Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul: Pleasure and Learning

by James Paul Gee

Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul is about pleasure and learning. Good video games allow people to create their own "music", to compose a symphony from their own actions, decisions, movements, and feelings. They allow people to become "pros", to feel and act like an expert soldier, city planner, world builder, thief, tough guy, wizard and a myriad of other things. They allow people to create order out of complexity, to gain and feel mastery, and to create new autobiographies, careers and histories. In his earlier book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy , James Paul Gee offered thirty-six reasons why good video games create better learning conditions that many of today's schools. In this new book, built entirely around games and game play, he shows how good video games marry pleasure and learning and, at the same time, have the potential to empower people.

Genres: Nonfiction, Video Games, Games, Gaming, Computers

130 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

James Gee is a researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee is currently the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. Gee is a faculty affiliate of the Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Reviews

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Gee is, to my mind, one of the best books on education ever written. I have used it in seminars, given it as gifts to friends, and recommended it countless times. And so, I was eager to read Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul: Pleasure and Learning.

Gee is reflective about video games he has immersed himself in, teasing out why they are soul-building experiences and offering why, in a shorter version than his earlier book, they are better than most school-based experiences for fostering learning and the shaping of an identity. He does this extremely well.

There are, however, two problems with this book. First, it is badly in need of editing. There are skipped words, extra words, words that are homonyms for the intended word, and so forth. It's obvious that one more go round in editing would have saved it. Second, there is far too much repetition of points made and information given. The author needs to trust that the reader will remember what was previously stated just a few pages earlier.

I wish more care had been taken before publishing. Gee is one of our great minds and deserves better.

[Always2014 · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting ideas. Got me to start thinking about what are the benefits of video games. There are a handful of typos in this book.

[Mark Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Video Games Are Good For Your Soul
Despite the outcry that gaming is a waste of time, video games make us feel good, Gee says, and what’s more they are a great learning tool.
There’s no question that people get pleasure from such gaming, that’s why they buy them but are they “good” for you? We know young children learn through play and Gee argues that video games provide learning within a structured environment, with contextual help on demand, and positive reinforcement for success. But can games teach you … anything? Can they teach you math, geography, economics…archaeology?
Gee largely focuses on immersive games. Some of what he says could equally be applied to all games – simpler computer games, but also board, card games and role play games. But the new breed of virtual worlds, he notes, let you take on a blended personality with your avatar, harnessing a set of developing skills and role playing different situations. Read Neal Stephenson’s excellent the Diamond Age to glimpse the future possibilities. Potentially games, through re-play and structured contextual environments can provide information, but more importantly learning, empathy, long term planning and critical thinking skills. And they allow failure and the possibility to try again - something often absent from public education.
It’s an interesting book, though a little repetitive in place for such a short volume, and I’d have like to have seen more educational and learning theory. (He has since published further volumes). I’d argue that there are elements in these games that can be taken advantage of quite simply – creative use of multimedia, interactive content, built in rewards and social learning. If our classrooms aren’t ready for Call of Duty can we at least develop web-enabled text books with interactive content?

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gee makes a persuasive case that playing video games, as part of a balanced range of activities, enhances the emotional, cognitive, and social growth of children, adolescents, and adults. This isn't his first book on this subject, but he covers some new ground and backs up his assertions with examples from specific games. I would have given this five stars except for two things - first, a lot of the content overlaps with his earlier work; second, and to me equally important, his editor really let him down - this book is more riddled with typos, word mix-ups, mis-punctuations, and other basic instances of sloppy writing, that I had to go back and re-read some sentences and paragraphs two and three times to figure out what he meant for them to say. Still, a very worthwhile read on this subject.

[Maren Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book showed me how people can get addicted to video games, something I couldn't really fathom before. My experience with gaming never got past the Super Mario Brothers. So I didn't have a lot of context for what Gee was talking about, but his ideas were interesting. He mentioned how games could be used in education but never delved into that. I've heard he does take on that topic in another book, though. So I'll have to check that out.