Speaking of video games, this issue of The Nicholls Worth gives me the opportunity to review the impact video games have had in my academic career. Of course, judging by the way I phrased that statement, you might guess the video games I’m familiar with are all educational, as opposed to purely fun. But is there really a difference between the educational and the fun?
Apparently, people have been studying the connection between education and video games for a while now, or at least since the days when Atari was a hot seller. Pardon the pun, but there are several main “schools” of thought regarding this connection.
There are those who believe video games are educational as a storytelling medium, placing a player’s mind within the fiction of the game. These people are called “Narrativists.”
There are others, called “Ludologists,” who believe video games are instead educational because they teach rules, strategies and decision-making.
And, of course, there are still others who believe video games have no educational value whatsoever. These people are called “Losers Who Never Made a High Score List.”
If you’re like most people, however, you don’t worry about how video games teach. You just play, have fun and then learning happens.
Having fun and letting learning happen with a computer video game is precisely how I learned intermediary metabolism in graduate school.
These were the pre-Windows, pre-Pentium days, and I remember staring at a green, highly pixilated DOS screen with stiff, white images. The game was called “Killer Krebs,” and the object of the game was to see how many food molecules you could blast into two-carbon fragments.
The arsenal was a variety of Pac Man-shaped enzymes, and the player had to choose the correct enzyme to blast incoming glucose, amino acid or fatty acid molecules.
After correctly blasting a specific molecule with a perfectly timed strike of the space bar, the player had to guide the resulting two-carbon fragments with your arrow buttons into the proper place in Krebs Cycle, while its spiraling substrate molecules spinned faster and faster.
After correctly placing a molecule into the cycle, the player heard a sequence of sounds: (1) an “anvil bang,” representing condensation of the fragment into the substrates of the cycle, (2) a “coughing sound,” representing the carbon dioxide released, (3) several “electrical sounds”, representing electrons being harvested from the release and (4) an “explosion” each time the player gained enough electrons to make an ATP molecule.
I remember Killer Krebs very well – so well, in fact, I easily made an “A” on the metabolism test in the biochemistry course.
More importantly, I held the High Score for many years. And, because new operating systems can no longer play such primitive games, I remain undethroned.
Killer Krebs and other fun, educational video games came to their untimely obsolescence with the institutionalization of more colorful and graphically complicated computer games.
I grew depressed as I watched younger graduate students become mesmerized with Windows Solitaire, as if winning a hand and watching the cards slowly cascade down the screen was a reward as great as making ATP molecules.
“Where was video gaming headed?,” I asked myself.
What I quickly learned was that, for an academician, where video gaming was going was all downhill.
As an assistant professor, I was given a video game called “SIS,” which is what we faculty use in the office to check student schedules and register students for classes.
SIS is DOS-based like Killer Krebs, so you might imagine I would have adapted to it well. Unlike most video games, however, there’s no way to win in SIS.
Now that as an associate professor I have a bit of a handle on SIS, the most challenging video game is each new Windows version. Just when I figured out where Microsoft moved all the commands in Windows 2007, Vista is released.
The worst thing with each of these systems is they run on computers too fast to allow time to savor winning a game of Solitaire, as the cascading cards rush like lemmings off the side of a mountain to the electronics store in the valley that’s selling the new Xbox.
I hear that when you’re a full professor, after full Ludological and Narrativistic development, you can give up video games altogether. Because I cannot become High Scorer in either SIS or Vista, I hope I can be promoted soon.
Until then, however, I shall not be bested by these softwares, for I was a High Scorer when there were few video games in the world – when a High Scorer was someone to behold.
You should have seen me lay down the law in Killer Krebs. I was the lawgiver!
