Lobo Duck Pond(er)

I had the pleasure of reading my book, Video Games and Education, by Harry Brown by the duck pond today, in the shade no less. It was nice. I read through some good stuff that I think you’ll enjoy the below quotes as food for thought.

“If videogames, like literature would transform consciousness and enthrall both critical and popular audiences, its creators must be artists as well as artisans, trained in the craft of writing, as well as the use of the complex tools necessary to tell stories in this new medium” (p.19).

Last year my middle school students were all over digital literacy. They really wanted to know how game designers write code and compose plot lines. This was great because as much as my students used digital literacies, they did not know much about how they were created. Players can turn into game designers. Just like a reader can turn into an author. 

“This presence within a virtual world, Ryan explains, allows us “to explore an environment, and the ability to change it”. Like Baroque frescoes, video games stimulate a world beyond view, but as interactive environments, they also simulate a world that is responsive to the player, the illusion that our actions as well as our vision extends into their world” (p.46).

I’ve talked to two social studies teachers who have used Assassin’s Creed games in their classroom to help teach certain points of history. The idea is not for kids to play games all day in class, but to relate the digital literacies in their everyday lives to your curriculum. 

“Ludologists, those who study videogames as games, insist that playing a game differs cognitively from reading a novel or viewing a film. While the emotional satisfaction we derive from a narrative relies on following a sequence of events and identifying with characters, the ludic or gameplay experiences relies instead on the mastery of puzzles and problems” (p.4).

I’ll save these quotes for a paper down the line… I think it’s funny to think with all I have going on in my life, I still want to play my Super Nintendo for a little bit. All this talk about video games makes me want to play one. I think I’ll play Pilot Wings - classic! This game was made in 1990. I remember playing it when I was four years old.

Don't Tell Me Video Games are for Kids

Don't tell me video games are for kids. The Education Software Association released its annual report in 2014 which states the average age of a video game player in this country is 31 years old, and to boot, 48% of them were females. So lets get reading (playing).

• The number of females gamers age 50 and older increased by 32% from 2012 to 2014
• Women age 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (36%) than boys age 18 or younger (17%).
• The average number of years gamers have been playing video games: 14
• Adult gamers have been playing for an average of 16 years, with the adult men averaging 18 years and adult women averaging 13 years.
• The average computer game player is 35 years old.
• 44% of game players state that computer and video games give them the most value for their money, compared to with DVDs, music, or going out to the movies.
• Casual and social game play on mobile devices and online has increased significantly over the past year. Among most frequent gamers, social games are now the most popular genre, increasing in popularity by 55% from 2012 to 2013.

I bring up these figures because every time you see the word "games" or "playing" above, just replace it with reading in your head, and you will begin to understand my pressing concern with video games and reading. In my book, Brown discusses the trend of reading to be something much more digital than we ever thought it would be.

Below: I provided some basic rental stats from Redbox, a popular rental company. There is a new digital library in town, and they aren't checking out books people...

So Lets Play

I have enjoyed playing video games since I can remember. Matter of fact, I can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't playing video games. This is why I chose this book, and this topic of study. I have to admit, going into this reading, I am ready to push the boundries of literacy not only from a theoretical perspective, but also on a practice level too. I am a teacher of language arts at a local middle school. I have been employing video games into my classroom for a year now, and I can say it has been a remarkable journey so far. Thus, I am looking to keep that journey moving. This book should provide me with some more theoretical backing to my practices next year as a teacher, so lets play.

Chapter one of the book is about video games and story telling. This is a great place to start. As a language arts teacher, experiences, stories, and life are what my curricula is all about. Much like our lives, we are a story. As students in school, we read and write about life, stories both fiction and non fiction. The first basic principle to get across here is this, video games are just another medium for learning. Within video games, we can live, learn, solve, and question whatever is around us. It is very similar to anything you are very familiar with; however, video games can provide us with a medium that seems endless in its possibilities. So, lets get some things squared away before we get started.

First, why even consider video games as learning tools? How can this even relate to storytelling to begin with? First start by watching this short video by James Gee who talks about video games as problems which need to be solved.

Video Games and Education

I have chosen to read Video Games and Education by Harry J. Brown. This book has been referred to me by my advisor and several of my guiding teachers towards my path to get my Ph.D. My focus of studies revolves around literacy, learning, and technology. I believe that video games are a great place to look for all three of these things. This book is a great place to continue this investigation, and I am sure I will be able to use this book to help me understand more challenging concepts of literacy in relation to learning in and out of the classroom. This book will be a challenging read, but I think I can make some serious progress though it in the time I have left in this course. I have provided a picture of the book below:

Blog Blog Blog

There is a lot of blogging out there these days! It seems that everyone has one, and they are updating it frequent. If you are not blogging, you are probably reading other people's blogs. I can agree on this, as I have read blogs for years now, but honestly, I have never blogged myself. I always thought it was reserved for those who could not keep their thoughts confined to their own head. I was never one to go out of my way to search, locate or track down somebody's blog for their ideas on this or that. I was more of one to end up on a blog because a web search brought me there.

Bloggers always reminded me of people I'd see reporting on TMZ the television station. In my mind, blogging was reserved for those who had the time to sit and write in their internet diary about their thoughts in hopes that someone would read it, share it, and somehow become famous. This outlandish thought was fueled by the stereotypical thought that blogging was a bunch of whining from people who had nothing better to do with a computer.

Times have changed. I now see the importance for blogging. As a growing scholar in the discipline of education, I find myself reading as many literacies as I can to learn about the great world of education. This thoughtful paradigm shift within myself has quaked free an abundance of resources that I find myself desperately trying to read as fast as I can.

As I looked for blogs to read, I found myself looking for blogs that contained information about things I like myself. For example, I began searching for blogs that contained information about video games, ice hockey, and auto mechanics. These blogs were great because not only were they all very different, but they all contained a wide variety of multimedia within them. I noticed that each type of blog I looked at contained information in ways that might suite that audience more properly than another. For example, I noticed the auto mechanics blogs I read often contained many step-by-step instructions pertaining to do-it-yourself fixes to cars and upgrades. The ice hockey blogs often contained videos from a variety of places. The video game blogs often contained actual games to play!

Lets be honest though, not everything found out there is worth reading, or remembering for that matter. It takes a great deal of practice to understand how digital literacies like blogging works. So, my first task is to explore what is out there. A great place to do this is within my graduate course on reading and writing across content fields. Here I'll be able to practice my skills in order to become a competent blogger,  so here we go!