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Opinion: Video Games Are The Silver Bullet
by Duncan Fyfe
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August 7, 2008
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[In this in-depth opinion piece, game commentator Duncan Fyfe considers the educational potential of games -- and wonders whether the ardent hype that surrounds certain flagship titles may be a part of that potential.]
What makes learning fun? Check with any demographic that's high school age or younger and the answer will probably be "nothing."
School is where we are introduced to the idea of learning as a regulated process, and it is expressed to us there as a punitive contract.
Often we try to learn because we fear the consequences, not because -- especially not at an early age -- we have a Jeffersonian zeal for knowledge. Rare and precocious are the self-made seven-year-old scholars, and the rest become combative and reluctant when faced with calculus and biology.
The truism we learn the best is that learning is work. That's even the case with ostensibly enjoyable subject matter. Kids are smart, and they sense that To Kill A Mockingbird is really about writing essays and delivering presentations. Put any great work of literature in a class of high school boys and watch it be diminished to to a laughable, pretentious relic. Few can appreciate a classic in that environment.
The problem isn't with the novel or even with the intelligence of the boys. The contract of learning is the problem. In high school, they'll discover way more about chlamydia than they will about Keats. Students are conditioned to approach literature with entirely the wrong mindset.
Allow Learning To Entertain
The trick to enthusiastic learning is the trick. We need to have the right attitude, need to be in the right frame of mind to develop interests in art on its own terms and at our own pace. It's not necessary to instantly attempt a codification of its merits even when the art does not move us to speak.
We grow up viewing classic fiction as homework first and art second. It follows that we like learning best when we don't think we're doing it. We like literature more when there's no studying involved. What better medium for learning, then, than that apotheosis of anti-intellectualism, the video game?
We can learn a lot from games in ways we cannot from more traditional avenues. Simply by virtue of being entertainment, of course, video games automatically bypass defenses against intellectualism. I posit that there is more to it. Certain games are in a position to take advantage of gamer psychology peculiarities and have players happily engage with potentially educational themes. The game's intention is probably not to teach, and the player's intention is certainly not to learn, but it will happen nonetheless.
Educational video games are represented on a broad continuum. Educational and Serious games, those that are exclusive to school computers, are one thing. Mass market puzzles like Brain Age and Typing of the Dead are one more. Another thing entirely is high-profile, sophisticated games like BioShock, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
Clearly, they do not explore their political and philosophical themes -- objectivism, the war economy, the Middle East conflict -- at any level deep enough to substitute the video game for a university education or even the introductory paragraph of a Wikipedia article. They are not academics, nor comprehensive, nor credible.
Graduates will boast that their college professors were Cornel West, John Rawls and Michael Abbott; no one will cite BioShock, PhD on his thesis. Compared to video games like Big Brain Academy and Darfur is Dying, however, BioShock and Metal Gear Solid have the potential to be better teachers.
They have a captive audience. At present, the psychological climate of gamers is both frightening and alluring, but it is, amongst other things, the right mindset.
Capitalize On Hype Catalysts
Video games are an exceptionally diverse medium, but they suffer from a dearth of creativity within sub-strata. If one likes the fundamental gameplay model of an RPG, they'd better learn to to like fantasy and science fiction, because that's all they have. If one likes the visceral action of a shooter, they'd better learn to like World War II and... science fiction. If one has only a PlayStation 3 for gaming, they'd better learn to like Resistance and Ratchet & Clank.
No one bought Metal Gear Solid 4 solely for Hideo Kojima's unique treatise on private military corporations and the war economy, but a lot of people bought it because it was a major title for the only console they own, and were looking to validate that original purchase. When Metal Gear Solid is the only game in town, the player is going to get very well acquainted with it.
More still bought it because they were invested, via message board proxy wars, in the financial success of the PS3 platform. Metal Gear Solid 4, as a major exclusive title for a console which attracts relatively few major exclusives, evoked a great protective fervor in its audience that it would have done had it appeared simultaneously on Xbox 360, PC, Wii, DS, PS2, PSP, the iPhone, and the N-Gage. Or if there were a dozen other titles releasing at the same time -- on any platform -- with comparable levels of production, positive hype and potential for high sales.
BioShock and Call of Duty were not exclusives but, as triple-A titles, they reached such a critical mass of excitement and press that guaranteed their voice would be heard, as hardcore gamers had to play them to stay in the loop.
1UP.com's Shawn Elliott wondered recently why Monolith's Project Origin generates less hype than Guerilla Games' Killzone 2, when Monolith has the better track record with F.E.A.R. and Condemned, more to show of Project Origin itself, and no major PR blunder like Killzone 2's "possibly real" pre-rendered footage at E3 2005.
The disproportionate levels of enthusiasm are because Project Origin is coming to the 360, the PS3 and the PC. Neither it, nor F.E.A.R. before it are able to inspire the zealotry associated with flagship titles for the Sony consoles, which the Killzone series can enjoy. Killzone 2 has a dedicated audience that Project Origin doesn't, and so it has a chance -- that it shouldn't waste but probably will -- to talk about something important, to teach.
Guerilla, Kojima, 2K and Infinity Ward have gamers right where a teacher would die to have them. Gamers in the console war mentality are fastidious, enamored and strangely protective of their subject matter, and hyper-attentive to every detail in every screenshot, press release, and NPD chart. They're primed to absorb information.
These developers, of course, don't have a teacher's benevolence, and if their students are learning anything practical, it's because they're being manipulated. They won't, however, be any less engaged. This is condescending. Yet gamers are far more amenable learning about private military corporations when the source is a crazy anime about clones and nanotech rather than an international relations class they don't want to be in.
A Time magazine article on Mark Twain had Yale law professor Stephen E. Carter observing that "Twain melded his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story." BioShock does the same thing. Twain's intellectual subversion, however, is rendered inert when his books become part of the classroom.
We're not in a classroom. We're in an arena of spectacle, and while we bemoan all the fanboy bullshit, the hype, the perfect scores, the jaw-dropping graphics, all these little things that are so symptomatic of the race to the bottom, they are still what secures our attention, and that's the first step.
Imagine if that compulsiveness and fanaticism ever translated to those high school English students, who'd form an appreciation society around Huckleberry Finn, ready to defend it to the death. Developers have never had a better opportunity to found their game on real-world subtext. At the moment we don't see the mainstream video game as preachy, or work, or a lecture, and so we will listen.
This is the same phenomenon which spontaneously ignites in three million gamers an interest in fitness. Is Wii Fit attracting fitness buffs, or gamers interested mostly in the Wii, and with gaming trends? Thomas Jefferson would have read all the airport thrillers he could have got his hands on if only they had existed.
Let The Game Sell The Message
Narrative-heavy video games are almost exclusively airport thrillers. Some of those airport thrillers, though, like Metal Gear Solid, like BioShock, like Call of Duty, touch upon serious issues, perhaps introducing the very concepts to a certain fraction of their audience. These games are not didactic -- they're entertainment, first and foremost -- but, at their best, serve as the preamble to an appendix of further recommended reading.
Call of Duty 4, however subliminally, can make gamers more interested than they previously had been in the current Middle East situation, and from Call of Duty it's George Packer and Thomas Ricks and Seymour Hersh, and from there it's so much closer to actually doing something about it in the real world.
Call of Duty is not a history lesson. It doesn't need to be; in fact it needs to be so little. All it has to be is that fleeting spark that lights the fire. To be sure, it will sound bizarre to remark some day, while shaking hands in the White House, that this was all made possible by Call of Duty 4, that renowned catalyst for positive social change.
Yet why should the indignity in that statement matter to anyone? Surely the ends justify the means. Video games can be gateways to higher learning. Is it idealistic? Sure. But the base repudiation of idealism is so often used as a shield against saying anything interesting. Anti-idealism is what keeps triple-A games generic, and the reversal of that trend should already be a good enough target.
Compare the social value of these games to that of Halo or Oblivion. They're just as entertaining, but they are not relevant to any humanitarian or political discussion, and are certainly not literary. The Wire and The West Wing will not reform government but they will challenge and galvanize their viewers.
Now imagine if The Wire was one of five titles available for Blu-Ray at launch and how much larger a pulpit it would have. Blacksite: Area 51 had something provocative to say, but unfortunately for Midway and designer Harvey Smith, it wasn't an exclusive nor did it have the promotion or production of BioShock. Blacksite was marketed on its message (at least by Smith, and to a greater degree than Call of Duty or Metal Gear Solid) and that selling point was evidently not as exciting to gamers.
The game, commendably, still said what Smith wanted it to, but it never reached the audience it could have, because subtext doesn't sell. It's the blood and the psychic abilities that draw gamers in. Sometimes teaching is like a magic trick. You need to hide the blackboard.
We still see video games, the commercial blockbusters, as entertainment first and art second. One can read as much into the philosophy of BioShock as they like, but it can still be experienced as just a fun shooter. In this narrow historical window, video games can make learning fun. They can be a podium for developers to share with gamers their ideologies; their interests; their bookcases.
Shakespeare and Milton quotes read as superficial gravitas through overuse, but Deus Ex's inclusion of passages by the less-ubiquitous G.K. Chesterton surely spurred players to investigate Chesterton's body of work. That's the reaction that video games can shoot for but so rarely do.
Talk To Us
It's not all about saving the world. We can still discover things like objectivism, Chesterton and BMI through video games. With the second Guitar Hero, Harmonix, then holding a monopoly on the franchise, had the chance to include whatever music they wanted, lesser-known bands that without Guitar Hero would never have drawn a massive audience of video game players. The tracklist could have been limited entirely to early-eighties post-punk because maybe that was what the developer happened to like.
Even if gamers didn't think they would be interested in the music, they would buy it anyway because it was the only new Guitar Hero they had. They may have found in Mission of Burma or The Fall something that they liked, and have Guitar Hero to thank. Now, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises are bloated and overexposed, and gamers might as well pick a SKU based on what bands they recognize, and never discover anything new.
In time, this will happen to video games at every level. There will be twenty games that look like BioShock and gamers will choose the one with the best graphics and AI over the one that is sort of a consideration of philosophy and society. Which is why it's important to act now.
This is a call to developers. Ken Levine cared about objectivism and he said so. What moves you outside of games? What matters so much to you, but because you make shooters instead of social policy or literary journals, you never thought you the audience were receptive? Rock music? Mark Twain? Calculus? We're listening. Talk to us.
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If you want to teach in a game my suggestion is to be more like Ken Burns and less like Michael Moore.
There is a difference between encouraging people to think and telling them what to think. You get people to think by presenting a concept and showing its fair and balanced exploration in a way that engages both their minds and their hearts. That is what Deus Ex did, and (to a lesser degree) that's what BioShock did. Both took the honorable course of presenting a concept, showing some practical effects of embracing or rejecting that concept, and leaving it up to players to decide what they think about it.
But Duncan Fyfe appears to be promoting games not as an exploratory medium, but as a manipulative force. "Sometimes teaching is like a magic trick. You need to hide the blackboard." No. Specific beliefs slipped into people's minds in this surreptitious way will be (and should be) rejected when the trick is discovered. If some bit of knowledge truly is valid, then it deserves to be said up-front, not snuck in through the back door.
If your intention is to change minds, then be honest about it. Make a "game for change." Tell people what you believe and why you think they should believe it as well, and then grant them the dignity of making up their own minds about it. There is no end that justifies the means of causing a person to accept some belief without realizing that they have done so -- that is called propaganda, and it's not something that game developers need to be doing any more than they want it done to them by governments or corporations or other agencies.
Absolutely game developers ought to be able to tackle big ideas in an entertaining way. In fact, I would argue that this is one part of the reason for the high esteem in which games like Deus Ex are held: a deep concept explored fairly can give gameplay a driving energy it would not otherwise have had. But the power of that effect should not be misused to try to impose specific beliefs, no matter what the belief.
The potential effectiveness of games as tools for sub rosa teaching does not justify that use. Believing that it does would be a very bad lesson for game developers to take from this opinion piece.
The premise of this piece, is that when left to their own devices most people, especially young people will refuse to learn anything. The conclusion is that entertainment can be used as a catalyst for further education when the individual is then incited to learn on their own.
It would seem to me that the promotion of self motivated learning is the antithesis of propaganda. "Hiding the black board" is not a euphemism for pushing a biased belief system on an unsuspecting public, it is a metaphor for replacing the didactic mode of education with one that serves up passion and knowledge in equal portions.
One need only look at how propaganda, or the spread of bias belief systems in general takes place. If you want to spread a message like that you do it in the great wide open for all the world to see. People who want to infect the minds of the populous with their singular ideas do it by plastering the world with paper, not by whispering about it behind closed doors. The subversion they use is the overt social pressure of the vocal minorities, the extremists who wage an eternal battle for the hearts and minds of the regular folks. They don't hide the blackboard, they mass produce the blackboards and have them shipped free of charge to your doorstep and mine.
That this manipulation can allow a game to be a "catalyst for positive social change" doesn't justify it as a pedagogical method -- not when the stated point is to "galvanize" people into accepting a belief without their being conscious of that teaching.
That people won't accept such instruction any other way is not a defense. It's not the responsibility of any game developer to teach any specific lesson.
As I said, raising hard questions and examining them fairly and openly in a game is one thing. That's defensible. The kind of sneaky, learning-despite-yourself-because-we-think-it's-for-your-own-good encouraged in this opinion piece does not deserve your defense.
If we don't like didacticism (and I agree that it's not effective for all students), then let's find other and better methods for teaching what really needs to be taught. But let's keep that instruction in the sunlight where it belongs.
It is my observation after reading this post from your blog:
http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2008/07/politics-of-far-cry-2.html
That you are in the game of first injecting your perceptions of an opposing political view into the texts you read, regardless of their actual subject matter, then secondly scolding the authors, while voicing your own political view as a more righteous alternative to the one you have claimed is to be read between the lines of the article you have chosen to rail on that particular occasion.
I take this as evidence that my gut instincts were correct, and as such, apologize for waisting your time by interloping it what was clearly a solitary exercise, good day sir.
But if that's your best surrebuttal, I'm content to let any remaining readers decide for themselves where the stronger argument lies. Good day to you as well.
That's why most of the game concepts I'm developing either highlight other (progressive, etc.) points of view through over the top satire or offer them up almost subliminally, as undercurrent elements that the player will just take for granted while playing.. but might think about afterward - and in both cases, my focus is on the fun factor. The messages I put in a game are frosting with sprinkles to the entertainment's cake.