A game as a medium for learning

In this post, I want to talk about the role of experiential learning in games. In other words, the use of a video game as a tool for learning. So the context of this is I recently played a game called rue valley (owl cat games) and initially I picked this up as what I thought might be a silly, fun little game which would gave me a similar vibe to disco Elysium (which was a very mercurial and playful game that I enjoyed quite a lot a while back and has been very popular).

What I discovered as I began playing the Rue Valley was that what I initially thought would just be quirky turned into actually being quite a deep and insightful examination of the development of one character's psyche, a character experiencing what I could list off as a number of different mental illnesses or ill health from a psychological standpoint.

The game operates in that you have a single character that you used to navigate around the world, interacting with objects and making conversational choices. The premise of the game, which you would find out with a quick search is that this character is stuck in an ongoing time loop and you essentially restart this sequence regularly with new information and then have different conversations with the same people or try different things with the benefit of this new knowledge. This is not a unique game mechanic in any sense, there a number of games that use something like this, but what was interesting was in some ways it allowed the player to parallel the experience of the character, which in my very non-medical fashion, I would suspect the character has elements of depression, anhedonia, substance abuse, PTSD. There are a number of other elements to it, which I don't need to to define explicitly across the entirety of it, but suffice to say that it covered a lot of these

One of the interesting moments of it is where the character describes feeling like their actions are pointless and you can yourself experience that as the player as well in that you run through this loop multiple times not being able to do anything differently. It makes use of things like montages to make you feel like despite this being a loop within which technically no time passes except for those 47 minutes, that potentially this character could have spent lifetimes "doing nothing" so this allows the you as the player to experience a sense of futility.

So what's interesting about this from a pedagogical standpoint? That's where I'm going to bring in my expertise as more than just an enjoyer of video games. It aligns itself to the practice of experiential learning. As you are playing through these particular scenes and sequences, you are forced to reconcile with the experience of this character while you embody them through the (character's) self-talk you engage in and needing to convince the character to do or not do things. For contrast, there are pieces of art created by folks with very key mental illnesses to represent the feeling of having that mental illness, for instance encapsulating the distress one might feel in not being in control of oneself or surroundings, to represent depression, etc. but there's something something unique about a game as an experience because you as a player, as a user, are active within the process which adds a distinction from a purely passively experienced medium. With a painting or even a movie (which has sequence and temporality to it so changes over time) you can certainly get some of this exposure, however in a game you're necessarily more involved in a video game and I could see the potential with my pedagogical hat on that one could take a snippet or a scene from, for instance, this game and use it as a teaching activity. This might look like: “Here's what I want you to know and think about as you play through this scene”, and then you have a debrief either some independent reflection with some guided questions or you have a discussion together with some people who had that same experience and you unpack that and you examine what it did to you as a person to be within that scene, within that experience.

So I think it's a really interesting opportunity to not just embody another another's experience (something that I've seen done through virtual reality), but truly experience it. There is something different about being a part of the experience. Much like in a more traditional teaching context, there's a difference between showing someone how to perform a particular skill and actually practising that skill in a realistic context that you had to go through. It means the student has this become a more strongly connected element within their brain. I could go on about theories that are relevant to experiential learning and skill development and things like that, but I mostly wanted to use this as a means of highlighting that a game can quite easily become an instrument of teaching and learning where it is set up suitably to do so. I'm not sure whether that was explicitly the intention with this game; As in, I'm not sure whether it was done with an awareness of pedagogic theories, but I would say it was successful at doing that because it interrupted my initial simplistic view of it and pushed me into one where I became reflexive and considerate of the experience itself. That takes a very careful design with the player in mind. I'm not sure it's entirely possible that someone could go through a game like this purely as a piece of enjoyment, purely hedonistically as I suspect in this case there's the potential for some of it to be triggering but I leave that to others to explore

Something else that was interesting in the context of this game in particular was the way that it interfaced with my own neurological operating system. Often, what I find as I'm playing some games, watching certain media, etc. the ADHD can sometimes make it challenging to engage with the medium in the way that it was intended, I find there are high activity moments and low activity moments and in the low activity moments I need to increase the dopamine of the experience or reduce the access barriers. If it were a video I often would watch it at 1.75 speed and if it were a game I have a piece of software on my on my computer which allows me to speed it up during those moments. This is really just for the purpose of my own personal engagement with it, but the interesting thing was in this case as I went to do that as I often have, I once again paused and reflected on that. In the sense that one of the mechanisms used in this game *is* waiting and intentional frustration, it is the sense of things being drawn out and so, a moment of reflection arose (that's certainly would not have been a moment of reflection intended by The producers or developers of the game because they wouldn't have known anything about me, specifically). That's an interesting interaction between myself as the player and the medium itself. so you needless to say these much like many forms of interaction games are a valuable opportunity for learning.

There are of course distinct practices like gamification of learning, but that's actually very different piece as that's more about taking what you're intending to do as part of your teaching and learning experience and adding game elements to it, which will make it more game-like perhaps changing the format, something about the narrative that goes with it, whereas this is the use of a game itself for the purposes of learning. I'd be curious to see what others thought about it. If you're interested, I can include a link for the game itself if anyone does wish to play it. See below:

​https://store.steampowered.com/app/2126190/Rue_Valley/​

but what about you? What stood out to you in this piece? Are there any games or perhaps other media which you've engaged with which you can see as naturally forming an element of a learning sequence?