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Serious Games - World of Borecraft?
Slate has up a piece right now talking, in a somewhat frustrated tone, about the mixed message that serious or education games can pass on. The article recognizes that serious games have a great deal of power, and can be useful ... but do they have to be boring? "The basic issue here is that it's easier to make a fun game educational than it is to inject fun into an educational game. In his 2005 book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that games like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto make us smarter by training the mind in adaptive behavior and problem-solving. Most overtly educational software, though, ignores the complexities that make games riveting and enriching. The serious-gaming types think they can create educational software from whole cloth. In reality, they have a lot to learn from Grand Theft Auto." Coincidentally, Gamasutra is running an article entitled Who Says Videogames Have to be Fun?, which looks at the same issue from a slightly different point of view.
What game is education only, with no fun? That sounds like a sheet of math problems for joe average. Why in the world wouldn't you just take missle command and make it a typing tutor or math solver or whatever? By default, games should be fun, so I don't see how you could start with something "not fun" and end up at "fun" without adding a complete game, which is the same net result as starting with that game and adding in the education.
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I think the point was that by starting with the idea "educational software" and trying to turn it into a game, you're more likely to get crap because people underestimate how difficult it is to make a fun game.
On the other hand once you already know you have something fun, it's pretty easy to add a few educational elements to it.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
If serious games aren't fun, people won't play them. It's really that simple. As TFS mentions, games not labelled as serious are learning tools as well; in fact, Raph Koster theorizes that we find games fun because we are learning, and constantly challenged (see his book's website). People in "serious" games (a moniker that I despise) have a lot of work to do before their games will be as widely played as mainstream games. I hope they succeed though; games have such a great potential to teach, and people are more willing to learn than they think.
I've played a ton of games that could be considered purely fun and weren't intended for educational purposes, but I ended up learning simply because I was drawn in by the fun aspect.
:)
For instance, Popcap games are brilliant in that they are simple, fun, and for the most part, educational. Word worm can help out vocabulary skills, and typer shark is a great way to improve your typing skills and speed without feeling like the goal of playing it is to improve your typing skills. I've always felt like I needed to save the diver!
Another good example is the Myst series. The first few games in the series were plenty challenging, and the puzzles caused the player to think analytically, using mathematical approaches without asking the player to actually compute anything (mostly).
And of course I can't leave out Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego! I learned all sorts of state capitols and information about various places because I wanted to catch Carmen. Of course, when I played that game, I probably wasn't old enough to differentiate between playing a game for fun and education. If I played now, I'd probably quit rather quickly because I realized that it was a definite educational tool, but at the time it was just fun.
If the geography of Warcraft was the same as the geography on Earth, there would be no need to teach most teens geography. Better yet, name the flightpaths after real airports. Then we'd have a generation that never got lost.
...is probably made by the same classroom losers that add no value beyond the syllabus, and see the world as a standardized test.
Real learning is spontaneous, dynamic and usually involves some from of application that goes along hand in hand with the educating. The learning can often be a side-effect of the pursuit.
I'd say this type of learning is actually better served by the creative forces in the gaming industry than our so-called systems of education (rote memorization).
'nuff said...
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I argued this in high school a lot.
I played a lot of RPGs. A lot of this involved mental math, estimation (Three more battles until I level, four until I need a healing. WOOO!), problem solving skills, proper budgeting of items and the in game money.
Games that don't try to be educational can be educational.
Although, some people do spend a lot of time worrying about playability, I remember I played Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago like 3 times.
wtf games have you been playing? Did you never play The Oregon Trail? What about Lemonade Stand? Mathville, for the old Unisys Icons (if you went to school in Canada, that is). Did you think all of the location-based info-dumps in Carmen Sandiago were just for kicks?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
As someone who holds a teacher's license, is working on a phd related to studying videogame players, and who considers myself a gamer, I have to say that I've little to no interest in educational games. I don't remember learning anything from things like Sesame Street and I don't remember learning anything from Oregon Trail except an interest in computers and games. I've talked to a couple of fellow academics who are into "serious games" and using games to teach and while they are nice people and I wish them the best I just don't see the need for it.
While people learn things differently I can't help but feel that this is similar to trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Can a game be made that is fun and educational? Sure but I'm just not sure that making it would be an effective use of time.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I learned a lot about teamwork by playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory online.
I find it odd that I originally got into playing that game for the sheer arcade-style fun of it but I quickly started enjoying winning with whatever team I was playing with, and the only way for my team to win was to cooperate.
Does that count?
Since when does education always have to equal "boring"? On that same note, since when does "fun" always have to equal "non-educational"?
There's no arguing that a lot of games don't lend much in the way of teaching traditional subjects like science and history, but I think that a lot of people seem to think that education means "memorizing facts". That's bullshit.
To learn any life skill, you need to learn how to do something; the method. Without this, the facts are useless. A lot of video games involve problem solving skills that can be applied to many other facets of life.
When I played WoW, I had friends who learned to play the economy and amass large amounts of money. While this practice has low (real life) risk and equally low rewards, the same principles apply to the real economy. Were any of them real life economists? I doubt it.
A lot of video games help people to think with logic and reasoning at the most basic of levels. Mario has cause and effect. You jump, the Goomba dies. You don't, Bowser kills you. Tetris has made a friend of mine amazing at stacking boxes inside a U-haul van (which was extremely useful in my recent move). They are skills everyone uses on a day-to-day basis, instead of facts that won't help you unless you decide to go on Jeopardy, enter into Politics, or become a teacher (to continue the cycle with newer minds).
Ah, I can see it now. "Grand Theft Auto - Oregon Trail". "Where in the Halo is Carmen Sandiego?" "Mavis Beacon Teaches Ganking".
How could it possibly go wrong?
Where else can you learn such amazing things, such as:
- What it is to be "rickrolled"
- That everyone should "lrn2ply" "nub"
- That ridiculous is actually spelled "rediculous"
- That OMG I"M NOT TWLEVE I"M TJHIRTEEN is acceptable retort?
- The facepalm?
- That people often like pie?
- The internet is for porn?
- Leeroy Jenkins
OK but seriously. I've learned that WoW is just MySpace with cool loot.
Now, back to the topic.
Is it safe to call a game that stimulates the brain, one that requires the solving of complex problems in succession, one that requires the organization of many things simultaneously, educational? Even though it doesn't teach you about the war of 1812? Does education mean book smarts? Or does it expand to cover things like problem solving and mental conditioning?
Because if it does, then most video games educate. Whether or not the time spent on that form of education is worthwhile, I am not at liberty to say.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
By my experience, educational means sesame streeting a game, usually resulting in poor gameplay and a low rate of knowledge transfer.
/. had a quote from some brain who said that physics is to sex as math is to masturbation. That's very true. Unapplied math is the most boring thing in the universe. With an application like a proper game, kids don't even realize how much they're learning here. It's fun.
The better games I've seen that also convey some useful knowledge and skills tend to be fun first, you don't even realize you're learning anything. Carmen Sandiego was a great stab at a world knowledge educational game. While the facts in the game weren't directly related with landing the player a job, it would help prevent him from being "that person" when Jay Leno goes out in public with a camera to see just how stupid the average American is.
D&D was created to be a game that wraps math up in a fun fantasy setting. I think that's brilliant because it actually gives you and application for arithmetic and algebra beyond drilling stupid problems in the book. Someone here on
I was in a young business leaders program in high school. It was mostly a stupid and pointless course, the only worthwhile part being the annual trip to Japan to meet our sister school. One of the highlights of the program for most students was the business simulation software provided with the course material. The class gets divided into four groups, all companies in the international pen market. You have maybe ten variables to work with that are also influenced by the decisions of your market competitors. You iterate the market each class period and make additional decisions. Our game was managed poorly but we heard there were some classes in Russia that were grand champions at it. I shudder to think what their version of a zerg rush might be.
With the power of modern computer systems, I think we could take the concept of an "educational game" far further, a game that doesn't teach the player but teaches the designers instead. When I read economic theory, a lot of it comes across like unfounded bullshit. There are so many assumptions, so much handwaving, and the models can be unfairly influenced by the economist's own biases. When these yahoos catch the ear of someone powerful, the first real test of the theories is often in the real world on poor, unsuspecting economies. But consider online games like EVE, Everquest, World of Warcraft. These all have economies and are not just simulations of people, they're people! I think that economists could learn a lot from studying the development of the game economies. Seeing as it's "only a game" and real lives aren't at stake, the game developers would probably be interested in trying out new strategies for improving the economy, strategies we wouldn't want to see beta-tested on our own economy first. There could also be the potential of creating academic forks of these systems to run business simulations just amongst interested economists. From my layman's perspective, I think the shortcoming of most economic theories is that they are rational and based on rules, expected to be predictable on a statistical level. People are irrational and it's hard to model that accurately in a system.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"What game is education only, with no fun? That sounds like a sheet of math problems..."
you mean to say that a sheet of math problems isn't fun? who knew!?
Personally, I think that the Total War games are great fun and despite a few simplifications made for the sake of gameplay (such as Gold Florins being the standard of currency through the Middle Ages in Medieval II) that they teach the player a lot about history and heography. Heck, even The History Channel uses Rome: Total War to illustrate historical battles.
Militant Agnostic: "I don't know, and damn it, neither do you!"
There was a game like this. "Typing of the Dead" I think was the title. Basically, every time you typed a word correctly, you would kill a zombie. They would come at you faster and faster, so you would have to type the words faster. Mistakes had to be fixed or the shot didn't count.
As the gamasutra article says - most 'activist games suck'.
I think the lesson there is that people don't really look to their entertainment media to preach to them - they get enough of that crap from everything else from the media to the government, to the doorknockers of all political stripes and agendas.
I liked the redistricting game, because it really does point out the flaws in the *system* in a neutral way - it's a critique of the system, not of a particular side. If it had shown how EVIL Republicans or Democrats specifically are, then I personally wouldn't have bothered to even try it.
Now, that's not to say that every game with (or without) a message doesn't have an agenda somewhere in it, in the assumptions that go into the game, but that's cool. Show of a raw simulation of physics, I'm not sure bias-free programming is every possible.
The question is: where does ernest belief carry one into the realms of propaganda? What is a reasonable effort to model reality (albeit colored by one's own biases) end, and a deliberate (if well-meant) dissimulation in order to advance a political point begin? It's the same question that's been posed in the film industry for years - was "Fahrenheit 9/11" a documentary, or is it a biased political screed? Is "An Inconvenient Truth" an entry-level exposition on a critical issue facing humanity, or is it a Riefenstahlian exercise in the "big lie"?
Maybe it's the interactivity in games that forces the audience to become engaged that makes them less suitable as a propoganda engine. I know no knowledgeable people on either 'side' of the global warming discussion whose viewpoint was even slightly changed by An Inconvenient Truth. Yet I know many UNinformed people who came out convinced that Global Warming is a serious and imminent issue. In that sense it was successful. Could a game accomplish the same thing?
-Styopa
Typing of the Dead here is the best example I can think of.
The only thing I hate worse than a misspelled word is a zombie.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Brain age must have started out on paper as purely educational, but that is quite fun. This is the only "edutainment" game I can think of at the moment, but it certainly seems possible to start out as purely educational and end up at fun.
I think this is a great idea. I can think of plenty of examples of movies and/or games teaching concepts that were just byproducts of the plot. For example, as an English major, when I took a grammar course, I had difficulty understanding the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. My prof couldn't provide a clear example, but it all became clear when (and I'm not kiding) I heard George Carlin's routine on the usage of f*ck. For some reason, it just made sense.
What if a game's system of laws involved the actual laws of a country, its constitution, amendments, etc.? What if real economic principles were utilized to simulate in-game economies? WoW and other MMOGs are "missing" (from the point of view of TFA) opportunities to utilize this. Buying gold with real-world money? Prime example of supply and demand.
The only thing I hate worse than a misspelled word is a zombie. Then I've got one word for you: zombei. Run!!!!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
An educational drilling MMORPG. Awesome!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Grand Theft Auto V Mission #1: Tony Pinetti's ho owes him $230. She's been dodging him for 3.2 days. Tony charges an interest rate of %0.1 interest per hour a ho dodges him. Tony has instructed you to smack her for every $3.50 she owes him. How many times will you have to smack Tony's ho?
The sad thing is that a lot of people who make educational 'games' are following very, very simple formulas to make games. From my experiences in teaching children, I noticed that quite a few games designed around training for standardized tests have some serious, glaring flaws in how they're set up.
Children would often exploit the mechanics of the game's poor design and actually LEARN very little, while still registering a good score on a problem.
I don't know how you can mention a typing video game without mentioning The typing... of the dead!
Seriously. Turn yourself in to the proper authorities now.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Swampgas. Oregon Trail. Need i say more?
oh marmalade.
Damn right. Instead of grinding giant rats, you get to go to school to up your intel. skill!
Actually, I credit the early King's Quest and Space Quest series by Sierra (and even Zork) for teaching me how to type. That was back before you just moused over everything in games and actually had to type out your commands (and you got lots of trys when attempting to find just the right phrase that the game was expecting). Some games do a much better job of disguising their lessons than others do.
There was another that was a knockoff of Space Invaders, in the same vein. Words were falling and you had to type them correctly to kill them. The words got longer and longer, and a 10-letter word you missed could take out most of your defenses.
I can think of a few games, though, that serve to be educational without actually trying, because math and tactics are part of how it works.
NetHack/Angband/etc - those series of games require some analytical thinking.
Stars! - Another gem from a few years back. Now, resurfacing as a SourceForge clone. You can play it normally, but to really get into it, you have to crunch some math. It's pretty painless overall, since you have an emotional interest in planet growth and so on in a game like this.
Many net games also have a good approach as well. The old Astronest was a good example of this. There was math. Loads of it. But it wasn't an aim. Just something you had to do. Planetarion and other similar games are also examples of the "hidden math" approach to gaming.
"I think the point was that by starting with the idea "educational software" and trying to turn it into a game, you're more likely to get crap because people underestimate how difficult it is to make a fun game."
Well if you look at "fun games" many fun games are simply repetitive tedium that happens to take advantage of you brains psychological reward system, and many commercial games aren't even all that fun.
I think many games started out as someone simply trying to SIMULATE or understand something, not just 'invented for fun'. I'm sure many accidental games have been DISCOVERED, take SimCity and The sims, while designed to be 'games', they are more akin to 'serious' attempts at simulation of the world around us in many respects.
Indeed what are flight sims and war games if not spin-offs from the idea of military simulation? Many military sims to many are pretty boring, take the old Panzer General / Fantasy general games, note they represent combat by gaudy icons, numbers and statistics representing units. I know people to this day that still play Fantasy general (a financially failed SSI game), simply because to them the challenge and strategy it presents to them is inherently engrossing.
There's tonnes of games I find more simulation or 'excel spreadsheet like' then 'gamey', take Eve online or even MMORPG's, I detest MMO's because most of the game is travel and not gaming in the traditional sense and everything is automated. MMO's are really dumbed down single player games, imagine taking God of war and dumbing down the combat to WoW combat mechanics, it simply would NOT be the same game. Yet some certain subset of the population would find it 'engrossing' in own way.
The same could be said about MUD's (multi user dungeon's) and old BBS games like LORD (Legend of the red dragon).
I think games can educate when it comes to certain kinds of concepts, ideas or facts you want to teach. I remember trying to answer an question in my university course using civilization,
This reminds me of a game I played while in early high school called "Journeyman's Project 2: Buried in Time." The game was essentially a standard old-school graphical adventure game, in the style of Myst or Return to Zork. It just happened to revolve around some important parts in history. All the gameplay elements that made games like Myst so popular, as well as artfully done graphics and sound, were there. The game was fun, but it could definitely be used as a history lesson at the same time. About 2/3rds the way through, I started asking myself, "is this an edutainment game?" but by that point, I was so immersed in the game that I didn't care.
Of course, I really think that it IS the gameplay elements that teach the most important lessons: how to think and problem solve, for yourself. I feel that teaching facts, like historical events, scientific principals, and whatnot, are much less important than something that actually teaches students HOW TO LEARN. Zelda can do that, Myst can do that, just as well, if not better, than most edutainment games.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
How about those old TLC games? Some of them were pretty cheesy, like Treasure Math Storm, but I played the crap out of Ancient Empires. That game had really fun puzzles. I remember playing some old space based math game on Macs back in elementary school too. Probably lame now, but really fun at the time.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
It's everything I learned about videogames.
http://paulcarhuff.googlepages.com/videogames
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
This game is my favorite game of all time, when playing it I learned the geography of the Caribbean without even realizing it. Games can teach a lot transparently if the topic isn't overbearing and remains relevant to the game.
This would actually be a lot more fun than WoW and it'd have the added bonus of weeding out all the idiot kids because none of them would get past the single digit addition levels in the n00b area.
The Farewell Tour II
I tried using the skills I learned from Shenmue to navigate towns but most people got tired of me asking them about "the. day. of. the. incident." and I spent all of my money on little toys.
You know, while games may have potential to educate, Raph Koster is... less than clued anyway:
1. Let me point out that, if he's that good at knowing what makes a game fun, why didn't he make SWG fun? It started a niche game in the first place, with plenty of unpopular ideas but tolerated by some for the sake of the franchise or because it was the only one with a non-linear advancement. And then got kicked in the balls twice with some _massively_ uninspired changes that managed to turn even most of those away, the last change managing even to take away the main reason why people stuck with it.
At any rate, if he's the expert at what _all_ people find fun, why didn't he manage to attract more than a niche of the market? That's a reality check.
2. There are studies better than Koster's anyway. If you want to have a slightly broader insight than, basically, "what Koster personally finds fun", try Bartle's original classification of MUD players. Bartle saw 4 categories there, or 4 personality components, by looking at what players actually _do_ in games: socializers, explorers, achievers and killers. Koster saw only one of them, basically: the explorers. There are at least 3 other major groups of players, which Koster at best spent some time handwaving why he knows better than them what they really want, than actually trying to understand them.
3. Here's another reality check: there are plenty of games which are very light on the learning. Take Tetris, for example, or Lumines, or the whole category of real time puzzle games that work on the same basic principle. Sure, there is quick thinking involved, but not much learning. After maybe the first hour, that's it, you won't learn any new information about Tetris. (Go ahead, try to play tetris for a few hours, and then sit and think what permanent lessons you've learned today.) Yet a lot of people found it fun.
Or take a lot of FPS players. I know someone personally who spent years on the same CS map, climbing the same ladder, crawling through the same duct, and jumping up and down in front of the same vent. Just because that got him the highest score. What was he learning there?
No, the much more obvious common denominator is: rewards. Give players their favourite rewards often. It doesn't have to be big rewards, it just has to feel like having achieved something. And keep doing it. That's what makes games fun. Whether it's a new armour piece, a new friend, or a row eliminated at Tetris.
Now what counts as a reward varies among players. Some appreciate knowledge (explorers), some like talking to people and making friends (socializers), some like getting lots of points or a big enchanted sword (achievers), and some like to humiliate/annoy/etc (killers.) It basically boils down to what each player deems important: an achievement along that axis will be felt like a bigger achievement. And as humans have more than one personality, it's pretty ridiculous to make a claim like all fun is learning, because some people will assign the least priority to that.
4. What might help understand what happens there, is a bit of neurochemistry. People's brains are wired to, basically, do a differential. Anything that improves your situation triggers a release of chemicals, like, say, dopamine, which are quite similar to drugs in a nutshell. (Well, except they're natural brain chemicals.) Conversely, everything that worsens your situation significantly makes you unhappy.
It's the natural "wiring" to keep doing what's good for you. If you do something that improves your situation (e.g., eat when you're hungry), there's an "I'm happy!" signal triggering in your brain. If you let your situation deteriorate too much, you gradually get less and less comfortable and happy. It's not just for humans, that's what keeps your cat or dog taking care of themselves too.
At any rate, you don't notice absolute values. You only notice differences. Getting a 19" TFT makes you happy if you were on a 17" before, or on a CRT, it makes you actually
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"The danger is that these false assumptions could be carried out into the real world. "
And that's why there's game violence. Oh, wait...
We made ESL software, entirely for institutional use. Every now and then the executives would get a wild hair about trying to find a way into the consumer market but all they could think of was just re-marketing the boring school version. So I'd sometimes get invited to their meetings and would try to tell them this wouldn't sell at all.
Their main focus was Japan, and I thought I had a semi-clever idea that would make their product much different than the usual English stuff sold there. I've never designed a game before, but I've wasted too much of my life playing games, and have played a lot of JRPG's. So the basic idea was pretty simple. Create a FF-esque epic, complete with blonde emo boy with a forgotten past, and a blue-haired emo girl with many secrets and they have to save the world from the demons or whatever.
Of course, as the story gets underway, they encounter ancient ruins of a lost race and find fragments of their writing. The writing is in English, very simple English at first. In order to progress in the game, cast spells, find clues, etc., the player has to learn some English. Very simple words at first then, later in the game, they discover the ancient mysterious race isn't entirely dead, and the heroes have to converse in the ancient race's language, and by the time of the final boss battles, they have to have a certain level of English proficiency to win.
I thought it was a good idea. Makes language learning a little more fun than the usual drills and memorization, would take advantage of an otaku's desire to see everything in a game and learn all the secrets and hidden weapons, and was a nice little joke about how some Japanese view gaijin: as something very alien and mysterious. And this sort of game would be easily portable to other languages.
The executives thought this was a great idea but wasted too much money on hookers and blow to actually pursue anything new and risky.
I had a less formed idea vaguely related to GTA. The basic concept was to have the player role-play a tourist in an American city, driving around, and interact with the locals, with the structure of the game being more or less non-linear (and non-violent). There would be overlapping storylines with lots of conversation practice. The whole idea was to give the usual sort of conversation practice you'd find in language learning, but with storylines and game goals to make it less boring than the usual sort of stilted conversations you'd find in textbooks.
That idea was realized, not by my company, but by an Army contractor who created an Arabic trainer designed for the troops. The engine was based on a modified Unread Tournament engine and had the player drive around Iraqi villages, interact with the locals in their language, and make split-second determinations about who to trust, who to arrest, and who to ignore, with in-game problems developing when you made the wrong decisions.
Was actually kinda sad when someone beat our company to market with that concept, when I had laid out the basic groundwork for that idea back in early '02. Oh well.
Damn, I thought it was World of Boarcraft... pig versus pig!
Sierra and Dynamix had many, many edu-tainment titles:
Mixed Up Mother Goose, Mixed Up Fairy Tales, Pepper's Adventure's in Time, Quarky and Quasoo's Turbo Science, The Castle of Dr. Brain, The Island of Dr. Brain, The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain, EcoQuest 1 and 2 (to a degree), etc....
A lot of those games were really fun. I never played the 'mixed up' games, but I played the rest of them, and recently played the Dr. Brain games again because some of the challenges in those games (especially on the higher skill levels) are deceptively clever and can stump people of any age for at least a small amount of time.
Further back than that tho, I had edu-tainment titles on my C64 back in the early 80s. There was 'Cave of the Word Wizard' where you typed the word that the computer said for points (yes, said, as in spoke! 3 C64 3), there was a baseball game that involved answering simple math questions to hit an oncoming pitch, etc..
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
Look at the games on the Cisco website in the prep center.
I'll admit that they would rarely start an interest in networking but as reenforcement tools they're amazing and fun.
I suspect it also had something to do with very specific premises and objectives.
I remember the first game I ever played on a computer... it was at primary school (age 6) and was simple 5+3=? type questions on a screen. It was fun and interesting because back then computers were very rare (there were 2 in the school and one was for admin).
:)
These days, however, with computers and consoles and games on mobile phones all commonplace anything educational has to be at least as interesting to the children as the non educational competition.
PS: anyone think that its a bit of a coincidence that these articles come out at the same time as Nintendo releases Brain Training 2 (Called Brain Age in some other regions I think...) on the DS?
[The Universe] has gone offline.
The best defense I have read for the educational value of "serious" games (including some of those "violent" ones) is James Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy . Gee is a socio-linguist and uses his theoretical background to analyze the cognitive engagements in a wide range of popular console and computer games.
Here's an excerpt:
Gee's book demonstrates that, even if they initially look like a button-mashing "shoot'em up," many video games are built upon active inquiry and deep conceptual understanding (often success in a video game is learning its semiotic code, understanding the game's mechanics). Recently I've been playing Res 4--you have to learn; when to fight, when to run, what ammunition to use on which monster, etc. Not to mention the "America is protecting the world from tyranny and bio-terror, don't trust multinational corporations, always save a damsel in distress" and other socio-cultural messages running throughout the game.
Oh, no doubt a lot of that stuff happens. And indeed, now that you mention it, it does sound like something game designers could use more.
But just saying that dumping a bunch of info on someone won't trigger an "I'm having fun" signal in their brain, no matter how you look at it. Some of SWG's biggest mistakes were based on (A) not understanding there's more than that, and (B) taking the "learning = fun" idiom way too literally.
There will be some learning involved, but for some people that's actually a turn off, not the reason they're having fun. You have to keep the game fun for _their_ personal taste, and give them enough rewards to compensate for it.
Getting new info or learning something new is only perceived as "good" or "fun" in as much as you convince each group of players that it's furthering their own cause and goals. Basically:
- explorers: most will find it fun just to find out new stuff, but even for those it has to not feel like a lecture. The game has to have _depth_, and basically be like one of those kids' chemistry sets: give you enough elements and constraints to combine and experiment with. That's really what most explorers are all about: experimenting with a heap of wires, bolts, and body parts and seeing if they can come up with a Frankenstein. These are the mad scientists of MUD's and MMOs. Knowing that is already more useful in designing a fun game even for explorers, than merely "learning = fun."
- achievers: they appreciate information in as much as it furthers their goal. They'll appreciate learning a tactic that lets them defeat the boss who drops the +5 Sword Of Awesome, but they won't appreciate learning trivia. At any rate, for them it's not the learning new stuff as such that ends up feeling like fun, but the reward or anticipation of a reward.
- killers: (Bear in mind that by "killers" Bartle didn't mean "PvP players", but what the rest of us call "griefers". The term "killers" comes from the greatest reward they can find: driving someone completely off the game, in effect permanently "killing" them off the game.) They'll appreciate any information which can be used to make someone else's day miserable, they won't appreciate trivia which doesn't. They'll over info about how to get a +5 Sword Of Ganking, but may be completely uninterested in information how to get a Sword Of Undead Slaying, if no players can be undead.
- socializers: these are pretty tough customers to satisfy by game mechanics, because their main goal isn't to actually play the game. The best you can do is give them enough social possibilities (chat channels, guilds, clubs, housing, whatever) and reach a critical mass of active players, so they have lots of people to play with. In effect, to get socializers, you must first make the game fun for everyone else, so they see lots of people around to talk to. How do you get them to learn stuff? Tough question. Maybe make it an opportunity for social interaction, like organizing a guild event to solve the problem.
That's of course, just one way to slice the players into groups, and not even the only one. It's probably the earliest and best known, though, so I figured it will make a good example.
And, yeah, someone with solid knowledge of cognitive science could do a lot more for each group. Just saying, though, that it helps if you realize you're dealing with more than one group and more than one set of priorities. The "learning = fun" over-simplification is IMHO the awfully wrong axiom to start with. It's like starting by postulating "only rabbits live in the woods" and then getting genuinely surprised when one is mangled by a bear.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think that was my favorite game in elementary school (as far as educational games go).
1. The game was fun, thousands of people enjoyed playing it. He and the rest of the dev team did not have total freedom to do what they wanted, they had Sony and Lucas fucking things up. And the changes you are talking about occured long after Koster was gone. You do realize he doesn't work there anymore right?
2. Maybe you just have very poor reading comprehension? The point is that all 4 Bartle types (which is grossly oversimplified and innaccurate to begin with) are all deriving enjoyment from their different activities for the same basic reason. Fun = learning. Some people enjoy learning how to dominate other players, some enjoy learning by exploring the world. But at the base level, its all about learning.
3. Ok, you definately have very poor reading comprehension, or simply didn't bother to read at all. Tetris is about learning. Learning doesn't have to mean learning a new skill, or an important skill, or something that is a life lesson that will stick with you forever. Getting better at manipulating pieces as they fall faster and faster is learning. Learning is the entire game of tetris.
4. Now you are agreeing with the base premise of Koster's book. Yes, we are built to learn. We get high from it. Our bodies don't care if its an important life skill, or if its getting better at handling a bike in GTA:SA, either way you get your high.
And no, downgrading from a high quality, high contrast, colour accurate CRT to a washed out, faded looking LCD that can't display black doesn't make me happy. But its not about happy, its about fun. Uprading or downgrading monitors isn't fun. It just makes you happy. Playing games is fun, which also makes you happy. You shouldn't be so hard on Koster if you can't even manage to keep straight the simple concepts he talks about. Its not a complicated or difficult book to read, maybe you should try actually reading it?
Here's a fun concept for you: Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: massaging the data into looking like whatever you want it to look like. That's what Koster is doing. Just because Raph can argue a hypothesis without (A) any more proof than his own delusions of grandeur (it must be true because He said so), and (B) based on some very vague correlations and assumptions (just because it involves some learning, doesn't mean that's what triggers the "fun" signal), doesn't make it true.
Here's another fun concept for you: Correlation does not imply causation. Just because (A) you're having fun, and (B) you're learning something, doesn't mean that A causes B. B is something so intrinsic to the brain, that it's there just by virtue of being there all the time. It's like saying that the sun causes the fun signal, because hey, every time you're having fun, the sun still exists.
And in this case it's not just the taking a wild assumption, it's outright ignoring reality and the readily available counter-examples. There's a heap of counter examples where B (learning) is present, yet A (the fun) is missing. Think a boring lecture at college. Think being forced to learn a subject you don't like. FFS, think the players'/users' complaints about the learning curve. So postulating that "B => A" is just stupid. If there is at least one case (and there are plenty) where B is true, yet A is false, that implication just doesn't hold.
Here's a third fun concept for you: theory != hypothesis. What Koster does is just handwaving a _hypothesis_. It's not a theory, it's not some grand revelation, it's just an unproven hypothesis. Supported by nothing more than handwaving and ignoring everything that was already known.
As for point 4, no, au contraire. It means that there is _no_ dedicated "learning is fun" circuit up there. Those signals measure how much your situation has actually improved, not how much you learned from it. Heck, there isn't even any actual learning until you've slept a night or two on it: that's when any data is actually committed to long-term storage. Seriously, read a real biology book, if you want real info, not Koster's ego-masturbation.
Oh, wait, is that you, Koster? Well, then carry on. That's exactly the kind of thing I expected from you.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Math Blaster?
Wouldn't that be a game where you make wild pigs?
Half life for example it in itself a fun FPS game, but in single player there is a lot of puzzle solving and such to be done. Same as doom ans Tomb raider. This show that learning can be fun. It might not be traditional learning, but if makes of educational games take a page from that I think it would help a lot.
Today's Tomorrow is Yesterday's Future! --- "Where Ever You Go, There You Are" -- Diablo 1
Now THAT is a Christian videogame that would sell, dammit!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.