Harnessing Video Games to Cultivate Social and Emotional Learning
Harnessing Video Games to Cultivate Social and Emotional Learning
Harnessing Video Games to Cultivate Social and Emotional Learning
September 12, 2022
By Matthew Farber
Summary
In the book, How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design, scholar Katherine Isbister observed that because of player agency, "Games have an additional palette of social emotions at their disposal." Suppose a student reads Victor Hugo's classic Les Misérables.
In my new book, Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to Social and Emotional Learning, I explored how games can be safe practice spaces for cultivating social and emotional learning skills.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning defines SEL as the process of how youth "Acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions." Games can also engage players with thought experiments on ethics.
Pickle's Quest for Happiness, a youth-designed game made using Scratch for the Games for Change Student Challenge, has players role-play as an emotional support animal who helps a human companion.
Multiplayer games can also embed opportunities for SEL. Of note is Sky: Children of the Light, a game with mechanics encouraging positive reciprocity through social play.
More ideas are in my new book and in Rethinking Learning: A Review of Social and Emotional Learning for Education Systems, a UNESCO MGIEP report I co-authored, available as a free download. Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an associate professor of educational technology at the University of Northern Colorado, where he also co-directs the Gaming SEL Lab.
His latest book is Gaming SEL: Games as Transformational to Social and Emotional Learning.
Reference
Farber, M. (2022, September 12). Harnessing video games to cultivate social and emotional learning. Retrieved September 23, 2022, from https://clalliance.org/blog/harnessing-video-games-to-cultivate-social-and-emotional-learning/