Digital Game-based Learning (Paperback)

Prensky starts by showing that today's trainers and trainees are from totally separate worlds. Sure, learners have a short attention span nowadays - for the old ways of learning! His point is that the old ways are inappropriate for the new generation of learners. Games now infuse the culture with movies of games and games of movies. The powerful argument that underpins the rest of the text is that games are cool, education and training are dull.

The real power in the book comes from the arguments he gathers on motivation, and using game techniques to improve learning. This is much more useful, as games' designers often know a lot more about motivation than those in education. They have to - or their games won't sell. There is real mileage in taking game design techniques and using them in learning, mainly through simulations.

His analysis of what makes games tick is exemplary; better than many I've read in books like Trigger Happy or Joystick Nation. This is matched by a similarly strong analysis on learning in relation to simulations. The difficulty, however, is in bringing these two worlds together, and Prensky is not entirely convincing in making these two worlds congruent. Games may not be as widely applicable in education and training as he imagines.

One practical danger in his approach is the implication that creating games is easy. Games are difficult to design and expensive to make. Having been involved in the games industry myself, I know it is easy to underestimate the culture, talent and costs issues. A game's budget can push through ten million dollars with matching marketing spend - and they require rare talent to design and code. Training departments rarely have this scale of budget for individual training programmes.

As one would expect, and as with any book that takes a single, strong line - traditional learning bad, games good - the book is light on arguments against games in learning. He quotes Neil Postman on page 74, but fails to mention that Postman has been a vigorous opponent to games in learning. Postman's hugely popular 'Amusing Ourselves to Death', first published in 1985, was a damning attack on the idea that all learning had to be 'fun'. Postman is still recommending resistance to this idea. With only four pages of conterarguments which are dismissed in a rather cursory fashion, rather than through real arguments is a weak spot in the book failing to address the many debatable issues that surround the use of games in learning. These include: violence, gender gaps, distractive elements, disappointment and a whole raft of arguments against the use of games in reflective, higher forms of learning. For example, it is quite difficult to argue that the violence in games has no effect whatsoever on players, then argue that games make great sense for behavioural change. Why has the military spent so much on games, simulations and even a free downloadable game with over a million players (America's Army)?

This is a dimension to the 'games in learning' debate that is often underestimated by the games evangelists. Games often have no educational value, and, even worse, can distract, disappoint or even destroy learning. Distraction - if the learning objectives are not congruent with the game objectives you run a real danger of distracting learners from the learning. Learners become obsessed with progress, scores and other non-learning components in the game, to the detriment of the content. Even in real computer games, players will go to enormous lengths to obtain cheats. Disappointment - this is a danger where the learner is set up to experience a game which actually turns out to be a rather weak affair. Children brought up on a diet of blockbuster realtime games are often bored by poorly designed educational games. Destruction - in some cases, games can even destroy learning. This is the argument put forward by Postman. If game-playing induces an expectation that learning must always be an amusing experience, then setting such an expectation risks producing the opposite effect in contexts where amusement is absent. In this way, a games-based approach might undermine other more traditional forms of education and training.

Clearly, the luddite position of either banning games or ignoring them altogether is not possible. A measured approach to their use is advised. The debate about games in learning often ends up as talk between older non-game-playing educators, and old idealists, (I'm both) neither of whom are truly immersed in the culture they are examining. Here's a telling comment on the book from a twitch-generation game player:

'I don't find my generation totally unable to learn without computer games as injected fun. For my part, I'm able to contemplate, read and write. Yes, some of us do like computer games. But this is a matter of culture and aesthetics - not of learning. And yes, like many other people we need to learn: that is why we go to schools to get an education.' (Lars Konzack)

However, I remain, like Presnsky, an evangelist. I do not see games as being a waste of time and educationally barren. If we can pull out the strengths of games while setting their weaknesses to the side, games may turn out a generation with better IQs, better skills, more attuned to technology with a more enlightened learner-centric attitude towards learning than any previous generation.

This book remains the vanguard text in this fascinating debate.