knowledge as a noun because of assessment

Rereading Gee’s “What Video Games have to teach us about learning and literacy” for the third or fourth time for a class, I’m truly starting to understand the idea of viewing knowledge as a verb instead of a noun. So the discussion question in the board was related to assessment, how should assessment change if we look at videogame learning as a basis for understanding our education system. Gee spends most of this book showing how videogames reward players for learning, how they open space for players to apply learning principles in new contexts, the focus is on achieving goals during play, of beating the game. In the beginning of the game learning is easier, tasks are easier, other players are in place to overtly assist with learning (a parental type character will provide ‘helpful’ information that more expert gamers glean over due to their expert status, they assume they learned it before. Novice players will read all the help bubbles and try out the points as part of their learning process). So when we read all this, and we see how failing in a videogame is giving up, because the game will provide ample opportunity to try the task again (unless you’re playing a 25 cent arcade game, then opportunity is limited to funds) because the focus of the game is playing and learning, not on achieving something. When this book and the assessment question is introduced in discussion so many resorted back to the idea of knowledge as being assessed, so we approach knowledge differently. But we haven’t really understood Gee’s point that knowledge in videogames is learning, it’s doing, it’s a verb. As soon as the dreaded a word is mentioned we resort to traditional views of literacy and education as reading, writing and arithmetic accompanied by grades and tests. All of this focused on assessment of the content, did you read the right literature, and can you talk about it the right way, did you learn out to produce the right math answer. What we should be looking at in education is did the student learn how to arrive at the right answer. Did they understand the process? If it took student A 1 try to get the process and student B 50 tries, student B shouldn’t be punished with a lower grade. But we get so caught up in teacher time, and testable information that knowledge will never move into the realm of verbs, it will remain a noun because it’s something to be assessed.