In a recent New York Times article, journalist Nick Bilton reports on “Using Addictive Games to Build Better Brains.” Neuroscientists at UC San Francisco are working on unpacking the qualities that make a game addictive in hopes of building addictive games that have educational benefit.
Although I will say that addiction is beyond the scope of this blog, I would like to reframe the words that we use for gaming that is intended to be educational, and suggest that a word that refers to a positive dynamic, such as Csíkszentmihályi’s flow, would foster a more beneficial discussion of gaming for learning.
Flow describes the mental state of a person fully and enjoyably immersed in an activity, expending complete focus and energy on the task. Usually these conditions come about when a person is challenged in a way to match her skill level – such as an athlete who may have met a well-suited opponent, or a programmer working on something new and exciting (and a bit difficult).
As the NYT article points out, researchers and developers have been working on games such as NeuroRacer (also at UCSF) to deliberately target and improve memory and attention in players. However, it is also noted that first-person shooters (often under attack for their violent content) and Tetris also increase cognitive skills.
(source)
Games may not all be created equal, and games could certainly be developed with the intention to specifically aid in spatial reasoning or learning trigonometry, for example, but most games can be argued to have a brain-enhancing element. It is important to point this information out when we try to bring games into the educational community, and it is also important to frame our argument in a positive light by using words like “flow” over “addiction,” so that gaming is more readily accepted as the addition that it is (rather than a “disruption” as the article’s full title suggests) to other methods of learning.
Flow describes the mental state of a person fully and enjoyably immersed in an activity, expending complete focus and energy on the task. Usually these conditions come about when a person is challenged in a way to match her skill level – such as an athlete who may have met a well-suited opponent, or a programmer working on something new and exciting (and a bit difficult).
As the NYT article points out, researchers and developers have been working on games such as NeuroRacer (also at UCSF) to deliberately target and improve memory and attention in players. However, it is also noted that first-person shooters (often under attack for their violent content) and Tetris also increase cognitive skills.
Games may not all be created equal, and games could certainly be developed with the intention to specifically aid in spatial reasoning or learning trigonometry, for example, but most games can be argued to have a brain-enhancing element. It is important to point this information out when we try to bring games into the educational community, and it is also important to frame our argument in a positive light by using words like “flow” over “addiction,” so that gaming is more readily accepted as the addition that it is (rather than a “disruption” as the article’s full title suggests) to other methods of learning.
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