What Is Learned in Game-Playing

Nothing, or everything?

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.


Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.


Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game


It's easy.

John Lennon tossed this clue into the airwaves when All You Need Is Love premiered in a global TV broadcast watched by 400 million people. "You can learn how to play the game." Really? So what?

The question ranks pretty high for those who realize that games are the future of learning; that games are becoming, as they once were, a matrix in which formative experience creates knowledge, skill and quality.

I'm reminded of this heritage of games by John Keegan, who analyzed the Battle of Waterloo in his remarkable book, The Face of Battle:

...the most perceptive of all the comments about Waterloo is the best known and apparently the most banal; that it was 'won on the playing-fields of Eton.' The Duke [of Wellington], who was an Etonian, knew very well that few of his officers were schoolfellows and that football bears little relation to war. But he was not speaking of himself, nor was he suggesting that Waterloo had been a game. He was proposing a much more subtle idea: that the French had been beaten not by wider generalship or better tactics or superior patriotism but by the coolness and endurance, the pursuit of excellence and of intangible objectives for their own sake which are learned in game-playing - that game-playing which was already becoming the most important activity of the English gentleman's life.

Who among us has formulated a better mission for education and training: "the pursuit of excellence and of intangible objectives for their own sake." It was true 200 years ago when Napoleon met totally unexpected defeat, and it is true today in every corporation and academic institution that truly fosters inquiry, development and performance. 

We debate about the mechanics of learning, though I feel pretty sure that all our ideas sum up to Keegan's reflections on the face of battle. There can be no more certain test of a learning theory than having your life and your civilization depend upon it.

Be that as it may, there is no plausible argument about how to accomplish the ultimate mission of learning. It is rarely accomplished by research, rote, watching lectures or experimenting in labs. It is not done by attending professional meetings where Pooh-Bahs sprinkle pixie dust on the naive and the witless. But strangely, it is often and best accomplished though the apparently frivolous and recreational activity of game-play. As John Lennon put it, through game-play there is: 

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time

It's easy.

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