Serious Games - World of Borecraft? 112
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.
how do you start with a purely educational "game"? (Score:2)
Re:how do you start with a purely educational "gam (Score:5, Interesting)
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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An educational drilling MMORPG. Awesome!
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Damn, I thought it was World of Boarcraft... pig versus pig!
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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 ju
Re:how do you start with a purely educational "gam (Score:1, Funny)
you mean to say that a sheet of math problems isn't fun? who knew!?
Re:how do you start with a purely educational "gam (Score:3, Informative)
Re:how do you start with a purely educational "gam (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing I hate worse than a misspelled word is a zombie.
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The only thing I hate worse than a misspelled word is a zombie.
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Mixed Up Mother Goose, Mixed Up Fairy Tales, Pepper's Adventure's in Time, Quarky and Quasoo's Turbo Science, The Castle of Dr. Brain, The Island of Dr. Brain, The Lost Mind of Dr. Brain, EcoQuest 1 and 2 (to a degree), etc....
A lot of those games were really fun. I never played the 'mixed up' games, but I played the rest of them, and recently played the Dr. Brain games again because some of the challenges in those games (especially on the higher
Re:how do you start with a purely educational "gam (Score:1)
These days, however, with computers and consoles and games on mobile phones all commonplace anything educational has to be at least as interesting to the children as the non educational competition.
PS: anyone think that its a bit of a coincidence that
Srsly (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, Raph Koster (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Re: I'll rasie you a Jim Gee (Score:1)
The best defense I have read for the educational value of "serious" games (including some of those "violent" ones) is James Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy [amazon.com]. Gee is a socio-linguist and uses his theoretical background to analyze the cognitive engagements in a wide range of popular console and computer games.
Here's an excerpt:
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But just saying that dumping a bunch of info on someone won't trigger an "I'm having fun" signal in their brain, no matter how you look at it. Some of SWG's biggest mistakes were based on (A) not understanding there's more than that, and (B) taking the "learning = fun" idiom way too literally.
There will be some learning involved, but for some people that's actually a turn
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Heh. Oh please... (Score:1, Troll)
Here's another fun concept for you:
How about a decent Christian game?!?! (Score:2)
My perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, Popcap [popcap.com] 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.
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Which game teaches the difference between capital and capitol?
*/snipe*
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They're also ripped off [slashdot.org].
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).
Man I did not like Myst's puzzles. Way too easy, just keep notes and the answers fall out. I finished it in one sick day my fresh
Typing of the dead (Score:2)
Seriously. Turn yourself in to the proper authorities now.
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Warcraft on Earth.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Warcraft on Earth.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Too many generations have been raised to not ask questions. The autonomic reflex to ask questions (even about the inane) is annoying to those who think they know everything, but it's a Good Thing(tm) for our culture.
Re:Warcraft on Earth.. (Score:5, Funny)
She's at 49,50. Now go finish your quest.
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barrens chat restored.
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Too many generations have been raised to not ask questions. The autonomic reflex to ask questions (even about the inane) is annoying to those who think they know everything, but it's a Good Thing(tm) for our culture.
Real life isn't WoW
um, okay.
and the primary resource is never the quest text anyways. Seeking out an independent source like Thott is the correct course.
i never read the quest text, either. i wonder if there's an independent source i can look up?
Do you even play WoW?
you'd be surprised at how many thanks i've gotten for answering a query with a direct quote from the quest text. you might even be surprised at how many people have gotten mad at me for directing them to thottbot, except you're probably asleep by now.
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Re:Warcraft on Earth. (Score:1)
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You haven't taught them geography, you've taught them to read a map and crib from the Wikipedia.
Interplay's Conquest of the New World [1996] built its world using randomly generated terrain and other elements. You have to explore the world to understand its geography and peoples.
The solution to any problem isn't handed to you on a plate. You don't where the gold is, the rich timberla
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The "right" areas?
The value of a randomly generated - but plausible - world is that it forces you to make the difficult decisions, ask the right questions. The answers aren't to found in the back of the book.
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I've also long had this idea that they should take a normal long RPG-like game (like a Zelda), and have you play it such that they gradually transform the language they use in it, into a foreign language. You'd play through once in your own language, and then another time with
Another Approach? (Score:2)
NetHack/Angband/etc - those series of games require some analytical thinking.
Stars! - Another gem from a few years back. Now, resurfacing as a SourceForge clone. You can play it normally, but to really get into it, you have to crunch some math. It's pretty painless overall, since you have an emotional interest in planet growth and so on in a game like this.
Many net g
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You could be playing as part of the civil war - with a bonus mission that you can unlock to kill lincoln or something =)
The Typing of the Dead... (Score:1)
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RPGs (Score:1)
I played a lot of RPGs. A lot of this involved mental math, estimation (Three more battles until I level, four until I need a healing. WOOO!), problem solving skills, proper budgeting of items and the in game money.
Games that don't try to be educational can be educational.
Although, some people do spend a lot of time worrying about playability, I remember I played Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago like 3 times.
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I've always found that insofar as the "education" is not tightly coupled to the more fundamental game mechanics it can be ignored. I didn't need to know anything about the incas, the leaning tower, etc. I just needed to be able to relate what I saw in the game to a dictionary.
Th
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Counterpoint (Score:4, Insightful)
wtf games have you been playing? Did you never play The Oregon Trail [wikipedia.org]? What about Lemonade Stand [wikipedia.org]? 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 [wikipedia.org] were just for kicks?
why educate? (Score:2, Interesting)
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1) Balance of Power. It's not an educational game per se, but it's an excellent game that teaches about international relationships and the ramifications of your actions on a global scale. It's also historical, being that it's set in the Cold War.
2) Hidden Agenda. Same ideas, but focused on a national rather than international scale. The detail in this one is fantastic and forces the player to really think abo
Re:why educate? (Score:5, Insightful)
>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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I don't learn anything when I spank the monkey.
But when I first started spanking him I learned quite a bit!
So I think "root of play" is more accurate than "all play". But good point, and your reference sounds intriguing.
...Bad monkey! Bad bad!
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It all depends on how you define 'education' (Score:2, Interesting)
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 p
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Tetris has made a friend of mine amazing at stacking boxes inside a U-haul van (which was extremely useful in my recent move).
One of the only games my dad played to any extent was Tetris. Our church would always get together to help people move using my dad's company's truck, and he would be in charge of packing it, because he was as they called him "The Tetris Man". When he wasn't around to place a box, the called on me "The Son of the Tetris Man" because I too played that game. It is still an invaluable tool for helping visualize just how to orient a box to slide into the odd remaining space. On a similar note, Puzzle Pirates is another great puzzling game, and one of the people from the crew I was in would play with his whole family. His 4 year old son learned about how colors mixed by playing the alchemy game.
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Educational Games (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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Ah, I can see it now. "Grand Theft Auto - Oregon Trail"
I know you're doing this tongue-in-cheek, but just imagine if they were able to take the ambulance/firetruck aspect of GTA:3 but incorporate it with a real world map of a city. Drivers could train going really fast in their own city without ever having to enter into their vehicles, and get a good idea of directions etc. Sure, it isn't as fun as GTA, but it would be a heck of a lot better than having to sit around studying maps to learn where everything is.
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"Hey, Bob! I just found out that if we take a shortcut through the playground of the school for the deaf and disabled kids, we can cut two minutes from our response time to half of our cove
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Don't believe me? Check out http://shenmue.planets.gamespy.com/forum/viewtopi
It's pretty crazy.
WoW is educational! (Score:4, Funny)
- 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
What do they mean by educational? (Score:3, Insightful)
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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Lesson one: quit preaching (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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As the gamasutra article says - most 'activist games suck'.
I think the worst problem you can run into with an activist game is that you can "stack the deck" to support your belief while real life isn't that clear-cut. A christian moralist game could have your character damage his immortal soul for having sex out of wedlock. A Jewish or Islamic fundie game could see the player damned for eating pork. The game could just easily make the world be flat. Within the confines of the game, these assumptions may be correct. The danger is that these false assumptions could
Injecting fun games with education (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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
I can see it now... (Score:4, Funny)
Educational 'Games' (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Buried in Time... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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It is a puzzle based game that deals with the various sections of the brain. Vision, thought process, music. Turned into entertaining games like herding Neurons and trying not to wreck trains.
The musical aspect was by far my worst. (I'm horrible with music, and
Please see this guy's page! (Score:2)
http://paulcarhuff.googlepages.com/videogames [googlepages.com]
Sid Meier's Pirates! (Score:2, Insightful)
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I worked at an educational software company.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Number Munchers! (Score:1)
Games that help you learn (Score:1)