Learn to play, play to learn

I feel that, over the years, I've got a lot out of playing computer games in addition to the intended entertainment factor. One game alone (Grim Fandango) helped me to extend my English vocabulary (I specifically remember hearing the word 'ostentatious' here for the first time), learn some basic Spanish phrases and vocabulary, and informed me about Mexican beliefs in relation to the afterlife and their celebration of The Day of the Dead. This, however, isn't a unique quality for a game. I have clear recollections of various bits of information I've learned from computer games. I've always thought of the things I've learned as mostly useless, but as I grow older (and hopefully wiser) I find myself being more and more aware of the value of this knowledge.

I've always been quite an interested person. I've always been curious about why things are the way they are, how things work, and how we got to this point in civilisation (the real one, not the game). The problem is that although I can be very interested in a given subject, I tend to need a little direction to get me started. With Grim Fandango, I simply wanted to play an interesting game that would be challenging but, most importantly, fun. It was a fun game with interesting characters and an exciting story, but the fringe benefit of playing was that it got me interested in The Day of the Dead festival and the beliefs surrounding it. Not only did I learn a lot from the game, but it whet my appetite, encouraging me to find more information on these beliefs. I've found computer games to be an incredibly powerful way to inspire learning, as well as being a resource to some extent.

Primary education

I mentioned simulators in my post last week. Many people know that pilots are trained in flight simulators, and some of you might be aware that some driving schools use driving simulators these days; but simulators are used for numerous things because, lets be honest, experience is much more useful than a lot of theory. You could spend months reading the instructions for your new mobile phone, but why bother? Most people keep the manual for reference and just get on with using the phone. Things stick in your head better when you've learned them yourself, and if they don't stick the first time, you will have at least had practice at figuring it out; making it easier to do it again. I never liked reading manuals, even for computer games. Games always come with a manual, but as far as I'm concerned, it's a reference guide, and I suspect that most people are the same. You check the manual on a drill because you want to make sure you don't put a hole through your leg, but mostly, learning is about doing.

Secondary education

Ignoring, for a moment, the information I've learned from games; I find it interesting to think of the skills I've learned. I can genuinely look at video games as having given me many opportunities to practice my lateral thinking, logic, management skills and strategies. I always find it interesting to watch other people play computer games. I think you can tell a lot about a person by how they act, and these behaviours can still be spotted when you watch someone playing a game. I am a perfectionist. I know most people who know me won't believe that but it's true. I've been known to be quite lazy, but in the past that has tended to result in me not finishing things. The things I actually finish, are done to a very high quality, and this became apparent in my gaming habits. If I messed up in a game, I would tend to reload a saved game from earlier and redo that section until I got the absolute best result possible. I learned where pitfalls were and was able to avoid them, as well as learning to spot them in the future. In contrast, I have a friend who also plays a lot of games, and when I watched him play the same games, it became apparent to me that there was a lot of his personality going into how he played the game. If something went wrong, he just pushed on. Even when things became desperate, he would continue playing until he achieved his goal. Obviously he would hit a dead end from time to time and he'd get a game over screen, but each scenario gave him more training. The interesting thing was that we were both learning, and both achieving the end goal; but I was amazed by the kind of insight that watching a person play games could give me. It has become even more apparent over the years that these interactions have become like practice for real life. I don't mean this in the sense of “I learned to drive from Grand Theft Auto” but that there are certain cognitive processes that can be honed through the use of computer simulations.

I recently got back into playing sudoku. I think that many people assume that because it's a game played with numbers, it's a game about maths; but sudoku is a game of logic. I introduced my girlfriend to the game and she has taken it up very enthusiastically, but she isn't particularly good at it at the moment. This isn't at all because she's dumb (she's quite the contrary) but she clearly hasn't played as much sudoku and so she hasn't had the same practice in using that form of logic. It's an easy comparison for me to make and through this logic exercise I can practice using my brain in certain ways that are beneficial in life. I find much the same in computer games. I love adventure games, especially ones with environmental puzzles. I am concious of having grown up with fairly well developed lateral thinking skills which I feel can be at least partly attributed to computer games. Again, I recently introduced my girlfriend (who has hardly ever played any computer games) to one of these games, and again I have found the results very interesting. She is very good at getting the answers and more than capable of solving the puzzles herself, but I found that if I'm in the room when she's playing, she can't help but ask me what she needs to do. This makes for quite an interesting game play style because , to be honest, there's no reason why she wouldn't ask me for the answer; I do know it after all. I even found that when I left the room and came back some time later, she had looked up a website with the solutions to the puzzles. That to me is brilliant task oriented thinking. She got the answer and the result. What is to say that she hasn't learned anything from that? She sought the answer herself and was presumably able to understand how the solution worked, and so she learned something new.

BA(Hons)

There is plenty of educational software out there. There are simulators and games that are specifically intended to teach us things, but I definitely feel that even mainstream games have something to offer. Even if the only thing we get is a taste for a deeper knowledge of something that game introduced us to. Games and simulations can train us, and exercise our brains; but they can also give us things to take away and consider and develop. There is such an ocean of games to choose from and whilst some of them might find you with your pants rolled up splashing in the shallows, other will give you reason to dive in head first; and you might just be surprised how deep they can go.

The Super Simulator

Here is something interesting that I read today: The first known flight simulator was developed in 1909 to help pilots learn to fly the Antoinette monoplane. Apparently some of the controls, more specifically the one concerned with controlling the roll of the plane, were slightly counterintuitive. The purpose of this was to give the pilot a chance to get used to controlling the plane before taking the real thing up into the air. Needless to say this saved the people building the planes a considerable amount of money that would have otherwise been spent on ads in the classifieds reading “Man wanted. Must have a head for heights. No fatties.” And if at this point you find yourself thinking “Surely Developing the world’s first flight simulator would be more expensive than a few more ads in the paper” think again. Take a look at what passed for a flight simulator in 1909.

"We admire your enthusiasm Frank, but this has got to be your shittiest parade float yet"

Compared to this; my shenanigans as a young boy, in which my brothers would push me down the garden in a box on a skateboard, look like astronaut training. If all this sounds just too ridiculous to believe, there is apparently a full-size model of this piece of high tech kit in the foyer of the Airbus Training Centre in Toulouse for you to check out at your convenience.

What does this have to do with anything? Well it’s like they say: Practice makes perfect. Simulation is a widely used method of teaching that has been around for a very long time, and I’m not just talking about barrels on seesaws here. Simulation is a natural part of how humans and animals learn to do things. Ever watched kittens play fighting? Lion cubs on the telly stalking each other in the grass? Or children playing house? These are all natural ways in which we learn to do the things we’re supposed to do (or in humans’ case, occasionally, expected to do). Some of it is instinct, some of it is imitation. As a child you might see your mum or dad talking into the phone, you might have a toy phone and so you do the same. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing but everyone else seems to be doing it, so it can’t be that weird. You even know that you have to start by mashing the keypad a few times because you’d just look stupid otherwise.  By the time you’re old enough to be allowed to use the phone you will probably be told that the numbers you press are important and that they need to be input in a certain order, but other than that, you almost instinctively know how to use the phone. Some children talk to their toys or have imaginary friends. This isn’t antisocial; it’s practice (bare in mind the fact that I’m not a qualified child psychologist here. If your four year old child tells you he put Mr Fluffykins in the microwave because ‘Fred’ told him to, you should probably seek professional advice). Children use these games and role-plays to practice being a proper ‘grown-up’.

Beyond the realms of imitation, we have an even more powerful simulator at our disposal: our brain. People daydream all the time. We fantasise about things we’d like to say or do with members of the opposite sex, having lots of money, or a big house, or fantasise about pushing that loudmouth prick on his blackberry off the station platform into the path of the 815 to Southport. Whilst each of these fantasies looks at a larger goal; they contain smaller, more everyday scenarios, such as how you might smooth talk your boss into giving you that raise, or how to resist pushing that loudmouth prick on his blackberry off the station platform into the path of the 815 to Southport. Still not satisfied with that, Mother Nature has seen fit to install an automated simulation cycle in the form of dreams. It’s still near impossible to explain in any certain terms exactly how dreams work and why we evolved to have them (or why the divine being that picked us from his nose gave them to us), but one theory that has caught my attention is the idea that at least some dreams are a way of training us to deal with situations that may arise in our waking lives.

As adults, we simulate situations in our dreams often. If something is worrying you, such as an upcoming job interview, you might find yourself running through that situation in a dream. It’s not uncommon for these things to feed back negatively. If you have low expectations for the job interview you might find things going horribly wrong in the dream, far worse than might be reasonably expected. These nightmares, however, might spur you on to prepare even more vigorously for your interview and ultimately aid you in getting the job (if you don’t have a mental breakdown first). Even if you end up with the old ‘naked in front of an audience’ situation you can at least go to the interview knowing that, as long as you’ve double checked you’re wearing your pants, things can’t get that bad.

The mind’s power to provide us with a safe environment in which to simulate various scenarios has led to some people using it as a way of learning actions through meditation and lucid dreaming. It’s around here that things all start to get a little hokey, and despite my own interest in this area of self improvement, I feel I’m better off skipping it here.

Whatever you think of dreams, it’s hard to ignore the impact they can have on our waking lives, and their application as a natural simulator makes a lot of sense. And even if you don’t think much of this mental training, it’s hard to ignore the benefits of learning through simulators. Simulators continue to be used as effective learning tools in many walks of life, and whether it’s in your head or on your computer, chances are that you learn from one on a daily basis.