Video Games CAN Be Useful... Maybe
In the article, "Are Video Games A Waste of Time?" the author, J.P. Gee, in a section titled An Alternative Perspective on Learning and Knowing, makes a really important point. He says that we should not ask the question is this a waste of time? We should ask whether or not we are learning valuable, if we learning to understand or participate, and what kind of domain this information refers to. I agree with this view point on learning entirely, as I feel that no matter what, each moment of everyday brings a new lesson for us. I have looked back on a day and realized that I had learned something, though more often than not it was not an academic type of learning. Simply taking a new path to class reveals more to us than we can imagine and that knowledge can stay with us and be useful to us in the future even though it seems useless in the moment. He also makes the point that it is hard to determine just what domain each bit of information falls into. The problem with this is that most domains overlap one another. He makes an educational reference to physics, but I prefer to think of the kind of learning we get just going through life. Lets bring back the new path to class example. Say you drive to class and one day, on a whim or because there's road construction, you take a different route to school than you have taken before. Days, weeks, even months later a friend needs directions and you know the area they are talking about because you've driven through there on your way to school. Everything is connected, everything falls together in strange and sometimes coincidental ways, which is what makes classifying each bit of information so difficult. This is also why the attempts at placing video games in the "waste of time" category is hard to say because there is learnings gained from the activity. Not all the learning is useful, true, but some bit of it is because it provides a new link to other knowledge or information you have or will one day have.