Jesse's+Journal

=Jesse's Reading/Gaming Journal=

Week 1
Reading about James Paul Gee’s late introduction to video games, I’m struck by the fact that video and computer games (and games in general) have been a part of my life for much longer than a lot people. I grew up with video games. From Oregon Trail and Odell Lake on the Apple IIe to Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt on the Nintendo, my first experiences with video games date back to elementary school. More than just video and computer games, though, I have always been fascinated with games in general. Computer games, video games, board games, card games, role-playing games (e.g. Dungeons & Dragons), and athletic games and sports.. I played them all. So while I can look at games and game culture and identify learning and principles about learning, I think it’s healthy to remember that a lot of people still see games as a “waste of time”.

Further, it’s probably important to mention that with the games I play I’m typically looking for a very specific kind of game experience. When I play a game, I won’t just play it once, but typically many times over, trying out different characters, classes, routes, skills, etc. I want to learn everything there is to know about that game, and am typically drawn to games of such depth and complexity that they can be played at many levels (of understanding). Game designer Richard Bartle would classify me as an archetypal ‘Explorer’ gamer, one of the four archetypes of his ‘primary gamer motivations’ system. So it’s probably fair to say that even when playing games for entertainment I’m actively trying to learn from them, while other game players may not be thinking as overtly about what and how they’re learning while playing.

One of the first things that caught my attention was the section about the game World of Warcraft and the concept of “enacting identities” (pg 7). A self-professed ‘hardcore’ World of Warcraft player for over three years, I logged thousands of hours of playtime (In fact over 5,000 hours) and delved into every aspect of the game. I strongly agree with James Paul Gee that Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games like World of Warcraft are an excellent place to examine the process of taking on and enacting ‘identities’. As a ‘Tauren Druid’ by the name of Toskk, I served as a Human Resources Officer for a guild of ~300 players spread across the United States, Australia, and Indonesia, as well as created an online mathematical model for the game used by over 1,500 players each day. At the time I stopped playing, the model was available in four languages, with a total readership of over 100,000 players. I strongly suspect that more people know my ‘toon’ than know me.

I also ‘take on’ two technology-related ‘real’ identities. In one of them, I am the primary technology support for the Pacific University College of Education. I believe in always acting professionally and respectfully toward faculty, students, and staff, regardless of how comfortable with technology they are. I think a lot about how they need to use technology and attempt to anticipate issues and problems that may occur, even looking for solutions to keep issues from happening in the first place. I also place high value on teaching users how to fix technology issues themselves, rather than simply fixing the issue myself. In my other identity, I’m an Adjunct Instructor for Pacific University and (now) Western Oregon University, and teach technology courses for educators. I try to place the goals and interests of my students first, and I value practical and low-cost technology tools, meaningful learning, and student-directed exploration. I also like to think about the potential of educational gaming and the merging of curriculum design with game design.

Coming from a Science background, James Paul Gee’s definition of ‘literacy’ makes a lot of sense to me. All too often in the classes I took throughout my education, Science was taught as a body of decontextualized facts. Absent was the method and process by which they were discovered, and the utility they might hold for future inquiry. As James Paul Gee would put it, what was missing was that I wasn’t learning how to think, act, and value as a scientist would. These aspects of science literacy are really critical.. scientific ‘fact’ is only particularly useful in that it allows us to make predictions.

My most recent experience with trying to learn in a new semiotic domain has actually been learning to play disc golf. At first glance, disc golf doesn’t seem like a complex-enough activity to have its own semiotic domain. You take a Frisbee and try to throw it into a metal basket a few hundred feet away.. how hard can that be? Well, it turns out that disc golfers will laugh at you if you call it a Frisbee or bring one to the course, unless of course you’re a professional disc golfer, in which case they call Frisbees ‘superclass discs’. What most disc golfers throw are ‘discs’, and there are easily 200 different kinds of discs out there, each with their own unique flight characteristics. Just picking a disc requires learning a fair amount of technical jargon. Each disc is rated for ‘speed’ (the top speed or terminal velocity of the disc), ‘turn’ (the tendency of the disc to turn to the right or left while traveling at high speeds, often referred to as ‘stability’), ‘fade’ (the tendency of the disc to turn to the right or left as it slows down), and ‘glide’ (the tendency of the disc to stay afloat with less speed). Further, there is more jargon for describing how you throw a disc. Throwing a disc with the outer edge angled down is called a ‘hyzer’, while throwing with the outer edge angled up is an ‘anhyzer’. I think the point of all of this, though, is that without actually playing the game and throwing (a lot of) discs, none of the extensive set of terminology related to disc golf is of much utility or value. A person could memorize the disc golf terminology but still not understand the relationships between the physical aerodynamic properties of the disc and the form, strength, and technique of the thrower, or see how such terminology could be useful.