Gaming as a Woman: Gender Difference Issues in Video Games and Learning

Background

In his 2003 work What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee makes the suggestion that video games should become a tool for improving education. Gee makes the case that playing and improving at video games is a literate practice that follows patterns similar to learning real-life skills, and that many games are designed well enough to motivate the player through many failures in order to acquire the skills necessary to succeed. Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher follow up on Gee’s ideas with their 2007 collection Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century, which looks at individual gamers from many demographics “to offer historical and cultural analyses of their literacy development, practices, and values” (p. 1). Together, through their examination of gaming as a type of literacy, these works suggest two primary purposes to this vein of inquiry: modeling our teaching methods after those utilized in the design of video games and actually using games and similar virtual worlds to teach.