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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.
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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.
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?
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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
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I'd no nothing about sailing except for Pirates! and 17th century trading games. In addition, I have a good knowledge of Carribean geography and who the colonial powers were, as well as what most nations produce/export from those games. None of them were intended to be educational, but when you're a pirate in a Barque on the run from a Spanish Frigate (and you're running low on men). It helps to know where British, French or Dutch ports will be located without refering to the port list every time. I'm not sure it was a great use of time, but for a bit of side knowledge that I'd never have picked up elsewhere (and probably would have spent playing Mario or something similar anyway), it doesn't come off too shabby.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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An educational drilling MMORPG. Awesome!
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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?
Actually there is a lot of debate if all play is about learning. In his book The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith talks about some of the different purposes that people have tried to make "play" serve. I won't get into it here because it really isn't the point but if anyone really cares it might be worth reading his book.
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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.
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 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.
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
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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.