GLS Conference

The original games and learning movement (at least as I conceptualize it) was inspired by the fact that good video games (where “good” was specified) incorporate good learning as this was then defined in research on human learning, research better reflected, then and now, in good video games than in most schools. The movement, though, had two signal flaws—flaws common across the board in educational research at the time and today, as well. First, it underplayed teaching. Many of the good learning principles argued to be in good games are actually good teaching principles. Recent research on animals and human evolution has shown that teaching is ubiquitous in nature and was foundational for human evolution. Recent research on humans has shown that teaching—though of neither the liberal or conservative sorts seen in school—is essential for furnishing the human mind/brain in ways that enhance survival and, beyond that, human flourishing. It is indicative of the problem here that we have 27 Learning Science programs in the U.S., but not one Teaching Science program (in the requisite sense) as far as I know (and don’t tell me teaching is art, because so is science). The second flaw—one barely spoken to in research on learning, now or then—is that modern work on learning and the human brain has argued that humans learn from experience, but has never specified what experience is or what constitutes a good experience. Experience is composed of inner and outer sensations and yet the word sensation is not in the index of any edition of the supposedly definitive How Humans Learn book from the National Academy. Nor is experience defined or explicated at the level of sensation in the recent Human Experience (“HX”) movement, despite its name. In this talk I will argue that once we get clear about the sorts of teaching essential for human development (though of a sort that both liberals and conservatives would decry) and finally begin to work on a viable theory of affect, sensation, and the ecological roots of cognition we will see, once again, that good games—and, too, good art—represent good learning, teaching, and experience better than do schools or most mainstream educational research. The implications for education are obvious (and will, as always, be ignored in mainstream liberal and conservative educational research and practice). One not so obvious implication for games is that if game designers want to make games that truly rise to teaching and learning for human flourishing in our highly imperiled world they must make games that are art (a fact some game designers are already well aware of). Unfortunately, “art” has become a dirty word to many (liberal and conservative) educators (who can barely stuff it into STEAM before it burns off to become STEM again).