Educational Game or Gaming Education?
An old friend of mine, Wu came over to Vancouver for a business trip (with EA). He is a well known game producer in China whom owns a 400 people development team in the on-line gaming industry. We had a great conversation over a few beer on Saturday. I explained to him our initiatives of bring educational contents into immersive 3-D environments, to accommodate the interest of the young generation that grow up with video games. Wu asked me a simple question that made me think: “are you trying to create educational games or developing gaming education?” The two arguments sound very similar but they are different. The differences are the first one is to create a game around a focused educational goal while the second argument is to bring out the education knowledge from a fun game.
It has been years that academics tried to create “educational games” to let the learners learn from playing. But I have to say there have been very poor results from these attempts. There are merely none pure “educational games” out there in the market today. The gaming industry is flooded by games like World of Warcraft, Counter Strike Source, Battle Field 2, Age of Empires III... You may ask why? Well, one of the reasons would be these “educational games” were created from “narrowly focused educational contents” using “existing templates”. But are the players learning from playing the seemingly pure entertaining games? Of course they are! Games like The Sim, Civilization, Sim City are very educational to the players from various of angles.
The conversation extended to other entertainment industries like movies and music. I remembered a perfect example, right after enjoying the movie 300 two weeks ago, I researched and learned a whole lot about the Persian war, Spartan and Greek History, not from the movie, but from wikipedia and our university libraries. The movie was a trigger though.
What we came to realize is that a good entertainment piece can motivate people to do research, learn and create. Therefore, instead of focusing on creating “Educational Games”, why don't we take a look at what are the players learning from the popular games and work out a system to help them further understand and digest the knowledge from the game experiences?
Comments:
· http://researchquest.blogspot.com I think this is a very good point and one that often gets missed. I interviewed with Matt Weise (from the MIT game "Revolution") a few ago after GDC and he made a similar point. It is not about throwing traditional content into games and having students learn - it is about the process of playing and what can be learned. It's not about disguising regular material in a game, but about having a game flesh out and enhance a student's understanding of the material not by listening or reading but by doing.
thanks
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03/27/07 @ 10:54 · http://blog.loaz.com/timwang Permalink
03/27/07 @ 22:21