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I played my first video game four years ago when my six-year-old son, Sam, was playing Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside. In Pajama Sam, child "superhero" Sam goes off to the "Land of Darkness" to find and capture "Darkness" in a lunch pail and thereby alleviate fear of the dark. Darkness turns out to be a big, lonely softie who just needs a playmate.
I wanted to play the game so that I could support my son's problem-solving. Though Pajama Sam is not an "educational game," it is replete with the types of problems that psychologists study when they study thinking and learning. When I saw how well the game held Sam's attention, I wondered what sort of beast a more mature video game might be. I went to a store and arbitrarily picked a game, The New Adventures of the Time Machine. Then again, perhaps it was not so arbitrary, as I was undoubtedly reassured by the association with H. G. Wells and literature.
As I confronted the game, I was amazed. It was hard, long, and complex. I failed many times and had to engage in a virtual research project via the Internet to learn some of the things that I needed to know. All of my Baby-Boomer ways of learning and thinking did not work, and I felt myself using learning muscles that had not had this much of a workout since my graduate school days in theoretical linguistics.
As I struggled, I thought: Lots of young people pay lots of money to engage in an activity that is hard, long, and complex. As an educator, I realized that this was just the problem our schools face - how do you get someone to learn something long, hard, and complex, and yet still enjoy it? I became intrigued by the implications that good video games might have for learning in and out of schools. And, I also played many more great games such as Half-Life, Deus Ex, Halo, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Rise of Nations, and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Good video games incorporate good learning principles, principles supported by current research in cognitive science (Gee 2003, 2004). Why? If no one could learn these...
