The major role of video games in teaching and training young U.S. military recruits is described in a featured article in Live Science. The picture the reader gets is of an effective new methodology for engaging adolescents and training them in battlefield skills. New games are being developed that aim to prepare the mind for war by simulating distressing battlefield situations and walking players through handling these crises.
Once established education shakes itself loose from its analog preconceptions — and someday it will — digital gaming will play a big role in future teaching and training. For now, the military, not the educators, are inventing this new venue for learning.
Why not the massively multiplayer mathematical game, where players are armed with calculus and trig? Or the Medieval Wars of Europe game in which player avatars are historical characters like Charlemagne or Macbeth — constrained in the playing by the facts of history and their own personalities? One supposes an adolescent playing a game like these would learn a lot more about the subjects involved than by for cramming for a high school standards test in math or history.
Sure, developing such games would cost a lot of money. But the scale to student in the open internet makes them very cheap. If a game cost $10 million and were made available to every student in the public schools of New York City, the per-student cost would be one dollar. (There are about a million students in the NYC system.) If the game were openly online and went viral, the per-player cost would plummet to almost nothing.
And while we are musing about the potential of gaming as schooling: Games may diminish the appetite of the new global gaming generation for war if they are playing each other virtually. The Live Science article includes discussion of how military games encounter the stressful reality of actual war. Perhaps the world’s youngest generation will learn to settle its disagreements virtually and live in actual peace.
All optimists raise your hands and say: “Yes!”
