A recent Wired article by Chris Kohler titled “Hey, Video Games: Please Trick Me Into Thinking I’m Smart” caught my attention between levels of the mind-bending puzzle game Monument Valley as I rode the train in to work one morning. I began to wonder if video games (“real” video games and not the ones designed principally as educational tools) really can make us smarter. And if they can in fact make us smarter, I wondered how I could replicate this in my own courses.

I can admit to having moments in class when I was a student where everyone around me seemed to get an idea with ease and I just stared at the teacher, feigning a smile and hoping my cluelessness wasn’t too apparent. It was similar to moments I had in video games, walking back and forth between the same locations, looking at the same objects over and over and simply not seeing anything there; there was no rhythm or pattern that I could discern to do anything useful or that resembled anything I had done in the game before. Overcoming these blocks was often even more dire due to the fact that I have 3 brothers who are extremely talented gamers, and were often several levels ahead of me as I bumbled my way through the levels at half their pace. (I would be teased relentlessly for missing the obvious solutions. Their favorite was to emphatically say “It’s right there in front of you!” without pointing at anything and letting the anxiety paralyze me.)

What usually solved my gaming issue was changing the angles I used to look at things— standing on a different side of the room, looking down from a ladder, or trying and retrying the character’s abilities or items until something worked. (When all else failed, I usually looked for a cheat-sheet or walk-through, a study-guide-like item explaining each step to take to beat the level.) Within the games—trying and retrying or looking at things from different angles—I often learned a new skill that I was ready to employ later in the game to get the next level.

Within the classroom, I usually didn’t get such opportunities. I would simply admit defeat so that I didn’t fall behind going into the next level, and hoped that I didn’t need that particular skill again later. It had never occurred to me then that some of the same gaming strategies might benefit me in class, and that all I may have needed was a different way to look at and do something.

Various media outlets have reported on the mixed views of video games’ effects on children, how they either benefit hand-eye coordination and understanding of narrative structures, or destroy focus and distract from more important schoolwork. In other corners, mainly within academia, there are many theorists and researchers exploring the benefits of video games and digital content on learning beyond these standard media discussions, and even recommending an understanding of how gaming benefits learning.

On the surface of games and education, many people might think of those educational games played on computers the size of compact cars throughout their earlier school years, like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, Number Munchers, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and Oregon Trail, rather than today’s top video game titles. Despite the seeming disconnect from education, the principles of learning and gaming are still applicable even in many of the modern (supposedly non-educational) games questioned in the media. How can this be?

In his article, Kohler describes an experience with a new game whose opening sequence declares “This game is a narrative experience that does not hold your hand,” a sentiment many instructors try to impart to their students. Many people think that education, at least on the college level, isn’t supposed to involve large doses of “hand holding”, since we expect that our students will have some level of curiosity, dedication, and familiarity with solving issues on their own, and we don’t need to waste time or effort on explaining every step of the process.

Yet, there still needs to be some level of guidance, otherwise, there would be little value in going to college when you could just figure it out on your own in the real world rather than spending time in a classroom–a sentiment that isn’t lost on Kohler either, who states “A game that doesn’t grab onto your hand is a refreshing experience these days. But this one could have benefited from a little bit of secret hand-holding.” I’ve heard students who say this too–that courses with too many minor assignments that don’t have a clear end goal can feel like childish “busywork”; I’ve also heard of students complaining when a class feels like “doctorate level work” that requires advanced skills in a 200 level course. It was this sentiment that brought me to the realization that a better connection between our understanding of how games are designed, what gamers refer to as “game mechanics” that set the expectations for what is and isn’t possible and how to go about things in a game, can give us a better understanding of how we can improve our course design and learning for generations of students familiar with video games and game mechanics. If you’re curious about game mechanics and want to explore iconic elements, learn about the konami code.

James Paul Gee, a noted Composition and Education Theorist, would argue that it has to do with learning as a view primarily based on literacy and the performance of literacy/identity rather than just content acquisition and rote memorization of information. As he cautions in a video series from edutopia.org, “Don’t just look at the game, because there’s more going on.”

Gee, like Kohler, goes on to discuss attempting to play a game for the first time and not understanding what was going on or how to get started, a sentiment many students face when handed an assignment, and how simply reading the manual was no help in those moments. He then describes the various game mechanics and player roles in some popular titles he attempted to play, and how the more successful games often created a series of repetitive minor tasks that instilled various strategies or abilities so that the player becomes instantly aware of the range of possible solutions to new problems as they arise, or are privy to the patterns and behaviors present in different challenges throughout the game, allowing them to develop new strategies to cope with problems that are more difficult than the ones they previously faced. Along the way, the players also develop a vernacular that allows them to not only understand these game mechanics and interactions, but to engage in a sort of mentorship by articulating them to other players (often to “newbs” or “newbie” players just starting to face the same questions all players had earlier in the game). The students become the teachers, and in those moments, further develop their understanding of the game mechanics as well (we might say cognition meets metacognition, form meets function, or theory meets practice).

This point is brought home when Gee declares that, like his earlier experience feeling lost when reading the manual, schools are “full of manuals without the games, we have handed kids all the manuals without the games.” This is further reinforced when he argues that “There isn’t any such thing as technical, hard language; there’s only language you don’t know because you didn’t live in its world, you didn’t play its game.” The solution is finally summarized that “on theory, we could level the playing field for the first time in American education if we brought the games to the manuals, and I don’t mean a videogame. If we brought the activities, the problem solving, the living in the worlds of chemistry and algebra, with making kids want to do things with them–that is to see them as tools to surmise new possibilities–that’s the game. If we brought those to school, they’d like them as much as Portal.”

I can admit that when I first started as a teacher of Composition and Rhetoric, I often fell too far into the theoretical, vernacular-laden explanations when I presented new concepts to students. What I lacked in those early classes was a good example or explanation of how those theories can be used in the real world. Over the years, I’ve gotten better at starting with observations and simulations of rhetoric and composition in the world and working backwards to naming and classifying these moves, something the students find much easier to grasp (and better yet, much more fun to replicate when it is their turn to employ these concepts to their advantage).

The takeaway here is that the shortfall of many courses that lean toward opposite ends of the spectrum indicated in Kohler’s article and Gee’s video are that they either focus too much on the “game” or the “manual”–that they are either too hands-on and fail to demonstrate higher level thinking or abstractions that help to provide the understanding of how these skills and experiences will relate to other ideas or experiences in the world, or they are too abstract and fail to come across in ways that students can see and apply or experience in the real world. Students will often express these shortfalls when they complain a class is too easy or too difficult, when the answers to the problem are either too apparent to feel rigorous (busywork) or too abstract for them to understand or utilize (like when Kohler stated the difficult game he started could benefit from “a little bit of secret hand-holding”).

Within our courses, we can turn our current system of education into a game when we combine the games with the manuals, when we set our students up for success by designing courses that “hold their hands” without letting them know that it’s even happening through interactive low-stakes experiences (what we’ve always called scaffolded learning) that let them experience new worlds and ideas (experiential learning, or even simulated real-world tasks), when the manuals of our readings or lectures demonstrate the real-world applicability of these skillsets and give them a vernacular to interact with one another and their new worlds. We need to design assignments that better allow students to use and experience these things they’ve been reading about in the same ways that a professional might use these things. In essence, we can achieve Kohler’s request to “Please Trick Me Into Thinking I’m Smart” once students can not only articulate, even a little, what we do, but then also do what we do on some levels.

So my questions to you are, how do your game mechanics work, and what are you doing in your courses to bring the games to the manuals?