Some thoughts on video gaming

A few years ago I was a manager for several different GameStop stores. When I decided to make a big career shift and move into teaching, one regret I had was that the vast majority of the experience and skills that I had built up to be a successful and marketable retail store manager wouldn’t really carry over. But upon reflecting on my experiences in different stores, it hit me that I have a fairly good insight into areas that almost all American students have an enormous interest in – not just video games, but music and movies as well.

For video games, it’s important to acknowledge that they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. There is a very large gender gap when gauging students’ interest in electronic gaming, although more and more girls have found gaming approachable and accessible in the past five or ten years. Systems like the Wii and Nintendo DS and the growing popularity of simple mobile games have brought in tons of demographics that would never have been interested in gaming in the 16-bit days.

What I’ve found most fascinating about the gaps in interest in video gaming is that there’s virtually no difference in interest across different socioeconomic groups. Attainability of the most modern gaming machines and the newest software may be different, but you’ll find no shortage of students in Newark who love playing their Playstation 2 systems as much as more affluent suburban students who own every up-to-date console available. A shared interest like this seems very rare to me, it doesn’t seem very likely that children with such starkly different backgrounds and cultures would universally love video games. So if a vast majority of our students are so into gaming, why is it so hard to come up with ways to use this interest to engage our students’ learning?

It could be that educational software is simply unwelcome on these platforms. Consoles like Leapster are a rare case of a perfectly effective educational video game experience, but only because all the hardware and software is exclusively focused on that purpose. Furthermore, the target audience is for a fairly young age, and as it carries no other entertainment purposes, other home and handheld consoles become more desirable as the child grows older.

When the DS first came out, Nintendo began exploring ways to incorporate educational software and came out with some great titles like Brain Age, Personal Trainer: Math, and Learn Science. Brain Age in particular was a huge commercial success and got a lot of parents to reconsider the value of allowing their children to spend time playing video games. To a certain extent, though, the presence and success of the games may have been based around naive purchases. In my experience, the vast majority of the copies of educational software we sold were purchased as gifts by the parents or relatives but rarely or never put to good use. Lots of children immediately traded the software in to buy more engaging games, and the general impression I got was that the only benefit of having educational software was that Nintendo made their products more marketable by claiming they had better intentions for the kids using their systems.

Despite the inherent difficulty in merging the worlds of electronic entertainment and education, I feel that there’s something important to our students’ ever-growing interest in video gaming. I’m not sure how I would go about tying in this interest my students may have into my classroom – I’m certain that engaging the students as a class with games would be ineffective, but in certain one-on-one scenarios perhaps I can use a particular student’s interest in games to motivate learning. In my case, this may be finding out what kind of game they’re into and having them analyze how certain physics properties were programmed into the game’s engines or perhaps having them find moments in the game where the physics don’t actually make sense.

In the end, regardless of how any of us may feel about gaming, we have to face facts - we're all going to have students who love them. How would you go about engaging a student who has no interest in your class but loves playing Halo?