Reading Notes on Gee: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Macmillan, 2007

This book was published in 2007, which makes it, at least in internet years, ancient. Nevertheless, Gee has some interesting things to say, things that make me think deeper about online learning. As I read through this book, I’ll dip into the ideas that seem most pertinent to this blog. 

Gee writes that when playing a game like, WoW (World of Warcraft) players can take on different identities, such as “female night elf priest” or “male tauren warrior.” I’ve never played WoW, but Gee says that when he plays the game using different identities, it changes his perceptions of the “virtual and social” (7) world of the game. 

We are all familiar with how we ourselves identities on a daily basis as we go about our lives. We act and speak, and perhaps perceive, differently when we are having breakfast with the kids, greeting colleagues in the department office, meeting friends after work. These roles, the identities, are seldom consciously assumed; they are dictated by the environment—including other identities in that environment and our long-term interaction with that environment. We grow into these roles.

Such flexible, though situationally constrained, identities may be most evident in the physical classroom. Walk into any college classroom: desks, cramped, uncomfortable, arranged in regimented rows, facing a single desk (impressive, solid, often covered with expensive equipment). What identity does one have to assume to sit in one of those dinky desks? These desks are the higher education equivalent of the cubicles in a Dilbert cartoon; the placement of these desks ask, perhaps insist, that students assume just such a flat identity. 

Sure, the professor can walk into the classroom and ask students to arrange the desks in a circle, a move that shifts identities by seating everyone, including the professor, in equal desks at equidistance from each other. As often as I’ve done this myself, it never feels like I’ve gone far enough. Those desks are still part of the classroom environment. I still have an unequal identity to students even though we are now sitting in equal desks. 

The question I find myself asking is whether online learning provides the possibility to create environments in which students can assume identities that are personal, creative, adventurous. What would those identities look like? How would they feel? More important, how can I create an environment with fewer constraints, allowing students to create rather than assume an identity? 

One problem with that physical classroom is that it makes room for a limited number of identities—watch any teen flick and you’ll run through the main five or six before the opening credits are over—and few of those seem to make room for students to get excited about learning.