Learning Principles in Video Games

Lifted from James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Literacy and Learning. This list is/seems longer and more repetitive (I think) than it needs to be, but where it seems to repeat itself, what I think is happening is that Gee is trying to focus on a slightly different aspect than an earlier similar point.

1. Actve, Critical Learning: All aspects of the learning environment are set up to encourage active and critical learning.
2. Design: Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience.
3. Semiotic: Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems as a complex system is core to the learning experience.
4. Semiotic Domains: Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.
5. Metalevel Thinking about Semiotic Domains: Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.
6. Psychosocial Moratorium: Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.
7. Committed Learning: Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as extensions of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual world that they find compelling.
8. Identity: Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and the old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity, and a projective identity.
9. Self-Knowledge: The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but about themselves and their current and potential capacities.
10. Amplification of Input: For a little input, learners get a lot of output.
11. Achievement: For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner's level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner's ongoing achievments.
12. Practice: Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring. They spend lots of time on task.
13. Ongoing Learning: The distinction between learner and master is vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the 'regime of competence' principle listed next, must, at higher and higher levels, undo their routinized mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automization, undoing automization, and new reorganized automization.
14. 'Regime of Competence': The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging, but not 'undoable'.
15. Probing:Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.
16. Multiple Routes: There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem-solving, while exploring alternative styles.
17. Situated Meaning: The meanings of signs (words, actions, opbjects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are situated in embodied expereience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whateve generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up via embodied experiences.
18. Text: Texts are not understood purely verbally (text-internal relationships), but are understood in terms of embodied experiences. More purely verbal understadning (reading texts apart from embodied action) comes only when learners have had enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experiences with similar texts.
19. Intertextual: The learner understands texts as a family ("genre") of related texts and understands any one text in relation to others in the family, but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some texts. Understanding a group of texts as a family (genre) of texts is a large part of what helps the learner make sense of such texts.
20. Multimodal: Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.) not just words.
21. "Material Intelligence": Thinking, problem solving, and knowledge are "stored" in material objects and the environment. This frees learners to engage their minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects.
22. Intuitive Knowledge: Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experience, often in association with an affinity group, counts a great dea and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.
23. Subset: Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain
24. Incremental: Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guesses the learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or generalizations the learner has found earlier.
25. Concentrated Sample: The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of fundamental signs and actions than would be the case in a less controlled sample. Fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well.
26. Bottom-up Skills: Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more and more of the game/domain or game/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a given type of game/domain.
27. Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time: The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice.
28. Discovery: Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunity for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.
29. Transfer: Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning.
30. Cultural Models about the World: Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways.
31. Cultural Models about Learning: Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models of learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as learners.
32. Cultural Models about Semiotic Domains: Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.
33. Distributed: Meaning/Knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, sybmbols, technoloiges, and the environment.
34. Dispersed: Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see face-to-face.
35. Affinity Group: Learnes constitute an "affinity group," that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared endeavors, goals, and practices and not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, ot culture.
36. Insider: The learner is an "insider," teacher," and "producer" (not just a "consumer") able to customize the learning experience and domain/game from the beginnig and throughout the experience.