Plugged In
Page 23
In all, their review provided support for the stimulation hypothesis. Several experimental studies with young children indeed show that educational television programs such as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Barney, and Dora the Explorer can promote imaginative play.45 Similarly, longitudinal evidence indicates that the viewing of educational television during early childhood predicts increased creativity during adolescence.46 And interestingly, nearly 80 percent of parents in an American survey reported that their children “sometimes” or “often” engage in imaginative play based on something they saw in educational media.47
Although research on the effects of television on creativity is limited, research on the role of interactive media in creativity is even scarcer. A study by Linda Jackson and colleagues found that twelve-year-olds who frequently played games scored higher than their nonplaying peers on a figural subtest in the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in which children are supposed to make a drawing using a curved line.48 Researchers in an experimental study attempted to gather evidence on the relationship between the creative app play of children ages 8–10 and their creativity. Their study revealed that developmentally appropriate creative apps improved children’s engagement with content and increased its appeal for them. They did not find effects of app use on creativity, though, which, according to the researchers, may have been a result of children’s limited exposure to the content.49
In an era when children can design avatars, when they can experiment with identities in cyberspace, and when they can play games that allow them to construct homes, cities, and landscapes, the potential benefits of interactive media on creativity seem vast. Indeed, app sales indicate that creative apps become increasingly popular throughout childhood—with tweens in particular gravitating to this form of content. As digital gaming comes to demand ever-more creative solutions to gameplay, and as creativity emerges as a key factor for twenty-first-century success, an emphasis on fostering creativity is certainly an important direction for interactive media.
Program Characteristics and Child Characteristics Matter
Overall, the evidence that educational media can support children’s academic knowledge, social-emotional learning, and creativity is convincing. It is important to recognize, however, that theories of educational media effects make the point that such benefits are, in large part, contingent on program characteristics and child characteristics. Although a complete review of characteristics that might enhance children’s learning from educational media is beyond the scope of this chapter, several key factors warrant attention.
Program Characteristics
Unless children pay attention to the content of educational media, they will be unable to comprehend the embedded lessons. According to the moderate discrepancy hypothesis (introduced in chapter 4), the media content most likely to attract and sustain attention is content that differs moderately from what children know and understand. Content that is too easy quickly leads to boredom and decreased attention, and content that is too challenging leads to frustration and decreased attention. Careful attention to content complexity is thus crucial when designing (educational) media content.
It is important that media developers consider the developmental needs of their target users in order to find the sweet spot of content complexity. For younger children, comprehension increases when producers rely on a simple, prototypical story line that clearly states causal linkages between the successive story events.50 For this age group, comprehension is enhanced when the educational content is explicitly modeled (that is, every step is clearly demonstrated). And finally, comprehension is enhanced when advance organizers are used. Advance organizers are cues presented early in the program to alert viewers to particular subject matter. Such organizers can help orient younger children by identifying which content will be central to the story.51 For older children, most program characteristics of this type are too simple. A developmentally appropriate story line for older children and teens violates some of the rules of the prototypical story (for example, by using flashbacks, a more complex chain of events, or multiple story lines), and relies on a balance of explicit and implicit modeling of the embedded educational lessons.
While the appropriate degree of content complexity is crucial, other program characteristics can enhance children’s learning from media, too. For example, researchers have found that repetition of the educational lesson in varied ways helps children understand and apply the content more successfully. This use of varied repetition is effective with younger children as well as tweens and teens. For younger children, repetitive exposure to the same media content can be an effective means of supporting learning. For example, an American study using the animated program Blue’s Clues revealed that preschool children who viewed the same episode repetitively showed improved problem-solving strategies compared to children exposed to a single viewing.52 Both forms of repetition—within the program or through repeated exposure to the program—help draw attention to the embedded lessons.
Along with repetition, developers can use participatory cues to draw children’s attention and encourage their comprehension of embedded educational content. Participatory cues involve asking children to respond to questions or building in pauses to allow children time to respond to these questions.53 The well-known American preschool program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was among the first shows of this type to include such participatory cues. In games and apps, participatory cues are more self-evident, since they can easily call on their users to interact with the educational content. Participatory cues provide children with time to reflect on the content and to engage with the lessons, a type of interaction that is particularly important for younger children, whose information-processing capacity is relatively limited. Research indicates that participatory cues in educational media can facilitate learning, imaginative play, and creativity.54
While a variety of program characteristics can support learning, at the end of the day, it is entertainment that matters most. If media content is not appealing to a target group, it will be ignored. Unfortunately, the entertainment aspect of educational media all too often fails. So much care is given to the educational message that attention on how to deliver the message is slighted. A simple “drill and kill” app designed to teach mathematics misses out on critical entertainment opportunities. Similarly, throwing dozens of historical facts into a television program without an entertaining narrative discounts the greatest capability of television—to tell stories.
From a programmatic perspective, it is therefore crucial that developers consider what appeals to a target audience. One particularly important element in educational media is the use of characters. Typically, the lead characters drive the educational lesson. These characters often serve as social role models, depicting, for instance, how to help others, how to generate creative responses, and how to delay gratification (as we saw in the case of Cookie Monster). If such characters are done right, children are more likely to develop parasocial relationships with them (see chapter 8), in which case the likelihood of learning is greatly enhanced.55
Child Characteristics
Program characteristics work in tandem with child characteristics to predict effects. This means that when developing (educational) media content, developers must clearly define and understand their target audience. As has been argued throughout this book, children’s development is the most important factor to consider when reflecting on educational media content. Children’s developmental capabilities will influence not only what content they find moderately discrepant (and thus appealing) but also the extent to which they can comprehend and recall this content. Just as it is developmentally inappropriate to attempt to teach a three-year-old about algebra, it is equally inappropriate to attempt to teach teens about letter recognition. As the moderate discrepancy hypothesis states, the most appropriate content will be content that is slightly different from what a child already knows.
That said, there are other audience cha
racteristics that producers should keep in mind when creating educational media content. When working with educational media that contain story lines, it is important to consider children’s understanding of story schema (the set of expectations about the internal structure of stories that makes comprehension and recall of the narrative more efficient).56 Research has shown that children who have a more advanced story schema process narratives more easily and, as a result, have more cognitive resources available to process the embedded educational content.57 Similarly, if children are familiar with the content (the program, the characters, the setting), they are better able to learn the educational lessons.58
What might this look like in practice? Consider an episode of the preschool program Blue’s Clues entitled “Bugs.” During the design phase of this episode, the program developers envisioned a scene in which the main characters were in a jungle looking for bugs. But the show’s educational consultants felt that the concept “jungle” might be too unfamiliar to American preschoolers and, therefore, not moderately discrepant. Ultimately, the designers changed the scene into an expedition in which the main characters explored a backyard, looking for bugs that preschoolers might find in their own environment.59 In this way, by capitalizing on a familiar backyard (rather than an unfamiliar jungle), developers allowed children to devote greater cognitive resources to attending to and learning the educational content.
Conclusion
Perhaps the most important conclusion of this chapter is that just as today’s youth can learn negative lessons from media content, they can (and do!) learn positive lessons. When developmentally appropriate educational content merges with entertainment content, children and teens can benefit. Younger children, in particular, seem to benefit from the academic, social-emotional, and creative lessons that media can offer. There are benefits for tweens and teens too, particularly when it comes to prosocial and social-emotional learning. By capitalizing on the power of narrative entertainment, educational media can play an incredibly powerful role in supporting the development of youth.
In addition, this chapter has shown that there remain at least two gaps in our knowledge of the effectiveness of educational media. First, the educational media landscape for youth is quite unbalanced. While infants, toddlers, and preschoolers have a range of options at their (and their parents’) disposal, options become more limited as children enter middle childhood and beyond. Given the potential benefits of educational media beyond the early childhood years, efforts to develop educational media that appeals to older children and teens seem worthwhile.
It can be done. Numerous one-off examples in the health communication literature show how blending entertainment and education can be an effective means of educating teens and adults about a range of topics. Similarly, there has been considerable growth in “serious games” aimed to foster academic and social-emotional learning. The next chapter shows that these games, which predominantly focus on older children and teens, have the potential to bridge the age gap in educational media use. While there is no simple recipe for success, a key point for the future of educational media lies in identifying how to create successful educational media content for older children and teens.
A second gap is our lack of knowledge of how educational media content works. There is evidence that it can support beneficial outcomes, but empirical efforts to explain these effects are still scarce. Evidence is emerging about the ways in which programmatic and child characteristics can predict learning—but this knowledge is far behind what theories on the effects of educational media tell us. We know that differences in children’s development, disposition, and social environment influence how they experience media and how media affect them. If we can identify which children are most likely to benefit from educational media, and why, our ability to create effective content for youth will dramatically improve. And, in doing so, so will our ability to capitalize on an easy and affordable means of supporting the development of youth today.
12
DIGITAL GAMES
Why are there games? Why do we, biological entities capable of creating poetry, climbing mountains, and splitting the atom, spend so much time playing games, especially when playing these games often conflicts with our basic human needs: to sleep, to feed ourselves, to communicate with our spouses?
—Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas H. Smith, and Susana P. Tosca, Understanding Video Games (2013)
Why do we play digital games? What makes them deeply attractive and, for some, seriously addictive? Although digital games were once considered the domain of a small, clearly defined demographic of young men, today they are a mainstream pastime for young and old, male and female. How have games managed to occupy such a significant share of our leisure time? Do games affect us, and if so, how? Do they, as some suggest, positively influence spatial skills and, perhaps, intelligence? Or do they, as others fear, hinder our physical and emotional development? And if these effects occur, for whom do they occur? These key questions of game studies, a new research field concerned with the use, appeal, and effects of digital games, are ones this chapter will address.
How It All Began
The human need to play games is as old as Methuselah. Indeed, people in ancient Egypt played at least one game that we know about, called Senet, a board game assumed to be comparable to backgammon. And while analogue games still have a prominent place in daily life, the rise of digital technology has permanently changed our game experience. According to books on the history of digital gaming, the story begins in Boston in 1961, in the basement of a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A small passionate group of geeks conceived of a science-fiction game in which players had to torpedo their opponent’s spaceship. At the time, computers had very limited capacity and capabilities, making these ideas just that—ideas. Yet, shortly thereafter, the MIT lab obtained access to the cutting-edge technology of the PDP-1—a computer with monitor (see figure 12.1). This was, quite literally, a game changer. In 1962, one of the geeks—Steven Russell—turned this dream into a reality with the birth of Spacewar!1
Figure 12.1. The PDP-1 monitor was used for playing Spacewar! in 1962. The computer used with this monitor was the size of a truck. (Joi Ito, MIT Media Lab)
Although Spacewar! represented a crucial starting point in the history of digital games, it was ten years later, in 1972, that Magnavox transformed gaming with the introduction of a home video game console (the Magnavox Odyssey). A few years later, in 1975, Atari released Pong—a primitive Ping-Pong game in which two white bars representing paddles hit a square ball. Pong was a tremendous success, and it permanently moved video games from the arcade into the home. Soon after, second-generation video game consoles (containing microprocessors) pervaded the market. Games came on cassettes, meaning that more than one game could be played on a console. Many games at the time were adaptations of arcade games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man, and like Pong, they were hugely successful. By the end of the 1970s, dozens of factories all over the world were manufacturing video games.
In the early 1980s, the console market collapsed. From 1983 to 1985, revenues of the game industry dropped almost one hundred percent. The public seemed to have had enough of video games, too few good games were being produced, and a need for something new arose. And then in 1985, Nintendo introduced its NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) in America, and one year later in Europe. Almost instantly, this game console became a worldwide rage. The NES came standard with the video game Super Mario Bros., which featured an Italian plumber (Mario) trying to save a beautiful princess from a giant turtle-like monster. Mario became the symbol of video game culture, giving the market a boost that has continued to today.
Not surprisingly, the success of NES and Super Mario Bros. soon gave rise to formidable rivals, especially Sega Genesis, with its icon Sonic the Hedgehog and Mortal Kombat, a two-player battle game known primarily for its photorealistic characters committing excessive violence. Interestingly, although Mortal
Kombat could be played on Nintendo consoles too, only the Sega version featured blood. It was mostly the blood, the legend goes, that helped Mortal Kombat grow into one of the most successful games for the third generation of consoles. In time, Sony’s PlayStation became an important competitor of Nintendo, as did the home computer, which was capable of delivering better graphics than console games.
Beginning in the 1990s, innovations in game hardware and software followed each other in rapid succession. Unable to keep up with the ruinous competition, some initially successful console manufacturers, including Atari, were forced to close their doors. And while these doors closed, other opportunities emerged. In particular, the “16-bit age” brought three-dimensional games onto the gaming landscape. The first was Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, which was soon followed by Doom, an extremely successful “first-person shooter” for home computers. Doom, one of the first games with a multiplayer function, allowed players to form a team or play against each other. Gamers could even modify the conditions of the game itself, providing them more control and freedom of movement. These new functions led to more intense involvement by gamers, as illustrated by this “vintage” interview from 1995:
Yeah, I do really get involved in a computer game . . . Sometimes playing Doom is so scary that I just . . . that my heart really goes bonk-bonk-bonk . . . that I really think ‘oh shit’ and sometimes I just think I don’t want to be playing this! Like in Doom, there was a room . . . you had to play in the dark, the only thing you could see was gunfire from the mouth of the other guy’s gun and then you could shoot at that and then you heard him screaming so you could tell if you’d hit him or not. That was it, I said, I’m not playing this and I found the code that turned the light on.