Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul

Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul is about pleasure and learning. Good video games allow people to create their own ‘music’, to compose a symphony from their own actions, decisions, movements, and feelings. They allow people to become ‘pros’, to feel and act like an expert soldier, city planner, world builder, thief, tough guy, wizard and a myriad of other things. They allow people to create order out of complexity, to gain and feel mastery, and to create new autobiographies, careers and histories. In his earlier book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee offered thirty-six reasons why good video games create better learning conditions than many of today’s schools. In this new book, built entirely around games and game play, he shows how good video games marry pleasure and learning and, at the same time, have the potential to empower people. James Paul Gee is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is the author of the acclaimed What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and the more recent Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling, both of which deal with video games and their implications for learning in the modern world.