My kids and I have been playing Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze for last few days.
I downloaded it to the WiiU and I told my kids that I needed them to help me review a new game. This is not a review. Forbes already did a review of the new Donkey Kong game. Bottom line: great graphics, good platformer, more difficult than Mario. This is an article about why we need to teach our kids to think critically about video games. It includes some suggestions about how we might do it.
Even before playing, I knew that Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze was a good choice for my kids. They like platformers: the ongoing challenges, leveling up in a way that scaffolds one skill atop another. I often think of platformers as a perfect example of intrinsic motivation in video games. You play for the satisfaction of completing the challenge by finishing the level. Few players care about points. And there aren’t really winners and losers; hence, the popularity of platformer co-op mode.
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze lives up to the platformer promise. My kids turned it on in two player mode, chose their avatars, and got going. Sure, they fought a bit at the beginning: “You’re going to fast! You’re not working as a team!” But soon, their goals were aligned and they worked together.
I asked them what they thought. “Good,” said the older one. “Cool,” said the younger.
“So that’s all you guys think I should write, the new Donkey Kong is good and cool?” I asked, “that doesn’t sound like a very interesting article.”
They ignored me.
“What do you think of the graphics?” I asked.
“They remind me of Rayman,” said the older one. “What does graphics mean?” Said the younger one.
I explained, and then went on to ask a ton of other questions that focused the conversation in a way that forced my kids to ask themselves what, precisely, they thought was “cool” about the game. We covered narrative, game mechanics, rewards, color palate, and more. We discussed the user interface and even the menu pages. We compared and contrasted Donkey Kong with other platformers.
This kind of questioning probably annoys my kids, they just want to play the game. But it is good for them. It reinforces a use of precise language and increasingly complex vocabulary. Research shows that exposure to more words between birth and three years old correlates to increased language skills. In some ways, that’s kind of obvious, how can one acquire anything that’s not there? So, put more vocabulary in front of your kids and they’ll have a larger vocabulary. My kids are older than three, and they are already pretty good readers, but they need more guidance understanding the ways they can apply vocabulary to make meaning from the world around them.
Discussing Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze with my kids also helps them to develop their metacognitive functions. Metacognition, put very simply, describes an individual’s ability to think about one’s own thinking. In the case of my kids and Donkey Kong, I’m ask them to think about what it means when they “like” something or think it is “cool.” I’m asking them to evaluate their own thinking about the game, to assess the language they’ve used to describe their experience, and then to revise or iterate their language in a more precise way.
Most importantly, when I talk to my kids about a video game, I’m teaching them that after they get lost in the experience of game play, they should also stop, back-up, and think about the game as if it were a text. Hopefully, in the long term, my kids will learn to think critically about the underlying messages in commercial games and how we might use video games for their ability to provoke conversation.
This is not just about kids. In my opinion, there is far too little critical examination of video games happening even among adults, especially in academia.
Video games represent a shift in the way we construct narrative. Video games might be the new mythology. I personally believe that with video games, we are writing what will eventually become scripture in the hyper-connected centuries to come.
I’m troubled when I consider how few of the brilliant academic thinkers in the humanities are forcing us to ask difficult questions about the kinds of stories we want to tell through video games specifically. These video games are shaping the next generation. These video games are teaching them how to think about the world, how to make meaning. And we’re letting it happen by accident. That’s crazy.
How can we be more intentional about the implicit messaging in video games? In my book, FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide To Maximum Euphoric Bliss, I try to model a practice and a method for analyzing the underlying psychology of video game narrative. Ian Bogost is another great author who does it from a different perspective. But we need more people to jump on this bandwagon. We need more video game studies departments that are not about game development and computer programming, but are about critical thinking. I’m not talking about video game classes that analyze game design and mechanics, but video game classes that are about analyzing the game’s signifiers, metaphors, and procedural rhetoric (to use Ian Bogost’s fantastic term). Video games should be a central component in all media studies’ curricula.
Humanities teachers at all levels should start adding games to their syllabi. I teach undergraduate humanities at Temple University, in Philadelphia. I sometimes require all of my students to play a popular game in the weeks immediately following a unit on Freud. I challenge them to analyze the game like a dream. I ask them to identify the latent content. We identify gender biases, the subtle differences between games aimed at boys and games aimed at girls. What skills are they teaching? What conceptions of reality are they privileging?
There are also games that are intentionally created to provoke thought. Games that force us to ask questions. One good one is called Republia Times. In this game, you are editor and chief of the newspaper in the free nation of Republia. Your job is to use your influence to sway public opinion. How much space do you give to each article? Which items on the wire do you ignore? What and how are things deemed newsworthy? You must make quick decisions as stories come into the newsroom. How do the stories impact the readers’ loyalty to the government? You earn points by increasing readership and manufacturing more citizens loyal to the state.
I’ve used this game in university classes and the discussion that it inspires is vibrant: about free speech, about how political conversations are framed, about media bias, about hidden political agendas.
The Republia Times is usually lumped into a category that’s called “Social Impact Games,” as if there’s such a thing as a game that doesn’t have social impact. Instead, I think we should understand games like Republia Times as interactive essays: the new non-linear equivalent of non-fiction. But in order to do that, we’ll need to create a generation of gamers that think critically about video games.
Don’t just play games with your kids. Talk to them about the games. Teach them to be thoughtful, articulate, and critical of the games they play.
