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.