Can Video Games Provide Meaningful Learning Experiences?
Can Video Games Provide Meaningful Learning Experiences?
Can Video Games Provide Meaningful Learning Experiences?
By Steve Mintz
March 7, 2023
Summary
McCall asks history instructors to embrace video games because they provide an opportunity to discuss and debate the game version of history.
Implicit in many historical video games is a particular vision of history, a history of power struggles and fights for domination.
Video games take different forms and fall into distinct genres.
McCall's basic advice is to treat historical video games as inherently and inevitably problematic.
Your job as an instructor is to supplement video games with primary and secondary sources and subject the game to interrogation.
In 2014, A. Martin Wainwright, a historian of modern Britain and India, offered another way to use video games in the classroom: as a lens onto historical theory.
Of special interest to Wainwright is what video games teach about contingency and the value of counterfactual speculation.
Reference
Mintz, S. (2023, March 7). Can video games provide meaningful learning experiences?: Inside higher ed. Higher Ed Gamma. Retrieved March 28, 2023, from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/can-video-games-provide-meaningful-learning-experiences