Arguing that pop culture is not dumbing us down, but making us more intelligent, is guaranteed to generate media buzz. And in the US, Everything Bad is Good for You, the new book by American pop science writer Steven Johnson, has indeed sparked a flurry of comment, much of it centred on his claims about the beneficial effects of watching reality TV and The Sopranos.
In the UK, media attention has focused more on Johnson's observations that modern computer games require concentration, forward planning, lateral thinking and sustained problem solving - and, as such, offer a "cognitive workout" that can benefit overall mental development.
This may be news to parents - and journalists - who don't play games, hence the media buzz. But over the last few years, many in the educational research community, from academics and teachers to software developers, have come to the same conclusions as Johnson, and begun to experiment with different ways to harness the cognitive innovations of games in more directed ways.
MIT's Education Arcade has played a leading role, along with James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. He argues that the best games offer a model learning experience and suggests teachers can learn useful lessons by looking at how games draw players in and motivate them to concentrate and tackle complex problems.
"Academic areas, like biology or history, are themselves like games," says Gee. "Scientists act and interact in terms of certain identities and values and use knowledge and information to accomplish certain sorts of goals. So learning science should be about learning how to 'play the game' of science. Games could do this as well, since they are based on taking on distinctive identities in order to act and value in certain ways."
Gee is critical of "skill and drill" teaching, which focuses on lists of facts and repetitive testing. He points out that this is what a lot of "edutainment" games do - game content is used to sugar the pill of fairly boring tests. Of course, many parents assume that edutainment games are better for their children than Zelda or Grand Theft Auto, but because they don't grapple with the potentials of the form, many edutainment products are less educational than the best of the big commercial hits, Gee suggests.
Johnson agrees, though he is less critical of edutainment titles, such as the Carmen Sandiego series. These do a good job of conveying facts and helping children memorise information, he says.
"But the great opportunity is to do simulations that take Sim City, Age of Empires and Civilisation but use real information about what did happen, what the variables were and what social forces were at work and let people play out alternate versions of history."
It would be great, says Johnson, if games companies opened up "the underlying architecture of these games and let educators load it with real historical information, or alter the model slightly, so you have different theories of how cities work".
As he says, Sim City has its biases. "It is geared to traffic and subways. But if it was open source, you could build a model more geared to pedestrians and sidewalks, the urban model advanced by Jane Jacobs, and teach her theories with it." Gee points out that universities and companies are experimenting with educational simulations.
"The New York-based company Tabula Digita is making a 3D game to teach algebra, and at the University of Wisconsin [where Gee is based] we're making a game to teach urban planning and the ecological, social, economic, and cultural issues connected to it."
Ian Bogost, a games designer and theorist who blogs about "games with an agenda" at Water Cooler Games, is also working on games that teach in a smarter way than standard edutainment. Via his studio, Persuasive Games, Bogost has worked on a series of games designed to help voters and citizens get to grips with policy issues in the US. He has just finished working on a series of seven games, called Project:Connect, designed to "teach how telecommunications technology works".
"Good educational games teach differently than contemporary classrooms," says Bogost. "Games could play a part in integrating real use of abstract knowledge; that's what I try to do when I design such games."
The best educational games are procedural representations of systems, he adds. They let people play around with elements of a system to see how they combine to generate effects and structures.
"Civilisation is a good example; it teaches about material and geographical contingency in the progression of history. Nintendo's Animal Crossing is another - my five-year-old learned almost everything he ever needs to know about long-term debt by figuring out how to pay off his home mortgage in the game."
The last example begs a question. If commercial games can offer such cognitive benefits, why bother designing educational versions? Why not just use commercial games in the classroom? Many teachers here and in the US are experimenting with this, and Civilisation and Sim City are the games of choice.
Gee says this only works "when the curriculum into which the game is built is a good one. Games, like textbooks, do nothing or less than nothing when they are not used well."
Jane M Healy, educational psychologist and author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds - for Better and Worse, agrees. Though a fan of some simulation games, Healy's book criticises badly designed edutainment and the assumption that children need to be started on computers at an early age.
For kids to get the educational benefits from games suggested by Johnson and others, Healy says they need to be supervised by an adult who understands learning and games and can encourage them to reflect on what they're doing when they play. This takes time, she says: "sometimes more teacher time and energy to do it right than it would to teach a standard lesson".
However, despite her misgivings, Healy says she can see a time when games become just one more tool that teachers use, along with the blackboard and textbooks. Steven Johnson agrees, and argues that schools need to figure out how to use games and their cognitive benefits as a matter of urgency.
"What's our children's working environment going to be like in the future? Will it look like their gaming life, where they're checking five emails while having a conversation, while moving through these virtual worlds? Or is it going to look like reading a book?
"As much as I love books, I just don't think that's what the future looks like. If we're going to train kids for that future we probably need environments that are going to reflect what it's really going to be like."
· Everything Bad is Good for You, by Steven Johnson, is published by Allen Lane, price £10. To order a copy with free UK p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop
Links
Steven Johnson
Water Cooler Games
Persuasive Games
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