Education, Gaming, and Serious Play

Attention is a critically important consideration in the design and development of virtual environments for learning, in fact, their very existence depends upon it. Unlike the independent reality of material classrooms and teachers and textbooks, virtual educational realities must address learner attention as an essential condition of their functioning. For just as digital texts are “written” only as they are read—appearing as readable text only when users scroll through them—so for virtual knowledge-artifacts, their very existence is conditional upon user attention. In this respect, a virtual tree falling in a digital forest is not at all like a real tree falling in a real forest. The latter, we may at least argue, still makes a resounding crash, whereas the former’s silence makes the virtual tree no tree at all—neither sound nor forest nor tree itself comes to “life” until some user activates the would-be event with eyes to see and ears to hear.

An information society, a society in which information is designated the primary commodity to be produced, marketed, and consumed, has attention as its primary currency. Education has always sought to cultivate a “knowledge society”, and has therefore always had attention as its primary currency: In this respect, if in no other, education is a step ahead in the “information society” game, having given considerable thought and paid considerable attention to the culture and management of attention. In schools, attention, both of students and by their teachers has been “traded” for marks, for disciplinary action, for praise. It is captured and held by compulsory schooling laws and, more traditionally, by fear—fear of failure, fear of corporal punishment, and fear of disapproval. And Teachers typically positioned themselves as the center of attention, at the front of the class, “all eyes forward”, and as the central figure in the distribution of information (text books, worksheets, library) and knowledge (subject matter).