Did you ever go on a field trip for science class? Chances are you remember it if you did, because it was probably wildly different from the other ways you learned things in school. I remember learning more outside of class than I did inside. It was simply more interesting to do stuff than to read about what might happen if I did stuff.

There’s a fancier term for this – “experiential learning” – and it’s one of several concepts discussed in the freshly revised edition of James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (due out next week). And if that title’s a mouthful, just wait and see what happens when its contents hit your brain.

The way Gee explains it, learning to play a video game that way you already do – walking around, trying things, dying, trying something else -- is “expert reflective practice in a complex semiotic domain.” That made me feel really smart for having “wasted” so much time raiding tombs, dropping colored blocks, and finishing the fight.

James Paul Gee is a baby boomer, a PC gamer, and a college professor interested in how language evolves and how human beings learn. In watching his son play games, he realized there was something to it – that the best games demanded really effective, satisfying, and enjoyable ways of learning things that schools were sadly not even attempting. Games teach risk-free experimentation, social models, cultural values…they’re deep, man.

And his resulting book is deep, too, but it remains accessible. I won’t go into too much detail because I’ll only mess it up, and it’s better to let Gee lay it out for you himself. His examples from Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Deus Ex will be familiar and crystal clear to gamers, but then he peels back a few layers and the next time you pick up a controller, you suddenly See What They Did There. This is not a textbook, but it is a serious non-fiction tome for people who want to know more about how their brains process information and why sometimes repetition in a game is fun (Rock Band) and other times it’s frustrating and boring as hell (any game without a save-anywhere system). You’ll also sound really clever at cocktail parties when you say things like, “I think it was James Paul Gee who said, ‘None of the current research even remotely suggests video games lead to real-life violence in any predictable way.” Then you can change the topic away from that boring old violence debate and start talking about expert reflective practices in complex semiotic domains.

I’m a fan of this book – big enough of a fan to entice James Gee to write us a column a few issues back – and I’m really happy to see that that ...Learning and Literacy is being re-released in an updated edition, complete with more recent references to Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft. The tone is as light as an academic tome can be, but you’re going to have to pay attention to keep up with the big ideas within. In re-reading it, I found myself surprised at all the things it tried to tell me the first time around that I’d simply forgotten.

I’m pretty sure I’ll remember them all when they make the book into a game, though.