Reviews by Pancho @ "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" By James Paul Gee. Chapter 6

🎮What Video Games Have to 🎲Teach Us About Learning and Literacy📙

The sixth chapter of this book covers how cultural models alter a human’s perspective on an event. In reality, there are always two sides to arguments, stories, or social happenings. With these two sides, people form opinions letting others know if they are for something or against it. James Paul Gee lets readers know where cultural models can be found in video games and how it also affects the thinking of humans.

Two examples that he uses are Sonic Adventure 2 Battle by Sega and Under Ash by Dar Al-Fikr. In the Sonic game, players can choose to complete the good guys' story (Sonic the Hedgehog) or the bad guys' story (Shadow the Hedgehog). Gee explains how playing from a good perspective will cause you to feel good or successful in what you’re doing. In other words, doing this would feel right to you because the video game character is portrayed as the hero.

The author then goes on to say how it would feel to play on the opposite side of things. Knowing that the character and their intentions are bad, Paul Gee studies if video game players still feel good as they progress through the game. In the book, Gee writes (The six-year-old, in playing Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, has been confronted with these two models. He has realized that when you act in the role of someone else, this involves not merely taking on a new identity but sometimes thinking and valuing from a perspective that you or others may think “wrong” from a different perspective.) The overall goal of any video game is to be completed or beaten by the video game player. Accepting the role as the bad guy will have them participate in things that are not generally accepted as good, but players will most likely do them anyways. James Paul Gee wants to let readers know that cultural models in video games can affect or alter the thinking of video game players.

The model representing good or bad perspectives doesn’t matter in the case of video games. I can relate to Gee’s theory in the chapter. Kingdom Hearts: Rechain of Memories is a personal favorite of my Play Station 2 games. In the storyline, they start you off as the hero described as the light (Sora). When you finish the game as Sora, you have the chance to play it all over again as the character that is described as the darkness (Riku).

I personally enjoyed playing the game more as the bad guy than with the good guy. Riku possessed stronger abilities than Sora and even though his goal was not a good one, I still wanted to beat the game. This proves that cultural models and video games as a whole can have very big impacts on people and players.