The Face of Gaming

You may say that first and foremost games are ‘fun’. This is, of course, true, but games can be much more than that. Click on the Mr Toledano link below and take a look at some pictures of gamers playing and you will see fun in some of their faces. You may also notice another much more constant emotion: challenge. Games challenge in ways traditional linear media, from feature films to textbooks to PowerPoint presentations, generally do not, certainly not at such regularity with such power and impact. And in an age when politicians, parents and many educators feel that learning has lost its rigour, gaming presents a superb means to challenge young people. For a start, games seem to raise our expectations from the moment we launch them, like a Hollywood blockbuster, and then engage us for as long, sometimes longer. No matter what your own ideas and preferences about gaming are you will have an opinion about whether there is a place for it in education.  Simon Egenfldt-Nielsen discusses the challenges of edutainment in his PhD ‘Making Sweet Music: The Educational Use of Computer Games’. Where he suggests the area of ECG is not yet well defined.  He states that it is not enough that a player is more motivated, or that game culture is collaborative, or even to suggest that computer games as complex devices will somehow automatically transfer knowledge to the player.  Rather he promotes the notion that it is how each of these elements helps constitute the activity educational use of computer games.