Photography news site PetaPixel posted an interesting article today regarding “gamification” and how it may be useful in the teaching of Adobe Photoshop. Specially, the article mentions the difficulty in learning Photoshop by doing, how instead users tend to rely on books and tutorials to guide them. Would it be beneficial to turn “regular” software programs into “games?” I can definitely see an argument for this, but I wonder about the practicality of implementing it. Building Photoshop already requires a sizable team of engineers; adding a game on top of it, even a basic reward system, would add significant time to the development cycle. In his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee exemplifies how good video games mimic real life learning—whereas most rote learning done in school (or in front of Photoshop) tends to be completely unnatural. I think there is a big future in gamification, despite its critics. As a photographer and a gamer, I have no doubt I would become a more efficient photo editor if I got an achievement for every time I successfully applied a layer mask. Ooh… And how about online multiplayer photo editing? Yes!
What if Learning to Use Photoshop Was More Like Learning to Play Portal?.
This is a great idea! Actually, I created a game users layers in Photoshop to teach some…older…ladies how to use the program.
I had stacked layers and each layer had a task. When they completed the task, they would hide that layer and the layer underneath would be the “Nice work!” layer with their next set of instructions.
Fun times.
Nice! I think we will see a lot of this type of stuff in the future, but not just for learning software.