During our discussion in class today I realized that there's a very important quality in James Paul Gee's Video Games and Literacy book that I haven't much explored: adapting past experience to new experience. Being able to change with what's going on around you.
Why is that important in our world today? It is vital because everything around us is changing so quickly and so constantly.
James Paul Gee points out that video games provide environments that are conducive to learning and that we can learn to operate within a self-contained universe fairly quickly because of the way games are designed. They provide what he calls a "psychosocial moratorium", which means that real world risks are lowered. You're more apt to be adventurous and heroic if you can return to a save point when you die. The games also provide tutorials as you go along to understand the "semiotic domian", or self-contained world. (The world of basketball, with its own lexicon and rule system is an example he gives of a semiotic domain. The world of a video game could be considered one as well.) He argues that when one can master a "precursor domain" it makes it much easier to learn a new domain. He points out that people who have played shooting games who have never handled real guns before can understand and use them better the first time than people who have had no similar experiences in shooting. If you've mastered the current social networking site, it will take you little time to upload a photo compared to the time it takes a newcomer to understand what all the buttons and links do.
One of the important things about making video games useful is the ability to translate knowledge from one place to another. As you get to playing a lot of first-person shooter games, you come to expect, as you pick up a new game, which buttons will do what. There is usually a map in some corner to help you navigate, a certain button will fire your weapon, another button will change between weapons, etc. That's great for moving from game to game. What about moving from games to real life? I personally was able to translate my experience hooking up video game A/V equipment to camera equipment, which is very similar. I also knew basic things about software that helped me learn video editing with just a day of toying around with the program. With this knowledge and no past experience or anything impressive on my resume, I got a job shooting and editing video.
As JPG points out in his book, translation of knowledge isn't restricted to games. He gives the example (not scientific. don't dwell on it like I did) of the first cavepeople. Suppose the encounter a tiger for the first time. They figure out very quickly that tigers are dangerous and should be avoided. Suppose those same cavepeople encounter a lion. If they cannot translate the tiger experience to another jungle cat, they're dead. To put this in real life perspective I would add that if we cannot translate our computer or video game experiences to the real or working world, we will be at a disadvantage compared to those who are more capable of seeing the similarities from experience to experience.
Ishmael, at the beginning of the book, is new to the whaling business. If Ishmael had not been able to translate his experiences working on a merchant ship to the workings of a whaling ship, he would have been useless on this whaling voyage.
A bigger point I wanted to get to is the idea that we are all like Ishmael and must face the working world with whatever past experiences we have. If we want to go on adventures - even the adventure of paying our bills from day to day - we usually have to ally ourselves with a bigger entity. For Ishmael this is the whaling ship. He must accept very little pay for what he does because he is not individually very valuable to the company. He is not in charge of what the company is going to do. He is not in charge of what he makes. Ishmael is in charge of what is inside his head and little else.
At the end of the story, that is still what Ishmael has - what is inside his head. (Which might be PTSD.) His invincible whaling company with the big shot Ahab CEO has been crushed by a larger entity. That is, a large white whale. In fact, this whale has destroyed the rest of the crew and the ship as well.
Suppose Ishmael's whaling ship was Google. Suppose he had been working on this ship for a good couple of decades and to his dismay he finds himself shipless because something bigger has crushed it. Is Ishmael now useless because his company is gone? No, because he still has the capacity to move into another similar company. He still has experiences he can translate. Even if that means going from designing software for phones to software for the jet packs we will all have in the future, he can draw comparisons and still be useful if he knows how to adapt. If you become a big star in the blogging world and suddenly blogs are yesterday's news, you'd better believe adaptation is the key to survival. You could cling to old ways and try to shepherd people back to your world in small numbers, but to thrive you would need to figure out the new tools and change.
Right now I'm working at an insurance company and I'm doing a job that they have told us outright will be done by computers in the near future. If I was simply doing a minimal amount of work and not really learning about the insurance world, I might be very scared for my future. However, since I know there are other tasks needed to be done at this company I could easily move into - filing taxes, binding policies, renewals, etc. - because at my current position I'm not just entering data, but trying to understand what the data stands for and why it's important. So even though my little policy typing boat may be sinking, there are other boats around I can jump to. Maybe Ishmael joined the Rachel and helped whale there.
So it might sound silly to compare video game experiences to real life, but there is some truth to the way virtual worlds are constructed. That's why the Sims need to eat and sleep in order to go to school and work, just like you!
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