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[this article by Ryan Henson Creighton is re-posted from the Untold Entertainment blog, which is awesome]
Now that we're in a sort of golden era of video game idealism, when wild-eyed evangelists are spouting that games can change our lives, i think we should get a little tougher on our definitions so that we really can become a better industry. In particular, i'd like to drive attention what some people pass off as "educational games" which are, in reality, quizzes.
¿Qué?
There's a vast difference between a game that educates a player, and a game that requires a player to be educated. In the past year, i've sat down in front of a number of "educational games" which, right from the title screen, require me to prepossess certain specialized knowledge in order to succeed. These game offers no training or instruction. The only way i could learn anything from them was to guess and, if i was incorrect, hope that the game would show me the correct answers. While there's something to be said for learning-by-failing, i'm not convinced it should be your first line of defense while educating.
Here's a great example: Financial Football. This "educational game" is sponsored by Visa and the NFL, and the production values (for an educational game) are through the roof.
In the game experience, you fill the role of an unseen coach. In order to successfully choose your team's play from your playbook, you have to correctly answer a question about finances. The clock ticks down as you face a multiple choice questions about 401k plans and mortgage rates.
B... but what if you don't know anything about finances? Isn't the game supposed to teach you?
No!
Apparently, a traditional schoolteacher is supposed to print out the traditional, dry-as-toast lesson plan pdfs linked to from outside the game and teach you the underlying concepts using (presumably) the age-old one-two combo of blackboard lectures and worksheet print-outs.
The future is now!
It's a mistake to call something like Financial Football an educational game. It's a rich media quiz, meant to be the carrot-on-the-stick to cap off a few classes of deadly boring traditional schoolwork. This game is the equivalent of signing up for a course and walking in the first day to an exam. We can do so much more with educational games!
(Note: If you're a cynic like me, you're already suspecting that Financial Football isn't an earnest attempt at creating an educational game, but rather something Visa developed as a defense against accusations of predatory or unfair lending practices - the equivalent of McDonald's funding Ronald McDonald House ... an organization to help children ... while the food they sell hurts children.)
Watch and Learn
i played an educational game recently that i feel got it right in a number of ways. It's Playful Minds: Math (5-8 years old) from Gameloft.
A number of math-based mini-games - essentially quizzes - are scattered across different themed maps. The game runs a short tutorial video explaining each new concept as it's introduced. It provides tools for interacting with the elements that aid in figuring out the answer; for example, in the counting game, you're asked how many whatevers there are on the screen. As you tap each one, the voiced-over character counts them with you. If you get a question incorrect, the game doesn't just throw a big red X in your face and move on ... you keep trying until you're correct. The game will repeat the instruction for you if you're confused. It'll replay that tutorial video. You can tap a speaker button at any time to hear the instruction again.
Hey, kids: add up the number of dollars your parents will have to pay to buy you these cool virtual goods!
Are you developing an educational game, or a quiz? Make sure that your game actually teaches something, and that it gives players interesting ways to explore and internalize the subject matter before you hit them with a time-limited gun to the head. Let's strive to create more games that use all the advantages of an interactive medium to teach before we test!
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The problem in nowadays is really how developers and consumers define a genre of game, and I agree, education is not just about testing, but teaching and learning.
Schools in my country, I realise seems to keep thinking that, by testing the students, we can then gauge what is the level of education in a student. However, students who are weak in such subjects, often get caught in a Catch 22, where they are tested on things they don't know, and are expected to know through testing.
Education tends to take a different turn somewhere along the past years, where it seems that achieving good grades are more important than proper understanding. With your new term, I hope we could avoid any more mistakes as such.
We almost seem to have created an entire genre where we toss all of the games which largely involve heavy-handed educational material (or quizzes) mixed with a truly questionable amount of entertainment value. But it's not as though we don't see games that promote learning - we just don't call them educational, ostensibly because the learning aspects are sub-textual, and they're actually successful in the goal of entertaining.
Take Myst, for example, or any other mature puzzle-solving adventure game. Though these games don't provide us with a litany of factual information (in the time honored tradition of the ineffective North American style education system), it does present the player with many cognitive tasks involving complex problem solving and creative solutions to contextual problems.
If you break Myst down into its most identifiable components, it is more or less nothing more than a series of cognitive tasks that require learning, thought, and general exercise of one's mental faculties, all tied into a minimalist plot structure and a contextual world that give the tasks themselves a sense of real-world legitimacy.
It may not teach us about 401k plans, but it does teach the kind of skills that are prized in higher education environments: namely, how to think, how to persevere, and how to solve complex problems.
Frameworks such as Myst could probably be well-applied to more focused educational endeavors, with a little effort. The problem is that mundane real-world information such as financial planning doesn't engage, it doesn't inspire. And trying to marry that information into a more exciting world (in this case, football) just comes across as disingenuous.
Although it might not reach the desired audience, wouldn't it be more sensible to create a light business management game with a focus on financial learning? Slowly introducing real-world concepts as game mechanics to provide constant feedback to the player? Sometimes it's less valuable to teach someone the specifics of something like financial planning, than it is to make the entire concept of financial planning feel more familiar. Give a person the basics, and give them the tools to learn more, and you will do more with that education than a simple bullet-list of facts.
As a matter of fact, it reminded me of my final year project, where we were supposed to make a financial literacy game. And there was a real barrier, cause when we have an engaging and fun game, the clients don't feel it's educational enough. And when it's educational enough to the clients, it's frankly boring and likely to use a luck-based mechanic.
I supposed with these kind of scenarios, it simply calls for a question: What is, really, an "educational game"? And why do people perceive games as a tool, instead of just being a game?
I have never enjoyed any of the games I was spoon fed at school, which is a shame because I think most gamers have at least to a degree experienced the potential to increase your knowledge and train your brain with games, for instance most of my geographical knowledge originally came from playing strategie games, games I played for my enjoyment.