Gaming in Education: Under-Skilled at Overwatch

My brother-in-law, Joey, is a huge Overwatch fan and plays with his friends all the time. I'm not much of a gamer and have never really played with him. I have spent some time watching him play and interact with his friends and was able to discern quite a bit of information from the game, but the interest was never really something that drove me to play with him. The game is essentially a collaborative group game in which teams work together to beat the other team by controlling and defending certain control points. For more about the basic gameplay, please see the video below.

Via YouTube

In going through this process, I quickly realized that my hand-eye coordination was nowhere near as good as Joey's. Likewise, my knowledge of the maps and where to go was severely lacking. Since we were playing on Joey's PC, we had to take turns and he was helpful in telling me where to go and what buttons to push to perform certain tasks. While the use of hand-eye coordination and rote memory skills were necessary to play the game, I believe that there were more educational advantages to playing as well. 

The game is an excellent example of collaboration and communication from the entire team to perform as one unit. By varying different classes, certain skills are utilized by different members to create an optimal attack/defense balance. The constant communication of what is happening across the entire map also allows for teams to work as a collective unit to achieve their goals of capturing or defending certain control areas. 

To build upon the collaboration, quick thinking and problem-solving skills are also in play. Knowing when to rush in to a situation and when a trap may be present is a mental chess match between both teams to try and create a mismatch throughout the game. This website has a list of skills and infographics that help to highlight all of the advantages of playing video games. The first infographic, I believe, applies best to the skills gained by playing Overwatch:

Source

One aspect of playing Overwatch that did not occur to me until several hours after finishing was the global awareness and networking potential that online gaming offers. In an age of global awareness, video games offer yet another medium for people to connect over a shared interest. Complete strangers can come together to work towards a shared goal through these games.

I think that the biggest application of this game to a classroom setting can be summarized using the discovery model of education. If given the proper resources, students can form groups of ideal skills to accomplish a given task through collaboration, trial, and error. Just at Overwatch relies on teammates to accept different roles, students can accept different roles and master their craft to help better serve the group to accomplish the goal at hand. 

While I feel that I'm nowhere near ready to become a professional Overwatch player, I now have a newfound respect for online gamers for the time and dedication that they have put into their craft. Games have certainly evolved from the days of Super Mario Bros, to say the least.