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Education Entertainment Games

Games Are Better Educators Than We Think 47

Posted by simoniker from the watch-out-for-monkeys-with-barrels dept.
Thanks to the IGDA for their new Culture Clash column, which discusses how education can work through gaming, and suggests that "mainstream, top-shelf games - especially story-driven games" are already letting us "learn volumes from our game experiences." As an example, it's argued that "Any one of us who played through Morrowind could easily ace a quiz on Vvardenfell geography, religion, politics, flora, whatever", although there's one major snag to those wanting all their classes playable: "Corporations and schools interested in educating through games look at the price tag, project length, and lack of scalability in a Fallout or Morrowind and cringe."
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Games Are Better Educators Than We Think More

Games Are Better Educators Than We Think

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  • yes.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @06:16PM (#7139425) Homepage Journal
    one can really learn from games!

    like, for example, after i've played nethack i've learnt that getting spanked by nurses can be fun, and that once my cat has killed enough babies it will take on the shopkeepers and i can keep their stash!

    -
    • It also teaches that you will be punished for crime,
      not that you should commit crimes (like some people are saying video games teach, which is bull#$*&)
      Although, I don't think that the manager of my local Kroger is level 11...

  • sure... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SophtwareSlump ( 595371 )
    Games may more educational than some people think, but they don't/can't/won't replace the learning experience you get from researching a paper or listening to an interesting lecture.

    A bigger problem is when you try to argue with only some 'facts' you've obtained through gaming. Arguing with zoning committees over something you've only seen happen in Sim City isn't the smartest thing to do :)

    • Re:sure... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @12:08AM (#7141326) Homepage Journal
      ", but they don't/can't/won't replace the learning experience you get from researching a paper or listening to an interesting lecture. "

      I don't think the suggestion was to replace education with them. I think the point of this article is to say "your kids are not necessarily wasting time playing that thing."

      I know that's true in my case. I wanted to know how games worked, so often I played them while making observations about how I'd accomplish that in programming. Also, I've paid careful attention to how a game lets you know what's happening. I'm a 3D artist now. My interest in programming has made me effective in using the scriping and expression features of my 3d app, and my attention to UI has gotten me a promotion at work. They have me test the software and suggest changes/additions to the UI to make it easier to use.

      I don't know if other kids have gotten this from gaming or not (though I'm sure a lot of programmers today have, it's all about interest level) but I can say that if my parents were Dr. Lauara'esque in keeping me away from games, I'd probably still be in retail.
      • I think the point of this article is to say "your kids are not necessarily wasting time playing that thing."
        Another point that needs to be made is that kids do not necessarily spend their time wisely when they take any formal education. As far as I know, all too often children (and adults) completely waste their time in schools where everyone just pretends to be learning. People are talking about complex (or basic) concepts, but nobody cares if they have any understanding whatsoever - and usually they don'

  • Great... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Osmosis_Garett ( 712648 )
    This will give more ammunition to the segment of society which points their fingers at video games as the blame for school shootings, increased crime rates, and any other number of childhood problems which COULD NEVER be caused by poor parenting.

  • I've been saying that for years... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Creepy ( 93888 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @06:19PM (#7139446) Journal
    I'm not sure how much benefit Morrowind has in of itself, but Fallout was a trove of cultural information... then again, it was an M rated game, so the kids shouldn't be playing it (tho there's nothing explicit...)

    Games like Medieval Total War make excellent history lessons. I probably learned more about the 1300-1400s playing that game than I did in a history class where several weeks were devoted to that era... kinda scary (the classes were also very Euro-centric).

  • Educational Games (Score:2, Informative)

    by MadocGwyn ( 620886 )
    A lot of money and research goes into a lot of games for 'historical' accuracy, but in the long run its mostly 'fun' thats chosen over 'accuracy' Although a morrowind type game encompasing a real time period/geographical area would be interesting to me, its prob not very 'main-stream'. An interesting observation but unlikely to produce any actual games in the near future.
    • I don't want to say history isn't interesting, but it's hard to compare Morrowind or Knights of the Old Republic to European geography. Morrowind is fun for reasons unrelated to the geography or history, although they both make the game feel like a real world.

      But it's going to be hard to make wandering around Europe that exciting. Especially because it'll be hard to justify giving the player magic or Force powers.

      There is definatly a possibility for Age of Empires type games to succesfully teach history,
      • True, but if I read it right he wasn't talking pure educational games.
        So if you had say morrowwind, and used a real place, and all the background was real, then put the fanciful 'magic' and things in the foreground it could be damn fun and educational too. So real people in italy don't shoot fire from their eyes, but at the time period in question there were these X groups that thought X and did X.

  • What is the cost benefit? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 05, 2003 @06:52PM (#7139680)
    Sure, I've played a lot of Morrowind. But given the 100+ hour scope of the game, could I have learned just as much by cracking a book and studying Morrowind culture, geography, etc for 10 hours.

    I think games can be a great transparent way of learning, but the absorption ratio is very low compared to the time you play. In order to get that transparency, the game has to be the focus over education, and in that case, it will always lose out to activities where learning is the primary task (and by this I don't mean it isn't fun, just that reading a history book can be both informative and entertaining, but simply prefers informing first, then entertaining.)

    Outcast

  • About time. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Thedalek ( 473015 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @07:15PM (#7139815)
    Now if only they'd go about it the right way.

    The typical approach of education through gaming works like this: "Let's make education fun! We'll make a game-like program, only instead of having an exciting game-like theme, it'll be educational! Kids will learn and have fun!"

    The result: Edutainment. Be honest, given the choice between an edutainment title (any edutainment title) and a good non-educational game, which would you play?

    The approach they should be using is this: "Kids are playing a lot of this game. What concepts does it convey, and how could those be applied to learning?" Almost everything is educational in some way, so all you really need to do is figure out how you're learning from the things you enjoy.

    Resource management relates directly to economics. Tech/Research trees relate directly to the fundamentals of Sociology (which, when you understand them, make History easier to understand). Most any luck-based game has an observable level of probability and statistics. Lots of card games (Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, MagiNation) have algebra in them. There's high-school level material in Monopoly, but any 10-year-old can play and understand it.

    Someone really ought to take all the education checkpoints for K-12 (that's Kindergarten through High School in the US) and cross reference them to popular "non-educational" board, card, and video games. As an educational resource, that would be gold.

  • Isn't this obvious? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by August_zero ( 654282 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @07:18PM (#7139827)
    Expose somebody to something for even 2 or 3 hours and they are going to absorb some of the information. Can you remember which brick in the first stage of Super Mario Brothers held the mushroom? If you grew up playing it probably. In fact, by your 2nd or 3rd game you knew where the powerups on the first stage were, its just simple memorization.

    I would be more alarmed by people that played 30+ hours of Morrowind and didn't know some of the games culture and geography.

  • Sid Meier's Pirates (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@@@gmail...com> on Sunday October 05, 2003 @07:33PM (#7139915) Journal
    I was sitting in 6th grade class and my teacher was talking about pirates during the Spanish empire. Someone asked why they didn't use large warships like galleons and instead preferred smaller vessels. I raised my hand and answered that larger vessels are often at the mercy of the wind. Smaller vessels, like Sloops, typically had oars. Even if the wind weren't going your way, it was possible to board a ship.

    The teacher asked where I learned that, and I felt kind've embaressed. I couldn't really say a Nintendo game could I?

    Anyway, the article begs one question: with so much history, why must we often make fictional battles and fictional plots in otherwise realistic games?
    • Age of Empires is fairly similar. The lead-ins on the campaigns are great. Talk about making history fun. It really does read more like the plot to a computer game than a pretty faithful retelling of history. There aren't many specifics, but then, how many specifics are you going to remember in 10 years (or even 1 week after the test on them)?

      Teachers are more into this stuff than some people think, too. Hey, if it makes kids more interested in learning, they're all for it. Problem is, most games br

    • It's not just games that work, but novels too.

      Intending to try stoking some enthusiasm for real life space exploration in my children, I just got through reading Stephen Baxter's "Voyage" to my eight and nine year old children (they read well enough themselves but they would never have read this).

      Anyway, despite this being a thoroughly adult story about an alternate NASA history, heavy with politics and technical detail about NASA procedures and technologies, the kids just loved it. Where the book assume
  • If Morrowind is anything like Daggerfall was, how could you actually guarantee that the user would learn any one desired aspect?

    Besides that, if it is as long and tedious as Daggerfall was, even during my last wasted summer, I wouldn't have learned anything by playing it, as I usually got too annoyed with it to care.

    Otherwise, I could really only imagine becoming familar with literature, philosophical concepts, or history trivia. It wouldn't really be conducive to learning sciences, mathematics, or any o

  • another major snag (Score:3, Insightful)

    by andy_fish ( 557104 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @08:50PM (#7140287)
    This article is forgetting about another major snag. The material we learn in video games is easy to learn simply cause it is fun material. The politics of Morrowind had all kinds of rival houses fighting for control, and stuff like that - I'm sure if our party system was a little more dramatic and violent, we'd all be paying more attention. The fauna in Morrowind was worth knowing because you could use the ingredients to make magic spells - but real world herbology is not quite so interesting.

    In general, all of the existing commercial video games have had the convenience of designing the material to be as fun and engaging as possible (you may point at historical games as a counterexample, but notice that historical games are only based on the interesting moments in history). Games designed for education would not have this convenience.

  • Interesting read, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ePIsOdEOnline ( 711249 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @09:13PM (#7140390)
    I find it interesting that the article fails to mention the research that is going into seeing if this is entirely feasable at all. Not only the work at MIT, but also a host of othe colleges all around like UTA and some others.

    http://cms.mit.edu/games/education/ [mit.edu]

    http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,59855,00.ht ml [wired.com]

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday October 05, 2003 @09:48PM (#7140596)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • yeah (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Corporations and schools interested in educating through games look at the price tag, project length, and lack of scalability in a Fallout or Morrowind and cringe."

    Yes, you got it, it is NOT easy to educate. When you think about how much a person learns during 2 hours of one of these games or something, if you scale that to 12 years of school everyone should know the encyclopedia britannica by heart. But they don't, because in order for a person to remember something they have to know why to remember it,
  • This is a bad example, because it's about an action game, but I used to be a big first-person shooter fan. Well, the other day I went to the "real" gun range for the first time, and I found that I was an amazingly good shot, right from the get-go. We fired all sorts of weapons from small handguns to scoped rifles to small assault weapons.

    I found that many of the techniques that I used in the game (when auto-aiming was off) to hit targets turned out to be successful ways to shoot in real life too. This w
  • Well, sort of.
    Schools already teach biology, physics, art, programming, etc. An extra class or club that embodies those ideas could make their own games. Funding and scalability issues are thrown out right there. Every year or two the club could produce a new game if they wanted and the price tag would be very minimal (no more than schools already pay for tech-related clubs *cough*).

    To me, money and technical issues is not the problem. The problem is still an overbearing prejudice. When I went to high scho

  • Adventure games (Score:3, Interesting)

    by slux ( 632202 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @03:46AM (#7141974)
    I'm not a native english speaker and games were what got me started learning english when I was less than en years old. I would play games such as Monkey island and really want to understand what was happening so I had a dictionary I looked up words from.

    In a way, parser-based older adventure games were even better because you had to be able to type in the objects' names and also make no spelling mistakes. Maybe I should grab a non-english adventure game and try learning a new language. :)

    These days most games are so basic story-wise that I imagine they couldn't work as language learning tools as well. Fortunately it seems we do still have RPGs and even some adventure games altough most are playing Counter Strike.

    One more way that I've learned with games is by getting so interested about the subject that I would read the manual and even go to a library to borrow some books on the subject. This happened with Red Baron for example. It had a very informational manual and as a result, I know quite a bit about WW1 aviation now. Nowadays games are packed in DVD-style cases mostly and there is simply no room for all the stuff that always used to be a big plus in buying instead of copying.
  • Okay, I'll probably be ridiculed for this post by some pedantic bastard - but what the heck.

    I'm Norwegian. When I went to primary school, english courses started in the 4th grade. I sucked. Couldn't understand shit, and was among the few that really couldn't get a grasp on the language. Never was any good at human languages.

    The summer between 6th and 7th grade I got my first PC. I had had various Consoles, and mostly "arcade-game"-computers before that, but now I had a PC. Think Monkey Island. Thin
  • You bet! I have learned countless words from games! Such as Mirth from heroes of might and magic three and tons of Japanese weapon names from Nethack!

  • GK (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 )
    I learned a lot about voodoo from Gabriel Knight I, and a lot about the Knights Templar from GK III. The games themselves were also very enjoyable.

  • Despite the fact that it is half hour comedy, I learned more about the Korean War through M*A*S*H than I did in school.

    M*A*S*H didn't aim to teach about the war, but it did include facts and it did have episodes with meanings.

    The goal of an educational video game should be to teach the intangibles or big concepts being just a fun game in between the facts. Heck, Railroad Tycoon taught me a lot about money.

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