Dewey and Gladwell, Two Spheres of Life

This week, I read John Dewey's writings on Experience and Thinking and Malcolm Gladwell's Theory of Thin Slices. Both were very interesting, and both were surprisingly well connected to my field of study, one project in particular.

I find John Dewey's conclusions about the strong ties between experience and thinking to be completely applicable to the serious games industry, though he wrote those ideas over sixty years ago. Not only are they applicable, but I think some people still fail to see their significance. School is still to a certain extent taught the same way that it was when Dewey was writing - in a manner that forces students to suppress their physical existence and focus all of their energy on the mental process of receiving and retaining data. ADD is a reportedly rampant problem in our society, but it makes perfect sense to me - when kids in our country are becoming more and more privileged, when manual labor is rarely required of children in families nationwide, what else are they supposed to do with their energy but let it seep out a little bit at a time over the course of the day?

It is slightly more commonplace for more immersive teaching techniques to emerge from classrooms today, but the element of passivity is still pretty dominant. There are definitely some subjects that lend themselves better to physical activity than others, but it is very important for educators to realize that learning is much easier to burn into the brain when it's taken in hand by the learner and applied in the real world. Even beyond the subject's ability to be portrayed in a simulated situation in a classroom, it is entirely understandable that those circumstances under which hands-on learning can take place are not easy to recreate in a traditional education setting. To me, this is where games come in.

Games put you in another world, as realistic or unrealistic as the designer so wishes. As I've learned in my many game design courses, games create a "magic circle" into which players step; they succumb to the small universe of a game, and within that space they are willing to obey the rules of the game. Rules could be anything from pretending that a person with a white hat is a sheep to only walking with your elbows and knees touching the ground. In the educational sphere, games most often take two forms; direct simulation or metaphorical application. I can still remember playing a game in middle school social studies that was meant to show the imbalance of power between different countries in the world, a very direct simulation where one person represents one country. But on the other side of the coin, I also remember playing a cultural game last year in which two different card games being played by two different sets of people represented the way the US is interpreted by foreign visitors, and the way those foreigners treat US citizens when they travel abroad. Whether the educational content is realistically or unrealistically applied, the point is still to get someone actively participating in it.

This brings me to the project that I felt applied rather closely to this, but from the other end of the spectrum. I am working on a game funded by the UNFPA to try to help end violence against women in developing countries. We have only just started analyzing our target audience, young boys, and it has become very apparent that to some of them, they are too directly involved in the problem to feel that they can explore and learn a new way of life. But what if they had a game that allowed them to explore gender equality and freedom for women? How much more impactful would it be to let them experience first-hand something that completely contradicts the reality they've come to know thus far in life? And how hard is it going to be to counteract that horrific real-life situation that has been "learned" by them through experience already? We aren't sure, but we'll definitely try to find out.

Branching into Gladwell's concepts, we had a very limited trip to South Africa to try to learn as much about our audience as possible. I wish I had read his theory of thin slices before I went, because at the time it felt like we couldn't possibly learn enough in the span of one week. We've been shooting for a thick slice of South African boys, and even if that's what we need in the end, I think a thin slice would be a wonderful starting place. We saw a few homes, interviewed people on the trivial and the serious, visited schools, and absorbed some local history. Each of these interactions and experiences were such small snippets. We felt like we learned so much from these events, but they have yet to feel like enough. With the idea of thin slices in mind, though, it's easier for me to think that maybe we learned more than we realized.