While Gee has established digital games as a new literacy, Jane McGonigal has taken that idea and begun to develop the canon, the literature, of this new literacy

games as a tool to solve substantial problems and effect profound change.

McGonigal thinks of games as a tool and a grammar to articulate ideas and to generate and communicate new ideas. Her games, like Evoke or World Without Oil, are alternate reality games designed to engage diverse and distributed players in gaming modalities to explore difficult problems and propose (and model i.e. play out) potential solutions.

These are games, not merely as entertainment, but as a toolset (an alphabet) to create meaning. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is Foldit; a game created at the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington about protein folding, a highly complex problem.

Playing the game creates new solutions. Playing the game repeatedly refines those solutions, assists others, and furthers the research group’s knowledge and the number of useful outcomes. Rather than host a conference or set up a lab or publish a series of papers, these researchers initiated a globally accessible game and then simply watched what the participants came up with.

While the gaming experience is powerful and the effectiveness of games as a means to understand and be understood is undeniable, it is not sufficiently separate from its foundation in alphabetic literacy to qualify as a post-literate or emerging post-literate modality. However, the immersive and hypnotic nature of games suggests the kind of experience that might be a feature of post-literacy.

Play games. Otherwise how can you have meaningful conversations about them? Not learning how to play games would be akin to talking about “The Lord of the Flies” without having learned to read.

When people learn to play videogames,” according to James Paul Gee, “they are learning a new literacy.

They are learning a new interactive language that grants them access to virtual worlds that are filled with intrigue, engagement and meaningful challenges.

As our commerce and culture migrates further into this emerging digital ecosystem it becomes more critical that we develop digital literacy, of which videogames inhabit a large portion.

Gee, a linguist and professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, thinks we should expand the traditional definition of literacy beyond reading and writing because language isn’t the only communication system available in today’s world. And there is no better example of a new form of media that communicates distinctive types of meaning than videogames.

Games are fun, but their real value lies in leveraging play and exploration as a mode of learning the literacy of problem-solving, which lowers the emotional stakes of failing.

This doesn’t mean that game-based problem-solving should eclipse learning content, but I think we are increasingly seeing that a critical part of being literate in the digital age means being able to solve problems through simulations and collaboration.

Mistakes are how one figures out what doesn’t work and provides the impetus to zero in on what might.

Conversely, the game of modern education revolves around right and wrong answers. Now this kind of learning may be appropriate in some instances, say, when you want a student to remember the capitals of countries. That method is important, but it can only take you so far. It certainly can’t penetrate more sophisticated, and I would argue, more important questions, such as: How does geography shape culture?

Yet if we are not prepared to be wrong than we won’t be able to come up with anything creative or solve complex problems. Videogames, on the other hand, embed trial and error into the foundation of gameplay.

“policymakers interested in preparing students for success in the 21st-century economy would do well … to appreciate how skills developed through navigating virtual environments might pay off in the workplace … [and how] the new skills and dispositions of the gamer generation will transform the workplace. The gamer generation will push for work environments to incorporate more virtual aspects in fields, such as market analysis, and social and economic modeling. Gamers, for example, have abundant experience making big decisions, coordinating resources, and experimenting with complex strategies in game-based simulations.”

Although videogames have great potential to be powerful vehicles for learning, there is no guarantee this will happen

Play games. Otherwise how can you have meaningful conversations about them? Not learning how to play games would be akin to talking about “The Lord of the Flies” without having learned to read.

Connect games to books, movies, TV and the world around them. By thinking about games beyond their boundaries we can cultivate pattern recognition across media platforms and parlay the problem-solving of gaming into the real world.

Have your students or kids collaborate with other peers to analyze and interpret games, as well share strategies

collaboration and networking kids can learn to enhance their own perspectives, ideas and, perhaps, contribute to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.