Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

1. A Review of What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

2. Video Games“video games in this text has more to do with the medium than with the content” • Cognitive "that human learning is not just a matter of what goes on inside people's heads but is fully embedded in (situated within) a material, social, and cultural world." • Social "that reading and writing should not be viewed only as mental achievements going on inside people's heads but also as social and cultural practices with economic, historical, and political implications." • Connectionism "stresses the ways in which human beings are powerful pattern-recognizers" and argues that people "think best when they reason on the basis of patterns that they have picked up through their actual experiences in the world," not when "they attempt to reason via logic and general abstract principles detached from experience"

3. Semiotic Domains (the term Gee uses for distinct and embodied contexts, matrices of environmental attributes and, crucially, social practices in which signs are given a distinct meaning, and in which a person can be literate) • Video games present simulated “semiotic domains” and give information an embodied and contextualized presence that lends itself better to how we are psychologically structured to learn. • His key contention is that through informal games play, children learn to participate in what he calls ‘semiotic domains’, which are shaped by children’s interaction with games texts and with each other. Gee uses the term ‘semiotic domain’ to mean a set of things that can take on meaning, eg words, gestures or pictures, used to communicate distinctive types of meaning, for example the specialist language used by doctors or the way graffiti artists use image.

4. Gameplay • Learning how to negotiate the context of play, the terms and practices of a game's players, and the design choices of its developers. These levels of engagement are what Gee calls, respectively, internal and external design grammars for a given domain. These design grammars are present in any given semiotic domain--from a basketball game to an archaeological dig--and video games, according to Gee, allow gamers to simulate, learn, and manage design grammars in a way that traditional teaching practices do not. • • twitch speed vs. conventional speed• parallel processing vs. linear processing• graphics first vs. text first• random access vs. step by step• connected vs. standalone• active vs. passive• play vs. work• payoff vs. patience• fantasy vs. reality• technology as friend vs. technology as foe.

5. Make Learning Fun • The desire to harness the motivational power of games in order to ‘making learning fun’ • A belief that ‘learning through doing’ in games such as simulations, offers a powerful learning tool. or • The tasks are repetitive, e.g. continually doing sums, and thus quickly become boring and ‘work’ • The target audience becomes aware that it is being coerced into ‘learning’, possibly in a patronizing manner.

6. Critical Thinking • Video games simulate identities, experiences, contexts, and social relationships in designed spaces. A player learns to think critically about the simulation while at the same time gaining embodied knowledge through interacting with it: taking on new identities within it, solving problems through trial and error within it, and gaining expertise, or literacy, within it.

7. Video Games Primarily Teach Themselves • A player learns how to navigate the game's territory, how to solve game-specific puzzles, how to kill the "boss" at the end of the game. But Gee stresses that his argument pertains to "the potential of video games" (9), and believes that the method of instruction embodied in video games has potential for non-self-referential disciplines, particularly science. In this moment of potential, Gee's book is a valuable resource; though he clearly has a lot of enthusiasm for the possible futures of educational gaming, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy does not portray a free-wheeling technological utopia. Gee directly and thoughtfully engages his subject material, and provides a cogent analysis not only of current and possible learning practices but also of the experiential and formal qualities of video games.