Chris Colley 0:08

All here we are, another episode, people, of Shifted Podcast coming to you. I'm uh reaching out just down south a little bit. I'm up in the Laval office. I think I'm reaching down to around Concordia area. I have David Waddington coming in, who is a professor at Concordia. He's also the co-director of the Center for Study and Learning, Learning and Performance, and has this amazing new book out called The Hidden Curriculum of Video Games. And the title itself just caught my attention. I was like, uh, I gotta reach out to David. I need to drill it down on this because it's something that I've been really interested in too is gaming. And where's where's the learning and how can we leverage this thing that kids well humans like to do? We love the game. Can we use gaming somehow to embed in our curriculum a little bit? David, a real pleasure. Thanks so much for joining me for this chat on this really beautiful day that we have here. I mean, we've been kind of lucky all week, is like these beautiful blue skies, and bring it on.

SPEAKER_01 1:15

I I agree, Chris. I mean, I live up in the Laurentians and I've been walking around, and the fall colors are already getting started, and just these wonderful crisp fall days that we have in Quebec are nice to just kind of put a nice sweater on again or a nice polar fleece and just feel all I love it.

Chris Colley 1:35

It's like the best.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Yeah, it's pretty great.

Chris Colley 1:39

So David, I like to start off with a little walk down memory lane for you. If you could, like, what are what were some of those moments that kind of brought you to where you are today, or decisions or you know, that you would made that kind of brought you to becoming a professor at Concordia, and then this interest in in gaming and and exploring it a little bit more within the context of education.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

I mean, it's interesting, Chris, because I mean, I'm a lifelong gamer. I've been gaming since I was a really little kid, and I've just played a gazillion video games and with way too much, uh, way too much enthusiasm, uh especially in my teenage years, I remember. Uh during during college, there's a game called uh it's called Football Manager now, but I I had to have uh have one of my friends hide the CD ROM, okay? Spending too much time on it instead of uh doing my you know second-year university work and what I've always been a big fan of games. And when I was in graduate school, I did a bit of work on kind of different ethical questions around gaming. And then when I became an assistant professor at Concordia, I started actually doing some really serious research on games. We tested certain kinds of games for educational effectiveness, like we looked at a climate change game to see how a kind of complex simulation of climate change might actually promote a sort of more deep and systematic understanding of climate change. We looked at whether a nuclear war simulation would kind of change people's perceptions about nuclear conflict. And we even developed a language learning game called uh Space Team ESL, which still is available and played in classrooms and is a really fun way to learn English, or there's even a version in French where you kind of like have tablets or phones and kind of you learn through interacting and kind of shouting at each other and ridiculous. It's a really amazing game. But anyway, I mean, so we've I've done a lot of of research on gaming, but I kind of got started on the book here because I was at a conference, okay. I was a conference on video games and learning, and actually, in many ways, it was a very interesting conference. And I was sitting at the session of the conference where everybody was kind of giving these little like five-minute quick hit speeches, and the quick hit speeches were all like games are great, games are gonna transform education, games are a tool that we gotta get into classroom. And at the moment, I actually was just feeling really grumpy in the audience. Like, well, you know, games do have important power as an educational object. I mean, as a kind of educational tool, but there's also real problems with games. Okay, there's also real problems in the sense that I feel that people don't just learn good things from games, they also learn some things that are pretty bad from games, and so that's kind of how I got started thinking along these tracks and actually thinking about doing a book project on what I consider to be kind of you know some of the dark side of games. So that's really what inspired me to write the hidden curriculum of video games as I was pissed off feeling, you know, like all right.

Chris Colley 5:13

It's the best time to write a book, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 5:16

You just gotta like students with I always tell my students, like, you know, I teach like uh philosophy and history of education. I'm like, guys, this stuff's gonna be much more interesting to you if you react. If you write about stuff that you're pissed off about, inspired by, right? I love that, you know, pedagogically speaking, and it works, you know, and we're working as profs too, and we're writing about stuff that really motivates us and that we genuinely find interesting.

Chris Colley 5:43

Totally, totally. The only way to be, or it should be the only way to be, you know, the genuine way to be, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:49

And so you don't like get alienated from your own work too, importantly.

Chris Colley 5:53

That's it, that's it. Okay, well, I'm gonna start off with a softball question.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Sure.

Chris Colley 5:58

And I think that it gets confusing at times within our our educational sphere, the difference between so gamification, which is something we talk about in education, you know, you can go to conferences like you have, and there'd be a presentation on gamifying your classroom or whatever, versus game-based learning, right? There's this this two dichotomy that happens here. Can you kind of like give us a quick kind of 101 on the differences between those two, gamification and game-based learning?

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Okay, well, gamification is just using effectively like various kinds of reward mechanisms or kind of pretty primitive game mechanisms to spice up your learning. Okay, like basically we've been doing gamification since at least the 19th century, right? Like in Castrian system in the early 19th century, like you could earn badges and you could kind of like advance your rank as a student. I mean, there's always been these little systems of rewards that, well, especially in the 19th century, there are a lot of punishments. Okay. So I mean put the emphasis on the badges, on the rewards, on the leaderboards. But they're using game-based mechanisms like badges or leaderboards, or you know, little competitions to spice up the regular curriculum, like, you know, some boring math stuff you want the kids to do, or like, you know, some project you're sending them on. And again, this is just a mechanism we've kind of improved it now because we have like electronic systems that backstop all this instead of like, you know, handmade badges.

Chris Colley 7:41

Yeah, like a lot of our teachers use like class dojo, for example, right? That would be a good example of gamification, right? Where kids are getting like rewards for like bringing the recycling out or talking nice to a uh a computer, stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Gamification, it seems yeah, class dojo is is kind of the most prominent example. I mean, my own uh son class was using uh class dojo for a while. I mean, yeah, so you you see this, I mean, you see gamification too in the workplace, like a lot of the uh apps that people use, especially like Uber is is is very gamified in terms of like the ways that it motivates employees. But game-based learning is is something a little bit more ambitious and a bit new. I mean, it's where we use like full-fledged games, okay? A full-fledged, you know, video game or a full-fledged board game, a game that kind of like stands as a learning object in and of itself, and then we use that to teach a particular concept or a particular system or a particular set of systems, or you know, get people to ask a philosophical question. I mean, there's all kinds of different interesting things that you can do. I mean, to my mind, look, I mean, both have their place. Like sometimes, you know, your kid isn't motivated, like right now. My own kid is having a few, you know, motivation issues with math. I was like, let's gamify it a little. Let's gamify it a little bit. It's a very valid tool, it works, okay, and effectively there's a reason we've been gamifying shit for like the last couple of months.

Chris Colley 9:17

Right, right. It doesn't necessarily David change what you would normally do in class, right? Like, you're not changing the structure per say of how you deliver your content or the worksheets that follow it. It's like, oh, you you did a good job on the worksheet, or oh, you paid attention really well during the point.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

Like, generally not. Like, I I totally agree with you here, Chris. Like, the most dominant way that it's used is you take your standard curriculum, you slap some gamification on it, and then your standard curriculum is more interesting to the kids, right? Like this is something that works. I mean, some people have kind of a more thoroughgoing system of gamification. I mean, I talk about this in a book in the book, like something that kind of worries me a bit about class dojo is that it can become basically like a uh a kind of like overly kind of controlling system for classroom management, right? Like, I mean, every teacher does some classroom management kind of necessarily, but I mean sometimes class dojo seems to me to be going too far in the surveillance and control department. But this is just to say that, well, you know, gamification is something that lots of teachers use. Game-based learning to me is potentially much more exciting because there's kind of ways, I think, to totally change the uh the paradigm in your own teaching in certain ways. Like again, this when we did this climate change study, what was really exciting about it is that playing the game, I mean the game had some problems, but playing the game was really interesting because it did allow people to develop a much more multifaceted understanding of climate change in a way that I felt like a traditional curriculum curriculum really would have struggled to do that.

Chris Colley 11:03

Okay, okay. So the book, The Hidden Curriculum, then is that is that you you're trying to leverage game-based learning, but connecting it meaningfully so that there is deep learning and the the learning sticks to the learner as well at the same time. Is that like I was so curious about that title, The Hidden Curriculum? So exciting. Like, ooh, what could this possibly be?

SPEAKER_01 11:30

I think. Yeah, I love it. What I mean by Chris. I mean so basically, you know, the book is is really a book that's asking, well, what's the problem with video games? Is there a problem with video games? We have this sort of feeling that there might be, okay. And in in the first chapter of the book, I'm like, well, is the problem violent? Because everybody, you know, freaks out about violence in video games. And I say, well, you know, it's not like violence is totally unproblematic, but it's not kind of, you know, there's no reason to get too worried about. That's kind of the conclusion I come to in chapter one. But then much of the rest of the book, yeah, I'm trying to answer what's the, you know, what's the real problem with games, if in fact there is one. And my argument is well, the real problem with video games is the way that they make you think. Okay. And what I argue in the book is they tend to make you think in a kind of constant efficiency maximizing, super speedy, extractive way. So you're always kind of looking at things. Well, how quickly can I do it? How fast can I conduct this operation? How much can I get out of this thing? How can I kind of climb the meritocratic ladder faster? Right. So, what I argue in the book is that, well, the the real hidden curriculum of video games is this kind of commitment to an ideology of what I call hypermodern capitalism. So a kind of accelerated capitalism where you're really committed to doing everything really quickly, really efficiently, and you know, really who cares what the cost is because we're just playing the game. So, to my mind, that's the hidden curriculum of video game. What I argue in the book is that, well, I mean, it's not the case that all video games kind of fought through this mentality, but many do. Okay, many do. And I think that that is in fact a kind of miseducative learning. Well, I mean, it's kind of a moron to say that, but people are learning the wrong thing, okay, in effect, from video games. And the wrong thing is being committed to this ideology of accelerated capitalism. So basically, what I argue is well, you know, it's not the case that all video games do this. There's actually video games that can help us slow down, that can help us reflect, that can help us think critically about really important aspects of our society and kind of frame those problems in really pioneering and exciting and interesting ways. So, I mean, it's not the case that video games are kind of always negative educationally speaking, but they often are, is what my argument is in the book. And the problem is not violence, the problem, again, is this committed a commitment to efficiency maximization and acceleration. Right, right.

Chris Colley 14:28

Can can like the the games that the kids like to play be leveraged in a classroom? Like, I don't I don't even know what games they play nowadays, but you know, the shoot 'em up bang bang or the car racing or the you know, Dungeons and Dragons, I guess, kind of games. Like, is there is there can you find value in those games that you can bring into the classroom and uh you know, like get some kind of value-based understanding of them going? Or are games specific need to be specifically designed for an educational environment?

SPEAKER_01 15:09

I think games necessarily need to be specifically designed for an educational environment because I think that there's games that are out there in the wild that are really educationally interesting. Okay, like the game that I call that it's called the longing. Okay, and what it does in the longing fundamentally is that it's like a super weirdly slow game experience. Okay, and so I find that actually really educationally interesting because it gets people to experiment with slowing time down, okay, which is a really interesting thing to do, I think, with both, you know, university learners and potentially with high school learners is to think about well, what does it mean to slow time down? Right. And that's a game that's just out there, it's available commercially, right? It's not purpose built for education, it's kind of just an indie video game that's really cool. So I don't think games need to be purpose built to be educationally interesting. But I mean, sometimes it does help to actually design a game with teachers. Like again, you were talking about Scott Young, uh, my uh colleague here at Concordia. Like he's designed this game, the feed, for people to kind of experiment with ideas about um social media and how social media can manipulate people. And he's been working with teachers to kind of figure out how to design the game in such a way that the game is educationally effective. So designing it with teachers, designing curricula that kind of go along with the game, like that's really important stuff to do. I mean, games, you can't just plunk them in and hope for the best. You got to think about well, how are you gonna integrate these thoughtfully? How are you gonna plan a lesson around them? What educational outcomes do I want the kids to get? How am I gonna lead the discussion? Like these are these are critical. But what I think is both deliberately designed, okay, kind of game-based experiences are going to be really valuable, but some off-the-shelf games are gonna be great too.

Chris Colley 17:07

Yeah, yeah, totally. I love this idea too that they're kind of intrinsically motivating for kids. Like you'll put a you'll you'll give a math problem, you know, a situational problem, kid struggles, struggles, you know, gives up. Similar thing in a video game, and the kid keeps trying, fails, try again, try again. Like, what is it about the psychology of video games that intrigues kids so much more than you know like schoolwork that that is out there now? Like there seems to be something that the developers have have used psychologically to um you know keep the kids coming back for more.

SPEAKER_01 17:52

For sure. Okay, I mean I think there's multiple elements. I mean, one element that's very important is that there's various kinds of reward structures that are built into games, which I mean are like highly behaviorist, but I mean, look, when you do something right in a game, something nice happens immediately, right? Like you do something that's the least bit right, you know, like lights flash you're almost there. So I mean there are these reward structures that are built into games that are very clever and that reinforce people for you know using this particular object, right, for playing the game. But in addition, games are also really good at just at scaffolding learning, right? They're very carefully planned out. They're like, okay, well, you know, we gotta teach this new player these skills. And how are we gonna do it? Well, we're gonna, you know, create a level where they have to learn the important skills one by one, and we'll very carefully reward them and like you know, have the little breadcrumbs as as they get closer to success, right? I mean, there's very careful design, but then there's also the fact that games constitute worlds unto themselves, right? They're you know, like if we even if we abstract from like the whole question of like rewards and scaffolding, which are very much present. I mean, games are really interesting experiences, right? You're in the game world, it's very exciting, it's a new world, you're exploring it, you're having this kind of new experience that you know similar to other experiences you've had, but kind of intriguing in some way, right? I mean, but at the micro level, we can say there's all these kind of reward and scaffolding mechanisms, and then kind of at the macro level, there's the fact that these games are worlds unto themselves that are really intriguing experiences. So both of those two elements I think really help games be super motivating for kids a lot of the time.

Chris Colley 19:52

Absolutely. I guess a big burning question is what does this look like in a classroom? Like, say a teacher is like, you know, I want to try something, you know, I want to see like how my kids react. And like how how would you go about that in a classroom like you know, here in Quebec?

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Well, I mean, of course, you have to. It's not it's not so easy, okay, honestly, because uh again, maybe this was part of my skepticism in the audience. The fact is that there's been like a lot of you know hooting and hollering about how educationally great games are, but they have a real massive kind of last mile problem, okay, and in education, I guess you might say, which is that yeah, we create these games that are kind of interesting and sort of seem like they have educational potential, but then we don't really do a lot to help teachers get those games into the class a lot of the time, right? Like the the the interesting game gets made, but then there's not a lot of like curriculum development around it, or there's not a lot of like preset lesson plans that that teachers can use. And there's also this kind of suggestion, I think, on a the part of a lot of people who are kind of game advocates that all you need to do is chuck the games in and great stuff's gonna happen. But I mean, again, the research results don't really show this to be the case. And it seems to me like a lot of the time, you know, you chuck the games in and chaos happens, or people are confused, or you know, people don't know what to do, or some of the kids are really into it and some of them aren't, right? So, I mean, I think that for games to really work in the classroom, you got to think carefully about what kind of experience does the game create for the kids, you know, what's needed for the kids to actually learn how to play it, because that's often non trivial. You have kids with greatly varying levels of kind of gaming background knowledge. And, you know, how do I integrate this with the regular curriculum in an effective way so that like it actually works with? The rest of the stuff that I'm doing, and it's not some kind of like disconnected novelty that I'm bringing in. Right. That's not easy. That's not easy to figure out. Like all of that stuff is pretty tricky. And honestly, the games and learning space has not been super good at dealing with this stuff. You know, it's been a little bit too much hoping and chucking the games and osmosis will take place back in the 80s. Like, you know, get the kids to the computer, not just give the kids the computers, you know.

Chris Colley 22:34

Yeah. I'm finding too though that nowadays we're, you know, we mentioned Scott before that these kind of like more of like, you know, not computerized, no tech, you know, like board games and stuff like that, like seem to be having a resurge, you know, like we have restaurants now where you go and play a game while you eat, and like, you know, like libraries full of games and like give stuff for kids to do. And but I I I totally like again your title, the hidden curriculum, like there's something in all these, but it like you said, it takes the time to like you know know the program, know what you need to do, and then making those connections to you know a game, which you know is not always easy, particularly if you're you're you know, you're not coming from a background where you have like extensive knowledge or research that backs up you know what you're hoping to achieve with it.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

Like, I I think it's very important to reflect on this for teachers, and it's tricky, okay. It's tricky. I mean, of course, we have lots of teachers now, okay, with kind of generational change that have a lot of gaming experience. I mean, this is something that wasn't really true, you know, 25 years ago, but I mean it's certainly true now. But I mean, I think again, like if we want to go back to the hidden curriculum, okay, you have to think about well, what kinds of experiences do you want kids to have? Like, I mean, there were a lot of people that got very excited about bringing like the civilization series into class because kids can learn so much about world history and kind of important historical concepts and technological progress and all of that stuff, which, you know, I mean has some validity as a set of claims, I think. And I mean, the research shows that kids did learn some stuff from playing civilization. But I mean, if we turn to the hidden curriculum, the problem is that it's incredibly kind of colonial imperialistic game, you know, gameplay. Okay, like there's like implicit learnings, I think, from playing civilization that frankly, I think are pretty negative. Now, you know, I'm coming at this as sort of a leftist who's a bit anti-capitalist, and you know, I'm not a big fan of like colonialism. Okay. I mean, of course, like these are my ideological commitments, but you know, I would be very hesitant to say build a curriculum around civilization because I feel like the hidden curriculum, the sort of experiential payload of a game like that is just too strongly negative, too strongly diseducative, no matter how much you know, cool social studies curriculum content you build around it.

Chris Colley 25:08

Right. Yeah, no, totally I agree with you. Like, I mean, game designers come with certain biases too, right? Like they I guess they're looking for people to keep wanting to play it over and over and over, and new version comes out getting it, okay, over and over and over again. Like you get caught up in that kind of cycle of and it it's more of like that consumerism that you're talking about, rather than yeah, we want kids to learn about stuff that you know, like I mean, there's a couple of things going on, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Like, there's some games that are designed to effectively capture the learner, okay, or capture the player, let's say. You know, educational games usually aren't like this, but like, I mean, a lot of games are kind of exploitative in that sense. They they they try to keep the the player hooked as much as they possibly can. So, I mean, there's this element. There's also, yeah, the political commitments of game designers, which vary, okay. I mean, of course, you have like tons of radical leftist game designers these days, which, you know, is is I think great. But like, frankly, a lot of mainstream games are designed with kind of, you know, what I call a techno-libertarian set of values, okay? So, sort of like, you know, Silicon Valley capitalism, let's reduce the size of government, let's lower taxes, let's let technology run free, right? Like it's not terribly surprising because this is a popular ideology around four tech people, and tech people make games. So, you know, we shouldn't be terribly surprised that we find this ideology to be maybe not, you know, incredibly dominant in game, but very common, I would say.

Chris Colley 26:49

Yeah, okay. I think too, that mindset we're starting to see in AI as well, just to hand it off just for one second there, but I think that mindset is very similar. Do you agree with that?

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Oh, absolutely. Look, I mean, there's all kinds of people who have this kind of incredible faith that if we just kind of believe in technology, all right, that uh it's going to kind of get us out of our social problems, and we can't regulate it, and we can't, you know, try to find, you know, collective or governmental or bureaucratic solutions because that's not, you know, that's not the market-oriented solution, and that's just going to slow our society down. Whereas if we let innovation take its course and we just, you know, get out of the way for you know the grand technological overlords, everything's gonna be great, right? So, like this is kind of like what I call the ideology of techno-libertarianism.

Chris Colley 27:55

Just let technology rip, just let it rip.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

Again, it's something we find in video games, like both implicitly and explicitly. So, yeah, I mean, I'm not a big fan of that ideology. I spent a lot of time criticizing it. Okay, but like, look, it's interesting, some people love it. Like, I have a friend who teaches at a business school, and you know, I was telling him about the book, and I was telling him about you know, techno-libertarian ideology, and he's like techno-libertarian ideology, he's like, I love it. Let's right. So, like, you know, for some people, what I call the hidden curriculum of video games, they're like, Oh, give me more of it. I love you know, let's let's let's let's give our kids more of that stuff.

Chris Colley 28:37

Yeah, totally, yeah. Regulation, oversight, just max it out. Let's go. That's amazing. Well, David, this has been so fascinating. I just really appreciate your thoughts. And um, I haven't had a good laugh like this either in a while. So thank you for partaking in a bit of you know, jovial reflection, I guess we'll call it. Well, I love to chat about this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

I love to chat about this, Chris. And you know, I I urge any of your listeners to to to to get in touch. I mean, who are interested in the book or they can go buy the book. It's you know, it's uh it's out there, it's readable. I mean, it's an academic book still, so like, you know, it's not always easy reading, but you know, I think relatively relatively uh straightforward and clear to read, and you can kind of find out more about some of the arguments that I've get out today.

Chris Colley 29:39

Amazing. Well, David, I'll put all the links in our uh descriptor so people can click easily, get access to you and your book. People check it out, the hidden curriculum of video games just came out. The book launch was September 24th, 2026 of this year, so it's all off the press. David, thanks for making us all smarter. And you have a great school year. And again, thanks for for coming and sharing some of your ideas.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Thanks for chatting with me today. It was really fun and really interesting.