Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?

There are moments when James Gee seems like a teenager in the body of a middle-aged man. Many of those moments have to do with video games.

Mr. Gee is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Wisconsin's flagship campus here, but it is conversations about video games that win his undivided attention. He can tell you how to beat fantasy games like Everquest and Morrowind. He can outline the learning principles behind Pikmin, a cartoonish game made for young children. The adult in him talks about the moral complexities of Grand Theft Auto, which is often slammed in the media for being sexist and ultraviolent. The kid in him will say that the game is a hell of a lot of fun to play.

"People ought to use Grand Theft Auto in the classroom to think about values and ideology," he says. "There are lots of things people could learn from games."

This isn't the talk of a hobbyist or an eccentric, but of a serious scholar who is taking a lead in an emerging field. Mr. Gee thinks that video games -- even those like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in which players run around and blast Nazis -- hold the key to salvaging American education. His argument was recently delivered in a compact book: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan).

Although Mr. Gee's colleagues suggested that he was wasting his time when he started looking into video games, in the past two years he has found that he is part of a new and growing academic field. "In the time that I was writing my book, the interest in games in academe went way up," Mr. Gee says. "It's clear that by accident, I had entered an area where a wave of interest was coming up -- and is still coming up."

New conferences and essays dedicated to games appear all the time. Respected scholars, like Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discuss the cultural value of video games in the popular press. And graduate students and professors are designing games for use in the classroom.

Despite the swell of interest, Mr. Gee and others say the academic study of video games is still controversial. While some scholars embrace research on the games, others are recoiling.

Celia Pearce is the associate director of the Game Culture and Technology Lab at the University of California at Irvine, where two years ago the faculty rejected a proposal for a minor in game design. A professor on the committee that made the decision called the idea of a video-games minor "prurient," she says.

She finds it "baffling" that schools these days use a "pre-information-society model" in teaching. "Kids are playing games when they are not in school. They are going from this digital environment into the classroom, and they're suddenly in Dickens." Teachers and professors don't know what games are, or how to use them to their own advantage, she says. "At the worst they fear games, and at the best they are completely ignorant of them."

Until a few years ago, Mr. Gee was himself clueless about video games. He became interested in the subject as he watched his son, then 6 years old, play a game called Pajama Sam. Mr. Gee wondered what a game for adults would be like. So he bought a game called The New Adventures of the Time Machine, which was loosely based on the work of H.G. Wells.

"I was floored by how long and how difficult it was," he says, sitting in his office, one wall of which is now covered with posters of video-game characters. He realized that the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood, which means that millions of people are plunking down substantial amounts for games that take on average 50 to 100 hours to complete -- roughly the amount of time spent in semester of college courses. "Some young person is going to spend $50 on this, yet they won't take 50 minutes to learn algebra," he says. "I wanted to know why."

He says that game manufacturers deal with a compelling paradox from which educators can learn.

Games have to be challenging enough to entertain, yet easy enough to solve -- or at least easy enough for the player to feel like he or she is making progress. "To me, that was the challenge schools face," he says. "I wanted to see why these game designers are better at that."

Teaching Worldviews

Research shows, Mr. Gee says, that people learn best when they are entertained, when they can use creativity to work toward complex goals, when lesson plans incorporate both thinking and emotion, and when the consequences of actions can be observed. Those needs, he says, aren't met in college or school classrooms, where students are often given lists of facts, told to memorize them, and expected to regurgitate them on tests or in essays.

Video games, on the other hand, immerse people in worlds and make them rely on problem-solving skills to reach defined goals. In a well-designed game, people can even learn new skills and see the consequences of their knowledge, or their ignorance, as their scores climb or fall. Assessment is a cinch -- every keystroke and high score is recordable.

Mr. Gee points out that both the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, and the U.S. Army have developed video games. In Ethnic Cleansing, the National Alliance game, a player runs through a rotted city, killing blacks, Latinos, and Jews. In America's Army, a player learns how to work on a team to conduct missions and raids, and screw-ups can lead to jail time at Fort Leavenworth. "These groups see this as a cutting-edge way to interact with people's minds -- not to teach facts, but to teach worldviews. And yet schools don't."

"I'm no fan of people going into the Army," he adds, "but the Army realizes that that game recruits people on one level, and on another lets people who want to be soldiers see what it's like to be in a modern army. But what is it like to be a modern scientist? What is it like to be a modern businessman? We could build worlds like this."

Critics charge that the games can't teach content -- the facts of history, science, and so on. But, Mr. Gee says, people who play games are often inspired to study topics related to the game. His son, now 8, not only plays a game called Age of Mythology, but also checks out books about mythology at the library, writes to his friends about the game and about mythological characters, and reads articles in gaming magazines.

Keep the Books

Mr. Gee would not advocate throwing out books and traditional materials for classes composed of only games. But he would dump lessons that focus on teaching historical trivia -- names and dates, say -- in favor of showing students the big picture. "We're still judging people by essays and whether they have memorized the knowledge that we think is important when that knowledge is readily available on the Internet," he says.

In the modern world, in which actions and events are so elaborately interconnected, there is a premium on getting people to think about systems, he says. One of the best ways to do that is by having students play games like Rise of Nations or Civilization, in which the player manages a civilization's people, politics, and resources in settings that can range from ancient times to a sci-fi future. While playing the game, he says, students pick up historical facts surrounding real-life civilizations.

Mr. Gee acknowledges that his ideas have plenty of critics. When he started looking into games a few years ago, his graduate students didn't want to hear about it. They charged one another 25 cents every time someone asked a question that gave Mr. Gee an opening to talk about games. "My colleagues thought I was crazy," he says. "Fortunately, around here they are very tolerant of letting senior faculty do what they want."

Among some established academics outside of Madison, however, Mr. Gee's ideas are received with skepticism, even disdain. David W. Breneman, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, lauds Mr. Gee for thinking about technology in new ways and considering what interests students outside of the classroom. One could think of a case study as a type of game, he says.

But Mr. Breneman, who is not a video-game player, doesn't buy the notion that a game like Grand Theft Auto III could be a teaching tool. "Horsing around with these games might teach problem solving, but you don't learn anything about the world," he says. Mr. Gee "has probably pushed the limits to get people talking -- you have to be an extremist to get attention these days."

Traditionalists are even less charitable. Edward C. Smith, the director of the American-studies program at American University, sees video games and other technology as distractions that lead to the dumbing-down of college classrooms. He fondly remembers the days when he had to sit quietly with a book and memorize whole passages of Shakespeare. "I know where I'm coming from is completely out of the loop of where things are going," he says, adding that many of his students are ignorant, unsophisticated, uncreative, and shameless about what they don't know.

"I see an intellectual devolution, not a revolution, here," he says. "If you're going to replace traditional methods of education with something new, you should replace it with something better. If this guy thinks that playing some goddamn video game is the equivalent of memorizing a Shakespeare soliloquy, that's crazy."

Mr. Gee replies: "It's not the equivalent. It's more the equivalent of being able to produce a play, of being able to make up poetry. I think people ought to produce things rather than memorize."

"Let's keep in mind that Shakespeare in its time was popular entertainment, and that the elite looked down upon it," he adds. "We all know that some of the things that kids know now will be elite knowledge."

Curriculums dedicated to video-game criticism, game design, and education through games have been established at many colleges, including Southern Methodist University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University. Students like Robin Hunicke, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Northwestern University, are becoming more common. Ms. Hunicke is developing artificial intelligence that will automatically adjust the difficulty of a game to match the ability of the player. Her work is grounded in educational theories that say that people learn best when they are in the "flow" -- challenged and thinking but not overwhelmed.

Growing academic acceptance of video games is reflected in the creation of online journals dedicated to games, like Game Studies (http://gamestudies.org). They feature articles with hefty titles, like "Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis." A handful of conferences dedicated to the topic are scheduled for the fall. In September, Microsoft will sponsor a symposium for academics dedicated to exploring how game technology could be used to enhance learning.

The New York Law School and the Yale Law School will co-sponsor a conference in November called "The State of Play," which will feature a discussion of the new social, psychological, and legal issues created by video games.

Attitudes are changing in Mr. Gee's department as well. Half of the candidates who applied for two positions last year had some background in the study of video games. One of those hired was Kurt Squire, who had worked on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Games-to-Teach Project, which develops educational video games.

And while Mr. Gee's graduate students once mocked his interest in games, now many of them incorporate games into their theses. One of his students, Katherine Clinton, studies what she calls the "experiential aspects of learning" in video games -- for example, how a student might better learn about honeybees by becoming a bee in a game and having to collect pollen, perform dances, and ward off threats to the hive.

Another student, Alice Robison, studies the ways that video games encourage players to create characters and worlds, and how those techniques can be applied to teaching writing and rhetoric.

'A Second Job'

Yet another student, Constance Steinkuehler, is interested in how thinking develops in the online, role-playing atmosphere of video games, including the way in which a semi-collective "hive mind" evolves among the players. In particular, she studies players of Lineage, a game in which people from around the world can band together in small armies and clans and go adventuring in a fantasy world.

Her work has led to unusual research methods. Early on, she found that serious players wouldn't respond to her unless she had a powerful character.

Now, as Princess Adeleid, she plays Lineage four to six hours a day, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to lead her clan into battle.

"It's like a second job," she says. "The most I've ever played in one sitting, and I probably shouldn't admit this, was 30 hours." A friend in England, who was playing with her at the time, collapsed in exhaustion at his computer partway through the session.

Ms. Steinkuehler would like to write her dissertation for lay audiences, like the parents of video-gamers, and she plans to work in academe after graduation. She is not concerned about her prospects. "Those of us who grew up with Nintendo are moving into professor positions," she says. "If you pay attention to politics and what's happening in the field, I should have no worries about getting a job."

Mr. Gee's graduate students do some of their research -- that is, playing hours of games -- in a quiet little room on the University of Wisconsin campus. The room is outfitted with a couch, a PlayStation 2, an Xbox, a couple of PC's, and piles and piles of video games and strategy books, all purchased through Mr. Gee's endowed professorship. (The students have put speakers for surround sound on their wish list for the room.)

Mr. Gee says he doesn't take support from game companies, hoping to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Mr. Jenkins, of MIT, complained in an essay for Salon that moralist video-game haters used his associations with game companies to undermine his arguments that video games are a valid art form.

After a story by Mr. Gee about the educational merits of video games appeared in Wired magazine, he got many calls from game designers who were eager to discuss their ideas for educational games. But few of them really understood what aspects of a game make it educational, he says.

"People seem to think that anything you click on is a game," so designers come out with products that have a shellac of quizzing on top of a game, he says. "The power of these games is not the clicking. The power is being able to extend your mind and body into this virtual space, and in that virtual space being able to take on an identity that you can think about in comparison to the real world."

What's more, he adds, game designers have to start thinking about creating games within the context of a curriculum, and most companies are set up to design games as stand-alone products. There is hope, he says, in teachers' designing their own games. Modifications for popular games are available. An instructor who knows something about games or computers could customize The Sims or Civilization for a study of, say, Roman history.

But that future seems a bit distant. Conventional wisdom rules classrooms at the moment. The Bush administration's new educational policies, like the No Child Left Behind Act, promote standardized testing and curriculums based on learning distinct facts. For the time being, he says, students may do what they have to do to get through school -- and then spend their real study time at the computer after the school day is over.

"People have always condemned new technologies," he says. "We can either bury our heads in history, or we can realize games are not going away and build good things out of their potential."

• Game Research -- a site that discusses the art, science, and business of computer games: http://game-research.com
  
• Game Studies -- "the international journal of computer game research": http://www.gamestudies.org
  
• Games-to-Teach Project -- designs educational games at MIT: http://cms.mit.edu/games/education
  
• Joystick101.org -- "a community of gamers, designers, critics, academics, and researchers interested in the in-depth study of video games": http://www.joystick101.org
  
• Ludology.org -- a site that archives opinions, articles, academic papers, and news about conferences and other events in video-game studies: http://ludology.org
  
• MetaGame Group -- a project at the University of California at Irvine that, in part, seeks to "develop the study of games and game culture as a serious academic field": http://www.calit2.net/meta-game
  

• Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy, by Andrea A. diSessa (MIT Press, 2000)
  
• Digital Game-Based Learning, by Marc Prensky (McGraw-Hill, 2000)
  
• Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds, by J.C. Herz (Little, Brown, 1997)
  
• The Nature of Computer Games: Play as Semiosis, by David Myers (Peter Lang, 2003)
  
• What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)