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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
As the father of a 2 year-old I can assure you that you learned many things from Sesame Street. My boy learns tons of things from Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. From sharing and telling the truth to letters and manners etc etc etc. He's an absolute sponge. Heck he even learned about getting lost from Finding Nemo. When we go out he does NOT want to get lost like Nemo. And NO of course he doesn't learn those things just from the TV. But the day I scolded him about something and he told me he was mad at me and going to run away to Nana's house I knew for SURE he was learning things on TV. He's freakin 2! Somebody had run away on Mr. Rogers, one of the Make-Believe puppets. Granted, TV is the last resort for things educational, but when it does get turned on, he's learning something.
>I don't remember learning anything from things like Sesame Street
How many things at all can you remember from when you were 2? 3? I don't remember learning to read. Heck I don't remember learning to type either. I remember when I couldn't do either. But the learning part..it happens so insidiously that it's just not a memorable event.
As someone who is working on their PhD you should know that the entire concept of play is based on learning. Just look at animals playing. Now look at kids playing. They are learning everything from refined motor skills to problem solving to empathy, character judgement, following directions, cause & effect, etc etc etc etc.
Learning is the root of all play. Just ask a kitty. Hence, good games are educational whether they mean to be or not.
The important question is this: How can we make good games more educational? Because currently, we suck at it.
An interesting example, one of my gamer buddies lives in Quebec. He spoke no English but now attributes his decent mastery of English to an FPS game! He learned it in game, on the forums, on TeamSpeak, etc etc. He taught himself English to get along in an English Language game. And I was there for most of the process and can vouch for it.
Anybody know a great game with a predominantly Spanish speaking or Mandarin speaking community? I'm in!
Now how can we better promote game learning by design?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
"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.
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.