First things first, games teach basic video game skills. You can easily tell the difference from a hardcore gamer to someone who has barely ever picked up a controller. Gamers just know how to maneuver video games no matter the genre whether that means moving their character, how to approach a puzzle, or what do for a certain objective. Eric Zimmerman writes in his manifesto that, “to play a game deeply is to think more and more like a game designer” (Manifesto for a Ludic Century). Playing through a game that gamers know like the back of their hand or a new game, players will begin to think critically about new problems they face. Subconsciously, the player will think about the experiences they have had and how the designer created those experiences. They then use that subconscious knowledge to apply it to their current problem and best attack that problem. In other words, we learn about games by playing games.
Gamers know what to look for, how to look for it, and what to do with this information. In another book by James Paul Gee called What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he states that “a good game teaches the player primarily how to play that game and, then, to be able to generalize to games like it” ( 7). We can make generalizations about a game that we play and use that help us play a separate game. First person shooters are a genre of games that has cast a great cloud over the variety of games nowadays. Ask any gamer and they will have played an FPS at least once in their life. Then there’s players like me who have a surplus of FPS’s in their hard drive and finds enjoyment in each one of them but I digress, they all are incredibly similar. After playing all the Call of Duty’s for the past couple years, I can know a thing or two about a new FPS before launching the game. Their look and their play is scarily similar but gamers use the prior knowledge that they have learned from other games to aid them in playing a new game.
Take these screenshots for example: they’re from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, Destiny 2, Overwatch, and Halo 5: Guardians. The setup of the HUD looks nearly identical. Aiming reticle in the center of the screen, weapon info in the bottom right, mini-map (if there is one) in the top left or right, and a super meter (if there is one) in the bottom center. Even the controls are extremely similar! Left Trigger (Yes, I play XBox) to aim down weapon sights, Right Trigger to fire, Right Bumper for a grenade, and A to jump. Learn one FPS and you can play them all with small differences.
A lot of games can teach similar skills. They can teach hand-eye coordination by having the player try to shoot at a moving target making the player connect their eyes and their hand movements. Multiplayer games, especially a game like Overwatch, promotes communication and teamwork ideals. In Overwatch, the best plays or the turning point of a game can come from all players on a team communicating about their super attacks and coordinating their uses to eliminate the entire opposing team.
Then there’s a game like Dark Souls that requires the player to try, try, and try again and strive to find the best way to beat their enemy can teach a player about motivation. In fact, Jonathan Beedle and Vivian Wright created a survey that was published in Games and Simulations in Online Learning, where out of 346 participants, “more than 82% of the respondents felt that multiplayer games motivated players to learn the intricacies and rules of the game, and more than 86% of the respondents perceived that multiplayer games encouraged discussions about strategies and planning” (159). Motivation is a difficult thing to teach people and many people have difficulty in finding motivation every day but through playing games, people agree that you can find a sense of motivation.
Literally every video game teaches some from of the various skills in their play. A lot of games teach these similar lessons about teamwork, critical thinking, and motivation, like a whole lot of games, but there are a few special video games that can teach even deeper lessons through their gameplay. Every game has a special learning theme within that game that shines past all the others but the games that can really teach us something incredibly valuable that we can take with us in life. This is where the idea of learning through video games really begins to become apparent.
