James Gee

James Gee's talk on Thursday was one of the more fascinating speeches I've listened to in quite some time. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I've been playing video games since early childhood, I had never before even considered some of his basic premises about video games. Why indeed am I willing to spend so much time on overcoming the repetitive challenges in basic games, while a learning task of similar proportions in school would be stultifying? Gee's discussion of affordances and the sense of embodied power seemed spot-on, and the end portion of his talk brought the educational possibilities of video games into much sharper focus for me.