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Fall 2003
Class: CEP 911 Intellectual History of Educational Psychology
Instructor: David Wong, PhD
College of Education, Michigan State University, Lansing, Michigan, USA
Metaphors are powerful tools for understanding and appreciating ideas. Metaphors are especially valuable for clarifying complex or hidden ideas. Learning is both complex and hidden, so educational psychologists use a variety of metaphors to describe and predict learning. Computer games aren't hidden, but the experience and consequences of playing are hidden and can be very complex. The field of game studies includes the intersection of learning and computer games. At this intersection we find the influence of significant historic metaphors in educational psychology. We can also predict the legacy of these metaphors in the ongoing research of games for learning. Three sources of useful metaphors are Piaget, Bruner, and information-processing theory.
Jean Piaget provided many powerful metaphors for learning, including viewing children as "little scientists." Piaget described learning as adaptation, and argued that a learner should be free to discover new ideas autonomously. "Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered for himself, that child is kept from inventing and consequently from understanding it completely." (Piaget, in Miller, 1993, p. 90) Games are potentially ideal domains for learners to discover new ideas through semi-structured experiences. A player must actively engage the game, and can only succeed through assimilation and accommodation. In assimilation, the player categorizes the "rhetoric" of the game into his working schemas. For example, in a first-person shooter game, the player must become adept at distinguishing and shooting enemies. In accommodation, the player must adjust his schemas to address anomalies in the game. Continuing the example, some enemies may be immune to one type of attack, so the player must actively experiment with alternative tactics. In general, adaptation seems critical for cognitive change (i.e. learning). "If taken seriously by students, anomalies provide the sort of cognitive conflict... that prepares the student's conceptual ecology for an accommodation." (Posner, Strike, Hewson, and Gertzog, 1982)
Piaget's influence extends through Seymour Papert, whose own work impacts educational technology, including games for learning. Papert's theories are "grounded in notions about assimilation and accommodation." (Scott, Cole, and Engel, 1992) Papert regards learning spaces like the LOGO programming environment as powerful tools. Papert maintains Piaget's emphasis on discovery, through "constructionism." Computer environments like LOGO ensure that "the learner is engaged in the construction of something external or at least shareable." (Papert, in Scott et al., 1992) Through constructing something, a learner discovers the possibilities, limitations, and relationships of the environment and himself. If games offered more sophisticated and varied environments, they would be better spaces for such "exploration and self-definition," but such potential has rarely been realized. (Provenzo, 1992) Most games offer few new ideas, and only demand quick reflexes, familiar mental models, or both. To support constructionism and similar pedagogies, games must be more open-ended and foster multiple strategies. Player mindfulness is also critical, as I'll discuss later.
Piaget's developmental stages are also an influential metaphor for game studies. Like all instructional materials, educational games need to be developmentally appropriate. A specific game should be appealing and accessible to the target level of development. The game should challenge the learner to "move up" from his current Piagetian stage. A very young child may be moving from sensorimotor to preoperational, so the game should have simple controls and challenge the player to interpret symbols. An older child may approaching the formal operational stage, so the game should hide some cause-effect relationships and challenge the player to develop abstract models for these relationships. Piaget's developmental stages are controversial (Miller, 1993, p. 87), so game designers should use them loosely, and depend on user testing for making final decisions.
Some of Jerome Bruner's metaphors for learning are also useful for game studies. Like Piaget, Bruner argued for the importance of discovery. Bruner further argued for the importance of structure in learning, in the sense that each subject has structure (e.g. mathematics has set theory). Learning is the process of discovering and appreciating structures. "To learn structure... is to learn how things are related," and "unless detail is placed into a structured pattern it is rapidly forgotten." (Bruner, 1977, p. 7, 24) Educators should guide learners in discovering and appreciating structures.
Games are excellent tools for such guidance, especially games that simulate structures. For example, Sim City simulates a city, with sophisticated relationships between economics, development, politics, and more. (e.g. High crime rates hurt property values, which hurt tax revenue.) With guidance from a teacher, a learner could play Sim City in order to discover and appreciate these relationships. With or without external guidance, the best games guide the player in learning these relationships. The player is pressured to experiment and to develop mental models, and rewarded when his models have predictive utility. As an experienced player, I have become skilled in this process of experimenting and predicting. My wife calls it "gamer sense," while James Gee calls it "the Intuitive Knowledge Principle." (Gee, 2003) Bruner believe such "intuitive thinking... is a much-neglected and essential feature of productive thinking." (Bruner, 1977, p. 13) If a game fostered the development of intuitive thinking, Bruner would praise it.
Bruner's spiral curriculum metaphor is very appropriate to game studies. Bruner believed that "any subject may be taught to anybody at any age in some form." (Bruner, 1977, p. 12) The commercial games industry demonstrates a tacit belief in this principle, since they target nearly every age group. At one end of the spectrum, young children are offered visually-straightforward games with simple gameplay mechanics. At the other end, sophisticated Civilization-style games challenge older children and adults with highly symbolic interfaces and intricate causal relationships. Within a single game, a spiral curriculum is a necessary element of good design. A player is introduced to the simplest ideas and gameplay first, and proceeds through increasingly-complicated challenges. These challenges are often explicit levels, so the player has a strong sense of circular, upward progression. For example, every level may involve gaining a new in-game ability, practicing that ability, and defeating an "end boss" through mastery of the new ability (e.g. Metroid Prime).
Bruner emphasized the importance of transcending metaphors. Guided discovery should facilitate transfer, so after playing a simulation-based game, a learner's understanding should closely match the actual subject. Playing a game can be a very pleasing metaphorical experience, since games generally employ static, figurative messages in strict microcosms. For example, there is a specific relationship between crime and property value in Sim City, and once the player learns the relationship, the game is forever easier. Bruner argued that learners need to understand the underlying structure in a metacognitive sense. That is, a Sim City player needs to understand the limitations of the simulation and any learning derived from it. As metaphors, games and simulations may be biased or over-simplified. Again, Bruner can help. He emphasized recruiting subject-area experts to help create curriculum. To facilitate transfer, a simulation needs high external fidelity (i.e. it should accurately reflect real-world relationships). So subject-area experts should be part of the teams that design games for learning. Furthermore, gameplay should be naturalistic or "endogenous," requiring the player to "learn the properties of a virtual world through interacting with its symbology, learning to detect relationships among those symbols, and inferring the game rules that govern the system." (Squire, 2002)
Information-processing theory (I-P) offers a wealth of metaphors for game studies, because of its close proximity to the field. There is significant overlap of ideas and methods at the nexus of information-processing, instructional systems design, and game design. For example, interface design is important to and guided by all these fields. Information must be accessible without being overwhelming, for learners/players to process it effectively.
Both I-P researchers and game designers want to successfully model human learning and behavior. Researchers hope that "artificial intelligence" scripts will reveal more about the nature of learning and thinking, while designers want to challenge players with adaptive "bots" to compete with and against. The Turing Test is a grail in each field: an artificial system with enough "intelligence" as to be externally indistinguishable from a human.
Some I-P researchers deconstruct human behaviors, hoping to learn enough to construct artificial simulacrums. For example, problem-solving tasks can be broken done into algorithms. Inversely, game designers construct simulacrums to compel player behavior. For example, a computer-controlled opponent may attack in a specific pattern, compelling the player to dodge in a complementary pattern. More sophisticated challenges compel more sophisticated behaviors. For example, Sim City includes a series of disasters which require the player to adapt and invent strategies. The player has to exercise "control processes," to evaluate the situation and available options, and execute the appropriate routinized algorithms of behavior. Such "executive" metacognition is a popular metaphor among many researchers (e.g. Miller, 1993, p. 244). It's an especially powerful account when coupled with a metaphor of a problem space: an abstract, mental space for representing and manipulating problems (e.g. Putnam, Lampert, and Peterson, 1990, p. 79).
The metaphor of executive metacognition evokes the image of a business manager. While some metaphors for learning bring unwanted connotations, in this case the image is appropriate. A business manager depends on gathering accurate information and delegating tasks to competent staff. The "staff" of a human mind are routinized algorithms, and information comes from the sensory register and memory. According to some psychologists, a critical component of successful learning and problem solving is mindfulness at the executive level. For example, a student should evaluate his memorization and recall strategies and try to optimize these routines. Games can provide a rich context for learning and practicing I-P routines (e.g. "drill" games). Games can also improve executive processing, by challenging players with complex problems that yield to multiple solutions (e.g. Civilization). Such sophisticated contexts may be familiar and "natural" to children of the "Nintendo generation," because "they grew up with that kind of processing." (R. Spiro, personal communication, October 6, 2003) A game can demand executive mindfulness and flexibility, by challenging the player in a variety of unpredictable ways. The United States military and some corporations are using games to train their staff, because "they need people in touch with changing realities on the ground making the decisions." (Ibid.) (See also Prensky, 2001)
Games can challenge and thus strengthen control processes and the use of problem space, just as exercise challenges and strengthens muscles. Non-gamers are often amazed by gamers' abilities to multi-task and sort information. Ideally, the mental "strength training" of games should transfer to other settings. For example, consider a player who practices leadership by leading a group of other players in a game. The game may help the player learn to perceive and process signs of satisfaction or dissatisfaction among those he leads. If the game fosters more effective processing of such information in general, the player should become a better leader in other settings.
Transfer of in-game learning to external settings seems to depend on mindful playing. In general, Salomon, Perkins, and Globerson argue that technology users must be metacognitive about their thinking and learning with technology. They warn of a persistent danger of over-reliance on technology, causing a user's control processes to atrophy or deform (figuratively speaking). Instead, a user should be mindful of the nature of technology and his relationship with it. At least for computer programming, "...where mindful abstraction... has been cultivated by instruction, impressive transfer has been found...." (Salomon et al. 1991)
Thus, a player should be conscientious of the "rhetoric" of game. He should play to win, but he should also consider the game from a detached perspective. Ernest Adams suggests several dimensions for analyzing a game: physical, temporal, environmental, emotional, ethical, and "realism." (Adams applies quotation marks to "realism" for irony, since "real" and "unreal" are slippery labels in game studies.) (Personal communication, September 28, 2003) The options and consequences in a game constrain a player to the designers' choices in these dimensions. For example, in the ethical dimension, many games reward stealing. Characters can take and sell things that clearly don't belong to them. They are rewarded with more money, and there are seldom any negative consequences. A player who doesn't conform to this ethical rhetoric of kleptomania is disadvantaged by not having as much money.
A player should consider a game along all of Adams' dimensions. For example, a simulation should be judged for external fidelity, along dimensions like physical and temporal. The player should always ask, "What are the messages here? What are the assumptions? What things are included and what are excluded?" Such critical analysis of "meta-information" is widely considered valuable in reading, watching television, and watching movies. It has similar value for games. The player should use his metacognitive control processes to help generalize desirable learning and restrict undesirable learning. Without such mindfulness, there is a risk of generalizing undesirable learning, including over-simplified or otherwise-flawed understanding. This appreciative, critical mindfulness is a central principle of James Gee's What Videogames Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. (2003) Gee and others suggest that if educators want to foster such mindfulness, we should guide students in formally critiquing games and in designing their own games. In any medium, authorship fosters an acute awareness of the challenges and issues of encoding and decoding.
Finally, information-processing research has shown that children respond differently to characters compared to artifacts (e.g. cartoon characters vs. colored balls). (P. Mishra, personal communication, October 3, 2003) Stimuli on the border pose intriguing mysteries. For example, in one study children were presented with an inert stuffed animal and a semi-autonomous AIBO toy. (AIBO is a robotic dog, programmed with a playful simulation of a dog.) Children picked up the stuffed animal to look at it, but knelt down to look the AIBO in the eye. (Ibid.) Children may process information differently based on whether the source is a character or artifact. Research in this and similar phenomena will impact game design. With a better understanding how players process information in games, we may discover more effectives uses of games. For example, some children are more comfortable interacting with artifacts than people. (e.g. Some autistic children demonstrate this predilection.) Games (or toys like AIBO) may be effective border cases, allowing such students to learn social skills from within their comfort zone.
Piaget, Bruner, and information-processing theory offer useful metaphors for studying games for learning. Taken together, they sketch some design principles. Games for learning should challenge players to discover underlying structures. These structures should match their real-world inspirations. By adapting to the challenges of the game, players should develop mastery to transfer to non-game settings. The challenges should be presented in a progressive-yet-iterative pattern, like a spiral curriculum. Most importantly, players must be guided toward mindful consideration of a game. The concert of these principles should create an experience of optimal cognitive discomfort, presenting the player with information and choices that foster thinking, re-thinking, action, and learning.
Metaphors are powerful tools for understanding. Games provide as many metaphors as they take. For example, Peter Elbow has suggested a methodological "believing game" in which we can better understand new ideas by playing the role of a believer. (1986) A game gives a player a chance to believe by doing, thus accepting the designers' choices while simultaneously questioning them. In accepting, a player understands and appreciates. In questioning, a player learns.
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Created by Kym Buchanan | http://KymBuchanan.org | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
