Video Game, Author and Lemming: The Knowledge-Building Process

Many studies show that video games require attentive and interpretive capacity to generate complex cognitive skills in the gamer and they can be transferred to other contexts, such as school. In this paper, the authors do not aim to investigate the contents of the player's thinking, but rather his/her way of thinking. In this scenario the teacher becomes a worlds' maker, who provides his/her students with the tools allowing them to partake in the co-building of multi-tiered worlds, which requires not only the ability to get access to intangible information but also a skillful management of media interfaces. In this way, the click of the mouse becomes the action par excellence that allows each individual to contribute synergistically to the realization of the digital habitats. The ultimate goal is to search, in the learning processes activated by the video games in both the authors and the lemming, those features that make the learner a self-knowledge builder. Such “socio-cultural grammar” influences the writing and interpretation of messages, turning every individual into an author, who's often unaware of the “scriptwriting culture” that inhabits all the possible media worlds.