Video Games and Learning between Medium and Message. Considerations about the Role of Video Games in Education

This works aims to reflect on the relationship between video games and learning. The studies on this case often concern serious games (game-based learning) or the role of the content for informal learning activities (e.g. to use Assassin’s Creed for a lesson of history).In this paper we concentrate on the results about negative or positive effects that video games seem to have at the cognitive/behavioural level, collected and analysed by a desk research methodology. A comparison based on the classic distinction between medium and message proposed by Marshall McLuhan and other media theorists (Bolter, Grusin, De Kherkhove, Lévy, Debray) shows how the positive effects mostly refer to the medium as such, while the negative ones are mainly related to their content and (ab)use. Even the most critical studies highlight how video games can elicit certain skills, regardless of the content conveyed and narrated. Furthermore, it is clear to everyone how much video games can attract their audience, especially the young one.For explaining this attraction, we propose a focus on the medial characteristics of this medium, both for what concern gamification logics and for its sophisticated feedback system. This can help to reflect on a possible involvement in the traditional educational activity, with respect to the cognitive and soft skills that are solicited and to the relationship between formal and informal learning spaces.The presentation ends on a proposal of educational action plan, where the video game is used as a sort of trojan horse for starting a conscious media education in traditional classes, and where the different media are used ecologically, throughout a mutual counterbalance, aware of what is possible to obtain and not to obtain with each of them in terms of knowledge, skills and competences.