Traveling to Microworlds Part 4 Semiotic domains and their similarity to travel

Semiotic domains and their similarity to travel

An earlier book and one that Shaffer possibly got his inspiration from, is What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee, another scholar from the University of Madison in Wisconsin. In the book, Gee points out a question many teachers, parents and other people ask themselves when it comes to video games. Are they a waste of time? Is it even possible to learn from them? Yes, is Gee’s uncompromising answer. The big thing with games is that, according to the author, games ‘meld learning and identity’. “If a player takes on […] a projective identity vis-à-vis the virtual character he or she is playing in a game, this constitutes a form of identification with the virtual character’s world, story and perspectives that become a strong learning device at a number of different levels.”[1]

How does this work? Gee offsets the traditional way of learning by reading a book or making notes against learning to act and be critical in semiotic domains. Semiotic domains are “any set of practises that recruits one or more modalities (e.g. oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings.”[2] According to Gee there is a ‘nearly endless’ set of semiotic domains, ranging from Roman Catholic theology to postmodern literary criticism and cellular biology. Perhaps one might call these domains area’s of expertise. For Gee, video games are just another set of semiotic domains with their own language, values, images and artifacts. The argument of Gee is that you can learn about a certain domain like, for example, ‘physics’, but unless you learn to ‘write’ in the domain instead of just ‘reading’ it, you never learn to engage with it on an active level. He talks about psychics students who can write down Newton’s laws of motion but fail to answer a practical question like ‘How many forces are acting on a coin when it has been thrown up into the air?’[3] It is when you actively and critically engage with the topic material within a semiotic domain, becoming part of it (what Shaffer would come to call epistemology) that you have really learned something.

Video games are a semiotic domain that -at least in many cases- involve active and critical learning about a certain domain, because of the involvement it requires of the player. That is a good thing, because according to Gee: “Semiotic domains in society are connected to other semiotic domains in a myriad of complex ways. One of these is that a given domain can be a good precursor for learning another one. Because mastering the meaning-making skills in, and taking on the identity associated with it, the precursor domain facilitates learning in the other domain.”[4]

So, learning to operate within the semiotic domain of a video game, might give you an edge when learning about something else. “It may well be that the popular (sub-) domain of simulation games (so-called god games, like Simcity, The Sims, Railrood Tycoon, and Tropico) could be, for some children, a precursor domain for those sciences that heavily trade in computer-based simulations as a method of inquiry.”[5] Gee and his research team interviewed players who used the domain of games as a precursor to more ‘serious’ domains like computer science. Like Shaffer, Gee says games let you learn about other epistemologies or domains and play with your identity. But while Shaffer focuses on its direct, educational benefits, Gee describes the process as a broad phenomenon in which people potentially learn about other domains in life all the time. To look back at my earlier comparison of games with travel,  you might say that nearly all games invite you to travel to their world, put you into another frame of mind. This is true whether the frame is that of a city planner, army general, superhero, vampire, car thief (because ‘bad’ frames of mind exist as well), or someone who turns blocks around to make them fit with other blocks.

When travelling to Thailand in 2005, I stepped into a world that was completely different from the one I grew up in. Together with a helpful guide, me and my co-travellers quickly learned to adapt to the new frame of mind it required to function in this alien society. Not that we completely integrated into Thai culture, of course (not by a longshot!) but at least enough for the time being. Adapting to a different rhythm of living, coping with spicy food, changing our attitudes of what constitutes ‘safe’ driving in hectic Bangkok traffic, bartering for every purchase that you make and appreciating the religious importance of Theravada-Buddhism were all parts of the semiotic domain that was Thai culture that we had to engage with. When we returned to the society that was familiar to us, we took our new experience with us and were able to use it in other domains. For example, I found out I could understand Buddhist concepts more easily. Or appreciate negotiation skills I had dismissed earlier in life. Also, I might add, I am able to handle spicy food to a degree I could not do before.

In the same way, players of video games step out of their own domain and learn about new ones while playing. When they stop playing (return to their own world, the lifeworld) they might just take their new experiences with them. Despite the useful applications -what Shaffer has done is create experiences within games that are quite clearly useful in the lifeworld, like engineering- it is this quality of games that has already changed the minds of learners worldwide.

Table of contents:

• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Broadening your horizons
• Part 3 Epistemic games
• Part 4 Semiotic domains and their similarity to travel
• Part 5 Homo Ludens
• Part 6 Case in point: waging war as frame of mind
• Part 7 Conclusion & References.

[1]          . James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) pp. 199.

[2]          . Ibid., 18.

[3]          . Ibid., pp. 18.

[4]          . Ibid., pp. 47.

[5]         . Ibid., pp. 48.