Games and Learning

We are facing an epidemic of sensationalized violence – made all the more horrific by the seemingly increased number of young victims and perpetrators. The most tragic example of this is the December 14, 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT in which 20 first graders were murdered with six of their adult educators by a 20-year-old young adult.

It is only natural to ask why and, of course, to point fingers at the usual suspects. These include genetics, exposure to early-life abuse, substance abuse, environmental toxins, physical brain trauma, poor nutrition, and violent media. At the front of this finger-pointing line-up are video games (this includes both video and computer game platforms). There is substantive research to support each of these, ironically with the exception of video games.

Zoo U is one of the new era of video games that aims to develop childrens’ emotional and social skills.

There are clearly established associations between violence portrayed on television and in movies and an increased propensity for violent and aggressive behavior. Yet data establishing an association between video game violence and violent behavior is, for the most part, forthcoming and what is out there is inconclusive and debatable. However, the first person, interactive, and immersive nature of many video games is a far more profound connection to the player than the passive “watcher” role of a television viewer – video games are essentially television on steroids. We can only assume it will have an amplified effect on the player.

Does this lead us to conclude that video games and screen time should be eliminated from our children’s lives? Absolutely not. Let’s face it, technology is not going away. Ninety-seven percent of kids ages 2-17 years are playing video games.

We believe technology can and should be leveraged to build social and emotional skills in youth and games provide powerful opportunities to build these skills, both for our childrens’ success and their safety. We also believe game companies should be making more of these games, particularly when first person shooter games currently represent 20% of the 6.1 billion dollar video game industry. Yet they are not. It is time that we, as consumers, incite the industry to make more of these games as a means to prevent violence and increase empathy.

Before we home in on how games build social and emotional learning skills, it is vital to understand how games can support all learning. By their nature, games serve as effective tools to engage, motivate, and reward a player – three components critical to facilitating learning.

This should come as no surprise, as you likely have experienced – either yourself or with a child – the difficulty of putting down a game. Games are uniquely designed to make each challenge just one step more difficult, thereby keeping us and our kids engaged and motivated. The reward of course is the satisfaction of having completed one level and the distinguished opportunity to tackle the next challenge. This is exactly how teachers and parents would like kids to approach learning.

Additionally, we have seen substantive research prove that the very act of playing games physiologically sets up the player to better learn. How? Computer games stimulate the brain to produce many important signaling molecules, for example the chemical dopamine. Dopamine helps orient attention and encourages the creation of connection between neurons, and perhaps more importantly, in certain regions of the brain it is responsible for rewarding pleasure seeking behavior.^1,2 It’s these connections or synapses that are the physical basis for learning and motivation. This means that the act of playing video games can change the structure and composition of the brain and can be used to enhance learning.

The real-time nature of games also makes them uniquely qualified to assess learning. Their ability to capture data and provide immediate feedback to the player gives them an edge over the traditional way of testing. The traditional method, called summative assessment, might look like a paper pencil test given to the child after information has been taught and with a grade returned some time later.

The real-time feedback loop of electronic gameplay allows a child to immediately identify and correct mistakes or know instantly that she’s on the right track and feel confident to forge ahead. This type of “real-time” assessment is referred to as formative assessment and has been proven to be more effective for learning.

Now that we understand that games can serve as tools that effectively engage, motivate, and reward; allow for “real-time” assessment; and put children in an optimal “brain-state” for learning, let’s look at how they might specifically support social and emotional skills.

According to the Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning (CASEL), Social Emotional Learning (SEL) represents a set of core life skills which include five competency areas: Understanding and managing emotions (self-awareness); setting and achieving positive goals (self-management); showing empathy for others (social-awareness); building and maintaining positive relationships (relationship building); and making responsible decisions (decision making). SEL is increasingly being taught in schools, as research shows that children proficient in these skills achieve more, are happier, and make healthier decisions.³ Schools that teach SEL also report less incidents of violence and are safer, more supportive climates.⁴ We believe games are ripe environments to build all five of these competency areas. However, we have evidence to support that electronic game platforms can build perseverance and a strong sense of self-identity (facets of self-awareness), healthy decision making, and empathy.

Games: Environments that support perseverance

We all want our children to be self-aware, to know and understand themselves so that they have confidence in who they are and what they can achieve. By teaching children that they are capable of persisting through failure, we build this self-awareness. One of the key components of persevering is how our children think: Children need to believe that “failure is ok” and with enough effort, “they can do it” in order to pick up and try again. Yet children rarely receive these messages. Games are one of the only environments that message to children that “failure is ok” and “they can do it.”

In life, our kids are going to be faced with some things that they’re naturally good at, and most things that they are not. Stanford researcher Carol Dweck has proven that children who believe that “with more effort, they can become smarter,” actually achieve more.⁵ She’s labeled this belief a “growth mindset.” Yet academic failure is just one of many perceived and real failures or challenges that have the potential to either build more resilient children, or derail and negatively impact children.

Building self-awareness in children should encompass their ability to emotionally navigate failure in all domains, to see setbacks as part of the process and a challenge, not cause for shame, giving up or a negative self-image. Imagine going into a math class and hearing that you will likely fail a test around twenty times before you pass and move on to the next math challenge or that you’d have to ask twenty kids for a playdate before one accepts – this likely would neither engender confidence nor motivation. However, kids accept failure all the time in a video game context, in fact, it is part of the allure. What exactly creates this allure?

Jane McGonigal, in her bestseller Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, writes: “No one likes to fail. So how is it that gamers spend 80% of their time failing, and still love what they’re doing?” She describes a 2005 MIND Lab study, in which researchers found that the positive failure feedback in games – in this case Super Monkey Ball 2 – actually reinforced the player’s sense of control over the game’s outcome. The game is essentially a bowling game. When the player rolls a gutterball or “fails,” the game hurls the ball – a clear ball with a monkey inside – into outer-space. Not only did the players find this sequence humorous, it empowered them with a sense of agency. Subjects reported that if they could send a monkey into outer space, they felt confident that they could “pick themselves up” and knock down a few pins. The positive failure feedback in the game served to exhilarate and motivate them to try again.

Another affordance of games that builds perseverance is the knowledge that within a game environment, the player can ultimately solve whatever challenge is presented. McGonigal writes: “By design, every video game puzzle is meant to be solvable, every mission accomplishable and every level passable by a gamer with enough time and motivation.” Gamers know this, therefore within a game environment, they are actively exploring a space that nurtures the belief that they can “figure it out” with time and willingness.

In the chapter of The Ecology of Games, edited by Katie Salen, entitled “In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives,” researchers Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy found that this belief created less shame in children.⁶ In their research, they looked at how children played games in their home and at friends’ homes (in situ) as compared to how they played in forced research settings.

They were interested in comparing children’s attitudes around game challenges to their homework challenges. They found a striking difference: “Although [the subject] knew less content in the game environment, lack of ability did not impact willingness to, for instance, offer help to [a sibling]. Yet in the homework situation, lack of ability was a source of discomfort, self-negation and disengagement.”

By providing children with environments that reinforce that failure is okay and that they have within themselves the capability to “figure it out,” we are communicating a powerful message to children. Whether navigating academic or interpersonal challenges, they can do it.

Role-play games: Ripe environments for exploration of possible selves and building self-awareness

In addition to creating an environment in which “failure is okay,” games, specifically role-playing games, allow players the ability to imagine and navigate possible selves, and in doing so, build their self-awareness, identities, and ability to make positive decisions. Role-playing games (RPGs) provide children with the opportunity to safely explore the consequences of any behavior, right or wrong, with the freedom to enact a “do-over.” They can play the role of both the superhero and the mad scientist.

In 1986, researchers Markus and Nurius established “The Theory of Possible Selves,” which posits that a critical part of how we form our identities is through our ability to envision versions of ourselves in the future. They called these versions “possible selves.”⁷

A few years later, Markus and researcher Oyserman conducted another study exploring how children’s possible future selves motivate their behavior. In this study, they found that children who were able to only imagine a positive possible future self, or what they hoped to become, were unable to prepare properly for setbacks or obstacles. Youth who were only able to imagine a negative possible future self, or what they hope to avoid becoming, “had no belief that a positive future was possible, they were incapable of making plans for the future and were not motivated to pursue long term goals.”

However, youth who were able to balance both – who were able to see or imagine themselves succeeding, but balance that with a vision of what they might look like if they went down the “wrong” path – were indeed motivated to make positive, healthy decisions in their lives.⁸

Constance Steinkuehler, a professor of game-based learning at the University of Wisconsin and former Policy Analyst and advisor to the White House on video games, helps us understand how RPGs can help children imagine possible selves and learn through this process. In her essay “Critical Ethical Reasoning and Role-Play Games and Culture,” she writes:

“Though the term RPG is not often used in formal school contexts in the United States, it is nevertheless a widely used tool in curricular and extracurricular learning environments. When a young person represents Uganda in Model U.N., [he or she is] role-playing for the purpose of learning. The same can be said for a history student participating in a mock trial, emergency service workers participating in an Incident Command System exercise, or military personnel participating in war games⁹.”

Role-Playing Games, which add reward systems, win states, and fictional role portrayals to these learning states, give children a rich, engaging “playground” for envisioning and creating both positive and negative possible future selves. In these safe environments – by virtue of their being simulated – children are not only able to “play out” various scenarios or “selves,” but they are able to make and actually experience the decisions that led them there.

Research further supports that this in-game process of identity exploration actually transfers to real life. In the same study cited above, researchers Stevens, Satwicz, and McCarthy found evidence to support that there wasn’t a black and white distinction between a child’s in-game identity and their real-world identity, as is often believed. Rather, “the identities being crafted through game play are in fact [the] real world identities [of children] that are crafted as young people compare their actions in-game and their consequences, with the consequences those same actions would have in the real world.” This has positive implications when you imagine children grappling with ethical dilemmas that they might face in playing negative roles, which play out in a negative manner. On the other hand this has scary implications when you consider one’s avatar in such games as Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Hitman, and Gods of War, in which a negative behavior is rewarded.

Games have the potential to support self-awareness in children in two ways: by instantiating a belief that they “have it in them” to persevere through challenges, and by facilitating their better understanding themselves through role-playing possible future selves, they give children spaces to safely ask and answer “Who Am I?” and “What am I capable of achieving?” These are questions we want our children asking and answering now and at every stage of their lives.

RPG’s: Ripe environments for building empathy

Role-Playing Games also support children’s awareness of others’ perspectives and emotions. They are environments in which children can take others’ perspectives with ease, and in doing so, understand those perspectives and build empathy. In our interconnected world, where children are connecting and collaborating with other children across the globe at the touch of a button, empathy has become a critical 21^st century skill.

Research also points to an inverse relationship between empathy and aggression: The more empathy we have for one another, the less likely we are to act violently against them. Researcher Ian Bogust, in the “The Rhetoric of Video Games”, shares how the popular children’s game “Animal Crossing” supports children’s perspective taking and empathy building.¹⁰

Common Sense Media, the premier organization devoted to rating children’s media for parents, succinctly describes “Animal Crossing,” an age five and up game, as a “cute town sim about friendship and spending virtual money.” The player begins the game with her avatar moving into the game’s small village. She’s immediately offered a small house by the village’s shopkeeper and real estate boss, Tom Nook. By doing odd little jobs in the town, she’s able to pay off the mortgage. She can also customize and buy things for her house, and as soon as she pays off the mortgage, she’s able to upgrade to a better house.

With a bigger, nicer house, comes the desire to customize it and fill it. Here she’s a bit torn: She wants to pay off the now bigger debt, but also really wants to fill up the house, because it’s bigger, and she simply needs more to fill it.

Bogust writes:  “Animal Crossing (AC) is a game about everyday life in a small town. [It’s] about customizing and caring for an environment…about making friends and…collecting insects. But AC is also a game about long term debt. It is a game about the repetition of mundane work necessary to support contemporary material property ideals… about the bittersweet consequences of acquiring goods and keeping up with the Joneses. AC accomplishes this feat not through moralistic regulation, but by creating a model of commerce and debt in which the player can experience and discover such consequences.”¹⁰

In highlighting games as a place where cultural values or perspectives can be represented, Bogust helps us see their capacity to organically build in the player perspective-taking, and with that, the ability to understand, assess, and weigh those perspectives. In an RPG as cute and seemingly “lite” as Animal Crossing, children are actually taking and exploring the perspectives of others within complex social, cultural, and economic systems.

Steinkuehler, also a mom to two young boys, highlights additional facets of role-play games that encourage empathy and connectedness. “Successful gameplay requires empathy…[Games] are not just simulated external worlds but [they can also be] social worlds, both within the game (like multiplayer games) and beyond the game (the communities who value and interpret them through co-play on the couch, on-line manuals and walk thru’s, fan discussion, fan fiction and other means.)”

Armed with evidence that games are in fact ripe environments to build self-awareness and empathy, and possibly even motivate good choices, as parents and concerned citizens seeking safer communities and healthy children, what is our role in seeing that games serve our children for “good?” Do we have a role?  We argue “yes.” With 9 out of 10 children playing games, if you have a child, this likely means yours is playing. And if your child or a child you care about can potentially be impacted by the good or bad effects of video games, you have an important role.

As the purchaser of your child’s video games and apps, your voice and your money are your power. If you voice a demand for games that build social emotional skills, video game companies will meet it. Common Sense Media corroborates this. “Parent voice is strong,” says CEO Jim Steyer. “Whatever parents want – and their kids ask for – should be what companies produce if they correctly gauge demand,” adds Shira Katz, Senior Director of Education Content. Common Sense Media recommends parents write op-eds in parent facing publications and lobby game developers, particularly those with an interest in making change. Socialmoms, a media company that leverages parents’ voice through blogs to promote products and deeply supports social emotional learning, recommends that parents blog and utilize social media. “Facebook and Twitter can be like handing a microphone to parents for what they care about,” says CEO Megan Calhoun.

Let’s challenge ourselves. With emerging research that social emotional learning, and the skills and safe supportive climates this learning produces, inhibits violent behavior in children, let’s move from an unproductive, blame-based dialogue to one that incites positive action.

The U.S. Department of Education and National Institutes of Health have identified the potential value in these games by funding the research and development behind evidence-based social emotional learning games, like Zoo U and S.S. GRIN. We share below links to these soon-to-launch games, as well as Common Sense Media’s list of current games that seek to build these skills. Let’s incite game companies to grow this list to at least triple this size by next year.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally ran on the Adaptive Health Systems website and is reprinted with permission from the authors.

www.adaptivehealthsystems.com

www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/apps-and-websites-for-empathy

www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/games-that-support-kindness-and-compassion

¹  F. Hoeft, C. L. Watson, S. R. Kesler, K. E. Bettinger, and A. L. Reiss. Gender differences in the mesocorticolimbic system during computer game-play. J.Psychiatr.Res. 42 (4):253-258, 2008.

²  M. J. Koepp, R. N. Gunn, A. D. Lawrence, V. J. Cunningham, A. Dagher, T. Jones, D. J. Brooks, C. J. Bench, and P. M. Grasby. Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game. Nature 393 (6682):266-268, 1998.

³  J. A. Durlak, R. P. Weissberg, A. B. Dymnicki, R. D. Taylor, and K. B. Schellinger. The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: a meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Dev. 82 (1):405-432, 2011.

⁴  A. B. Dymnicki, R. P. Weissberg, and D. B. Henry. Understanding How Programs Work to Prevent Overt Aggressive Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis of Mediators of Elementary School-Based Programs. Journal of School Violence 10:315-337, 2011.

⁵  L. S. Blackwell, K. H. Trzesniewski, and C. S. Dweck. Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: a longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Dev. 78 (1):246-263, 2007.

⁶  R. Stevens, T. Satwicz, and L. McCarthy. In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives. In:  The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by K. Salen, Cambridge:The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, 2008, p. 41-66.

⁷  H. Markus and P. Nurius. Possible Selves. American Psychologist 41 (9):954-969, 1986.

⁸  D. Oyserman and H. R. Markus. Possible selves and delinquency. J.Pers.Soc.Psychol. 59 (1):112-125, 1990.

⁹  D. W. Simkins and C. Steinkuehler. Critical Ethical Reasoning and Role-Play. Games and Culture 3:333-355, 2008.

¹⁰ I. Bogost. The Rhetoric of Video Games. In: The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth Games and Learning, edited by K. Salen, Cambridge:The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, 2008, p. 120-139.