Videogames and your soul

Now that I'm settled in at NYU-Poly, I'm going to renew my efforts to post regularly on this blog. At the moment I've been doing a lot of reading about games and learning, because I'm part of the newly formed NYU Games for Learning Institute (visit here for a description by the Institute's funders, Microsoft).

So far my favorite book about the topic, is James Gee's book Why Video Games are Good for your Soul. It came out in 2005. In it he really is able to put his finger on what makes gaming such a compelling experience for the player. I particularly like how he brings empathy into the picture. He talks about how physicists and other specialists learn to project themselves bodily into a complex model or system, in order to really get a feel for it and make progress in their ideas. He calls this 'embodied empathy for a complex system'. He feels that fusing with a game character through playing that character, is the same kind of process. He points out that good games always do this for players, and often end up teaching them complex things as a result (e.g. he has a rant on Deus Ex: Invisible War and how it allows the player to explore what it might mean to have a world in which abilities can be purchased systemically--e.g. parents buying smarts for their kids).

Gee does a great job expressing the general feel of this kind of empathy, and its power, through tracking on several particular games and examples from them.

I'm excited to use this book to ground some of my own design-based explorations of how specific choices impact player experience and empathy!