The Social Mind
Gee’s chapter on the social mind felt pretty commonplace, probably because I’ve spent so much time near rhet/comp. Still, it was fun to see Gee apply these concepts to videogames, especially during quotes like “…thinking is at least as much social as it is mental and individual. Actually it is more social than mental and individual” (182). These types of quotes are a good model for how to describe the constructed-ness of knowledge to someone outside the humanities, which can be said both here and throughout the rest of the book.
Especially for this chapter I saw a strong connection between the learning principles involved. In the distributed knowledge principle, the ideas are distributed across the learners, the tools, and the environment so that there isn’t one “master” way of accomplishing a goal or even learning to accomplish the goal. This differs from a normative classroom, where the knowledge is distributed in the teacher and the textbook. The problem is that we like to imagine, like in the normative classroom, that we can master the knowledge and become singular resources of information. This is the way people idealize teachers, professors, and basically any credentialed intelligent person. They would ask, “Why use Wikipedia if you have your PhD?” It all goes back to the model of mastery.
I also encountered the pr
oblem most frustratingly in math classes. The teacher would try to present a simple way of solving the problem with specific steps, but I would spend my time trying to figure out a different way of solving the problem that worked for me. I would skip some of the teacher’s steps, and make my own new steps in order to find the correct answer. Inevitably there were times when my method would get the problem wrong because it skipped steps, but then again my methods usually worked better for figuring out the “tricky” problems, because they were built using more than one method. All of which has gotten significantly off track from games and distributed knowledge.
The distributed knowledge depends on the affinity group principle. In order for the knowledge to be distributed, someone has to distribute it. Members of the same affinity group are likely to do so because they care about spreading information about the topic they enjoy, and their not so built up on outdated models of copyright control, or on separating via race, gender, nation,
ethnicity, or culture. The combination of the two principles helps the knowledge spread and grow. Because, it seems to me, that the chapter was not only concerned with the fact that knowledge is social, but that we need to distribute it socially in order to reach an understanding.
Lastly, the insider principle is similarly indebted to the two previous principles. The way Gee describes it, the insider principle rests on the user’s ability to affect the game environment, helping the player to become a teacher and producer of the environment. Easily, the player will learn more, and create better products by taking on this insider role. It can also be read that the player becomes an “insider” as a member of the affinity group, so that even a user who goes from passively playing the game to being an active member in the forums is becoming more of an “insider” into the group. And the more members take on the role of insider, the more distributed the knowledge will become.
Conclusion
I found the conclusion a bit abrasive, mostly because I didn’t see the need for the deep interrogation of the cannon. I agree (for the most part) with his argument, I just don’t see it as a particularly effective one for talking about the positive aspects of gaming as an educational model. Gee wants to be able to create a perspective which includes great games alongside great literature, and then runs into the brick wall of the question “What is great literature?” But instead of spending time on the similarities between the two modes, he spend most of the time arguing for what the word “canonical” should mean (which is odd because he makes very clear decisions at earlier points in the book to avoid politicized phrases). It was also odd that he used the word “duped” to such a large extent.
Perhaps what he was trying to do was to combat the criticism that games are only built for white males, or that people are forced to believe whatever happens in the game they play, or to dispel
the idea that there is only one type of gamer, with one type of perspective. Perhaps still, he is trying to defend his earlier claim that we need to defend games with violence, and that even games like “ethnic cleansing” can be a necessary learning experience. I agreed with him there, so when he began the chapter by defending a person’s ability to play Ethnic Cleansing intelligently, I was on board. The more he argued around the role/power/idea of canonical literature, however, the less interested I became.
Images found @:
http://www.tractionsoftware.jp/db/attachments/blog/640/1/HumanNetwork.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CnubTjj0i80/TWQ0DGtf0cI/AAAAAAAACn0/auaXpwHQTDA/s1600/gatsby-game.jpg
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