This is right up my alley! I might go run out and buy this right right now. Or maybe I should just wait till later when I meet up with my brother in Manhattan. Goddammit! But I want it so bad! AHHHHHHHRRRHHGH!

I’m all in a tizzy over here! I just found another article about this dude who wrote this book. There’s some good stuff that he says:

Games make kids smarter when they play them proactively, that is, when they think about game design, how their own styles of play interact with that design, how different strategies work, and how games relate to other things like books, movies, and the world. Schools may not yet care about this, but modern workplaces care about whether people can think about how their environments are designed and can be re-designed to be better and more productive.

…It dawned on me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and learning. Many of these principles could be used in schools to get kids to learn things like science, but, too often today schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning.

…Third, good games create what’s been called a “cycle of expertise” by giving players well-designed problems on the basis of which they can form good strategies, letting them practice these enough to routinize them, then throwing a new problem at them that forces them to undo their now routinized skills and think again before achieving, through more practice, a new and higher routinized set of skills. Good games repeat this cycle again and again—it’s the process by which experts are produced in any domain.

Holy crap! This is gonna make me cry its so good! Bret, you definitely have to at least read the interview I got that above stuff from. He pretty much makes all the points we used to talk about all the time at Catalyst. Goddamn! This guy is the shit. He even knows that he can only go so far, because of his age and upbringing: “But as a baby-boomer, I am an immigrant and the younger academics, as well as game designers, as natives, will make the really big discoveries.” And it just goes on and on, I want to paste the whole thing in here, really:

Also, people are too hung up about learning “content” in the sense of facts. What we need people to learn is how to think deeply about complex systems (e.g., modern workplaces, the environment, international relations, social interactions, cultures, etc.) where everything interacts in complicated ways with everything else and bad decisions can make for disasters.