Boy, oh, boy. If there were one
assigned reading that we've done for this course that I could sign my name to
with an unequivocal endorsement, it would be Eisner's sixth chapter. This
chapter thoroughly describes my feelings toward the madness for "standards"
in our public education discourse (and my feelings toward those
"standards" go a long way in explaining my move from English to
Art--though, I should add, not all the way).
Even so, there was a moment in the chapter where I began to wonder if Eisner's stylistic choices were hurting his argument--specifically, the section that begins on 168, titled "Conceptions of Standards" Here, Eisner seems to lapse into the page-filling, mind-numbing, Freshman Composition technique of pulling out the dictionary and reporting on what is there contained. And even though my mathematician friends have amused me with tales of how Bertrand Russell filled 500 pages to prove that one plus one makes two, I couldn't help but marginally notate Eisner's statement that "a third meaning of standard is a unit of measure. Units of measure are the result of arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric that can be applied to describe matters of amount" was "a little flip."
But then I read Pink's chapter on Play, wherein he quotes James Paul Gee as saying (in defense of video games) that "learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them" (p 193) and that got me thinking about my own long history as a video gamer and whether or not I felt this was an accurate appraisal and what it may mean to my perception of learning and standards.
I couldn't tell you when I start playing video games. My parents had an Atari before they had me. I do remember the day they bought a Nintendo as one of the happiest in my life and I have owned every succeeding generation of Nintendo platform since (Wii being the fifth) and many other non-Nintendo platforms as well, so that should tell you a thing or two about my relationship with the format. But it's not the whole picture.
You see, I'm not only geeky, I'm obsessive. Along with that Nintendo, I begged a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine out of my parents. My parents--thankfully--indulged my inclination to spend hours not only playing, but reading about video games. I couldn't tell you how many subscription renewals it took for me to realize that Nintendo Power was largely a mouthpiece for the Nintendo Corporation but the realization somehow sullied my enthusiasm for passing on their reviews and secret strategies to my friends and classmates (as had become my custom). So, I switched to the edgier, independent Electronic Gaming Monthly, whose website eventually evolved into gamespot.com which gets top billing from Pink on p 212.
I won't bore you with the tale of how I suspect these habits of information gathering and dispersal eventually evolved into real-world, grown-up skill sets--partly because I think that lens demeans the continuity of play--suffice it to say that for years, I devoted a significant amount of time to gathering information about video games and even today I draw on that knowledge base to enhance my experience as a gamer--even though I rarely play through even one game a year from beginning to end any more. So, yes, maybe there is enough variety and room for discovery in video games to warrant the appraisal that "when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom" (p 193).
The trouble is--being a relatively young medium--video games rarely live up to that potential and it can take an extraordinary investment of resources (time and money) to uncover the types of experiences that rival real world (classroom or not) learning. Video games are a multi-faceted experience, often involving scripts, art direction, sound design, play mechanics, etc and etc and etc... Frequently, a game will excel in one or two of these aspects and fail in every other regard, and probably even more frequently, a game will fail in every respect. It's difficult to say exactly why this is: either games are just too complex, relying on a sizable group of people and it can be difficult to coordinate their efforts into a cohesive, working game experience; they're such a young medium that training still happens on the job, so the error of trial and error still creeps into the finished product; or, maybe, the audience still doesn't quite know what to expect from the format and has therefore been too forgiving.
When I purchased and played games regularly, it was with these shortcomings in mind. Rather than expecting a wholly satisfying experience from the games I invested in, I curated exemplars: games that nailed the established gameplay rules within a particular genre, but maybe lacked a strong narrative or character design; games that pushed the established gameplay rules in a new and exciting direction, even if they did so a little imperfectly; even games with control systems or play mechanics that bordered on the inept or masochistic, so long as they pushed narrative or design in remarkable ways. Finding these games and exploring their strengths and weaknesses was an exercise in context discovery and coordination. It was a learning experience but it was top-heavy and I put a disproportionate amount of work into bringing meaning to the games. They seldom returned the favor. Eventually, I discovered music, literature, and art, and found they had a better track record.
(As a side note: the "young medium" dynamic of video games may provide some useful perspective on the value of Great Works notions of studying art or literature. Great Works curriculums are hobbled by bias, expertise, academic incest and all the ugly smugness that established power structures can bring. Rich Texts--as I defined them in an earlier post--provide a reliable springboard to broader studies because they've proven themselves to be reliable meaning delivery systems. The tricky thing is that Great Works curriculums are generally composed of Rich Texts. The distinction needs to be considered and maintained if we're to gather the benefits of the one while avoiding the pitfalls of the other.)
On the other hand, just as even narrow or imperfect works of art can yield unexpected, rich opportunities for meaning making that would otherwise be missed, often the unintended, jagged edges of game design yield some of the richest creative opportunities within the medium. Indeed, bucking against a restrictive, artificial, or flawed system is one major way of uncovering the creative instinct. Many a gamer has refused to merely suffer a game's weaknesses for the sake of its strengths, choosing instead to probe the rough spots for an opening--a way to bend the rules or physics or storyline into a more favorable configuration. These openings come in many forms. Sometimes they are glitches (errors in the coding or expected play sequence or game physics); sometimes they are cheat codes hidden away by programmers as a workaround to the game's finished form (cheats began their lives as ways for designers or hired testers to play through games without being slowed down by a game's difficulty, though they evolved into a way for programmers to include content changes that didn't fit the finished form as approved by the design team); sometimes they're additional code made by a third party and retrofitted to the game. This article has some good examples of this creative gaming principle at work in the online gaming world (my favorite is 'Fansy the Famous Bard Isn't Touching You, You Can't Get Mad', though I should warn you that the article is written in an elevated version of the kind of teenage boy-speak that is common in the online gaming world, with cursing, insensitivity and the lot):
http://www.cracked.com/blog/
I suggested, way back toward the beginning of this entry, that my thoughts on video games and their educational possibilities provided some insight on what Eisner was getting at with his 'standards' definitions, so I want to wrap this up by returning to that. Later in his chapter, Eisner suggests: "Standards should be viewed as aids, as heuristics for debate and planning. They should not be regarded as contracts or prescriptions that override local judgments" (p 173). To contrast the notion of standards as "arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric" against the notion of standards as heuristics is a bit like comparing apples to apples, but as Eisner makes clear with his enumeration of 'standard' definitions, it is really only comparing one definition of standards because it is neither their characteristic (im)precision nor their mutability toward which Eisner is critical. It is, rather, the mix of meanings that allow that mutability, that arbitrariness to be forgot, and that is where video games come back into this...
Even so, there was a moment in the chapter where I began to wonder if Eisner's stylistic choices were hurting his argument--specifically, the section that begins on 168, titled "Conceptions of Standards" Here, Eisner seems to lapse into the page-filling, mind-numbing, Freshman Composition technique of pulling out the dictionary and reporting on what is there contained. And even though my mathematician friends have amused me with tales of how Bertrand Russell filled 500 pages to prove that one plus one makes two, I couldn't help but marginally notate Eisner's statement that "a third meaning of standard is a unit of measure. Units of measure are the result of arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric that can be applied to describe matters of amount" was "a little flip."
But then I read Pink's chapter on Play, wherein he quotes James Paul Gee as saying (in defense of video games) that "learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them" (p 193) and that got me thinking about my own long history as a video gamer and whether or not I felt this was an accurate appraisal and what it may mean to my perception of learning and standards.
I couldn't tell you when I start playing video games. My parents had an Atari before they had me. I do remember the day they bought a Nintendo as one of the happiest in my life and I have owned every succeeding generation of Nintendo platform since (Wii being the fifth) and many other non-Nintendo platforms as well, so that should tell you a thing or two about my relationship with the format. But it's not the whole picture.
You see, I'm not only geeky, I'm obsessive. Along with that Nintendo, I begged a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine out of my parents. My parents--thankfully--indulged my inclination to spend hours not only playing, but reading about video games. I couldn't tell you how many subscription renewals it took for me to realize that Nintendo Power was largely a mouthpiece for the Nintendo Corporation but the realization somehow sullied my enthusiasm for passing on their reviews and secret strategies to my friends and classmates (as had become my custom). So, I switched to the edgier, independent Electronic Gaming Monthly, whose website eventually evolved into gamespot.com which gets top billing from Pink on p 212.
I won't bore you with the tale of how I suspect these habits of information gathering and dispersal eventually evolved into real-world, grown-up skill sets--partly because I think that lens demeans the continuity of play--suffice it to say that for years, I devoted a significant amount of time to gathering information about video games and even today I draw on that knowledge base to enhance my experience as a gamer--even though I rarely play through even one game a year from beginning to end any more. So, yes, maybe there is enough variety and room for discovery in video games to warrant the appraisal that "when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom" (p 193).
The trouble is--being a relatively young medium--video games rarely live up to that potential and it can take an extraordinary investment of resources (time and money) to uncover the types of experiences that rival real world (classroom or not) learning. Video games are a multi-faceted experience, often involving scripts, art direction, sound design, play mechanics, etc and etc and etc... Frequently, a game will excel in one or two of these aspects and fail in every other regard, and probably even more frequently, a game will fail in every respect. It's difficult to say exactly why this is: either games are just too complex, relying on a sizable group of people and it can be difficult to coordinate their efforts into a cohesive, working game experience; they're such a young medium that training still happens on the job, so the error of trial and error still creeps into the finished product; or, maybe, the audience still doesn't quite know what to expect from the format and has therefore been too forgiving.
When I purchased and played games regularly, it was with these shortcomings in mind. Rather than expecting a wholly satisfying experience from the games I invested in, I curated exemplars: games that nailed the established gameplay rules within a particular genre, but maybe lacked a strong narrative or character design; games that pushed the established gameplay rules in a new and exciting direction, even if they did so a little imperfectly; even games with control systems or play mechanics that bordered on the inept or masochistic, so long as they pushed narrative or design in remarkable ways. Finding these games and exploring their strengths and weaknesses was an exercise in context discovery and coordination. It was a learning experience but it was top-heavy and I put a disproportionate amount of work into bringing meaning to the games. They seldom returned the favor. Eventually, I discovered music, literature, and art, and found they had a better track record.
(As a side note: the "young medium" dynamic of video games may provide some useful perspective on the value of Great Works notions of studying art or literature. Great Works curriculums are hobbled by bias, expertise, academic incest and all the ugly smugness that established power structures can bring. Rich Texts--as I defined them in an earlier post--provide a reliable springboard to broader studies because they've proven themselves to be reliable meaning delivery systems. The tricky thing is that Great Works curriculums are generally composed of Rich Texts. The distinction needs to be considered and maintained if we're to gather the benefits of the one while avoiding the pitfalls of the other.)
On the other hand, just as even narrow or imperfect works of art can yield unexpected, rich opportunities for meaning making that would otherwise be missed, often the unintended, jagged edges of game design yield some of the richest creative opportunities within the medium. Indeed, bucking against a restrictive, artificial, or flawed system is one major way of uncovering the creative instinct. Many a gamer has refused to merely suffer a game's weaknesses for the sake of its strengths, choosing instead to probe the rough spots for an opening--a way to bend the rules or physics or storyline into a more favorable configuration. These openings come in many forms. Sometimes they are glitches (errors in the coding or expected play sequence or game physics); sometimes they are cheat codes hidden away by programmers as a workaround to the game's finished form (cheats began their lives as ways for designers or hired testers to play through games without being slowed down by a game's difficulty, though they evolved into a way for programmers to include content changes that didn't fit the finished form as approved by the design team); sometimes they're additional code made by a third party and retrofitted to the game. This article has some good examples of this creative gaming principle at work in the online gaming world (my favorite is 'Fansy the Famous Bard Isn't Touching You, You Can't Get Mad', though I should warn you that the article is written in an elevated version of the kind of teenage boy-speak that is common in the online gaming world, with cursing, insensitivity and the lot):
http://www.cracked.com/blog/
I suggested, way back toward the beginning of this entry, that my thoughts on video games and their educational possibilities provided some insight on what Eisner was getting at with his 'standards' definitions, so I want to wrap this up by returning to that. Later in his chapter, Eisner suggests: "Standards should be viewed as aids, as heuristics for debate and planning. They should not be regarded as contracts or prescriptions that override local judgments" (p 173). To contrast the notion of standards as "arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric" against the notion of standards as heuristics is a bit like comparing apples to apples, but as Eisner makes clear with his enumeration of 'standard' definitions, it is really only comparing one definition of standards because it is neither their characteristic (im)precision nor their mutability toward which Eisner is critical. It is, rather, the mix of meanings that allow that mutability, that arbitrariness to be forgot, and that is where video games come back into this...
A few video game companies have figured out
the perils of spreading themselves too thin and have begun, instead, to put all
of their efforts into expanding and refining relatively few titles. Instead of becoming the odd addition to one
gamer’s library to fulfill this or that need, they want their games to appeal
to as broad of an audience as possible and be, as much as possible, all things
to all gamers. This means releasing two
or three games a year—at most—instead of a dozen or more. Blizzard does this with their Warcraft,
Starcraft, and Diablo games. Rockstar
does this with their Grand Theft Auto series.
Bethesda does this with their Elder Scrolls games. The games that have resulted have given rise
to a whole new genre, the sandbox game. Sandbox
games typically allow players to invest 50+ hours and to choose, to some
extent, their character’s role in the story/game world. These games also have tremendous replay value
because the choices made by the player have an effect on game events and
outcome, meaning that one player’s experience will be very different from
another player’s. On the surface, this
sounds like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel but the choices are far more
subtle and numerous and the sequence of choices and effects isn’t linear,
closer to a large equation that will yield different results depending on the
order in which the various components are filled in and solved than a sequence
of multiple choice questions. These are
the games that probably come closest to rivaling real-world learning.
But because these games are so huge,
powerful, and well made and encourage gamers to spend tremendous amounts of
time exploring the ins and outs of their sandbox worlds, they are more or less
devoid of the sort of raw creative experiences that are facilitated by their
imperfect, frustrating cousins. It’s
probably possible to find the rough edges if you search long and hard enough,
but few gamers are going to be motivated to push past the already rich and
seamless gaming experience to uncover the unintended rewards of bending a game
that’s already so malleable.
Well-made “standards” could and should be like
these well-made gaming experiences, they should offer such a breadth of
learning and a variety of possible outcomes that the average student receives a
rich and rewarding experience from their time spent within the curriculum. To create such experiences, the programmers
and designers of these games imagine a fully-realized world and do their best
to anticipate the variety of interactions that would be desired in and
facilitated by that world.
Superficially, such a world as realized in “standards” form veers
perilously close to the bewildering array described by Eisner on p 171-172 but
we’re living in the age of Wikipedia, of crowd sourcing, GUIs, searchability,
etc. Why should our idea of “standards”
be a static, periodically updated PDF file?
Is it really desirable to reduce our desired educational outcomes to a
set of elliptical sentences that fit snugly in rigid, sequential boxes?
Eisner suggests somewhat ambivalently that “standards”
could be useful, but I’ll do him one better and say that “standards” should be made useful. I think we need something like standards, and, following Eisner’s suggestion,
we need to start treating them as
heuristics rather than contracts. There
are already a variety of resources for sharing lesson plans and teaching tips
online, but our profession would benefit from a centralized, professionally
monitored and organized resource that offers the best in practical and expert “standards”
and practices. Our “standards” should be
crowd sourced and broadened to reflect the wealth of learning opportunities at
work in classrooms and they should allow students and teachers to confidently
follow their curricular inspirations while receiving additional ideas and
feedback from their peers and other experts in the field. Such a database would never achieve a final
form, but would instead be persistently renewed and, especially so by the students and teachers that continue to bump up
against the rough edges of even this rich educational environment. The opportunities for raw creativity will
never go away because technology and cultural conditions will continue to
evolve. Unlike the worlds imagined by
sandbox game programmers, the world being addressed by such a resource—the real
world—will never become static. It’s
time we stop looking for standards that are.
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