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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.