“Cats and portals: Video games, learning, and play.” (Gee, 2008)
3 Descriptive Sentences
Gee (2008) explores how well-designed video games are a form of play that support deep learning, much like how cats engage with the world by actively playing, interacting, and exploring.
Games such as Portal frame play as a discovery process where players use tools to explore, test, experiment, and understand new possibilities in new environments, and this play can apply to virtual or real worlds.
This form of play mirrors how knowledge is built in the real world, much like when learners develop problem solving skills, use specialized language, and conceptual understanding through experimentation and interactions to become “Professional-Amateurs” or “Pro-Ams”.
2 Analytical Sentences
Gee (2008) argues that video games function as a sophisticated form of play that allows learners to practice strategic systems thinking and collaboration, or 21 Century identities.
Smart tools like the Portal gun allow the player to explore, manipulate, and physics concepts such as the conservation of momentum, allowing users to learn properties of both virtual and real-world systems.
1 Burning Question
If play is central to the learning power of games, as Gee (2008) suggests, do we risk losing this playful, exploratory quality when educators attempt to gamify academic content or design “serious” educational games?
“Games as distributed teaching and learning systems” (Gee & Gee, 2017)
3 Descriptive Sentences
Gee & Gee (2017) discuss how video games have largely been studied as separate, stand-alone entities from the “real” world but researchers are now realizing that people don’t always see real and virtual worlds as separate entities.
Recent research has begun to explore the learning that happens around games, such as “affinity spaces” and “virtual affinity spaces”, and these activities are often treated as separate from other learning experiences, but well-designed video games can be quite complex opportunities for learning, such as the video games Portal 1 & 2.
Gee & Gee suggest a framework that views video games as part of distributed systems of teaching and learning (DTAL) that transcends boundaries of the “real” and “virtual” worlds that leads to a “higher order collective intelligence” (Gee & Gee, 2017).
2 Analytical Sentences
The contrasting examples of Marco and Amanda (Gee & Gee, 2017) demonstrate that educational outcomes are not determined by the video game alone, but how interconnected the surrounding DTAL system is – learning isn’t necessarily inherent when playing video games.
Both children engage with Portal, however, their experiences vastly differ based on their learning ecologies: Marco deepens his knowledge and social capital of video games and physics through his dad’s expertise of engineering, whereas Amanda doesn’t have the same mentorship and material resources creating barriers to her learning.
1 Burning Question
How can educators act as effective ‘brokers’ within a student’s learning ecology to create a distributed teaching and learning (DTAL) system of video games that translates into equal, deeper learning outcomes for all students?
2 Sentence “Bridge”
The Gee (2008) article forms the foundation for video game research and a player’s individual interaction with games, comparing building knowledge through video games to cats at play, and the later article by Gee & Gee (2017) takes a broader perspective about how video games are a networked system of social interactions and “affinity spaces” across distributed teaching and learning.
Between 2008 and 2017, the evolution of cloud computing and mobile integration transformed distributed teaching and learning from theory into a pedagogical necessity when educational games evolved from individual, local software into networked social platforms that were ubiquitous in our culture.
AI disclaimer: ChatGPT and Google Gemini were used to edit my writing for clarity, grammar, writing feedback, and ideation on this assignment. All of the final edits are my own.
Photo from unsplash.com
References
Gee, J. P. (2008). Cats and portals: Video games, learning, and play. American Journal of Play, 1(2), 229. https://go.exlibris.link/4nNg9VJG
Gee, E., & Gee, J. P. (2017). Games as distributed teaching and learning systems. Teachers College Record, 119(11). https://go.exlibris.link/vtkXLTP2
Google. (2025). Gemini 2.5 Flash [Large language model]. https://gemini.google.com
OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/