You must have faced this conundrum in your life that are games good for us? From our teachers to our parents, almost everyone around us thinks that games of all kinds are just pastime activities and should be played only for entertainment. However, the reality is quite different. Games are not only played by humans; even younger animals of many species play games within their environments.
But Why?
The real world is full of high risks, you miss one step and boom you can get yourself in trouble. For example, if you look at kittens they do play with smaller insects and sometimes with absurd things such as threads. Playing allows them to simulate their future objective of survival in safer environments. Traditional games that children still play can be categorized into tag games (ball tag), hiding games (hides & seek), jumping games (leapfrog) etc. In all of these, we can see a pattern of how each one of these games would have been used by our ancestors to train children for hunting and gathering. These games are still played but they do not have a direct relation with the kinds of problems we humans face now a days. As hunting and gathering is not an objective for human beings in today’s world, so should we change the kind of games we play? Why not have games that will teach us to build engineering products, solving agricultural problems, making spaceships etc. But one will say we have schools for that.
What is wrong with Schools?
One of the biggest problems with schools is that they just allow teachers to talk at students. It is not a two way and interactive process; we just fill our classes with children and pack their minds with all kinds of extraneous knowledge. Learning is not a one-time course; it happens over a period of time. We must allow a person to solve same problem with multiple opportunities in different contexts. When we ask kids or even youngsters to memorize topics in school, we tell them about a reward in later life which might or might not be received. This decreases their interest even further with not having any end goal in sight. They do not find any application of all this information we fed to them. To somehow make sense of this, we have introduced an extrinsic reward. This comes in different forms from showing off grades to peers or getting a treat of some kind.
Reclaiming our Gaming Brain for Pedagogy
Imagine an interactive system, which helps us to study how to make a bridge by learning complex concepts such as weight distribution, tension, compression through trial and error. Elements of this larger science is given to us with an end goal defined. This system or we may say game will allow us to make mistakes, take risks and find solutions which are novel. Slowly reaching to a result of how a best possible bridge can look like.
Bridging the gap between learning and application
We have billions of variables around us with which we can interact and can learn about them. However, a game can help us to limit these variables and just study those which are of interest to us. Experimenting and interacting with these finite variables will help us to find the fundamental principles behind them. For example, a game like Monopoly helps us to understand relationship between Capital, Opportunities, Debt and Ownership. However, such a game might not allow us to get a deep understanding of a topic, but it will give us abstract ideas. We can experience things which might take hundreds of years for us to learn in real world. Because we can interact with the system, perform an action, go back and try something new eventually reaching to a best solution.
Final Words
Games allow us to compress time and complexity into capsules that are relevant, fun and consumable. For example, a game about global warming can help us to understand how humans are making climate change happen. This game will allow us to tweak our output and consumption to show us the long-term effects of each. Human mind is not monolithic, we can learn through multiple sources such as stories, art, design, expression etc. We compress all of this and make a personal heuristic model to amplify our genetic code.
References:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SI1KuYpDFk&list=WL&index=33&t=0s