“If you think about it, you see a Darwinian sort of thing going on here. If a game, for whatever reason, has good principles of learning built into its design—that is, if it facilitates learning in good ways—then it gets played and can sell a lot of copies, if it is otherwise good as well.”

“What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” James Paul Gee

I like Gee's book. I think he has a lot of interesting and useful things to say about the experience of playing games and how those experiences translate to something outside of the game itself.

That to the side, this quote strikes me as odd, or at least a good summary of one of my biggest gripes with the notion of serious games. Namely, I'm not sure anyone has really done a good job of explaining, much less proving, the connection between games and learning.

Look back at the quote. The assumptions could be summarized as:

• To play a game you must learn to play a game.
• For a game to be popular, it must be learnable by a lot of people.
• So, boiling down popular games should reveal. meaningful principles of learning.

You must learn to do. By observing people who do, you will find principles of learning.

And I think that is true. But it doesn't appear to have much to do with videogames or their superiority as a learning approach. While it is perfectly acceptable to look at games as a mirror of learning. That doesn't mean that games have more to tell us about learning than anything else or that we should think of games as special in this regard.

Or put it this way--I do think that games can tell us a lot about learning. But I don't see any reason why this fact gives us any reason to believe that we should games to teach.