Not just a good educational tool

June 28th, 2007

Games are the best (and second-most effective) education tools available.

Slate had an article yesterday on educational video games that I think serves as a pretty good high-level survey of the ongoing discussion right now, especially since it pointed to Koster’s key point from some time ago that adding an artificial incentive to perform an educational activity isn’t very effective but requiring learning in order to achieve a genuinely interesting goal does. (Koster responds directly to Slate’s article here.)

Here are two things I know:

• People will go way out of their way to acquire skills and learn things that help them achieve a goal that interests them and that they perceive as achievable.
• When people are motivated to learn something for such goals, they learn it faster and more efficiently than they will under any other circumstance (except in cases where survival is at stake, in which case they may achieve an even greater efficiency).

In other words, when people understand why learning something is worth their while—when they recognize for themselves the reward—they have all the motivation they need. Thus self-motivated, they will learn more rapidly than they ever would in a classroom or at a parent’s insistence.

I know a dozen people whose vocabulary exceeded their own parents’ (though with a geekier slant) thanks to Gary Gygax’s sesquipedalianism.

I knew a boy, something of a slacker, who rapidly learned the fundamentals of programming when he got caught up in a game in which you could tweak the code of your virtual robot to increase its chances in fights. (Alas, I don’t remember the name of the game.)

To make a video game—or any game, for that matter—that is effectively educational, the designer or design team has to focus on two key elements: goals and obstacles.

This is, of course, exactly what any halfway decent game designer already does. MMOs, for example, primarily focus on power-acquisition goals that are just fun enough to justify the obstacle of spending more time playing the game. The goals have to be satisfying, however arbitrary, and the obstacles have to be just challenging enough that people don’t think they can’t surmount them but do feel a sense of accomplishment when they do. A series of increasingly difficult obstacles centered on a theme, ubiquitous in all game design, is the right approach.

But to be educational, the obstacles have to require something more than just dedication or quicker button-pushing. Some RPGs (such as some of the Ultima games) require a little bit of language acquisition in order to complete them.

I’m willing to bet that a child (or grown-up for that matter) could get the benefit of six years of class-learning in a foreign language in the course of about two months of regular gameplay in an immersive single-player spy-based roleplaying adventure game in which acquiring the actual skill to learn the language was essential to completing the game and the mini-goals along the way provided the tools to do so. Early goals would require demonstrable skill in simple vocabulary and easy phrases. Later goals would hone in on those subtle points of a language that can trip a non-native speaker up, punishing sloppy and quick reading with setbacks and rewarding fluency with access to better in-game skills and tools and, ultimately, the final parts of the story.

The game could offer language instruction directly, in the form of mini-games or simulated classroom learning, but also reward language fluency acquired outside the game. If people find they learn faster on their own, they’re free to do so, but if they enjoy the in-game learning, that’s available too.

A couple of months after the game’s release (if the game is done right), high schoolers across the country would be chattering in French during study hall.

(I’m not an expert on the economics of the game industry, but I’m willing to bet that an A-list game of this sort sold at $50 would be able to make far more money than a language-learning program sold at $150)

Am I crazy? I know I’d drop fifty bucks on a well-written game like that in a nanosecond. Not because I’d finally learn French, but because I’d like a damn good, immersive spy-themed adventure-RPG set in the period after World War II. (Base it on Tim Powers’s incredible Declare to get some good supernatural elements, and I’ll spend $150!)

Entry Filed under: Popular Perception, Computer Games, Video Games, Massively Multiplayer, Learning