What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition

This book discusses the 36 principles of learning built into good video games. It seeks to use the discussion of video games to introduce the reader to three important areas of current research and to relate these areas to each other: situational cognition, new literacy studies and connectionism or a pattern recognition view of the mind. * Introduction: 36 Ways to Learn a Video Game * Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a "Waste of Time"? (literacy and semiotic domains, learning and the problem of content, an alternative perspective on learning and knowing, more on semiotic domains - situated meanings, internal and external views, design grammars. Back to Pikmin: critical learning, video games: a waste of time? Learning principles) * Learning and Identity: What Does It Mean to Be a Half-Elf? (Arcanum: learning and identity, three identities: virtual, real and projective. Identity and learning, learning principles) * Situated Meaning and Learning: What Should You Do after You Have Destroyed the Global Conspiracy? (learning and experience, Deus Ex, storying and living in the virtual world of a video game, situated and embodied meanings. The probe, hypothesize, reprobe, rethink cycle. Appreciative systems. Written texts, more learning principles) * Telling and Doing: Why Doesn't Lara Croft Obey Professor Von Croy? (overt information and immersion in practice, learning to be Lara Croft, strange language: Von Croy teaches Lara how to play a video game. Lara and learning, learning as a subdomain of the full domain, transfer and beyond in video games, System Shock 2, learning principles) * Cultural Models: Do You Want to Be the Blue Sonic or the Dark Sonic? (worlds and perspectives on the world, Sonic the Hedgehog and cultural models, Under Ash and terrorism, going to war, cultural models in school, cultural models of learning and video games, learning principles) * The Social Mind: How Do You Get Your Corpse Back after You've Died? (EverQuest and World of Warcraft: Learning as social, the social mind, birds, distributed knowledge, science in the classroom, learners as insiders and producers, learning principles) * Conclusion: Duped or Not? * Appendix: The 36 Learning Principles.