Historiarum

Can video games help people learn? James Paul Gee offers a convincing argument in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy that they in fact can create positive learning experiences at all age levels. Gee posits that beyond providing simple entertainment, video games have inherent potentials to encourage users to explore different identities, encounter and think about different cultures, or even grasp simple concepts like the power of practice.

It was fascinating to think about Tomb Raider, a game I played regularly years ago, as an educational tool. As Gee notes “This is what is magical about learning in good video games—and in good classrooms, too—learners are not always overly aware of the fact that they are ‘learning,’ how much they are learning, or how difficult it is.”(123) Subconscious messages of challenging authority and attempting to pursue one’s own goals were never part of my active thought process while playing these games, but I see Gee’s point here. The way the game is set up to offer multiple rewards for completing quests in different ways really drives home the point that these games are capable of training us about the decision making process, and the consequences involved.

I appreciate that Gee used a game like Tomb Raider, one of the all-time best selling video games, here to explicate his point rather than something obscure. I think using games people actually play makes his points more valid and, frankly, believable. It also makes his insights applicable to a wider base of both games and gamers, and his ideas can be more widely extrapolated as such.

Relevant to this week’s reading, I have been playing Myst III lately in preparation for later in the semester. If I said I was enjoying it, I would be lying … profusely. I just find it slow and tedious, and more to the point, I have never been particularly adept at (or interested in) intricate puzzles. I do enjoy a few visually based puzzles, like the ones at Eyemaze for example, but I find the ones in Myst particularly obtuse, and obviously made for people who are smarter and have more patience than I. This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy quest games that incorporate puzzles-Zelda, Castlevania, Final Fantasy, and Space Rogue were all some of my favorites growing up. But Myst lacks action, and I find the puzzles overly complex, to the point that I feel no sense of satisfaction on completing tasks, only relief. I’ll keep at it though…

Misha makes some interesting points over at Propaganda Redux on Gee, hitting the nail on the head “I just hope others in the class did not get turned off to this idea because it is in a book about video games–his points would be valid if you changed the words ‘video game to ‘books’.”

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Some of the readings this semester have been so valuable in terms of the simple advice they offer regarding topics I otherwise would have never considered or thought about much. For example Jakob Nielsen’s piece on Visualizing Links was fascinating. I take it for granted that I understand which text on a webpage will contain a hyperlink, usually because of a subtle change, such as color or a text decoration. These are precisely the alterations Nielsen highlights as essential to making one’s content easily recognizable.

I wanted to see just how true this was on the web, so I visited the top ten most visited sites in the world according to Alexa. Here is what I found.

Yahoo- Links are colored but only underline on hover.
MSN- Links are colored but only underline on hover.
Google- Links are colored and underlined.
YouTube- Links are colored and underlined.
myspace- Links are colored but only underline on hover.
Windows Live- Mixed some color and underline, some color only with underline on hover.
Baidu- Links are colored and underlined.
Orkut- Links are colored and underlined.
qq.com- Most links are colored and underlined, some are neither.
Wikipedia- Links are colored but only underline on hover.

Everything Nielsen talks about plays out as true on these sites. Some lack color and underlines on site navigation links, but it is clear by the design that these are menu bars with links to other sections of the site. But it is obvious from examining the sites that consistently have the most eyes on them, that people are becoming used to seeing material on the web in a certain presentation. For example, not only is there a consistency in the decoration on the above sites, but nearly all of them use blue as the color for the links. That is somewhat remarkable when you think about it.

Really, presenting material on the web is often very similar to more traditional methods of publishing. Luke Wroblewski drives this home by examining the organization of a circus poster with regard to how its information will be consumed and understood. As much as we may want the content to speak for itself on the site, the visual presentation, organization, and overall architecture is going to be just as important in making a clear argument via a webpage. Just another important facet of web design to be conscious of going forward.

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