

knowledge in a user-friendly format, supplemented me in just the right way,

allowing me to be more powerful, while fulﬁlling my goals of ﬁnishing the

game on my own as much as possible. Ironically, my individual achievement

of ﬁnishing Half-Life, of which I was proud, was nonetheless still a social

achievement. I had tapped into a large network of interconnected chat rooms

and game sites that offer other people’s knowledge and many tools with

which to supplement myself.

I had used this network before. Along with being a bad jumper, I have a

completely miserable sense of direction and location in space. This is not a

good thing when playing a video game, since many games contain mazes of

various sorts. Early on in playing games, I was deeply frustrated by these

mazes. However, one day, when I was reading comments on a chat room de-

voted to some game or another, a player (of who knows what age, race, or

gender, since he or she used an alias) said that the way to get out of a maze

was always to turn left whenever you could. The player was answering a

query from someone else. I have no idea why this works—or even if it does in

all cases—but it has always worked for me. (I suppose always turning right

works, too, though I haven’t tried it.)

Of course, at least initially, I got far more out of my connection to the

network than any other people in it got from me. One day, however, I was

gratiﬁed to ﬁnd out that a number of players on one site could not ﬁgure out

how to get a certain cheat code to work. It turned out that the code required

one to get into DOS (the operating system that PCs used before Windows),

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ﬁnd the right directory, and type in DOS commands. These particular play-

ers were probably all young—too young to remember DOS or to have ever

done much with it. I, of course, am old enough to have used DOS a great

deal. Ironically, I was able to tell them—young people whom I am sure knew

a great deal more about games, computers, and programming than do I—

how to operate the cheat code. So here we see that even a weak link in a net-

work can make the network more powerful in the right circumstances.

These, of course, are ludicrously simple examples. I am purposely trying

to use very simple examples to make the point clearly. In such a network, the

other players and various tools like cheat codes are part of what I know (and I

am part of what the other players know), even though neither the players nor

(at least, initially) the cheat codes are in my mind. My knowledge is not only

social, it is distributed outside my body. If you were to assess just my skills

playing video games alone in my own home, you would underestimate me.

You need to assess me as a node in a network and see how I function as such a

node. The knowledge I gain playing games, limited as it is for an old baby-

boomer, is but a part of my functioning as such a node, and it is knowledge

that can spread into the network as well. In turn, knowledge ﬂows to me,

making me better than your original estimate would have assumed.

If we want to know how good students are in science—or how good em-

ployees are in a modern knowledge-centered workplace—we should ask all of

the following (and not just the ﬁrst): What is in their heads? How well can they

leverage knowledge in other people and in various tools and technologies (in-

cluding their environment)? How are they positioned within a network that

connects them in rich ways to other people and various tools and technologies?

Schools tend to care only about what is inside students’ heads as their heads

and bodies are isolated from others, from tools and technologies, and from rich

environments that help make them powerful nodes in networks. Adrian would-

n’t play a game in these circumstances, nor would most of the other players

whom we have interviewed. Good workplaces in our science- and technology-

driven “new capitalism” don’t play this game. Schools that do are, in my view,

DOA in our current world—and kids who play video games know it.

SCIENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

Jean Lave, a leading theorist of socially situated cognition, has developed a

view of learning that ﬁts well with all I have said here. She argues that learning

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is not best judged by a change in minds (the traditional school measure), but

by “changing participation in changing practices.” Most important, learning is

a change not just in practice, but in identity—for Lave, “crafting identities in

practice becomes the fundamental project. Rather than particular tools and

techniques for learning as such, there are ways of becoming a participant,

ways of participating, and ways in which participants and practices change. In

any event, the learning of speciﬁc ways of participating differs in particular sit-

uated practices. The term ‘learning mechanism’ diminishes in importance, in

fact it may fall out altogether, as ‘mechanisms’ disappear into practice. Mainly,

people are becoming kinds of persons.”

Lave’s perspective ﬁts perfectly with the team- and project-based focus of

many modern workplaces. It ﬁts, too, with the idea that in the modern world of

the “new capitalism” (a capitalism based more on knowledge than on industrial

assembly lines) we must more and more come to see ourselves not in terms of a

linear progression up a “career ladder” in one single job but as a “portfolio”

composed of the rearrangable skills and identities we have acquired in our tra-

jectory through diverse projects inside and outside of “workplaces” as we move

from job to job, project to project, and career to career in a fast-changing

world. It ﬁts, also, with the new capitalist stress on leveraging the tacit knowl-

edge workers acquire “online” as they adapt to constant changes in practice.

And, ﬁnally, it ﬁts well with how players learn as they play video games as

members of clans and guilds with their own web sites and chat rooms.

In education, Lave’s views on learning are well exempliﬁed in the class-

rooms (called “communities of learners”) designed by Ann Brown and Joseph

Campione, two leading educational cognitive scientists. Unfortunately,

Brown died not long ago, leaving the area of learning theory (and practice)

much impoverished. Brown and Campione’s classrooms use a wide variety of

devices to ensure that knowledge and understanding are public, collabora-

tive, dispersed, and distributed. Two of these methods are reciprocal teaching

and the jigsaw method.

In reciprocal teaching, the teacher and a group of students take turns

leading a discussion about a reading passage. The leader begins by asking a

question. The group rereads the passage and discusses possible problems of

interpretation when necessary. Attempts to clarify any comprehension prob-

lems occur opportunistically. At the end of the discussion, the leader summa-

rizes the gist of what has been read. The leader also asks for predictions about

future content. In this way the core components of successful reading com-

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prehension (usually thought of as the preserve of “private minds”) are ren-

dered public, overt, and distributable. Much like “quality circles” in the new

capitalism, people are asked to publicly display and share their knowledge for

the beneﬁt of the group (and the system as a whole).

In the jigsaw method of cooperative learning, students are assigned a sub-

part of a classroom topic to learn and subsequently teach to others via recip-

rocal teaching. In Brown and Campione’s extrapolation of this method, the

setting is a science classroom. Students do collaborative research in research

groups each devoted to a different sub-topic of a larger theme or overall

topic such as animal defense mechanisms, changing populations, or food

chains. Then they redistribute themselves into learning groups where each

student takes a turn teaching (using the reciprocal teaching method) the

subtopic he or she has mastered in the previous research group.

In the jigsaw method, each module (team) is initially expert on only one

part of the whole topic, no team is expert on the whole. But each team dis-

tributes its knowledge to the whole. There is no single “leader” (teacher);

each member plays the role of researcher, student, and teacher in different

conﬁgurations and contexts. There is no “center,” only a ﬂexible network of

distributed roles and responsibilities.

There are still other important features of Brown and Campione’s class-

rooms, including a pervasive use of modern computer, telecommunications,

and network technologies. Students, for example, engage in e-mail conversa-

tions with outside experts and search the web for relevant information. These

are both ways to network the classroom, and the children in it, into a larger

knowledge system.

Students in these classrooms also each “major” in some area. A given

child may choose to be the expert on a given piece of software, a speciﬁc

technology, or some speciﬁc area of concern. This child—who is, of course,

still fully involved as a group member in the whole project of his or her

group—helps or coaches other children in his or her specialist area.

All aspects of Brown and Campione’s classrooms are put in place to sub-

serve learning within a “zone” of joint activity, another feature these class-

rooms share with modern knowledge- and technology-centered workplaces.

Brown and Campione borrow from the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky the

concept of a “zone of proximal development.” They deﬁne this zone as “the

distance between [an individual’s] current levels of comprehension and levels

that can be accomplished in collaboration with people or powerful artifacts.”

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The core idea is that novices, largely unconsciously, “internalize” or accommo-

date to the goals, values, and understandings of those more expert than them-

selves through scaffolded joint activity with those others and their associated

tools and technologies. The beauty of Brown and Campione’s classrooms is

that the other students, the various technologies in the classroom, and the very

structure of the activities themselves take on the role of the scaffolding, struc-

turing expert, not just the traditional classroom teacher.

Brown and Campione’s classrooms and many modern workplaces consti-

tute what some have called communities of practice and what I have called

affinity groups. I am not using the term community of practice, both because it

has been given various meanings and because I wish to avoid the romantic no-

tions that seem to accompany the word “community”; affinity groups can be

good, evil, or anything inbetween.) Video-game players like Adrian are prime

examples of members of an affinity group. For me, an affinity group, whether

in a workplace, school, or community, often has the following features:

1. Members of an affinity group bond to each other primarily through a

common endeavor and only secondarily through affective ties, which

are, in turn, leveraged to further the common endeavor. Implication:

Affective ties and sociocultural diversity can be dangerous, because

they divide people if they transcend the endeavor, good otherwise.

2. The common endeavor is organized around a whole process (involving

multiple but integrated functions), not single, discrete, or decontex-

tualized tasks. Implication: No rigid departments, borders, or

boundaries.

3. Members of the affinity group have extensive knowledge, not just in-

tensive knowledge. By “extensive” I mean that members must be in-

volved with many or all stages of the endeavor; able to carry out

multiple, partly overlapping, functions; and able to reﬂect on the en-

deavor as a whole system, not just their part in it. Implication: No

narrow specialists, no rigid roles.

4. In addition to extensive knowledge, members each have intensive

knowledge—deep and specialist knowledge in one or more areas.

Members may well also bring special intensive knowledge gained

from their outside experiences and various sociocultural affiliations

(e.g., their ethnic affiliations) to the affinity group’s endeavors. Impli-

cation: Non-narrow specialists are good.

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5. Much of the knowledge in an affinity group is tacit (embodied in

members’ mental, social, and physical coordinations with other mem-

bers and with various tools, and technologies), and distributed (spread

across various members, their shared sociotechnical practices, and

their tools and technologies), and dispersed (not all on site, but net-

worked across different sites and institutions). Implication: Knowl-

edge is not ﬁrst and foremost in heads, discrete individuals, or books

but in networks of relationships.

6. The role of leaders in affinity groups is to design the groups, to con-

tinually resource them, and to help members turn their tacit knowl-

edge into explicit knowledge, while realizing that much knowledge will

always remain tacit and situated in practice. Implications: Leaders are

not “bosses,” and only knowledge that is made explicit can be spread

and used outside the original affinity group.

In such affinity groups, people are committed through their immersion

in practice, since it is the practice itself that gives them their identity and not

some “occupation,” ﬁxed set of skills, or culture apart from the practice. Di-

verse individual skills and cultures are recruited as resources for the group,

not as identities that transcend the affinity group itself.

Of course, there are many variations on classrooms like those designed

by Brown and Campione. Ironically, however, when the U.S. economy was

doing poorly in comparison to the Japanese economy and other Asian

economies, classrooms like these were popular and spreading. They were

what policymakers wanted. However, when the U.S. economy rose and the

Asian ones fell, many policymakers decried such classrooms and called for a

return to skill and drill and a renewed focus on the learner as a social isolate

(isolated both from other people and from knowledge tools).

What happened, in my view, is that policymakers began to see that the

“new capitalism” was not going to make of every worker a “knowledge

worker,” as had previously been thought. Rather, the new global high-tech

economy called for lots of service workers in addition to lots of knowledge

workers. The service workers needed good communication skills and a will-

ingness to be cooperative and pliant but often did not need much sophisti-

cated technical or specialist knowledge. Thus some schools—the more

advantaged ones with more economically advantaged learners—would pre-

pare future knowledge workers via thinking curricula, while others—the less

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advantaged ones with the less economically advantaged learners—would pre-

pare service workers and the remaining industrial and manual workers in the

new capitalism via skill and drill on the “basics.”

Perhaps my view is too cynical. But, in any case, and for whatever reason,

young people who play video games often experience a more intense affinity

group, leverage more knowledge from other people and from various tools

and technologies, and are more powerfully networked with each other than

they ever are in school.

LEARNERS AS INSIDERS AND PRODUCERS

Video games incorporate a powerful learning principle that ﬁts well with in-

quiry-based classrooms and with workplaces that encourage workers to think

proactively and critically to build new knowledge in practice for the business

but poorly with traditionalist, passive, skill-and-drill school-based learning.

Many good video games come with free software, on the disk that contains

the game, that allows players to build new extensions (“mods” or fan modiﬁ-

cations) to the game or even new games altogether.

For example, a player who plays a shooter game on the Internet with

other players can make a new “map” (a new environment in which the play-

ers can battle with each other). In fact, game companies actively encourage

players to make such maps, and make them available to other players via the

Internet, to supplement the ones the company has already made, thereby get-

ting new design work done for free. Often, too, players can, when they ﬁnish

a game in single-player mode, design a whole new level to the game and con-

tinue playing. And some have even made up whole new games (mods that are

also called total conversions), using the software connected to a speciﬁc game

to design a different game altogether, and sold them via the Internet. (Half-

Life has given rise to a very vibrant mod community that has developed such

games as Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Action Half-Life.)

Good video games allow players not just to be passive consumers but also

active producers who can customize their own learning experience. The

game designer is not an insider and the player an outsider, as, in school, in so

many instances, the teacher is the insider and the learners are outsiders who

must take what they are given as mere consumers. Rather, game designers

and game players are both insiders and producers—if players so choose—and

there need be no outsiders.

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While using software to design new extensions or new games is a dra-

matic example of learner/player as producer, good video games build in this

principle at many different levels. In almost all games, the player can choose

among various difficulty levels. In some games, the player can switch the dif-

ﬁculty level even in the middle of the game when things get too hard or too

easy (and switch it back again thereafter). In addition, as I pointed out in an

earlier chapter, good video games allow players to choose different styles of

play (e.g., stealth or overt aggression) and to solve problems in multiple ways

(e.g., logic, systematic trial and error, free exploration, getting or not getting

hints, etc.), thereby allowing them to customize the experience to their fa-

vored style of learning or to try out new styles.

Some total conversions made by groups of players (who often work to-

gether over the Internet and never see each other face-to-face), using free

software from the game companies themselves, constitute games that are as

good, or better, than commercially available games. Players of these total

conversions often must own the original game, because the mods still use

ﬁles from the original. Thus, game companies are happy to help make the

mods available, via the Internet, to other players. Day of Defeat is a total con-

version of the game Half-Life. While Half-Life is about scientists and aliens,

Day of Defeat is a realistic military game about World II. Day of Defeat is now

made available (for a small access fee) by the company that made Half-Life

and is more popular than many commercially made military games. The

same company had already bought another total conversion outright

(Counter-Strike) and sold it as a commercial game.

Here is what the online magazine Salon.com had to say in April 2002 about

the phenomenon of game players becoming game designers: “Many of the

best game companies now count on modders to show them the way creatively

and to ensure their own survival in a savagely competitive market. This stands

in marked contrast to the music and ﬁlm industry, which vindictively discour-

ages fans from tinkering with their content and clings to an outdated interpre-

tation of copyright. By fostering the creativity of their fans, their more agile

peers in the game industry have not only survived but prospered.”

Let’s listen a moment to a 12-year-old boy, whom I will call Max (a pseu-

donym), talk about playing and designing new maps for the very popular skate-

board game series, To n y H a w k ’ s P r o S k a t e r (To n y H a w k ’ s P r o S k a t e r 4 is the most

recent game to appear in the series). In this game, players can choose to skate

with the skills of Tony Hawk, a legendary (but real) skateboard professional, or

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as one of a number of other professional skaters. Players skate through many

different urban and nonurban environments, ﬁlled with other people and vari-

ous obstacles, engaging in wild leaps and tricks. Max is explaining how he

makes new maps for To n y H a w k ’ s P r o S k a t e r (new environments or skate parks

within which players can skate and solve problems). As he talks, he is showing

the interviewer some of his maps. As in all face-to-face talk, by reading a tran-

script, you will not understand every detail, but the point will be clear enough:

It’s pretty simple. What you do is ﬁrst you pick a starting spot and then you

put out a block, to move this you use the mouse, that’s the starting block,

you don’t see the arrows, but that’s where you start. Um, this is a quarter

pipe and that’s like a ramp that you go up, so you can set that, too, and this

piece, it rotates, so that was kind of obvious.

I’ve made about 20 maps or so. The ﬁrst map was pretty random. It was

pretty bad, it was cluttered. You’d bump into things and that’s not very fun.

My ﬁrst map had a lot of variety, but it was cluttered, no space between,

‘cause I just put EVERYTHING in—that’s why it was bad. I tried to put

everything in—just to try it out. I could get through it, but it wasn’t fun.

So I started over again and, then, I started a theme. It just came to my

head to make a park, like where there’s trees and things. There’s trees and I

kinda made a lot of that and you can ride on that. It looks pretty, too. And I

had stairs and railings, like the arboretum and stuff like that. That one was a

very good map.

Another one I did was “Find the Secret Room,” and I tried to make this

really boring place outside and put walls, and this little small unnoticed

room [you had to discover]. I let my friends play on my maps—they come

here to play—and I’ll say “Hey, try this out.” They were able to ﬁnd the se-

cret room. It was not very good. It was fun, but the room wasn’t well hidden.

I started making maps when I ﬁrst got the game, like probably the second

day I played.

Max is only 12. Nonetheless, this is producer talk. It’s designer talk. Max

is developing a rich appreciative system in terms of which to evaluate his de-

sign decisions (and he does not spare himself criticism). Max, as a learner, is

also a producer and insider by the second day he has owned the game—and

this is the ﬁrst game for which he has made maps. Do 12-year-olds engage in

this sort of producer, designer talk, connected to a growing appreciative sys-

tem in their science classrooms? If not—and chances are great in today’s test

and drill-and-skill schools that they do not in many cases—then they are ex-

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periencing a much more powerful view of learning when they are playing

video games, an enterprise that many in our culture think is a “waste of

time,” than they are in school.

LEARNING PRINCIPLES

As in previous chapters next I list learning principles implicated in our dis-

cussion in this chapter that are built into good video games. Again, each prin-

ciple is relevant both to learning in video games and to learning in content

areas in classrooms. Again, too, there is no order to the principles; they are

each important.

33. Distributed Principle

Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools,

symbols, technologies, and the environment.

34. Dispersed Principle

Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares

it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner

may rarely or never see face-to-face.

35. Affinity Group Principle

Learners constitute an “affinity group,” that is, a group that is bonded

primarily through shared endeavors, goals, and practices and not

shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture.

36. Insider Principle

The learner is an “insider,” “teacher,” and “producer” (not just a “con-

sumer”) able to customize the learning experience and domain/game

from the beginning and throughout the experience.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The literature on sociocultural approaches to learning is immense; for a sampling of a

variety of different perspectives, see: Bereiter 1994; Brown 1994; Cobb, Yackel, &

McClain 2000; Delpit 1995; Engestrom, Miettinen, & Punamaki 1999; Kirshner &

Whitson 1997; Lave & Wenger 1991; Lee & Smagorinsky 1999; Moll 1992; Wenger

1998; Wertsch 1998; and Wertsch, Del Rio, & Alvarez 1995.

For work on views of mind that stress pattern recognition within embodied expe-

rience, see the references to connectionist views in chapter 4’s bibliographical note.

See also Gee 1992. On the notion of distributed knowledge (or distri

buted cognition),

see Brown 1994; Brown, Collins, and Dugid 1989; Hutchins 1995; and Latour 1999.

For Lave’s work, see Lave 1988, 1996 (pp. 161, 157); and Lave & Wenger 1991. For

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Brown and Campione’s classrooms, see Brown 1994; Brown & Campione 1994; and

Brown, Ash, Rutherford, Nakagawa, Gordon, & Campione 1993 (p. 191). On recip-

rocal teaching, see Brown & Palincsar 1989. On the jigsaw method, see Aronson

1978. On the zone of proximal development, see Vygotsky 1978.

My notion of an affinity groups is inspired by putting together Beck 1992, 1994;

Rifkin 2000; Wenger 1998 as well as work on modern workplaces; see Gee, Hull, &

Lankshear 1996. Learners as insiders is a common principle in modern business,

where there is a trend to make the consumer an insider and producer; see, for exam-

ple, Kelly 1998 and Rifkin 2000. More generally on the new capitalism, see these

sources Gee, Hull, & Lankshear 1996; and Greider 1997

The excerpts from two reviews of Half-Life are from reviews by Emil Pagliarulo,

December 4, 1998 at www.avault.com/reviews/review and Shaffer Buttars, January 12,

1999 at www.gamezilla.com/reviews, respectively. The quote from Salon.com is from

Wagner James Au, “Tr iumph of the Mod,” Salon.com, April 16, 2002, p.2.

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CONCLUSION:

DUPED OR NOT?

HE ARGUMENT IN THIS BOOK IS NOT THAT WHAT PEOPLE ARE

learning when they are playing video games is always good. Rather, what they

are doing when they are playing good video games is often good learning.

We can learn evil things as easily as we can learn moral ones. That’s precisely

why an organization like the neo-Nazi National Alliance wants to make a

game like Ethnic Cleansing, a game in which the player kills African Ameri-

cans, Latinos, and Jewish people, playing as a member of the Klu Klux Klan

or a skinhead. However horrible its views, this organization realizes that

video games are powerful learning devices for shaping identities. It realizes

that they are even powerful learning devices for learning the content of the

National Alliance’s white power perspective on reality, ironically, given the

grandfather’s remark in chapter 2 that video games are a waste of time be-

cause children don’t learn any content while playing them.

The power of video games, for good or ill, resides in the ways in which

they meld learning and identity, a matter discussed throughout this book. If a

player takes on what I called in chapter 3 a projective identity vis-à-vis the

virtual character he or she is playing in a game, this constitutes a form of

identiﬁcation with the virtual character’s world, story, and perspectives that

become a strong learning device at a number of different levels. This is so be-

cause, in taking on a projective identity, the player projects his or her own

hopes, values, and fears onto the virtual character that he or she is co-creat-

ing with the video game’s designers. Doing this allows the player to imagine a

new identity born at the intersection of the player’s real-world identities and

the virtual identity of the character he or she is playing in the game. In turn,

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this projective identity helps speak to, and possibly transform, the player’s

hopes, values, and fears.

However, people are not dupes. They do not necessarily take from a

video game, any more than they do from a book or movie, any one pre-

dictable message predetermined by the design of the game, movie, or text. It

is quite possible that some people could play Ethnic Cleansing and form a pro-

jective identity that both lets them understand the sort of hate organizations

like the National Alliance harbor and want to redouble their efforts to work

for a world of peace, diversity, and tolerance. And, note, both these things are

important: We cannot work for a world of peace, diversity, and tolerance

while disdaining to understand those who resist, hate, and feel disenfran-

chised in such a world.

This certainly doesn’t mean you should play Ethnic Cleansing. It does

not mean you shouldn’t despise neo-Nazi viewpoints. It doesn’t mean you

shouldn’t protect yourself from neo-Nazis. It does mean that if you have

no idea why people who would create or be drawn to such a game are so

angry and filled with hate, then you are very unlikely to do anything more

than recruit more members for organizations like the National Alliance by

claiming your own moral superiority. However, to understand their rage

means to understand the workings of history, economics, and culture.

That is, it means gaining, in or out of school, an education, one that cer-

tainly goes far beyond what anyone can currently learn from video games.

Sadly, this is not the sort of education usually offered in U.S. schools, least

of all those driven back to passive learning and skill-and-drill by the cur-

rent standardized-testing regime.

I am not here advocating any sort of “postmodernist” view that “any-

thing goes” and all perspectives are simply sociocultural “constructions” and

“culturally relative” (a very poor characterization of good work in postmod-

ernism). Things can be “constructed” and still be true or false, solid or

shabby. I certainly believe that we all need to defend ourselves from those

who would disdain and even physically harm us. I don’t advocate face-to-face

dialogue with people pointing a gun at your head, either. What I do advocate

is understanding the “play” of identities and perspectives as they work for

and against each other in the world, now and throughout history. This is

even a form of self-defense.

The left and right wings of the political spectrum have seriously misled

us about how people learn from the cultural resources around us. For exam-

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ple, both sides tend to agree that canonical literature (the so-called Great

Books) is indoctrinating. The right wing applauds the work the canon can do

to align people with what it sees as mainstream and universal values, values

that it also sees as already its own. The left wing decries this same thing,

claiming that the values embedded in the canon are, far from being universal,

just a historically and culturally speciﬁc instantiation of the values of certain

sorts of western, “middle-class” white people, people who wish to use the

canon to enshrine their values and perspectives as higher and better than

those of other people and other cultures.

Both views show a woeful ignorance of—and even a certain disdain for—

how many people—especially many poor people, people who rarely get in-

vited into academic debates about the canon, in any case—actually read and

used, in the past, canonical works like those of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton,

Carlyle, Arnold, Austen, Emerson, and a great many others. Of course,

schools and churches have tried through the centuries, up to and including

our own new century, to get people to read such literature—and the Bible—

in their way, so as to enforce their values, values that, in many cases (certainly

not all), stressed the subordination of women, nonwhites, and the poor.

However, many a woman, nonwhite, or poor person actually read canonical

works as empowering works that made them challenge the class hierarchy of

their societies and the ways in which schools, churches, and rich people up-

held this hierarchy in their own favor.

Jonathan Rose’s massive tome, The Intellectual Life of the British Working

Classes, is chock full of stories from the eighteenth century through the twen-

tieth of women, poor people, and nonwhite people who read canonical litera-

ture as representing their own values and aspirations and not those of the

wealthy and powerful. For example, Mary Smith (b. 1822) was a shoemaker’s

daughter who had this to say: “For long years Englishwomen’s souls were al-

most as sorely crippled and cramped by the devices of the school room, as the

Chinese women’s feet by their shoes.” Here’s what Smith had to say about

reading Shakespeare, Dryden, and Goldsmith: “These authors wrote from

their hearts for humanity, and I could follow them fully and with delight,

though but a child. They awakened my young nature, and I found for the

ﬁrst time that my pondering heart was akin to that of the whole human

race.... Carlyle’s gospel of Work and exposure of Shams, and his universal

onslaught on the nothings and appearances of society, gave strength and life

to my vague but true enthusiasm.”

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Of course, the left wing will say that Mary Smith was a hegemonic dupe

moving to the dictates of the elites in her society without knowing it and mis-

takenly taking their values to be her own. But the only people who were

duped by the canon were the right wing who thought it uncritically repre-

sented their viewpoints and the left wing who agreed with them. Mary Smith

read what for us is “high literature” but what for her was “popular” enough,

to say that even the daughter of a shoemaker was the equal, in intelligence

and humanity, of any rich person.

So why did she read canonical works as empowering her humanity and

rights to equality in a hierarchical society? It’s because she identiﬁed herself

with the characters and viewpoints in these books. She projected herself into

them. She didn’t distance herself from the hero because he was a male and a

king in a Shakespeare play, however much she might have wanted and cer-

tainly deserved female heroes.

Rather, she saw herself as projected into that powerful monarch. Perhaps

sometimes when she read Shakespeare, she was a king and other times a

queen, just as, in playing Arcanum, I can make my female hero as strong as

any male at melee ﬁghting. Perhaps sometimes when she read Shakespeare,

she was not a traditional monarch at all but a monarch shoemaker with the

dignity and the human worth of a monarch. Perhaps sometimes she was all

these and more at once. Remember, she was not just taking on the life of a

virtual character in the book or play. She was also projecting herself into that

character, creating something that both she and Shakespeare made, neither

one of them alone.

Neither the right nor the left wing wrote the scripts for the plays in

Mary Smith’s mind, no matter how inﬂuenced she, like all of us, was by the

political and cultural factors of her time. Shakespeare was deeply inﬂuenced

by his own times, but he wrote original scripts nonetheless. So did Mary

Smith. She read books that today’s students ﬁnd boring, with the excitement

that today’s students ﬁnd in video games, because, perhaps, she read them at

least in part much like those students sometimes play video games—actively,

critically, and projectively.

What Smith learned as she became these virtual characters in a projec-

tive way was the values and perspectives of the various personae behind

canonical literature. She did not see these values and perspectives as the pre-

serve of only rich elites. They represented, in the form she gave them, her

own values and aspirations. They made her see her equality to wealthy elites.

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She saw that, like all people, she had just as much capacity for greatness,

truth, and morality as any hero, king, or rich person. And, of course, canoni-

cal works are full of people who are not males or kings, people acting out

their true human worth in hierarchical worlds that hurt and disdain them. In

the end, Mary Smith and many more like her believed that canonical litera-

ture, far from representing the values of wealthy elites, undermined their val-

ues and showed them for the hypocrites they were.

Right wingers and left wingers who argue over the canon tend to act as if

people like Mary Smith will read books realizing and accepting their “infe-

rior station” and either want to emulate their “betters” (the right-wing per-

spective) or passively accept their inferiority as dupes of the elites in the

society (the left-wing view). The Mary Smiths of the world need do no such

thing. They already know that they are thinking, worthy beings. They some-

times see in canonical literature examples of who and what they could be, if

others in society ceased to disdain them. And, again, these examples are mu-

tual creations they build with the authors of the book when they project

themselves into the virtual creations of these authors.

Does all this mean I think there is some deﬁnitive list of “Great Books”?

No, by no means. For me, the canon is and was never a closed list. For me,

any book is canonical if it lends itself to the powerful projective work in

which Mary Smith engaged and leads people to desire not more hierarchy of

the sort elites so often celebrate but more opportunities for the display of

human worth and the greater development of human capacities for all peo-

ple. Of course, that last statement is a value-laden one. A work is canonical,

for me, if it gives people, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, new and better “equip-

ment for living” in a harsh and unfair world. It is canonical if it allows them

to imagine, and seek, in however small a way, to implement newer and better

selves and social worlds.

In this sense, works like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Gloria Naylor’s

Mama Day are canonical for me and many other people. And, of course,

there are a good many books written by women, nonwhite people, and poor

people that never got on the “official” canon as a list due to the workings of

racism and patriarchy but are most certainly, in my terms, canonical.

Tr a d itional canonical works, like those of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton,

and Dryden, function today quite differently than they did in Mary Smith’s

day. Smith’s society denied her any sort of schooli ng that gave her access to

these books. In fact, her society felt it inappropriate for a shoemaker’s

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daughter to be reading such books (which hardly comports well with the

left’s view that elites thought canonical literature would make people like

Mary Smith quiescently accept their status). She picked them up anyway

with deﬁance, and saw in them resonances with herself that just further

proved her own intelligence and worth.

But schools have, by and large, tamed the canon. They have made it into

the stuff of tests, multiple-choice answers, and standardized responses.

Everyone now, ﬁnally, has access to the canon at a time when schools have

rendered it toothless and the left applauds ignoring it as a historical vestige of

old, dead, western, aristocratic elites.

Furthermore, young people today have access to far more texts, images,

and diverse media, of far more kinds, than even the rich of Mary’s Smith time

had. Milton’s Paradise Lost played a very different role in the textual ecology

of Smith’s world than it does for a young person today. For her it was a pre-

cious book, hard won through a great deal of physical labor (to buy it, if she

didn’t borrow it) and mental labor (to read it seriously). For a young person

today, it is cheap to buy and the school tells them how to read it in the “right”

way (or get a poor grade).

This is no plea for reading Milton, though I am sure many people still

get a great deal out of traditional canonical literature when they read it of

their own choosing, usually outside of school. There is plenty of evidence

that people still read and watch many things that serve some of the same pur-

poses that canonical literature did for Mary Smith.

I am not pleading for the “canon” here, least of all as a list. Nor am I

claiming that every poor person read like Mary Smith. I am claiming that

elites can use anything—canonical literature, the Bible, biology, or any other

sort of text—to attempt to dupe people by trying to force them to read it in

the elite’s way. I am claiming, as well, that there are plenty of Mary Smiths

who are more than capable of saying “No, thank you” and reading it both

their way and intelligently.

Video games are a new form of art. They will not replace books; they will

sit beside them, interact with them, and change them and their role in society

in various ways, as, indeed, they are already doing strongly with movies.

(Today many movies are based on video games and many more are inﬂuenced

by them.) We have no idea yet how people “read” video games, what mean-

ings they make from them. Still less do we know how they will “read” them

in the future. It won’t do to start this investigation by assuming they are

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dupes of capitalist marketers—though, of course, some of them very likely

are. But there will always be Mary Smiths out there who use cultural prod-

ucts, whether “high” or “low,” for good purposes.

Video games are at the very beginning of their potential—“we ain’t seen

nothin’ yet.” They will get deeper and richer. Eventually some form of con-

versation between real people and computer-created characters will occur

alongside the conversations among people in their virtual and real identities

that already take place in Internet gaming. There are and will be vile games,

and eventually there will be some “canonical” games, games that lend them-

selves powerfully to elevating the aspirations and imaginings of all people for

better and more just worlds. These may be new aspirations and imaginings or

ones that ﬁll old visions with new meanings and hope.

But for now, video games are what they are, an immensely entertaining

and attractive interactive technology built around identities. I have made but

one claim for them here. They operate with—that is, they build into their

designs and encourage—good principles of learning, principles that are bet-

ter than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-

they-drop schools. It is not surprising that many politicians, policymakers,

and their academic fellow travelers who think poor children should be con-

tent with schooling for service jobs don’t like video games. They say they

don’t like them because they are violent. But, in reality, video games do vio-

lence to these people’s notions of what makes learning powerful and schools

good and fair.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The quotes from Jonathan Rose’s book can both be found on p. 45.

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Appendix

THE 36 LEARNING PRINCIPLES

1. Active, Critical Learning Principle

All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which the

semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active

and critical, not passive, learning.

2. Design Principle

Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core

to the learning experience.

3. Semiotic Principle

Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across

multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a

complex system is core to the learning experience.

4. Semiotic Domains Principle

Learni

ng involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able

to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.

5. Metalevel Thinking about

Semiotic Domains Principle

Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the

semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.

6. “Psychosocial Moratorium” Principle

Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.

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7. Committed Learning Principle

Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as

extensions of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which

they feel some commitment and a virtual world that they ﬁnd compelling.

8. Identity Principle

Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the

learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample oppor-

tunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and old ones.

There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reﬂect on, their

multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity, and a projective identity.

9. Self-Knowledge Principle

The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about

the domain but about themselves and their current and potential capacities.

10. Amplification of Input Principle

For a little input, learners get a lot of output.

11. Achievement Principle

For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the begin-

ning, customized to each learner’s level, effort, and growing mastery and sig-

naling the learner’s ongoing achievements.

12. Practice Principle

Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not

boring (i.e., in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own

terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots

of time on task.

13. Ongoing Learning Principle

The distinction between learner and master is vague, since learners, thanks

to the operation of the “regime of competence” principle listed next, must, at

higher and higher levels, undo their routinized mastery to adapt to new or

changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization, undo-

ing automatization, and new reorganized automatization.

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14. “Regime of Competence” Principle

The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge

of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging

but not “undoable.”

15. Probing Principle

Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reﬂecting in and

on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world

to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.

16. Multiple Routes Principle

There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learn-

ers to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and

problem solving, while also exploring alternative styles.

17. Situated Meaning Principle

The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.)

are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontex-

tulized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up

via embodied experiences.

18. Text Principle

Te x t s a r e n o t u n d e r s t o o d p u r e l y v e r b a l l y ( i.e., only in terms of the deﬁnitions

of the words in the text and their text-internal relationships to each other)

but are understood in terms of embodied experiences. Learners move back

and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal un-

derstanding (reading texts apart from embodied action) comes only when

learners have had enough embodied experience in the domain and ample ex-

periences with similar texts.

19. Intertextual Principle

The learner understands texts as a family (“genre”) of related texts and un-

derstands any one such text in relation to others in the family, but only after

having achieved embodied understandings of some texts. Understanding a

group of texts as a family (genre) of texts is a large part of what helps the

learner make sense of such texts.

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20. Multimodal Principle

Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images,

texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words.

21. “Material Intelligence” Principle

Thinking, problem solving, and knowledge are “stored” in material objects

and the environment. This frees learners to engage their minds with other

things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge

stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more powerful

effects.

22. Intuitive Knowledge Principle

Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experience,

often in association with an affinity group, counts a great deal and is hon-

ored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.

23. Subset Principle

Learning even at its start takes place in a (simpliﬁed) subset of the real domain.

24. Incremental Principle

Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to

generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more

complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guesses the

learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or general-

izations the learner has found earlier.

25. Concentrated Sample Principle

The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of fundamental

signs and actions than would be the case in a less controlled sample. Funda-

mental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners

get to practice them often and learn them well.

26. Bottom-up Basic Skills Principle

Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what counts

as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more and more of the

game/domain or game/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a

given type of game/domain.

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27. Explicit Information On-Demand

and Just-in-Time Principle

The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time,

when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best

be understood and used in practice.

28. Discovery Principle

Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample oppor-

tunity for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.

29. Transfer Principle

Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transfer-

ring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems

that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning.

30. Cultural Models about the World Principle

Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and

reﬂectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without

denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose

them to new models that may conﬂict with or otherwise relate to them in

various ways.

31. Cultural Models about Learning Principle

Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and

reﬂectively about their cultural models of learning and themselves as learn-

ers, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and

juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as learners.

32. Cultural Models about Semiotic Domains Principle

Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and

reﬂectively about their cultural models about a particular semiotic domain

they are learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social

affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.

33. Distributed Principle

Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols,

technologies, and the environment.

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34. Dispersed Principle

Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with

others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or

never see face-to-face.

35. Affinity Group Principle

Learners constitute an “affinity group,” that is, a group that is bonded prima-

rily through shared endeavors, goals, and practices and not shared race, gen-

der, nation, ethnicity, or culture.

36. Insider Principle

The learner is an “insider,” “teacher,” and “producer” (not just a “consumer”)

able to customize the learning experience and domain/game from the begin-

ning and throughout the experience.

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INDEX

academic language, 1, 24–26, 88, 106

adaptation, 70, 71, 74, 93, 110, 124, 127,

138, 185, 190, 208, 211

affinity groups, 27, 31–33, 35–36, 39–40,

43, 45–47, 49–50, 97–101,

110–11, 183, 192–94, 197, 198,

207, 210, 212

Aliens vs. Predator, 2, 150

American McGee’s Alice, 101, 109–10,

125, 127

appreciative systems, 96–100, 101, 112,

177, 196

arcade games, 47

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick

Obscura, 51–61, 76, 202

Aristotle, 21, 22

artiﬁcial intelligence (AI), 7, 80, 170

association, 73–75, 91–92, 94, 96, 184