Playing Video Games

I always believe firmly that playing video games is a waste of time, which maybe is not supposed to be the idea of modern relatively young people, as it is the same as the grandfather in the article. However, I think in this way because of my nephew,who has been addicted to some shooting game called CS and at the same time, he is doing very poorly in his study, which is blamed on the game he is playing. I am going to translate this blog into Chinese and send it to my cousin and hopefully it can make him feel a little bit better and change his attitude to video games and his son

Several ideas have been picked up from the article, Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games A "Waste of Time", that I personally think need to be highlighted as follows.

1. Video game is a new LITERACY.
The meaning of literacy has been changed greatly since there are more artifacts that can convey meanings nowadays apart from words. However, because of the traditional understanding of learning, people deny that texts fall into different genres including video games.

2. Passive, active and critical learning
Most of the knowledge that children have learned from school is considered from passive learning, as the main purpose of the study is for passing exams without knowing the real meaning or how to apply the knowledge learned. Active learning is learning to experience the world in a new way, to affiliate with people and prepare for future learning. While critical learning refers to "how to think about the domain at a meta level as a complex system of interrelated parts". That requires the learners to know how to locate meanings of multimodality in various domains and learn both internally and externally.

3. How to learn from video games?
Not all the video games are helpful to learning because it's determined by the internal design of the game and the people around the leaner. Not all video game playing is considered learning as we need to see if the learner is engaged actively and critically.

From the above summary, we may need to think as educators or parents what kind of attitude we should keep toward video games. Definitely we cannot shout the children away from the video games, which will rouse the negative mentality to your instructions.

The selection of video games is the first step, as the internal design of games matters a lot on learning. I was once recommended a computer game called "big fish eats small fish", but I just played it twice, because for the second time, I was able to pass all the levels. It was too easy. The game is to test how quick you click your mouse without any mental activities. So we should guide the children to play those games with potentials for active and critical learning. I have seen some good games which allow you to form a group, to choose weapons, to have different theurgies, to travel extensively with different vehicles, to fight with another party, to chat online with the team members on the strategies, etc. I once tried to learn it, in vain, but my nephew has mastered it quite well. It's really complicated. And I guess it is the sort of game that can help with critical leanings.

The guide to the children is vital too when they are playing games. Sometimes they keep on playing because they want to come to the next level, then they can possess a better gun or something. But in this process, they cannot realize what they can learn from it, like experiencing the world in a new way and collaborating with people. The adults should make it more explicit to make them realize that they are actually using very good strategies solving problems and how they could adapt the same way in studying.

Time limitation to the games is another important issue. Video games could be a way of learning but it's not enough. Thus children cannot spend too much time on it without enough time on school study.

This article provides another way for us to consider games, learning and to some other matters in daily life.