GAME PLAYER AND GAME BREAKER
Imagining the future with the unyielding roots of education
Human beings are, I think, by nature playful. The real reason for the fascinating capacity of human languages is that they can build the largest fictional universes out of the smallest fragments of words. These are universes that range from the tales of One Thousand and One Nights to Jules Verne, and are part of our mental life through popular literature with Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert. Traveling to the center of the Earth, diving to the unknown depths of the seas, searching for truth in the deserts of Dune and wandering through the societies of Middle-earth, we have taken cognitive journeys through words. In a way, word games have built our civilization since Homer.
?Sometimes a strange question comes to my mind; is the world actually a huge playground? Do the motives that drive us to play with everything stem from boredom, or are we evolutionarily obliged to do so because play is the only exploratory way of socializing and learning? So, what is play? Can we reconcile this with our words? Johan Huizinga, originally a linguist, asked and answered many questions about play before anyone else. Huizinga published his masterpiece Homo Ludens - (The Man Who Plays) - A Study on the Place of Play in Culture in 1938 and tried to open the horizons of us educators by seeing what the future brought before World War II. The fact that his work is still up to date can be considered as an indicator of the scientific nature of his analysis. He defined the game as follows;
A game is a voluntary activity or occupation that is played within the boundaries of a certain time and place within the framework of freely accepted but absolute binding rules, has a purpose of its own, arouses emotions such as tension and joy, and carries the awareness that it is "different from ordinary life".1
In the adult world, play is simply a childlike activity. It characterizes everything and everyone that is as far away from seriousness as possible. Play is a kind of offense in our vocabulary worlds, unless it is used for a small child's activity. For example, this is a serious business, you think it's a game? You killjoy, there's a game in this, you playboy... are some of the negative concepts of play that have been ingrained in our minds, and they are used in everyday language more than we think. However, the majority of adults are voluntary addicts of some "games". They even try to satisfy themselves emotionally by not playing the game themselves, but by watching those who do. Football, basketball, volleyball and all of the championships that are today called sports are actually designed for adults to spend money and time. These games are now the world's biggest industries and a major part of economic and social life. The Olympics is the biggest gathering of games, eagerly awaited every four years. In soccer, whether or not to participate in the World Championship, that is what the media is all about. In the daily routines of life, the human events that are reported, followed and read about the most are the games of adults. When we do these things as adults, I think that play is not an activity that is looked down upon as childish, but on the contrary, it is accepted as the most civilized form of socialization . Among the dozens of inconsistencies of us adults, I think the approach to play is one of the most unethical.
Ever since the Internet revolution redefined the concept of time and space for the human mind, gaming has updated its place in human life as one of the most important catalysts of this revolution. Even this inevitable update has not been enough to change the negative image of gaming among adults, except for those who follow them. In fact, the reputation of the concept of gaming has worsened. In fact, gaming has been considered a devilish activity in the adult world ever since it was transferred to the screen via video. By adults, I mean decision-makers aged 35 and above. Parents and educators express their dismay that students spend so much of their time in the virtual world of fantasy, playing various meaningless games, that they neglect school and formal education. It is always difficult to be the underdog. Playing real pre-internet games outdoors is now an important pedagogical treatment! The only goal here is to bring young people addicted to virtual games and screens into real life. As long as they stay away from this monster called the internet, study their lessons and most importantly succeed in exams. Yet the education world cannot ask itself why they dislike school and academic courses. It cannot transform because it cannot keep up with the pace of change. Leisure time and play are mostly "artificial" recesses in school life. Are these breaks enough to revive education from the coma it has entered?
In human life, however, it is often the amount of something that determines its benefit or harm. Scientific research also shows that 2 the amount of playing two games directly determines its benefit or harm. To use an analogy, sunbathing is the only way we have to synthesize vitamin D. Exceeding the duration of sunbathing can lead to other serious ailments. Benefit suddenly turns into harm. This is a valid analogy for gaming. Many studies have been published scientifically proving the cognitive benefits of video games. The harms are compared to the harm caused by addictive substances. How can we avoid this dilemma? Is the game the real cause of the harms? Or is it the player himself? What should be the moderation mechanism for both the game and the player? Who should determine this? If we use physical and virtual games effectively and equally in education, can games, which are seen as the enemy of education, become the most useful friends for learning? Are games, in essence, really the enemy of education? Before answering these questions, I think we should start by correcting some common misconceptions about the concept of play.
In most modern or developing societies today, the concept of play is regarded as wasting time, idleness or laziness. But what was the acceptance of people playing in their free time in the past? Did people have a concept of ' free time '? Could it be that modern negative adult perceptions of play, like many of our cultural assumptions, are rooted in antiquity? What is the meaning of the Ancient Greek word "skhole", originally translated into English as "school"? This question was asked on the popular quiz show ''Who wants to be a millionare''. The correct answer to our question: Free time. ?Millions of people watching the broadcaston their "screens" may have experienced a brief shock at the answer. Because the answer is the exact opposite of our modern convention
In ancient Greek sites, considered to be the cradle of democracy and education, the concept of citizenship usually involved men. In Greek cities, having a "skhole" was a luxury even for male citizens. Work life encompasses everything that needs to be done during the day. Time is first in the list of requirements for getting these things done. If you were wealthy enough to own slaves, you could have free time, or "skhole". Only those citizens who had this free time could get an education.
With this free time, these privileged citizens could gather in the public assembly on the hill of Pynx and engage in politics, while their children could learn physical education, poetry, music and rhetoric from the famous intellectuals of the time in the Akademus thicket or under a stoa in the city agora or in the gymnasium. These citizens were entitled to represent their city at the Olympic Games, the greatest privilege of the ancient Greek world, held in honor of the chief god Zeus and attended by all Greeks. If they wished, they alone had the right to be a tragedy writer competing in the Dionysia, the greatest theatrical festival held in Athens in the name of the god Dionysus, promoter of civilization and lover of peace, or a stratigos (army commander) in time of war.?
What was the equivalent of the concept of the game in society when the mighty Rome ruled the world? It seems that the game deviated from the most instructive and entertaining activity of socialization in the process from the Roman Republic to the Empire and turned into the easiest method of controlling society. Thanks to today's popular culture, it is known that gladiatorial contests took place in the Colosseum, originally called the Flavian Amphitheater! The atmosphere in the arena of these games to the death is embedded in our minds with movie scenes. Tens of thousands of Romans screaming with excitement, fighting tooth and blood and betting on lives. Here the game shows us the savage face of civilizations as so-called social entertainment. The fact that all activities in an arena, in a theater, in a school are called " games " hints at the true nature of human experience. The common element in all of them is the phenomenon of competition within games. Here is the ?school in Rome where gladiators were trained ! ?Ludus Magnus'' will once again whisper to us something contrary to our perception.
The word ''ludus'' actually refers to the folk dances that played an important role in Roman life and gives root to the meaning of school. ?As Huizinga points out, it strips the game of the "illusion it creates . Full of meaning, "illusion" literally means " staying in the game " (inlusio derives from the root inludere or inludere, that is, ludus). 3 Here it is clear that Roman society was also aware of the simulation aspect of the game and accepted it as a rehearsal for the realization of real skills. In other words, for the society of that time, the school-ludus was a place where life skills were rehearsed. The Latins must have lost the innocent etymology of the word with their growing state, because the word ludus, which has the root meaning of jumping up and down, fast movement and having fun, that is, the word used as school, fell out of use over time. I think this was due to the cultural transformation that occurred when the Greek word "skhole" was used instead of "ludus" because the children of senators and wealthy families were educated by Greek slaves during the imperial period. This word later became the Latin word "schola". I also think that the use of the school meaning of ludus where gladiators were trained for death also played a role in this. In short, the understanding of entertainment had changed a lot.
As we can see, in both major cultural spheres, the idea of school was used to transfer knowledge from generation to generation within a narrow community, when there was no obligation to do daily work, so that those who received education could dominate others. What was developed in this leisure time were physical and cognitive competencies. All of these classes were conducted as simulations. What was learned without practice and application was meaningless in the ancient world. In the gymnasium, students were prepared for the challenges they would face in campaigns, wars and the Olympics by studying physics, for the challenges they would face in political life by studying oratory and poetry, and for the challenges they would face in social life by studying music and theater. In essence, it was all a rehearsal, a game, and the winner of the game was determined as much by the talent of the student as by the quality of the education they received. The word campus, which we give to the places where our schools are located today, means "enclosed play or rehearsal space " in Latin. School was the campus of life.
So our incoherence in the face of play has no ancient roots. It seems to be a "modern" attitude peculiar to us. When exactly did the natural coexistence of leisure, school and play begin to diverge? Are we filling every moment of our students' time in our schools with assessment and evaluation activities and preparations, or are we causing them to experience a full emptiness?
Ken Robinson, one of the most recognized and influential educational thinkers of our time, has something to say about this.
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Prepare, Test, Retest
Standardised systems of education often hamper children’s full development. The focus on narrow academic outcomes suits some, but too many never discover their personal talents and interests. Young people are also under inordinate pressures from ‘high stakes’ testing and assessment. These are called high stakes because they have stark implications for their own progress and, often, for their schools and teachers. The consequence is that even young children are spending more and more time doing homework and studying for exams.
They pay a high price in other ways, including the loss of time for ‘real play’ and just being kids. By real play, I mean unstructured, physical play, mostly outdoors, where children follow their curiosity, and invent and enjoy spontaneous games. This has been shown to have profound physical, emotional and social benefits. Real play also develops the neural pathways upon which other forms of learning depend. Play facilitates critical life skills such as problem-solving, teamwork and creativity. Active play is the natural and primary way that children learn. 4
Alison Gopnik, a child development psychologist at the University of California (Berkeley), says that we humans have another subtle advantage in nurturing the capacity for imagination: A long childhood in which we put into practice the demands of our urge to explore while living in dependence on our parents. We are weaned a year and a half earlier than gorillas and chimpanzees, and then move much more slowly through puberty. In gorillas and chimpanzees this period lasts about 3 or 5 years, whereas in humans it lasts about 10 years. So we have a unique period of "play" in which we spend time under protection and learn the positive consequences of discoveries.
"Many animals play," says Gopnik. But while animals play mostly to practice basic skills like fighting and hunting, children play by creating hypothetical scenarios with artificial rules that test hypotheses. Can I build a tower as tall as I am with these blocks? What happens if we make the bike ramp a little higher? How does the game of teacher change if I am the teacher and my brother is the student? This kind of play makes children explorers of an environment full of possibilities.
"As we get older," Gopnik continues, "we give that up. We become less willing to explore new alternatives and stick to what we know. "5
In short, we lead routine lives in the risk-free, safe, yet unexploring environment of our comfort zones.
Metaverse and School on the Cloud
Facebook, the company that has contributed greatly to the globalization of the Internet and owns some of the most frequently used social media applications on a daily basis, has changed its name to Meta. This seems to be the beginning of the next stage in the evolution of the Internet. Together with its partners, the company has also unveiled a major virtual world project called Metaverse. What does this metaverse look like?
The Metaverse, or virtual universe, is a perceptual universe where people feel themselves completely mentally through augmented virtual reality devices without any physical effort.[1]?This universe allows human cognition to be involved in an artificial physical environment through computers, android devices and 3D devices.[2] 6
It's like reading an advertisement for a new video game, isn't it? As adults, we are on the eve of a transformation that is very difficult for our analog minds to grasp. Space is no longer physical but beyond it, time is relative. Like the network of consciousness woven by the neurons in our brains, through the internet all individual minds are acting like neurons and moving full steam ahead towards forming a higher consciousness of humanity. Man is making the biggest artificial intervention in his own mental evolution. The fictional universes we create with words are about to be replaced by virtual universes we create with bytes. Artificial Intelligence that learns with our words is creating completely different universes and in the next two decades we will face the biggest test in human history with the biggest technological wave since the invention of the wheel.
This rapid change will demand new and renewable adaptations from us. For example, will the school move from its existence in a specific space to cloud computing, that is, to a virtual "space" between devices - computers, tablets, wearables, phones and servers - as educational theorist Sugata Mitra predicted before the Covid 19 pandemic? If the metaverse will replace the real world in every field, how will the school be replaced? Can school be substituted with its ancient and modern meanings? As educators, where should we be or will we be in this game? We should start making preparations for this urgently. We need to do it just like kindergarten students. We should be open to new ideas for exploration, try to get to know the game through collaboration, and do all this in a way that is fun for both ourselves and our fellow students. We need to return to the essence of the play. While we are passive guests in the fictional universes created by literary texts with words, our students will soon be active participants, users, content producers and architects of universes like the metaverse.
As Huizinga notes, while culture as a judgment moves forward or backward in historical time, the unique relationship we assume between play and "non-game" does not remain static. 7 Play is at the core of everything that is said about culture. We are all gamers, even if we don't realize it. ?In envisioning a future where life is gamified, we should be aware that we are in the midst of a dynamic revolution where the players are the users but the rules of the game have not yet been decided.
Are you ready for the mediocrity of applications and programs becoming our colleagues and partners? Do you think it is too far away for designs made of algorithm codes to be printed on a printer as living organic structures? Could the goal of a scientist playing a game with DNA be to win the game? You may not have heard of Craig Venter. He is the first person whose entire genome has been read. He is not a writer like Frank Herbert. He's a different kind of writer. He uses the letters A, C, G, and T. What he writes is more fictional and more real than any fictional universe. He is trying to rewrite and recompile the biggest book in the world, DNA.
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It seems that information is in the process of getting rid of the limitations and obligations of space for the interaction of humans with humans and machines. The only physical things that remain are the human body and the physical hardware of machines. It is no longer a science fiction story to predict that these, too, will go to a singularity in the future thanks to organic computers.
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If we don't want to be a spoiler, a slave to the analog universe we have built, and if we don't want to be left out of the game, we need to change the way the game is played in education. This is not a piece of advice that will be easy today and tomorrow. But it is also a process where wasting time will have a heavy cost. School campuses must become playgrounds again. The school should not be a place with borders, but a place that removes borders. We need to build a future on how to return the skhole, which is stuck between the walls in a given space shaped by the factory logic of the industrial revolution, to its essential nature and how to get it back into play. The possibilities that our evolutionary adaptation to this revolutionary change will bring are limited only by our imagination, as are our words.Because imagination is more valuable than knowledge...as the only thing that makes us worth bytes and the only thing that makes us human.
Sources
1. Johan Huizinga. ?Homo Ludens - A Review on the Place of Play in Culture p.45 Alfa Publications
3. Johan Huizinga. ?Homo Ludens - A Review on the Place of Play in Culture p.23 Alfa Publications
5. Unstable Genes - David Dobbs - National Geographic Turkey 125th Anniversary Special Issue - The New Age of Explorers - page 62.
6. https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse ??Articles 1 and 2
7. Johan Huizinga. ?Homo Ludens - A Review on the Place of Play in Culture p.69-70 Alfa Publications