by Dr Taliesin Coward
Yes, despite never having actually set foot in Florence prior to that point, and not bothering to consult a map, I had a fairly good idea of where things were relative to one another, and how to get there. Want to get to the Ponto Vecchio? Fine. From there to Il Duomo? Not a problem. Ditto for the Palazzo Vecchio.
And this isn’t the first city that I’ve become quite familiar with via gaming. I’ve web-slung and crawled around enough digital reproductions of New York City in the various Spider-man games that, when shown a photo of a bridge and asked where it was, I could accurately identify it.
In fact, I’ve learnt quite a lot of things, some of the quite in depth, from my fascination of computer games. Courtesy of Red Baron and the plethora of flight simulators I took a liking to, I learned a great deal about not only the history of air combat in WWI and WWII, but also flight theory, aerial combat, and the handling characteristics of dozens of planes (like the Nieuport 17’s distressing tendency to shed it’s lower wing in a dive).
The more I think about it and the more I look, I realise how much can be learnt from video games. It could be the layout of a city, the history of a conflict, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or even pop culture. It could be the various ways people cheat at card (such as from the fascinating Card Shark game).
And, because of their interactive nature, what can be learned is not limited to knowledge alone. It can teach the ability to quickly learn and adapt to new control schemes. It can teach timing, the ability to accurately predict and track movement, and even spacial awareness. My sister, for example, has an knack for arranging objects to make the best use of space possible. She attributed this skill to having mastered the three dimensional tetris-like game called FRAC. In fact, Dan Ackerman’s book The Tetris Effect, notes that high-level Tetris players develop an intuitive ability to arrange objects to make best use of available space.
It can also teach (or help hone) physical skills. Twice now, I’ve come across gamers who, courtesy of ‘click twitching’ or button mashing, have an almost intuitive grasp of how to do spiccato on the violin (an advanced bow-bouncing skill often taught late to pupils) as they have learned the mix of tension and relaxation needed to quickly and tirelessly provide rapid impulses to the bow. And I do mean rapid: in Nováček’s Perptuum Mobile, the violinist plays 1,721 notes in two and a half minutes, or around eleven notes a second. To put that in perspective, the violinist is putting more notes in the air the M1919 Browning machine gun could rounds in the same amount of time (the M1919 was used extensively throughout WWII and had a fire rate of between 400-600 rounds per minute, or 6-10 rounds per second).
As a further example of video games’ educational use, one only needs to hop on the net to find videos of professional rally and racing car drivers practising their skills and familiarising themselves with their routes via setups involving racing wheels, shifters, and often a three-monitor setup.
And as an added bonus, none of these games fall into the invariably dreary and dull ‘educational game’ category. In nearly all instances, what learning has been done has been done by the simple, painless, and easy process of osmosis. The player is immersed in the game, so simply picks up information.
While it might be tempting to ask what the value of these skills are, this is arguably missing the point. Yes, sometimes they will translate into obviously applicable skills or financial benefit. Or even, as in my case, a PhD (courtesy of the fascination with history Red Baron helped foster, and something no one could have predicted). It may do nothing more than feed an interest and make the person’s internal world richer and their lives happier for it. And frankly, that is enough. ■