Video Games Are More than Hand Eye Coordination
Everyone, but the players that is, that talks about video games see them as pure entertainment and a waste of time. When I was a kid, my mother thought that watching TV and movies was a waste of time. But when I got older and started writing screenplays and studying film, she saw that it could possibly be a career that was sparked from watching all those movies when I was a kid. I think the same goes for video games, especially the games that James Gee, in his chapter on Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a “Waste of Time”? discusses. These role playing games are not your father’s Pong. To maneuver through these games, you have to think about your surroundings, where you are, where the other characters are and how to get from one place to another. There are often maps that have to be interpreted and followed in order to get from one place to another. The player must adapt themselves quickly to their surroundings in order to progress through the game. This is more than hand eye coordination. This is critical thinking and learning on the spot. This is watching where you are, where you are going, and many times where you have come from in order to continue through the game. I know adults that cannot master these games and I think that this dismissal of the games is partially a response to a feeling of intimidation and fear of the unknown. We have seen all through history critics negatively responding to something new that became a foundation for something brilliant in the future. Including the response and label of “outlandish” to statements such as the possibility that the world was not flat, or that the earth rotated around the sun, not the other way around. I agree with Gee that “If learning is to be active, it must involve experiencing the world in new ways.” We have entered a phase that incorporates electronic communication, on all sorts of levels, and that electronic basis is going to continue, because we cannot go backward. How do we equip children to be ready for what is coming next? How do we train them to be comfortable in an electronic age and prepare them for the next step? Can we equip them by simply putting a book in front of them and teach them the theory of the world around them without hands on experience? I think that in order to prepare them for what they will have to learn in ten years, we have to think of new ways to instruct. Ten years ago, Rowan was not the electronic transfer it is today. Most readings were handed out by the instructor in class, a trip to the library was exactly that and not a VPN connection from your home to available online databases, or, we go onto Blackboard and download reading assignments. Who knows the advances that Rowan will make in electronic communication in the next ten years? We owe it to our children to look at every possibility available to reach them and allow them to grow and be prepared for what they will encounter in ten years. Different types of personalities respond to different stimuli, we should allow our children the availability of every kind of teaching tool to spark that core of interest and response.
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