Last week, parent Nicole and I talked with @TheGamerEducator Ash Brandin about the challenges we can have when our kids love video games. [insert link to previous episode]

I had also hoped to ask Ash a lot of questions about what children learn from video games but we completely ran out of time, so I spent a fun day reading 10 books on the topic at the University of New Mexico library (non-students can’t check out books!).

I wanted to know a lot more about:

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• Why do children find video games so attractive?  And can we use that information to make the transitions away from screen time easier - as well as support their off-screen learning?
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• Even if video games don’t lead children to violence, are they picking up ideas that aren’t aligned with our values?
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• What useful skills are our children learning from video games, and how is this different from school-based learning?
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Jump to Highlights

00:45Introduction to today’s episode04:13Children are drawn to video games because they fulfill their needs for independence, skill-building, and connection. 13:00Children learn about gender roles and social behaviors from video games, which reflect societal misogyny and violence.28:55Video games foster active learning through problem-solving and experimentation. By connecting gaming identities to real-world learning, children can enhance their educational experiences.40:00Children learn best when they are engaged in activities they care about, and the You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop will help parents recognize and support this learning.50:01Wrapping up 

References

Benedetti, W. (2012, July 12). Anti-bigotry gaming site hacked, defaced by bigots. NBC News. Retrieved from: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/anti-bigotry-gaming-site-hacked-defaced-bigots-flna910262

Brown, H.J. (2008). Videogames and education. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

Condis, M. (2018). Gaming masculinity: Trolls, fake geeks & the gendered battle for online culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Gee, J.P. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave

Gee, J.P. (2007). Good video games + good learning: Collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. New York: Peter Lang

Gillin, L.E., & Signorella, M.L. (2023). Attitudes toward sexual orientation and gender identity in online multiplayer gaming spaces. Psychological Reports, 00332941231153798.

O’Leary, A. (2012, August 1). In virtual play, sex harassment is all too real. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/us/sexual-harassment-in-online-gaming-stirs-anger.html

Rigby, S., & Ryan, R.M. (2011). Glued to games: How video games draw us in and hold us spellbound. Santa Barbara: Praeger.

Richard, G.T. (2017). “Play it like a girl”: Gender expression, sexual identity, and complex expectations in a female-oriented gaming community. In B. Ruberg & A. Shaw (Eds.), Queer Game Studies (p.163-177). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Schaffer, D., & Loparo, K.A. (2007). How computer games help children learn. Palgrave Macmillan.

Self-Determination Theory (2024). Theory. Author. Retrieved from: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

Sliwinski, A. (2007, February 26). Gay gamer survey results with large hetero inclusion. Engadget. Retrieved from: https://www.engadget.com/2007-02-26-gay-gamer-survey-results-with-large-hetero-inclusion.html

Suellentrop, C. (2013, December 13). In the footsteps of Lara Croft. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/arts/video-games/chris-suellentrop-on-the-year-in-video-games.html

Yunkaporta, T. (2021). Sand talk: How indigenous thinking can save the world. New York: HarperCollins.

Hi, I'm Emma, and I'm listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives. But we're surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distill scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on the 13 Reasons your child isn't listening to you (And what to do about each one), just head on over to YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon, you're going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro. So come and record one yourself at YourParentingMojo.com/RecordTheIntro.

Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Recently, listener Nicole suggested that I interview Ash Brandin who's known on Instagram as The Gamer Educator. Nicole had a whole lot of questions about her son's behavior around screens, and how to be in a power-sharing relationship with him when he gets so much excitement out of playing games and really doesn't want to turn them off. I also had a bunch of questions I wanted to ask Ash about what and how children learn from video games that we ended up not having time to ask. So that's the topic of this episode, we're going to cover three main subtopics: firstly, we'll look in more depth at why children find video games so attractive, and how we can make other activities more attractive to children. So getting them off the video games might not be as difficult as it is now.

I also want to take a closer look at the idea of violence in video games. We did cover that in our conversation with Ash and I'm still in alignment with Ash on the idea that I don't believe video games cause children to be more violent, and to commit violent crimes. But also, that's a pretty high bar. There's a whole lot that children can learn about from video games that we might not like that doesn't rise to the level of actual violence and I want to understand that more.

Finally, we'll look at what useful skills children can learn from video games and how they learn them which is very different from what and how they learn in school. And I should mention that this episode will contain some ideas and language that you may not want your young children to hear until you've had a chance to digest them because they're going to be exposed to them anyway, but you might not be ready for that day to be today.

So the point of this episode is not to convince you that your child should be playing video games all the time. There are some children who get a lot of benefits from playing video games, not least of whom are neurodivergent children and or children who aren't accepted for some reason by their communities, because they find communities of like-minded people online. Of course, it would be better if those children could be accepted by their real-life communities so they didn't need to find a community who accepts them in video games. But that's probably the topic of another episode. Ash did also mentioned briefly that some video games have been shown to reduce symptoms of ADHD. And that is true, although it's important to know that these are games that are specifically designed to do this not just any video game you can buy online, and the studies finding that they're effective at reducing symptoms are usually sponsored or even conducted by the company that made the game. We're still waiting for more neutral evidence on those benefits.

I also think there's a LOT of benefits from not being on screens, and moving our bodies, and we'll have a conversation coming up with biomechanist Katy Bowman on that topic very soon. Yes, there are some games that encourage children to move their bodies. But these tend not to be the most popular games with children--it's like they see our nefarious goal to get them to move their bodies using a video game and they want no part of it. But what I do want to do in this episode is to change the way you see your children playing on video games, so that you don't see it as neutral at best or a waste of time or an actively bad thing at worst. Video games can have enormous value in preparing our children to succeed in the kind of world we're moving into as content knowledge becomes less and less important, and knowing how to get knowledge and evaluate it and apply it becomes ever more important.

So let's dive in with the first of our three topics, which is why children find video games so flippin attractive. Ash mentioned this in our conversation, and afterwards, I followed up with them to find out about the book that Dr. Scott Rigby and Dr. Richard Ryan wrote, which I think is sort of unfortunately titled it's called: Glued to games: How video games draw us in and hold us spellbound, because no parent hears that title and wants that for their child. If the name of Richard Ryan sounds familiar, it's because he's the other half of Deci and Ryan, who originated Self-Determination Theory, which is a well-established theory of motivation. Self-determination theory says that we are most highly motivated to do things when they allow us to experience autonomy, competence and relatedness or connectedness with others. When those needs are met, our performance will be better, we'll persist longer and we'll be more creative. The degree to which any of these needs is unsupported or thwarted within a context is linked to a similar degree of negative impact on our wellness in that setting.

Ash Brandin mentioned that video games are so enticing to us because they support our competence, autonomy and relatedness. So how does that happen? Rigby and Ryan, write that from the moment we're born, we naturally seek to gain mastery over ourselves and our environment. You've seen even babies observing, exploring and manipulating things. Later on, children do this through play. And as we get older, we try to do this through our work, through sports and games that we play, and our hobbies. I should also add that most of us want to get their needs met as parents as well. We want to know we're good parents, and we also want others to see us as good parents. We're all best able to meet our need for competence when two conditions are in place. Firstly, we're pursuing challenges that stretch our abilities, but we believe we can overcome, and secondly, we receive meaningful, intentional feedback on our actions. And that feedback has to be useful and nonjudgmental, and allows us to learn and improve our performance, even if we don't succeed the first time.

Video games are great at supporting competence, because they typically have what's called a fish tank environment, which is a place where beginners can learn the basics of the game in a safe space, where they're more likely to succeed. The monsters might have fewer abilities and be less likely to kill you. There are more healing kits available, so you can learn the kinds of places you might find them. Even as we become more competent of the game, and maybe we're working on defeating some of the most skilled villains in the game, we try new things, and we'd learn something about what works and what doesn't work. And even if the monster ends up defeating us today, we know that all isn't lost, because we can try again and apply what we learned, and maybe defeat the monster next time. The game doesn't grade our performance or tell us we're terrible at it. If the monster defeats us, then it defeats us. The feedback is nonjudgmental, and it happens right in the moment. We don't have to wait a week for a grade by which time we've forgotten what we were doing. We get it right then and there. And we can turn around and apply what we've learned about what got our character killed immediately if we want to.

Of course not all gamers are playing these kinds of role player games; some people play much more casual games on our cell phones, and many of these simpler games are marketed to women and girls, because the manufacturers assume that women and girls aren't capable of playing more difficult games. The casual games can often be mastered intuitively, and just a few minutes of play, which means that whenever we're not feeling competent in our real lives, we can come to the game, and very quickly get a competence boost from the game. I'm not going to judge you if you see yourself doing that. But I do think it's valuable to know that that's what you're doing. Perhaps in addition to managing difficult feelings you might be having about not getting your need for competence met in real life.

When we think about autonomy, we can imagine all the ways that role playing video games allow us to customize our experience these days. You can change your character's appearance, abilities, even their moral and ethical qualities. You can make them more like you in their physical and mental characteristics, or you can try on a new persona. While some games do have the player move through a series of levels in a prescribed format, many games today give players the opportunity to explore in an apparently limitless way. You can move in any direction and take out whatever challenges you like along the way. Accompanying these meaningful choices, there's often a heroic narrative that inspires the player's personal agency. The game is saying your choice matters. Nobody else gets to make the choice for you. You are the hero of your own game. It's very different from the real world experience that many children have where they don't get to make many choices about their days. And that's the focus in the Setting Limits workshop that we run live every spring and is now available anytime at YourParentingMojo.com/setting limits.

Then there's relatedness or connectedness which is about how we want to be seen by other people. This often involves acknowledgement as people say hi to each other as they enter the game because they've come to recognize each other's avatars and know those players' capabilities, and that the game will be more fun now the new player is here. Support is also an important component of this. We want the other person to connect with who we are and what we're feeling. And in games, these other people often help the player to meet their needs for autonomy and competence-- and especially competence. Players can often achieve more in games when they work as a team and they come to trust each other's ability to do this, which creates more relatedness. One of the books I read had a story about a person on a team of advanced players who got killed in the game in a way that would have meant he lost a lot of powers but the other team members had the chance to bring him back to life only within the next few hours. The player whose character had died send a desperate message out to the team members imploring them to find his character spirit and call him long distance in the middle of the night at a time when calling long distance was a really big deal so the he could resurrect himself. One of his teammates was able to find it and make the long distance call and the rescued player said the two of them stayed in touch over the years with a friendship that transcended the game.

Rigby and Ryan say that the last aspect of relatedness is impact--we matter to others when we can see our impact on them. This can come in the form of laughter as a shared joke and as a deep emotional connection between partners. I've seen my daughter Carys use all three of these aspects of Self-Determination Theory in her Minecraft play, which she started about three years ago. She got into it because a friend of hers from preschool played and they started getting together every morning before her friend went to school to play Minecraft. They have shared worlds where they divide up the work that they want to do to build things that they want to build. And if they don't play together for too many days, Carys will say how much she misses AJ--but when they talk, they talk about anything that you and I might think of as connecting. If he's been on holiday, we might ask him, you know, how was his holiday. She has no idea because all they talked about was Minecraft. It's deeply connecting for them. And of course, Minecraft offers a massive amount of autonomy, because you get to decide exactly what you want to do. And if you play in creative mode, then your competence isn't really threatened because nothing's going to kill you. And if you mess things up, you can always break blocks and have another go at whatever you're building.

So when we're asking our children to stop playing video games, we're asking them to stop doing something where these really deeply held desires are being met on a regular basis, and probably to do something that we have chosen, which doesn't support their autonomy, and which they might not be as good at as they are at the video game, which doesn't support their competence. And we're asking them in a sort of irritated way, which doesn't support their connection with us. So if we want to make this transition easier, we want to try to support all of those needs as much as we can in that transition. Ash mentioned getting really fine-grained on the way that we look at supporting that transition. So we start off with us monitoring the time limit. And then we have the child's set the timer. And then we have the child listen for the end of the timer, but we're there to make sure they heard it and to be there alongside them for the last few minutes. As they transition away to build our connection, we might try to have them transition to an activity they enjoy and they're good at to support their needs for autonomy and competence instead of transitioning right into something like homework that they don't like doing. Over time, they're doing more and more of the monitoring and the shutting off until you might feel ready to do an unlimited screen time experiment that I described in the last episode. But even once you get to the point where your child does manage to achieve a balance between on screen and off screen activities, your role isn't over. Because things will tend to slide, and they'll play more and more. And so you're still there to remind them to check in with their bodies about how they're feeling about the importance of balancing screentime with other activities. Your job isn't over at that point. But you've come a long way from the days when you're wrestling the iPad out of your toddler's hands, and you're much closer to a point where they can truly manage and balance their screen time themselves.

I want to return to the idea of relatedness or connectedness as we start to consider what children are learning from video games, even if they aren't learning how to commit actual direct violence because relatedness is typically considered a FEMININE trait or need. Of course, there's nothing actually feminine about it at all. All people have needs for relatedness, but needs for autonomy and competence as supposed to be more important for men and boys who have been socialized to be men, and relatedness is supposed to be more important for women and girls who are being socialized to be women. I read the book on self-determination theory and video games after I'd read a couple of books that were close to it in the library on how gender shows up in video games. So it was interesting for me to see these ideas alongside each other.

Gender identity is developed and played out, as it were through playing video games. Men's comments and video game chat forums make it clear that many men perceive that women are invading their video game space, and they use threats of violence both within the game and outside of it to defend their identity and space. Gamers monitor their own behavior as well as the behavior of other players by calling out any behavior that can be considered feminine or gay, and by repeatedly proclaiming a man's heterosexuality through homophobic comments. Video game players are often portrayed in pop culture as tech savvy and as geeky, which is not a prized form of masculinity. The stereotypical male video game players then not muscular and doesn't have a cool haircut or a lot of friends and isn't very good at sports. These men's masculinity is already at risk, so they tried to protect it through dominating performances in video gaming, and by this ongoing homophobic commentary. A 2006 survey of gamers called the Gaymer Survey, G a y mer, by Jason Rockwood was the first research on female and LGBTQ+ gamers, and hope to prove that they exist. I actually couldn't find In the survey or a peer reviewed publication describing it, it's possible it was produced as a thesis for a bachelor's degree. The survey also found that 88% of players use the phrase 'that's so gay,' and 83% of players use the words 'gay' or 'queer.' More than 60% believe the gaming community was either somewhat or very hostile to gay and lesbian participants. And this is where it would have been really nice to be able to get to the actual data because I didn't understand when I initially read about it that the survey was intended to be a kind of 'census' of female and LGBTQ+ gamers, which is how a record described it in online interviews. Elsewhere, it was described as "the first-of-its-kind approved study exploring the social and behavioral demographic of gay video game players and the role of sexual orientation on gaming habits." And if the respondents did indeed skew towards female and LGBTQ+gamers, then it does seem odd that so many of them are using homophobic slurs, and that while only 60% perceive online gaming as hostile, 80%, 80+% are using gay slurs, so more than 20% of a respondent pool that likely skews female and LGBTQ+ does not perceive that these slurs create a hostile environment. Something in there doesn't add up to me. Since then, there has been a slew of research on this topic, much of it reaching a very similar conclusion--a study published in 2023 found that "Across all respondent gender identities, the targets of the negative comments by others were almost always LGBTQ+ persons. These results bolster critiques of online gaming environments as hostile to members of marginalized groups."

And even spaces where women are supposed to be actively welcomed aren't safe--Dr. Gabriela Richard, Associate Professor of Learning, Media and Technology and Math, Science and Learning Technologies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst wrote that "In my own experience as a female player and an ethnographer, in both a female only and co-ed division of a video gaming group, I found the instances of emphasis on (or even division centered on) co-ed play, often had the unintended consequence of de emphasizing female play and participation, and reinforcing male play as men often came to the clan with more experience and confidence, having received greater social support for their inclusion in gaming activities."

For female players who want to remain sexually desirable to male players, cross-gender competition creates a dissonance where "females who dare to compete and win at the same level as males often find it necessary to emphasize the fact that they remain sexually female, and thus they are protective of 'their status as sexually viable.' Female players tended-- and are often even encouraged--to dress feminine and make ourselves pleasing to the male heterosexual gaze. Women in male-dominated domains are expected to be tough like the guys but also pretty and sexually available, though not overly promiscuous.

The sexual bravado for men is not an expression of desire or lust but a demonstration of power. Canadian feminist Anita Sarkeesian solicited funds on Kickstarter in 2012 to produce a series of videos called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. It had a goal of raising $6,000, which it achieved in less than a da, and ultimately raised $158,922. Journalist Chris Suellentrop of The New York Times said that the first four videos in the series were "essential viewing for anyone interested in video games," and went on to ask some big names in the video game world about the "damsel in distress" trope that's prominent in many games. Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games and developer of Grand Theft Auto 5, when Suellentrop asked how many time, how much time he had spent pondering the portrayal of women and their work said, "Seemingly not as much as I should have." Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo said, "Certainly I don't think that video games are the only genre that portrays things that way. And maybe it's just because I'm a male, I haven't given it a lot of deep thought over the years."

Anita Sarkeesian, for her part received misogynistic comments on the YouTube videos and emails of pornographic images of her being raped by video game characters. Her Wikipedia page was vandalized. She was Google bombed, hackers tried to access her email and social media accounts, and someone made a game where players could "punch this bitch in the face" and with each click, a photoshopped image would look increasingly battered until the screen turned completely red. At the end, it would tell people "thanks for playing" and invite them to "play again"--so the creators could evoke the desired reactions of outrage and disgust from their targets while creating a veneer of plausible deniability, which is the same thing that a lot of men say about misogynistic comments, which is, it's just a joke. It's just a game. Toronto-based feminist Stephanie Guthrie would criticize the Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian game and received death and rape threats in response.

Months after seeing the harassment that Anita Sarkeesian was experiencing, a gamer in Austin, Texas named Sam Killerman created a Gamers Against bigotry campaign asking people to sign a pledge supporting more positive behavior. The site received 1500 pledges before it was hacked and the hackers erased the list of names and then took the site down, and then took down KIllerman's other websites as well. Some female gamers have been stalked online or in person. Stephen Toulouse was the head of enforcement for Xbox Live and tried to manage behavior on that network which is owned by Microsoft. Angry gamers figured out where he lived and SWATted his house.

Dr. Megan Condis has observed that there are three female personas that are continually cited in video gaming culture. The first is the sexy sidekick, which is a fantasy of what gamer girl should be like. She's put on a pedestal by the gaming community because she's the perfect romantic partner for a gamer guy. And in fact, she's only into gaming because her boyfriend was into it. First, she props up her partner's masculinity, often by taking on a healer role in the game they play together so that he can achieve more, and she does this propping up in real life as well. The second persona is the casual girl gamer. This is a dabbler who's too inexperienced and ignorant about gamer culture to understand it properly. She stays out of the ultra masculine spaces where the hardcore gamers hang out so they can easily dismiss her as not being a true gamer. Finally, there's the fake nerd girl who isn't actually into gaming, she's only doing it as a deception to get something out of a gamer guy like money or time or attention. All of these are new takes on classical feminine roles-- the object of heterosexual desire, the inept, childlike, militant And the duplicitous whore. And these archetypes are seen everywhere in the industry and press releases, game advertisements, forum, blog posts and blog comment threads. Male gamers police women's behavior and women's bodies to make sure that men retain positions of power and control.

So when we think about what children are learning from video games, these are the kinds of things they're learning from video games. We might hear this and think "Then my child is never going to play video games again!" to which I would respond: Video games don't create culture. Video games reflect the culture we already have. Our culture is misogynistic, and video games give people a platform to perform that misogyny. Humans are a violent species. You may have heard me mentioned Tyson Yunkaporta's take on this from his book Sand talk: "If you live a life without violence, you are living an illusion, outsourcing your conflict to unseen powers, and detonating in areas beyond your living space. The damage of violence is minimized when it's distributed throughout the system, rather than centralized into the hands of a few powerful people and their minions." Our violence IS outsourced for the most part. That's why we have Congress passing laws to protect young people from video games, while the Pentagon has created a video game called America's Army to lure the same young people to recruitment offices in war zones. Dr. Harry Brown at DePauw University points up out that "a young man with an automatic rifle gives us pause at Columbine and Compton; in Kabul and Karbala he gives us pride." The America's Army game gives us photorealistic detail of combat, and implies that we, meaning the player the army, and by extension, the United States, are the world's protectors and specifically the protectors of American freedoms against tyranny. Of course the game doesn't say anything about what it's actually like to be separated from your family for months on end, the tedious routines, the conflicts between duty and personal values. The video game format emphasizes the personal decision making power that the player can make which the real-life soldier cannot make, as they navigate thirst, hunger, nausea, pain, dizziness, and shock to carry out orders that come from bosses on high, and the soldier never really knows to what extent those bosses know what what's happening on the ground, or have any clue whether the orders are giving makes sense.

Because this misogyny and violence happens in the world, we can't protect our children from it by keeping them away from video games. The linguist James Paul Gee developed his own love of video games after he started playing with his young son and has since written a number of books on what children learn from playing them. Dr. Gee writes that infinitely more violence has been done because people thought the Bible or God told them to do it than because of all video games combined, so let's stop violence in the name of religion And then worry about video games. Echoing Tyson Yunkaporta, he goes on to add with an admittedly gendered assumption: "in a world in which millions of people across the globe are dying in real wars, many of them civil wars, it is surely a luxury that we can worry about little boys getting excited for 10 minutes after playing a shooter."

If you've seen evidence saying that video games do cause violence in children, it's likely that a number of factors are at play, including a publication bias in favor of studies that find a correlation between video games and violence, and that researchers tend to use measures of aggression that aren't ecologically valid, meaning they happen in the lab, but would never happen in the real world. Studies mainly use college students as their subjects, which doesn't actually tell us a lot about how video games affect young children. And the weakest effects tend to be found in longitudinal studies, meaning studies that follow people over long periods of time, meaning that you might be able to sit a college kid in front of a video game and get them to act more aggressively in the lab. But chances are, they'd be back at baseline level of aggression within weeks, days or even hours. But what happens for the AVERAGE child may not be much of an indicator of what happens for YOUR child. So it's always okay to notice that you're seeing things in your own child that are different from what the research says you should see, and to take action accordingly.

Obviously, addressing the cultural issues of misogyny and violence are huge challenges and there's a good chunk of the population who thinks women SHOULD know their place underneath men, and the US is and should be the global enforcer, and that if we don't protect our freedoms, then those awful people from out there are going to come and steal them from us. It's hard to know what to do with that policy level perspective, except, of course, vote for people whose policies are aligned with your values and try to hold them accountable for delivering on them, which is a hard enough task in itself. So there's that piece and alongside that is what we can do with our children in our own homes, including the conversations we can have with them about what they're seeing. We talk a lot about stereotypes in our family, primarily when we're reading but elsewhere as well. When Carys asked what I'm working on right now, and I told her an episode on what children learn from video games, she spontaneously mentioned that she'd seen the Mario Brothers movie at her neighbor's house, and she'd also played the game somewhere, and that the game is all about rescuing helpless girls from difficult situations, but the movie doesn't have anywhere near as much of that storyline. She thought it was silly that the game would have it when the movie doesn't. And I think she assumed the movie came first and the game was based on the movie, which actually isn't the case. I can only assumed the movie turned those themes down because parents generally take kids to watch movies, but kids are much less supervised when they're playing video games, and the movie directors figured parents would protest if those themes came through quite so clearly in the film.

We have been reading the Green Ember series of books, which was actually recommended to us by Chat GPT because we had enjoyed the Redwall series and I didn't realize when we started quite how religious the author is, and the religious themes that permeate the books. Carys did immediately observe the art on the book covers which shows heroic looking male rabbits dressed in armor and carrying swords, and sweet looking female rabbits wearing dresses and carrying pouches that turned out to be full of medical equipment. There's that stereotype again of the female supporting the male's ambitions. One of the stories involves a female rabbit becoming queen, but only because the male rabbit who was first in line is unavailable because the other characters think he's dead. And even when she becomes queen, she defers ruling to her generals to fight the war with the evil falcons and wolves while she focuses on healing the injured. It's the stereotype come to life. And it could very easily slide by us only to reappear as Carys playing video games and slots easily into the role of healer to protect a more dominant male. Instead, she likes to point out that she could find any boy she wants to and based on her experience, she might well win. She also recently told me that a new friend we've made who identifies as a boy had told her he was the only boy in a dance class that he took. I said, "Yeah; some people think that boys shouldn't dance because dancing is the thing that girls should be good at and enjoy," and she said she thought it was really silly because boys can dance just as well as girls and girls can fight just as well as boys.

We have to be active participants in our children's learning, even when it doesn't seem like they're learning, even when it just seems like they're playing.

In this third part of the episode, I want to dig deeply into what children are learning when they're playing video games, drawing heavily on Dr. James Paul Gee's work. This section may challenge the way you perceive learning and where it happens and how it happens and even what aspects of it are important and useful. Dr. Gee uses an idea of a semiotic domain, which is an unusual phrase that means the context that gives sets of words, images, actions, or values a meaning. It's a set of activities where people think and act in certain ways. So a cellular biologist uses a certain set of words, that wouldn't mean much to you and me unless you also happen to be a cellular biologist, in which case you would have a great understanding of that domain--but you might feel completely out of place in the semiotic domain related to midwifery for example.

School is itself a semiotic domain because people think and act in certain ways about learning and because values about learning are passed on in schools. Usually, this knowledge is content related to subjects like physics, art, history and literature, which are themselves semiotic domains and in the domain of school activities that seem more mostly entertaining but don't involve this content based learning are seen as 'meaningless play.' Gee argues that the academic disciplines and, I would add, school itself are not just or even mostly about learning content in the sense of facts, but they're also about a lived and constantly changing set of social practices. So take the example of a student who has been through their first college level physics class, and can hopefully tell you Newton's laws of Motion. They can write the law down, they can produce the correct answer on a test some of the time. There are apparently quite a large number of physics graduates who believe that inertia is a force acting on objects when actually inertia isn't a force. When you ask them to explain how inertia actually acts on objects, they either can't answer or their answer isn't correct. They have the formula, they've entered the semiotic domain of physics in a passive way, but they can't produce their own meanings in physics or understand the concepts in producer-like ways.

When we learn a semiotic domain in a more active way, three things happen. Firstly, we learn to experience the world in new ways, which means we see it, we feel it, we operate on it differently. We actually get how forces work in physics rather than just memorizing and reciting information for the test. Secondly, since these domains are usually shared by groups of people, we gain the potential to join this social group. We find people who study physics to be interesting. We can have meaningful conversations with them about our shared interests, because we haven't just memorized a set of facts. Finally, we gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in the domain, and in other domains related to it. Now, I've been picking on physics here, perhaps unfairly, because what I've described about physics is pretty much how I learned math in school. The teacher would explain a concept and then we would all work independently to do problems based on that concept out of a workbook, I was lucky that I had a "good" teacher who didn't call us out for making mistakes; I know that many teachers do call students out and make sure everybody knows they made a mistake.

Because I'm a master at pattern recognition, I learned to recognize the shape of a problem and what that question on the test wanted me to do. I know that if the problem looks like this, it probably wants that. And the answer is one of these two, because they just have the decimal in different places. And if I make this certain mistake that I know is really common, I'll get the wrong one of the two answers. That's how I learned to do math. And I should add, I got an A in math because I did what was required of me, but I could not operate on the world using mathematical concepts, but I could do well in the exams.

But children fully enter the semiotic domain of video games, and they PRODUCE knowledge instead of just consuming it passively. In a video game, players are essentially repeating a four step process-- they're probing the virtual world in some way by looking around, by clicking on something, engaging in some kind of action. They reflect on what happens during that probing, and they form a hypothesis about what that element of the game might mean, whether it's text and objects and artifacts and event or an action. They reprove the world with that hypothesis in mind seeing what effects they get, and they treat that effect as feedback, which causes them to accept or rethink their original hypothesis. You may well have noticed here that a child who is playing video games is engaging in the basics of the scientific method, as scientists themselves use it. Real scientists don't do science in a place where they are given a set of chemicals and told to follow a precise set of instructions to get an outcome that the adult in the room already knows will happen if you were a good child in school, and maybe you always followed the instructions precisely, but maybe you remembered the other kids in class who weren't the good kids and who engaged in REAL scientific thinking as they did their own experiments with the provided ingredients.

Video games encourage children to think of themselves as active problem solvers. Mistakes in a game have consequences, of course, and your character might well die in the game if you make them. But we've already seen how video games deliver this feedback without judgment. It isn't you've died and you suck, and you'll never be good at this. It's you've died, play again. In a game children get to customize and try on new identities. They can see what it's like to kill living creatures in the game, or avoid killing them by running from them or sneaking around them. They can test social skills like cooperation, or pretending to cooperate and then going behind another person's back the whole time they're playing, they're exploring, making hypotheses, testing the hypotheses, and then applying what they've learned. They're taking risks, which sometimes pay off and sometimes don't, and learning how to persist in the face of failure. We see this identity work happening in school-based learning as well--so if a child brings an identity as a learner who can persist in the face of failure to school, they're more likely to be able to learn effectively. If this identity of being a learner or being a learner in a specific subject is damaged, then that identity needs to be repaired before any critical learning can occur. Now, I don't play video games because I have a sense that I'm not I'm really very good at them. And this was despite me getting to the very last level in Sonic the Hedgehog when I was about 14 after I won a Sega Master System for designing a first birthday card from my local supermarket. The other kids drew their cards and I embroidered mine, so it wasn't really a fair competition. I wasn't good at a lot of other games so I developed an identity as a person who isn't good at games and who doesn't find gaming interesting. I do have an identity as a school-based learner, which developed because teachers took a special interest in me and I liked the rewards I got for learning, which took the form of stickers, stars, grades, and also relationships with teachers. Dr. Gee had a school-based learning identity as well as a successful professor and he developed a gaming identity firstly, by watching his young son play, then by learning to play just a little bit to help his son, then by picking a game for adults that had a story and character that bridge to his real world identities of enjoying literature, academics, problem solving, and fantasy worlds. The real world consequences of developing this new identity were not high. He could always save the game and come back to it, there was a low cost of failure because the cost of caring about his identity as a gamer, if you failed, was not as high as it often is in school. I could probably find a game that incorporates ideas I'm interested in and use it to develop more scale of video games. I just have enough things to do to keep me busy without creating more.

Dr. Gee says we can use this process to understand how to support children in learning outside of video games. We can support children in building bridges between one or more of their video game-based identities and the identity at stake in the learning environment. If their sense of identity as a learner has been damaged, there are three essential components of the repair work that has to happen. Firstly, the learner must be enticed to try even if they have already good grounds to be afraid to try. Secondly, the learner must be enticed to put in lots of effort even if they begin with little motivation to do so. And finally, the learner must achieve some meaningful success when they have expended this effort. So if we want to support children in learning off-screens, when they really like learning on-screen, they're more likely to want to try it if they see the bridge between their on-screen and off-screen identity. A lot of companies have already tried a variation on this theme, which is a bridge between the topic of the video game and the topic of learning. That's why you see Minecraft-themed reading books and writing workbooks and math workbooks. Some kids will do these activities because the Minecraft theme makes it just interesting enough that they're willing to do the activities they otherwise would have been unwilling to do. But some of them see right through it to the trick the grownups are trying to pull, which is drawn directly from one of my favorite papers on the topic of learning, which is about how to get children to be interested in subjects they aren't really interested in learning about. The Minecraft theme in these books is just a veneer that's there to entice the learner --they aren't actually learning anything they're really interested in.

But creating a bridge between the topics of the video game and learning is quite different from creating a bridge between the learners identity in the video game and outside of it. You may find it helpful to play your child's favorite game alongside them for a while or just observe them playing it to get a sense for what is their identity within the game. Once you see how persistent they are, or how creative they are, or whatever skill they bring to the game, you can use that to help them create a similar identity in their real world learning. We can point out the successes they're having as they go through the learning process, which is likely to then encourage them to put in more effort. And it can help to lower the cost of failure by trying not to judge their successes and failures, and observing that whatever they do, it's successful because they learned something from it, just like they learned something about how to play a video game successfully, even if their character dies. Obviously, it also helps when our practice happens within a meaningful, goal-driven context that the child really cares about. If the child wants to learn how to jump rope or bake a cake or take appliances apart and repair them, they're going to be much more likely to persist than if it's a goal that you or another adult have chosen for them. Just like with video games, it's likely there's a lot more grunt learning going on in these kinds of activities than you might think. In the FREE You Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshop which starts in just a few days on Wednesday, August 7th, you'll learn how to see the deep self-directed learning that's happening in whatever activity your child is interested in. You'll see how to demonstrate this complex, multifaceted learning both to yourself so you can believe it's happening and others as well. You'll reimagine what learning looks like is something that's as fun and interesting and exciting as video games, and not something you have to bribe your child to do. You understand your values about learning so you can do activities with your child that are aligned with those values. And you'll also both be and believe that you can be your child's best teacher--whether your child is in school or not. You can sign up for the free workshop at YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher. That's YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher.

I have a Master's degree in education and I can tell you, you do not need a master's degree in education to be able to support their learning effectively. Most of what I learned from my master's degree was predictably about how to get children interested in completing assignments that had no practical real world application by trying to camouflage that fact, one of my assignments was to develop an assignment for children in which they imagined that their state's governor had tasked them with developing a water management plan for the state, which obviously would never happen. In my assignment, I said that that was a silly idea and instead, I was going to describe an assignment where the students themselves had noticed that the parking lot in a local park flooded every time it rained, and that they would work with the park's managers to develop a plan to address it. Submitting that assignment fit with my identity as a learner who critiqued the status quo, and the cost of failure was not high for me because I knew I could resubmit the assignment if I got a failing grade, which fortunately didn't happen. All of which made it worthwhile for me to put in the extra effort on my own assignment rather than the provided one. I was invested in it because it was mine.

Children get invested in learning when they care about it as well and real world experiences help them to care. One of the books I read quoted a paragraph from a geology textbook that said, "The destruction of a land surface by the combined effects of abrasion And removal of weathered material by transporting agents is called erosion... the production of rock waste by mechanical processes and chemical changes is called weathering." The reader is supposed to understand something from all of this and I know there are some geology majors listening who do understand it perfectly but it assumes a TON of existing knowledge, like what transporting agents are, what's a mechanical process, how erosion and weathering are connected, but different and what chemicals might be involved. It takes a lot of work to put all that together in your mind when the topic of erosion might not have much relevance to your daily life. And as I read that passage, my own thoughts cast back just a couple of weeks ago to when our family visited the Grand Canyon, and we saw what the destruction of a land surface by abrasion and removal of weathered material looks like on a vast scale. We've been rafting before, although on much tamer water in the Grand Canyon, and Charisse knows what rapids look and feel like we looked at the rocks that were precariously balanced at the top of the canyon, and imagine them falling down the side canyons and eventually piling up in the river, where they create a rapid at the mouth of the side Canyon. That's what abrasion and removal of weathered material looks and feels like and you can bet she's gonna remember that for a lot longer than she would remember the paragraph if I read it to her, because the information touches her in a very different way. Plus, she was observing things really closely because she wanted to get the Junior Ranger badge, which is an extrinsic motivator that she chose herself.

I think a lot of parents worry that their children won't be motivated to do things that the children find difficult or boring if they play a lot of video games, because they're so used to the fun and excitement of the game. I interviewed my daughter Carys for this episode, and she said that she didn't want me to share the actual audio with you, but it was okay for me to share what she said. I know she's told me in the past that she's worked on boring things in Minecraft so I asked her specifically about what kinds of things she doesn't particularly enjoy. And she said she doesn't like creating structures, but she does like doing the interiors. She could build an Education Edition and the code would would do the boring work for her. But instead she usually just puts a YouTube video on in the background and hits the button hundreds of times to stack block after block after block so that she can get to her self chosen goal of having an inside of a building to work on. She's willing to do the work she finds boring because it's necessary for her to get to that self-chosen goal. It actually came up again today because she has been learning a new game called seek Sneaky Sasquatch, which the kids we've been staying with in New Mexico are playing. She said she has been doing some fishing in the game because she's learned from other games like Stardew Valley that fishing is often a way to get currency in the game very quickly. She says fishing is pretty boring in Stardew Valley apparently you just stand around and wait. But in Sneaky Sasquatch, you have to hit a button over and over and over again and she was wondering if it might break her finger. She said it's worth it though, because now she has 3000 points and she only needs another 2000 points to get a scuba diving kit, which means she'll be able to explore the ocean which she really wants to do. But the more important part here is she's transfer the knowledge about fishing from other games, which is huge in the knowledge world. Transferring knowledge means you can call on experiences you've had in the same game and also in other games. It doesn't always work and it requires critical thinking. The learner has to be specifically aware of how two different problems or domains share certain properties at a deeper level, which may be obscured by more superficial features of the problems or domains. Fishing looks different in these two games. The player does different things to catch the fish. The goals of the two games are different, but she's still recognize this critical piece of information that helps her to get towards her goal of the points in Sneaky Sasquatch. And now I know that she sees this I can explain that what she's doing is transfering knowledge and when she's having a hard time solving a completely unrelated problem, maybe something that has nothing to do with video games, and I can see that the problem is related to another thing she knows how to do, I can remind her about knowledge transfer and help her to connect what she already knows with the strategy she needs to address the new issue. This is why you don't need a master's in education to support your child's learning. I didn't learn anything at all about knowledge transfer in mine. All you need is a bit of background in some critical concepts like scaffolding, critical thinking, metacognition, and guidance in helping your child take things just a single step further than they've been able to take their learning themselves. You don't have to be an expert to do that. I can show you how to do it and I will show you in the FREE You Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshop that starts on Wednesday, August 7.

Our friends with whom we're staying in New Mexico have friends with a pool, and we've had quite a productive day of learning. Even though we were just hanging out by the pool. We had the conversation about fishing on our walk over to the pool and then after we played fetch with every non floating object she could find, she decided to practice diving. She would always curve her body into a C shape and make a huge splash and she couldn't figure out how to not do that. Now, I've never dived in my life so I couldn't offer her any instruction but I asked if she wanted to watch a YouTube video on it. And I asked her what we should search and she said "how to dive" and I remembered aloud that we often seem to give get better search results when we want a video when we search directly on YouTube rather than on Google. So we did that. We read the titles of the first few videos, and she chose to watch one called "How To Die For Beginners" because she thought that was her level of expertise. The person making the video walk through step by step starting with falling gently off the side of the pool into the water. She decided she was fine doing that and she wanted to come into the process midway by practicing and dive from a kneeling position so we stopped the video there so she could try it. She got the feel of that a couple times and her position as you hit the water immediately improved. And I took videos of her doing it so she could look back and compare how she felt with how it looked on the video And adjust her positioning. She moved up to a standing position it was pretty quickly able to come up and critique how she'd done based on how it felt and she didn't need the videos anymore. I noticed what I'd seen in the videos, which was the instructor had bent legs and was also bending forward at the hips while keeping their torso straight, whereas she would often start with straight legs and bend her arms forward at the shoulders, which was what was leading to the C- shaped dive she had been doing before she started practicing. I positioned her back like the instructor's and then she was able to position her back that way the next time. Within half an hour she had made a significant improvement in her diving technique. I didn't have to be an expert in diving or in teaching to be able to help her with this. We used our network of experts in this case on YouTube to find out the information we were missing. We used our critical thinking skills just a little bit in this case to decide which of our search results might help us the most. I scaffolded her learning by positioning her when I saw she was doing things differently from the video, and by recording her so she could see the results herself. She took ownership of her learning as she realized she could match how she felt in her body with what she saw on the video so she needed the video less. The video offered immediate nonjudgmental feedback on how she was doing, which quickly increased her competence and because I was actively involved in the process And also pulling her out of the pool after every dive because there weren't any steps at the deep end, her need for relatedness was met too.

What you're seeing And my story is about Carys learning video games and diving is the difference in where knowledge is stored in the video gaming world compared to the school world. When I'm supporting her learning, we both hold important information. She knows far more about video games than I do, and I hold some knowledge about how people learn and how to help her take it to the next level. When she wants to learn how to dive I can offer the scaffolding of helping her to look at videos and match what she's doing with what's in the videos. We both hold critical parts of her learning and that's a feature rather than a bug as people in the software world say.

In school, the only knowledge that counts is the knowledge that's inside one child's head and that most importantly, the child can produce in a time and place that the teacher deems appropriate. In the real world knowledge is social and is situated outside our bodies. In the real world. It isn't only the knowledge that's in our heads is important, which is what school focuses on but also how well we can leverage the knowledge in other people's heads and other tools and technologies like search engines and AI tools as well as how we're positioned in a network that connects us with these people and technologies. And just as a reminder, if you want to get support doing this in your own life with your own child's learning, I would love to see you in the You Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshop will show you all the learning your child is already doing that may not have been obvious up to this point as well as how you can play your equally important supportive role in extending their learning. It's all available for FREE at YourParentingMojo.com/bestteacher and we will get started on Wednesday, August 7th.

So to summarize what we've covered in these last two episodes on children and video games, if you decide you want to set limits on your children's screen time, just know that for many kids, it's going to be a long journey from you setting the limit to them finding balance in managing their own screen time, but it is possible and it can be done by breaking the responsibility down into small steps, starting with you managing the entire thing: you're setting the timer, you're telling the child when it goes off, you're turning the screen off through them managing the timer, but you being there to back them up to them managing the timer without you and so on until you both feel ready to test the idea of unlimited screen time. And what that might look like to you both and both being willing to say, either I think we can keep doing this for a bit longer, or I'm not sure we're ready for this yet. Your entry level curious take home here can be to see where you are on this journey right now and just make sure you're matching what you're asking your child to do with their capabilities. So if you've tasked your child with turning off screen time, when the timer goes off, and they habitually don't do it, then that isn't really where you are on this journey. You're actually a couple steps further back, and they need your help to turn the screen off when the timer goes off. And that's totally fine. Because if you can accept that that's where you are, you're probably going to be a whole lot less resentful than you do, if you expect them to be able to do something they can't and each time they do it, you feel frustrated which compounds into resentment over time.

There is no compelling body of evidence that says on average, children are going to be more violent if they play video games. The vast majority of the population now plays video games and violent crime has decreased over that same period. Even in countries where the percentage of young people who plays video games is even higher than the in the US, violent crime rates are lower than they are here. But averages can obscure what's happening for individual children. And if you're seeing behavior that you don't like in your children after they play video games, it's okay to not allow them access to certain games, especially if they're on the younger side, say preschool or early elementary school.

We have to be aware of the kinds of things children are learning about our culture from video games. And it's not that these exist ideas exist only within gaming, but that they exist in the world so they show up in gaming. We can't protect our children forever from these ideas, but we can talk with them about it and help them spot the ideas when they show up and decide whether we want to take on those ideas or other ideas that fit better with our values. So your second level learning homework is to see what are the cultural messages your child is getting from the media they're consuming right now, whether that's aligned with your values, and to have a conversation about what you're observing and ask what your child is observing too.

We can recognize the reasons WHY children find video games so enticing, which is because they make it easy for children to meet their needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness. And we can try to have activities ready that also meet their those needs for them as we asked them to turn off screens, like a game they enjoy playing or roughhousing if they like that.

And finally, we can see all of the amazing learning that children can do through video games as they truly enter a new semiotic domain as a producer of knowledge, not just as a passive recipient of facts. We can see them engaged in scientific thinking, not the kind where they follow a set of instructions to get to a result that an adult in the room already knows, but the kind where they form hypotheses and test their hypotheses and refine their approaches in pursuit of success. Children often play creatively and develop persistence, and we can help them connect their identity within the video game play with their identity and real-world learning to help them navigate learning more effectively. So we can point out their creativity and persistence in their play, which might mean we have to watch them play or even play with them, and help them see how they can bring this creativity and persistence to their real world learning as well. Of course, it helps if they're learning something they really care about, like my daughter cared about learning how to dive because it's admittedly harder to get them to persist in something they don't care about, unless there's a goal on the other side that they do care about. We can see how shared knowledge rather than only knowledge that's held in one person's head is going to be the way of the future. Your highest growth level of homework is to start to observe some of these things they're learning both from a standpoint of the fact they're learning from the game, but also how they're developing skills that they can use in other areas of their life as well. This thinking about thinking is called metacognition And it's a critical skill to have and higher order learning. We'll help both you and your child develop your metacognitive thinking in the You Are Your Child's Best Teacher workshops, so I will look forward to seeing you there.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks with the final installment for now in this mini series on the intersection of technology and children's learning with a look at what children need to learn in the age of AI. Because you might think that digital skills like coding are going to be incredibly important and they are to some extent, but you might be surprised at the kinds of skills that researchers think are going to be just is important, and how you can help your child to get them. So I'll see you very soon for that. In the meantime, you can find the references for the books and papers behind this episode at YourParentingMojo.com/VideoGames.

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