The Digital Divide

In history, scholars have tended to view the human mind through the lens of a technology they thought worked like the mind. Locke and Hume, for example, argued that the mind was like a blank slate on which experience wrote ideas, taking the technology of literacy as their guide. Much later, modern cognitive scientists argued that the mind worked like a digital computer, calculating generalizations and deductions via a logic-like rule system (Newell and Simon, 1972). More recently, some cognitive scientists, inspired by distributed parallel-processing computers and complex adaptive networks, have argued that the mind works by storing records of actual experiences and constructing intricate patterns of connections among them (Clark, 1989; Gee, 1992). So we get different pictures of the mind: mind as a slate waiting to be written on, mind as software, mind as a network of connections.

Human societies get better through history at building technologies that more closely capture some of what the human mind can do and getting these technologies to do mental work publicly. Writing, digital computers, and networks each allow us to externalize some functions of the mind. Though they are not commonly thought of in these terms, video games are a new technology in this same line. They are a new tool with which to think about the mind and through which we can externalize some of its functions. Video games of the sort I am concerned with are what I would call “action-and-goal-directed preparations for, and simulations of, embodied experience.” A mouthful, indeed, but an important one, and one connected intimately to the nature of human thinking; so, let us see what it means.

Let me first briefly summarize some recent research in cognitive science, the science that studies how the mind works (Bransford et al., 2000). Consider, for instance, the remarks on the following page (in the quotes, the word “comprehension” means “understanding words, actions, events, or things”):

. . . comprehension is grounded in perceptual simulations that prepare agents for situated action. (Barsalou, 1999a: 77)

. . . to a particular person, the meaning of an object, event, or sentence is what that person can do with the object, event, or sentence. (Glenberg, 1997: 3)

What these remarks mean is this: human understanding is not primarily a matter of storing general concepts in the head or applying abstract rules to experience. Rather, humans think and understand best when they can imagine (simulate) an experience in such a way that the simulation prepares them for actions they need and want to take in order to accomplish their goals (Clark, 1997; Barsalou, 1999b; Glenberg and Robertson, 1999).

Let us take weddings as an example, though we could just as well have taken war, love, inertia, democracy, or anything. You don’t understand the word or the idea of weddings by meditating on some general definition of weddings. Rather, you have had experiences of weddings, in real life and through texts and media. On the basis of these experiences, you can simulate different wedding scenarios in your mind. You construct these simulations differently for different occasions, based on what actions you need to take to accomplish specific goals in specific situations. You can move around as a character in the mental simulation as yourself, imaging your role in the wedding, or you can “play” other characters at the wedding (e.g., the minister), imaging what it is like to be that person.

You build your simulations to understand and make sense of things, but also to help you prepare for action in the world. You can act in the simulation and test out what consequences follow, before you act in the real world. You can role-play another person in the simulation and try to see what motivates their actions or might follow from them before you respond in the real world. So I am arguing that the mind is a simulator, but one that builds simulations to prepare purposely for specific actions and to achieve specific goals (i.e., they are built around win states).

Video games turn out to be the perfect metaphor for what this view of the mind amounts to, just as slates and computers were good metaphors for earlier views of the mind. Video games usually involve a visual and auditory world in which the player manipulates a virtual character (or characters). They often come with editors or other sorts of software with which the player can make changes to the game world or even build a new game world (much as the mind can edit its previous experiences to form simulations of things not directly experienced). The player can make a new landscape, a new set of buildings, or new characters. The player can set up the world so that certain sorts of action are allowed or disallowed. The player is building a new world, but is doing so by using and modifying the original visual images (really the code for them) that came with the game. One simple example of this is the way in which players can build new skateboard parks in a game like Tony Hawk Pro Skater. The player must place ramps, trees, grass, poles, and other things in space in such a way that players can manipulate their virtual characters to skate the park in a fun and challenging way.

Even when players are not modifying games, they play them with goals in mind, the achievement of which counts as their “win state.” Players must carefully consider the design of the world and consider how it will or will not facilitate specific actions they want to take to accomplish their goals. One technical way that psychologists have talked about this sort of situation is through the notion of “affordances” (Gibson, 1979). An affordance is a feature of the world (real or virtual) that will allow for a certain action to be taken, but only if it is matched by an ability in an actor who has the wherewithal to carry out such an action. For example, in the massive multiplayer game World of WarCraft stags can be killed and skinned (for making leather), but only by characters who have learned the skinning skill. So a stag is an affordance for skinning for such a player, but not for one who has no such skill. The large spiders in the game are not an affordance for skinning for any players, since they cannot be skinned at all. Affordances are relationships between the world and actors.

Playing World of WarCraft, or any other video game, is all about such affordances. The player must learn to see the game world—designed by the developers, but set in motion by the players, and, thus, co-designed by them—in terms of such affordances (Gee, 2005). Broadly speaking, players must think in terms of: “What are the features of this world that can enable the actions I am capable of carrying out and that I want to carry out in order to achieve my goals?”

The view of the mind I have sketched argues, as far as I am concerned, that the mind works rather like a video game. For humans, effective thinking is more like running a simulation in our heads within which we have a surrogate actor than it is about forming abstract generalizations cut off from experiential realities. Effective thinking is about perceiving the world such that the human actor sees how the world, at a specific time and place (as it is given, but also modifiable), can afford the opportunity for actions that will lead to a successful accomplishment of the actor’s goals. Generalizations are formed, when they are, bottom up from experience and imagination of experience. Video games externalize the search for affordances, for a match between character (actor) and world, but this is just the heart and soul of effective human thinking and learning in any situation. They are, thus, a natural tool for teaching and learning.

As a game player you learn to see the world of each different game you play in a quite different way. But in each case you see the world in terms of how it will afford the sorts of embodied actions you (and your virtual character, your surrogate body in the game) need to take to accomplish your goals (to win in the short and long run). For example, you see the world in Full Spectrum Warrior as routes (for your squad) between cover (e.g., corner to corner, house to house), because this prepares you for the actions you need to take, namely attacking without being vulnerable to attack yourself. You see the world of Thief: Deadly Shadows in terms of light and dark, illumination and shadows, because this prepares you for the different actions you need to take in this world, namely hiding, disappearing into the shadows, sneaking, and otherwise moving unseen to your goal.

While commercial video games often stress a match between worlds and characters like soldiers or thieves, there is no reason why other types of game could not let players experience such a match between the world and the way a particular type of scientist, for instance, sees and acts on the world (Gee, 2004). Such games would involve facing the sorts of problems and challenges that type of scientist does, and living and playing by the rules that type of scientist uses. Winning would mean just what it does to a scientist: feeling a sense of accomplishment through the production of knowledge to solve deep problems.

I have argued for the importance of video games as “action-and-goal-directed preparations for, and simulations of, embodied experience.” They are the new technological arena—just as were literacy and computers earlier—around which we can study the mind and externalize some of its most important features to improve human thinking and learning....

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