When I was reading through the first couple of chapters in Shaffer’s book, I keep getting stuck on the idea of school being a type of game. In Shaffer’s words, “much of schooling is about learning to access parts of this cultural record: learning to read, and write, and work with mathematical symbols” (63). Shaffer also states, while talking about microworlds and autoepressivity, that “[w]hatever you do, you do based on assumptions about how the world works. By working with a simulation, users explore the domain begin simulated – and build their understanding of that world – through cycles of action and reaction” (67). Collectively, along with Pepper’s discussion of POMO earlier this week, these two statements got me thinking about Lyotard and Baudrillard.

I wonder, and this was highlighted earlier in the semester by Vitanza in “Whatever Beings,” if school to our 106 students is in a fact a type of Simulacra and if our students’ goals are to become a “Whatever Being” or an “inhuman” component of a larger game? Is that what school is for our students? Is their goal not to learn and become innovative members of the MMORG they belong to otherwise know as Purdue, but rather to navigate within the framework of the game and satisfy the rudimentary tasks they must achieve in order to advance to another level? Has that become our educational structure, where student players gain experience points, level up a various stages after completing specific tasks, and then, once they have reached the end level, win the game by putting on a cap and gown to stroll across a stage to receive a signified diploma?

The above questions, and many others, keep springing to mind whenever we discuss or compare education to game play. While I do feel that some games can be viewed as epistemic and that there is much learning potential within their digitized structures. I also feel that we have to be careful when we start making comparisons, because there are some components of games that are not health learning aids and do not contain epistemic components. Meaning, before we take the metaphor of school being like a game or begin comparing the inherent learning potential of game play to the learning our students receive in traditional educational environments – and yes traditional here should be open ended enough to keep my own POMO attacks from re-circling – we also have to start exploring what else we bring to our discussions. Which means, taking Shaffer’s claim that there is more to games than just being fun and expanding our critiques before the positives can spring to the forefront of the discussion.