Games: the future of education
BY Jane Kagon
The media guru Marshall McLuhan once said: “Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.” His provocative statement presents a profound challenge to educators in today’s post-Gutenberg, 21st-century creative economy.
Seismic changes caused by the digital revolution and globalization have rendered obsolete narrow definitions of both entertainment and education. Those educators who continue to make a distinction between the two may find themselves teaching on the periphery of an expanding spectrum of new learning models.
Today’s academic institutions face many of the same issues that confront the mainstream entertainment media industry. Both are large bureaucracies struggling to find relevant ways to deliver content. The key concepts realigning the entertainment industry around content are: interactive and immersive; distributed/networked “P2P”; and available anywhere, anytime to niche-market end users (think students). The end users are no longer merely consumers, but are becoming “prosumers” — active participants in creating the product they are purchasing (think learning).
The entertainment industry, like academia, has been in search of new financial models, with varying degrees of success. On the one end, the music business is floundering, while on the other, the game industry, and specifically the massive multiplayer online game platform (MMOGs) accessed on the Internet by millions, is highly lucrative, incorporating the concepts imperative in the digital age.
MMOGs have created a huge evolving ecosystem of digital/human networks by linking communities on a global scale. Along with encouraging group dynamics and shared values, MMOGs are teaching individual players sophisticated strategy and problem-solving skills, not to mention ways to collaborate in a complicated, multi-level environment — key requirements for success in the real world.
Traditional academia would benefit greatly by moving more quickly onto the virtual playing field. I believe educational institutions could flourish by supporting, among other initiatives, the building of strategic alliances with private industry game developers. They should also, as some universities do, provide serious study and research opportunities in game play as an enhanced learning model and offer students degrees and certificates in gaming.
Creative educators will almost certainly design and produce games (although the hurdles are currently high in terms of the cost and time required to create quality games of interest to the end user). They should also look for ways to embed educational spaces into the game spaces that exist in immense online communities. In addition, educators need to learn how to incorporate gaming architecture as an added-value knowledge tool into current teaching practices. They might also learn how to help students become “prosumers” (check out www.machinima.com).
Some academics take the moral high ground with regard to game content. Others may have an antipathy to advertising-supported business models. Yet others are daunted by emerging media technologies and uncertain as to how to incorporate them into their work. But many are embracing the power of McLuhan’s statement. Today, entertainment and education are inseparable, and their future will be dominated largely by games. Acknowledging this provides exciting opportunities.
Kagon directs UCLA Extension’s Department of Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts. She’ll help lead a workshop on gaming for the University Continuing Education Association. See www.ucea.edu/pages/sd2006/elearn.pdf.
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