Self-Regulated Learning and Video Games
Learning is a fundamental part of games. Essential gameplay activities include learning the rules and how to enact winning strategies. A player can engage in learning a game without direct participation. With observation/spectating and simulation, players can develop new strategies. An exciting aspect of gaming is generalizing strategies across completely different games.
This transfer of knowledge from one game to another is yet another type of learning in games. An internal play model can be built iteratively and this knowledge base can also glean information from beyond games themselves. What’s quite interesting is that just as non-game skills can generalize into gaming skills, so can the opposite be true. This is the heart of learning through play.
Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is the personal and iterative process of achieving educational goals using a cycle of Forethought, Performance Control and Self-reflection.
Last year, I wrote a paper on Generative AI for Self-Regulated Learning and in it, I proposed a possible way to “healthily” integrate tools like ChatGPT into a classroom environment. GenAI is both Prometheus’ fire and Pandora’s box for students and teachers alike so it’s important to integrate such technologies so they don’t undermine foundational learning processes. The proposal was built on a vision of a dystopian future where schools have succumbed to economic entropy; in it, the remaining few teachers act as consultants and students need to engage in a cyclical process to learn academic materials.
For example, instead of simply asking chatbots to generate answers, students would use them to generate lesson plans to assist with SRL Forethought. Teachers would provide prompt templates and help students evaluate or modify whatever GenAI suggested. Similarly, AI tools would be used to assist students with Performance Control and Self-reflection with teachers reviewing and reinforcing each phase of SRL. For instance, students engage in Socratic learning with chatbots, verifying their knowledge of subject matter by asking questions about their understanding (instead of simply asking for explanations); these conversations are shared with teachers to ensure offloading is not occurring.
The proposal has some positive points such as customization at scale. With AI tools, each student can get a custom plan and evaluation, catered to their individual needs without overburdening their teacher. Indeed, if all elements of my proposal were to work out as I described, students would become lifelong learners, and teachers would be helpful guides and not authoritarians.
What is interesting here is that while GenAI tools need to be massaged with SRL to be effective, games naturally provide an environment for SRL! And video games (or computer games or any games built with software) support data manipulation that further strengthens SRL. Mission Objectives (goal planning), Rewards and Leaderboards (motivation support), and Scoring (performance monitoring tools) are features of video games that can be mapped to components of SRL.
- Picking a side quest in an RPG is an example of Forethought, as is any act of planning or strategy formation.
- Dodging heavy attacks instead of Blocking is Performance Control, which entails executing actions, observing feedback, and adapting strategies.
- Reconsidering loadouts in a respawn screen allows for Self-reflection through result evaluation and strategy revision
It is fair to say that video games repeatedly cycle the player through the SRL process via the proverbial gameplay loop. Unlike other types of games, video games can offer safe failure, near-infinite retries, and immediate feedback and evaluation. Physical games like soccer, billiards or even pinball don’t easily support exact recreations of a problem; in video games, you can load and reload the exact level as many times as desired to easily test different hypotheses. Board games or tabletop games don’t support instant computation or telemetry that could be used for evaluation or monitoring. These games offer other benefits such as exercise and socialization but when it comes to supporting SRL attributes, video games are hard to beat. They offer systems that enable a player to easily run through the SRL cycle.
The irony as I see it is that video games have not evolved to reach their full potential. Video games don’t always contain material that is worth learning. They may have excellent learning mechanics but teach useless learning content, with most video games seemingly stuck in a carnival phase of glorified shooting galleries and random duck fishing. There may be exceptions but they are vastly outnumbered.
In defense of carnival-ish video games, a popular definition of games claims that games (of any kind) must not be productive. It is supposed to be a form of recreation after all. And yet, a lion cub playfully wrestles and eventually generalizes this play activity into powerful killing lunges (for its lunches). Arguably, because of learning, games are inherently productive. The exercise from playing sports is beneficial to the human body and research indicates that puzzles can help aging brains.
But when it comes to video games, the content is often lacking because skills taught by games don’t readily transfer to the real world in ways they can be useful. Playing thousands of hours of First Person Shooters will not improve actual gunhandling nor marksmanship; the environments are just vastly different. The input and output devices of video games do not match their real world counterparts; even with closely modeled proxies, it is difficult if not impossible to translate such skills out of the video game itself. Perhaps team-based FPSs might improve vocal communication and teamwork in real life situations but that would be fortuitous coincidence and not a goal accomplished by design.
With video games, one might develop strategic knowledge without acquiring the necessary skills to execute them.
And by design, educational video games are a whole genre dedicated to teaching useful skills, oftentimes conceptual and not physical. Unfortunately, they’re often games of low quality, or cater to schools’ needs as opposed to players’ needs (a great way to fail the motivational aspect of SRL). The phrase “chocolate-covered broccoli” was one I heard often working on an educational game which describes the unappealing nature of a product whose end goal is to teach academic content that was likely uninteresting to learn to begin with.
Even with appealing content and motivated players, there may be other points of friction for learning. For example, video games that teach languages often have motivated students who wish to communicate with new groups of people. However, these games have a problem with SRL performance control. Products like Duolingo are inherently ineffective for learning to converse in new languages because quizzes and human conversation are not the same; the skills being evaluated will not generalize to the real world environment. You might be able to learn grammar and build your vocabulary but you likely won’t achieve fluency with just the software itself.
With poor skill transfer, goals that undermine SRL, and environmental mismatches, video games face an uphill battle in evolving into tools that can transform their players. Most video games optimize learning for mastery of the game mechanics contained within; should they break out and go beyond these mechanics, they could become tools that improve people’s lives significantly. And yes, learning amazing skills with game software is a popular trope in Science Fiction. The Animus in Assassin’s Creed could inflict a “bleeding effect” where parkour and other abilities in its simulations could transfer to an excessive user. We can’t quite accomplish The Matrix’s brain-downloadable Kung-fu in our current reality but the war simulators in Ender’s Game are absolutely within reach. By accepting that video games provide powerful environments for Self-Regulated Learning, game developers can push their games to new heights where what the player learns remains valuable even when the game is over.