Gee, James Paul. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. United States of America. Palgrave Macmillan.

James Gee has crafted a remarkably educational book, while exploring a field generally considered un-educational – at best – by many instructional theorists. Anyone attempting to sell video games as educational tools faces a myriad of media focused on the graphic content of some games and their supposed penchant for “teaching” nothing but violence. Gee challenges this bad press and supports his ideas with conclusions derived from his own introspective endeavor into the world of “good” video games. While his research methodology may lack scientific credibility (due to its purely qualitative nature), his book could potentially plant a seed of curiosity in even the most callous of video game critics.

Gee opens What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, the first of his three books investigating video games as educational vehicles, with an ingeniously crafted introduction. In it, Gee clearly states his intention to avoid focusing on two prominent issues in previous writing about video games: “violence (e.g. shooting and killing games, depictions of crime) and gender (e.g. whether and how much girls play, whether and how video games depict women poorly)” (p. 10). Gee also outlines the book’s format for the reader. He intentionally avoids breaking lines of thought with bibliographic citations to seamlessly construct scaffolding within the reader. Instead, Gee opts to include additional resource materials in a single narrative section concluding each
chapter. The author aims to build each chapter around the goal of illustrating specific learning principles exemplified in “good” video games.

Additionally, Gee explains his intention to integrate his insight into the world of video games with three existing fields of modern research: situated cognition, connectionism, and New Literacy Studies, a body of work depicting reading and writing as social and cultural practices, not merely internal mental achievements (p. 8). This last field serves as both a backbone for Gee’s theorization and a built-in defense against critics who will quickly attack the lack of hard scientific evidence backing up his hypotheses.

The majority of the book discusses various learning theories and their seemingly unintentional inclusion in “good” video games. Naturally, one could offer a “chicken or the egg” argument regarding learning theories and video games, though it probably would not accomplish more than such arguments typically do. The distinction between a “good” video game as opposed to a “bad” video game is one Gee hardly touches overtly. Though the underlying thread throughout the book attempts to tie the learning principles discovered through playing video games to a game’s inherent “goodness.”

The concept of semiotic domains recurs consistently throughout the text, alluding to Gee’s background in linguistics. Semiotic domains refer to the varying types of literacy within and across contexts. To illustrate this principle, Gee keenly analogizes the different lenses used to view video games by digital natives and immigrants to the different interpretations one can derive from a point guard on a basketball team dribbling the ball up the court and holding up two fingers. Depending on whether the viewer is another teammate on the court, an opponent, or a fan in the audience, each will glean a different meaning based on his or her own semiotic domain (p. 44-48). Gee uses this concept to enlighten readers with the lessons he learned while immersing himself in the video game domain.

While it may be easy to criticize What Video Games Have to Teach Us… for its lack of hard evidence in support of its theory, such a critique would have little to do with Gee’s book. Throughout the text, Gee acknowledges the dearth of supporting research. The mere fact Gee, a decorated academic, sought to personally endeavor into video games and ended up becoming a huge proponent of game-based learning, should stifle many staunch advocates of education free from video game infringement.