Viewpoint by Cody Daniels

Video games are often argued to be a waste of students’ time or a detriment to their minds.

However, college-level educational value can be found in games in ways not commonly thought of before.

According to a 2011 Iowa State University study, 27.4 percent of all college freshmen reported having played video games at least six hours per day during their senior year of high school. Seventy percent reported that they considered themselves avid gamers.

Many TCC instructors recommend two to three hours per course per week reserved for studying. This is a conflict if almost a third of our students are spending two classes worth of recommended study time daily playing video games.

However, students can, in some cases, combine studying and playing video games. 

Take for example, the Assassin’s Creed game series. Throughout the timeline of the series, players are assassins fighting the government-controlling and corrupted Templar Order. Fiction, but players also travel to Rome, the Ottoman Empire and the Northeast U.S. to watch colonists claim their own nation in the 18th century.

Each place has literally thousands of interactions in 3-D with actual bits of history, some that would fit the course material of World History, American History and language courses such as learning Italian.

In fact, students can create their own tailored “gaming syllabi” and merge it with their courses’ syllabi by enjoying the conversation, dialogue, learning or cognitive development in the game that matches the course’s subject material.

One can find as many of them as possible and ration their gameplay like homework time. For each course found, students can spend 30 minutes to an hour playing the storyline of each one in the same order their homework was done for each course.

This educational value isn’t prevalent in every or even in most games. But educational value can be found if one looks hard enough in several video games.