Posts filed under 'Learning'
The Brainy Gamer (a proud new parent, as well as a terrific blogger and podcaster) recently asked for thoughts on what age kids should be introduced to video games. I began writing a comment, but it turned into a post, so I’ll put my thoughts here instead.
My simplest answer: I haven’t yet seen a video game I’d want my two-year-old daughter to play.
I still believe that games (in general, not just video games) are among the absolute best learning tools available. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most good education involves games and most of the best games involve learning. I haven’t examined the thought in detail, nor searched for evidence, but I suspect that peak playing experiences and peak learning experiences are biologically and socially very similar. I think humans (and other animals) have an evolutionary imperative to play that, at its root, arises from our need to learn and adapt.
But of course that doesn’t mean we should be plopping our six-month-old children in front of Halo 3.
My own daughter is now two and a half years old. We’ve been very careful in the consumption of all sorts of media. We decided to comply with the AAP’s recommendation to avoid all television before two years of age before she was born. I know some quality children’s programming may not hurt, but I also know that a you child’s mind may be one of the most powerful things in the universe.
Children seem built to learn, and to learn fast. It’s a good thing, too, because they have so much to learn. I remember thinking, in the first few weeks of her life, how many things I knew and knew how to do. Somehow, she’d have to pick up most of those, as well as learning millions of things I’d never know. Staring at the little warm bundle, I couldn’t imagine how it would ever happen.
Watching her walk and dance and do puzzles at two and a half, listening to her sing and laugh and have imaginary conversations with a toy llama, marveling as she happily matches pair after pair of Memory cards, I can see that, yes, it’s possible. She will successfully transform from the helpless tube she was to a wise, fun-loving woman. She’s built for it!
So much of what she’s had to learn exists in the “real” world. She had to learn that when she’s holding a toy and opens her hand, the toy drops to the ground. She had to learn that she can roll a ball. She had to learn that the cat doesn’t like to have her tail pulled but loves to have her face rubbed. She had to learn that when she laughs, her parents almost always laugh too.
Do you know that feeling of euphoria when you get completely immersed in some new and fascinating subject? Or when you begin to internalize the mechanics of a game? A new human has to be immersed in life. Every moment—even one so simple as picking up a rattle—is a moment of full engagement. As adults, we get experience this total engagement, this mindfulness, only occasionally; for children, it can be a full-time experience.
My daughter was exposed to some television before her second birthday. Not a lot. We never once left her in front of a set while we rushed about getting things done. (We still haven’t. When she’s watching, we watch too.) Whenever she caught a glimpse of that glowing, musical box, though, it grabbed her attention and sucked it in
The first time I saw it happen, I was a bit terrified. She directed her full concentration to the screen. She didn’t have any words, but the faces and music and colorful lights consumed her full attention. I knew her mind was fully engaged.
But her body had gone slack. The wriggling, the grasping, the giggling, the wild kicks . . . they all stopped. She became almost 100% watcher.
Television is so ubiquitous we forget how powerful it is. Watching my daughter get caught up in it, though, reminded me: it is awesome; it is terrible.
My daughter did have some positive early exposure to games. Although we resolved never to play World of Warcraft (despite the compulsion) while she was awake, when she was ten months old I did once log in long enough to move a character from one location to another in preparation for an event after her bedtime and she caught a glimpse of the screen. She loved watching “the bird” (I don’t remember if it was a gryphon or a hippogriff) fly gracefully over the forests.
She responded differently than she had to television. She sat in my lap, stuck her arms out, and leaned back and forth the way the bird did. She flapped her arms. And she laughed.
It seems to me that she knew, somehow, that we were involved with the flight. She saw the figure sitting astride this fantastical animal, and she understood that, in a way, we were riding it. I’d been pretty liberal in letting her play with my job-provided laptop. She’d bang on the keys and laugh or squeal when the screen changed. (We even have a record of some of her earliest “e-mail messages,” long strings of characters that delighted her grandparents.)
She understood that this device wasn’t there just to show her things, that it was a tool for doing things. She’d ask for the bird every couple of days for a while, so we’d send one of our characters on a longish flight. When it landed, she was sated.
Now, our daughter watches a little bit of TV almost every day. That is, as a family we watch from fifteen to forty-five minutes of TV together within the hour or so before she goes to bed. We choose the content from DVDs and video tapes.
See, now she’s ready for it. She has a huge mental vocabulary, so she can understand what’s happening on TV. When she was one year old, she didn’t necessarily understand that everyone had a name, that animals couldn’t talk, that balls never fall up, that letters had sounds. Now, when she watches a few clips from Sesame Street (out of distaste for Elmo, “the Red Menace,” we only spin up selections from Sesame Street: Old School
, which offers a peaceful five minutes of cows instead of an overproduced barrage of self-promoting music and colors), she asks insightful questions about how the characters are feeling or sings along with the girl bringing her llama to the dentist.
So what about video games? Is she ready? She may well be ready for video games, but I haven’t found a single one that I’d waste her time with.
We don’t think she needs to master touch-typing by the time she’s five, and we know that a program that splashes bright colors on the screen in response to bangs on the keyboard will only interest her for a little while, while costing more than the handful of animal figures that stimulate her imagination, figure in her storytelling, and keep her happily entertained for endless hours.
Really, these things aren’t so much games as toys. They’re virtual toys controlled by the keyboard, but toys nonetheless. As for the educational programs designed for slightly older kids, like the ones I see running on computers in the children’s section at the public library, I haven’t found one that appealed to me. Why? Because they don’t seem fun. (Defining “fun” can make for an excellent exercise when discussing the theory of games, but I still maintain that games should be fun.)
And she’s not ready for games requiring skill, dexterity, and timing, though they may be somewhat more fun. She’s still working on catching balls, the mechanics of fitting puzzle pieces together, and living without diapers.
My daughter shares my passion for games, but she doesn’t truly play them. For example, she adores chess (I happen to have a Simpsons chess set
, and the brightly colored, anthropomorphic figures are a big part of the appeal), but “playing” consists of setting up the pieces—along with other toys—on the board. When she helps roll the dice while the grown-ups play Arkham Horror or Descent, she’ll carefully count the dots, announce the number, and then throw her hands up in the air and cry, “I win! Daddy wins! Mommy wins!”
In a year or two, she’ll really be playing games. She’ll delight in figuring out how the rules work and developing strategies. She’ll take pleasure in a hard-won victory and (I hope) a fair defeat. When she does, I won’t hesitate to play video games with her.
But I’ll sure as heck be playing board games, ball games, card games, skill games, and roleplaying games with her, too!
January 17th, 2008
I’ve talked before about how valuable video games could be as a tool for learning new languages. Well, this interesting article
at Educational Games Research points to some real research on the subject, in particular on MMORPGs and language acquisition. Check it out!
October 29th, 2007
I love watching my toddler play games, not just because she has so much fun but because she learns so much as she does it.
Because the games—the skills, the goals, the rules—are so simple, I can see that the pleasure she takes from playing derives at least in part from the achievement of new skills or proficiency. Oh, the pretending part—the stories, the imagination, the simulation of things she sees her parents do—are a big part of the fun, of course. She loves imagining that she’s on vacation or that she’s a cat.
But when she begins to master a new skill or grasps a new concept, she can’t contain her joy. She dances. She shrieks. She sings. She insists on getting everyone who will stand still long enough to watch her play her game.
Why does she approach these developmental activities in the form of games? Despite being an avid gamer, I haven’t tried to force the concept of game upon her. Instead, it seems to be a natural approach. She imposes a game approach on almost every learning opportunity. Even the (to her) arbitrary rules we make are “game-able.” If we insist that she keep her food on her plate, she’ll test the limits of the rule.
“Can I put it here?” she asks, placing her broccoli on the table.
“No.”
“Here?” The broccoli is on the washcloth we keep at the ready at all meals.
“No.”
“In my cup?”
“No.”
“Can I throw it on the floor?”
“No, just keep your food on your plate.”
She shoves the broccoli into her mouth and asks “Here?” Her eyes twinkle, because she’s found a “cheat” to the game. She’s not putting her broccoli in any forbidden place, but she’s also not complying with the order to put it on the plate.
She has won.
I’ve written before about games being the absolute best educational tools we have at our disposal. Watching S— play, I stand by that assertion. She learns more rapidly when playing than at any other time, partly because the game makes learning fun, but just as much because the learning, properly framed, makes the game fun.
I see this in my own pleasure in games. I like to learn the MMOs I play. Once I’ve learned how to play my character, I lose interest in repeatedly doing so in order to achieve an arbitrary goal (like equipment), although I may enjoy improving my play in PVP. When I’ve learned all I can, I will probaby try a different class . . . or a different game altogether. The only reason I’d stay is for social aspects or exploration and immersion.
That so many people are motivated to collect rare virtual pets in an MMO seems a bit odd to me, I have to admit. I enjoy collecting as much as anyone, and I recognize that any goal in an MMO is an arbitrary one. But the pleasure for me comes not from getting something (especially something not real), but from learning how.
Thus, although I’d like to figure out how to make potty training a game, I don’t want to do so with prizes. I’m averse to giving rewards (like stickers) for successful potty use, even though I hear that it can be helpful. I know rewards of any sort, even arbitrary ones, can be powerful motivators.
My aversion stems in part from a philosophical conviction that the best motivator to learn a skill is recognizing that the skill is its own reward. Also, I want the rules of the game to be self-contained. I don’t want to be an arbitrary prize-awarded and authority; I’d rather play the game with her, somehow. In the best games, achieving the conditions of victory as defined by the game is the reward, because getting there is what’s fun. Trophies and medals are all well and good, and prize money is even better. But I greatly fear becoming the arbiter of my daughter’s potty success.
I’d like her to play the game to win the game.
—
I don’t have any plans for a fifth “Toddler gaming” post, although I have no doubt that I’ll be writing again and again about S— and the games she plays in the coming weeks, months, and years. That said, if anyone has any topics related to Toddler gaming they don’t think I’ve covered, or any thoughts on the topics I have covered, I’d very much like to hear them. Post a comment and let me know what you think!
September 12th, 2007
More than twenty years ago, Orson Scott Card published Ender’s Game, so why am I reviewing it now? Well, partly because, after twenty years, I suspect that some few newer fans of science fiction may actually not have encountered the book yet. But I have a better reason.
Ender’s Game is the best science-fiction novel focused on games and gaming that has ever been written.
The book isn’t just about games, which is part of why it succeeds. It recounts the experiences of Andrew Wiggin, who goes by “Ender.” Only six years old, he’s taken to a Battle School in orbit around Earth to train for an officer’s position in the International Fleet, the united interstellar army dedicated to defending humanity from the hostile insectoid aliens known as Buggers.
Games serve as a primary means of education in the book. Students spend their free time playing video games in a shared arcade or on their own “desks”—effectively, networked laptops. All the games, apparently, teach small lessons in strategy, tactics, and even more academic subjects. Card gives us just enough detail about the video games that we can imagine them as fun and innovative, even after twenty years of innovative game development have elapsed.
The book focuses especially on a zero-G battle simulation game that is the obsession of all the students. Divided into armies, the students vie with one another to achieve top rankings in various categories. Naturally, Ender performs exceptionally well.
But the game sounds damn fun. Card believably explores the physics of the game, imagining what would and would not work in such detail that you can almost feel the thrill of tactical combat. Someone could easily use the book to make a top-notch video game today. Almost all the design work is already done within the pages of the book.
I’m not much of an athlete (and I never want to be a soldier), but if I had the chance to participate in a zero-G game of human pseudo-soccer with guaranteed non-lethal guns and suits that freeze when they’re hit, I wouldn’t hesitate.
Games even influence Ender’s psychological growth. A vivid fantasy roleplaying game effectively serves as Ender’s personal psychiatrist, though he doesn’t realize it. And although the book came out well before MMOs had grown into their own, this psych program has surprising multiplayer dimensions. But that’s part of one of the book’s big twists, so I don’t want to go into detail.
The story itself is compelling enough that I’ve managed to convince many readers who dismiss science fiction as “kids stuff” that some of it is damn fine literature. Indeed, Ender’s Game has everything such readers fear: laser guns, bug-like aliens, spaceships, and more.
But it also has real heart. Card gives Ender, his classmates, his family back home, and his instructors real stories. Not one comes off as a two-dimensional villain, and the heroes carefully examine their own motivations, not taking their successes for granted for even a moment.
Card also engagingly tackles tough philosophical issues surrounding war. It presents a “just” war, but doesn’t shy away from the fact that war is awful and that even a just war is barely just. As does Ender, the book struggles to find new ways to solve problems, new resolutions to age-old conflicts, and new understandings of just why people fight and why they might not always have to.
Whether in the skirmishes in Battle School or the Usenet flame wars Ender’s siblings conduct back on Earth, the book wrestles with philosophical questions as part of the story. The narrative doesn’t come to a screeching halt while the author climbs on a soap box. In fact, the books seems to be a genuine exploration on the author’s part of some tough questions, not a final statement in the matter.
(In the past two decades, Card’s politics have become, to me, thoroughly reprehensible, though he and I may have started out with similar viewpoints. I can’t understand why he believes what he does today, knowing him through his work and a couple of brief personal encounters. But I know he believes it, and sincerely, so I won’t attack him for deceitful motives.)
Card clearly loves games. (They’ve featured big in some of his other books, like Lost Boys
.) In fact, as I understand it, he’s worked a bit in the video game industry.
In Ender’s Game, he presents a convincing case for games as educational tools. Sure, they’re being used to train soldiers. (Aside: America’s Army was a marketing tool, not a training tool.) But the book makes you believe that games are a powerful learning tool, maybe one of the most powerful.
With the MacArthur Fellowship granting over a million dollars to fund a school exploring games as teaching tools (the latest I’ve read about it is here, in an article by Robert Torres, one of the recipients, though it’s been in the news for weeks) and scientists and game companies alike exploring and marketing “serious games,” it’s astonishing to look back twenty years and see such a powerful argument in favor of educational games.
And I’ll reiterate here as I did before that the games are fun.
The book is fun, too. If you haven’t read it yet, grab a copy and settle down for a just plain good read. And if you have, maybe it’s time to read it again. Even when you know all the surprises and twists, you’ll find pleasure in watching the story unfold. And it’s fun to spot the gaming innovations that Card didn’t imagine. While reading, ask yourself if the book would have been different had someone put out a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game in 1985.
July 27th, 2007
In the spirit of my call for more innovative independent games, I’d like to second David Kushner’s suggestion in The Sandbox that students get access to cutting edge development tools.
Games that come packaged with level-building tools have fostered some real contributors to the gaming industry, and many of the great innovations in gaming have come from new outsiders who see things differently and are willing—and free—to take risks.
Kushner’s comparison of the future of video game design to YouTube is, I think, very insightful. Content development has shifted. Anyone can create a periodical, share a movie with the world, or publish a novel. And anyone can do these things cheaply. If it becomes easier for fancy games to be done inexpensively, we may well discover the next great type of game on some form of social network.
Sure, 99% will be crap, but the social networks already have tools in place to sift through silt to find the nuggets of gold.
July 25th, 2007
Just yesterday, I dashed off a quick post on games as art. A reader, Yehuda, pointed me to an article he wrote over a year ago on the topic, and it has some great thoughts. Not only does the article prove that the question has been discussed since long before I started this blog, but it also good job of defining “art” and “game” for the purposes of any discussion on the topic.
In contrast to that post, I deliberately tried to avoid getting into definitions—in part because such posts have done a grand job already, but also because I wanted to argue my point in such a way that the common, unspoken definitions of art and games would suffice to support my contention that games are art.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that it’s the emergent, participatory, interactive element of games that makes them an exciting and distinct form of art. This is not to say that a beautifully designed board game might not be a piece of visual art. But when the game is played, the convergence of the rules, the pieces, and the players themselves becomes a fascinating expression of art.
There have been many attempts at “interactive” art, such as museum exhibits in which visitors are in some way incorporated into the art. Museums are pushing for more interactivity in their exhibits, with good reason. In fact, here is a simply terrific blog on the subject.
But not all such attempts are games. Letting visitors touch objects, move through interesting drawers, or get a feel for the perspective of some historical group may be very compelling, but a game is something different.
I remember visiting an exhibit of work by the remarkable sculptor Alexander Calder shortly after his death. I was only seven or eight years old at the time.
The museum was bursting with Calder’s glorious, kinetic mobiles and bright, abstract sculptures. But what I remembered best was a series of doors in a row. Visitors were invited to walk through the doors, only to discover that each door opened in a different way. Some had a simple knob. One was completely covered with knobs, only one of which worked. One, I recall, didn’t open at all, and the solution was to walk around it to the next door.
I use the word “solution” deliberately. See, the doors were definitely art, a sculpture, but they were also a puzzle or game. (No, I’m not going to get into the definition of “puzzle” and “game.” They’re different, but the line is decidedly fuzzy.)
That simple exhibit—both a game as art and art as a game—has stuck with me for thirty years. I remember what it felt like to turn the knobs that didn’t work and the thrill of finding the solution to a door. I remember laughing with my brother as we tried to solve the door that couldn’t open, then realized that the solution lay in looking at the problem from a different angle.
I’ll note here that Calder created a great many wonderful toys as part of his work. His charming Cirque Calder is as delightful today as it was when he first exhibited it.
I haven’t read much about the man, but I don’t think he drew a line between the toys and games he made and the art intended to dangle magnificently from a domed ceiling.
Calder we have someone who delighted in visual art, in toys, and in games. In his hands, all these things were more definitely art. And although I love the look of his sculptures, for me at least the one that has made the most enduring impression was a game he created.
(You know, after all this chatter about Alexander Calder and games, I think it’s time I start writing up a profile of the GURPS campaign I ran a few years ago that heavily featured the public sculptures created by Calder’s father for the City of Philadelphia. Voodoo, witchcraft, horror, and secret history on the streets of the City of Brotherly Love! I’ll get around to it eventually, but if you’re very interested, comment here and I’ll try to move it up in the queue.)
July 24th, 2007
Last year, Google hosted a cross-promotional alternate reality game (ARG) for the Da Vinci Code movie
. I played the game and quite enjoyed the various puzzles. I didn’t qualify as a finalist, though, at least in part because of an irritating scheduling conflict. In fact, the nature of the game and its popularity meant that only those dedicated fans with very flexible schedules really had a chance.
This year’s game is the Ultimate Search for Bourne, a tie-in with The Bourne Ultimatum. I liked the first two movies well enough. (Actually, come to think of it, I slept through part of the second, and I’m not sure I’ve ever got the plot straightened out.)
The game looks fun, too. As far as I can tell, you can’t really do anything today except look at the site and take a stab at understanding the gameplay. When the first real briefings becomes available, you should be able to use clues in it to find a place on a map where you can catch a glimpse of Jason Bourne through a surveillance camera. And I guess, if you choose the right camera (or cameras), you “win” for that day.
The prizes aren’t very important to me, though I can’t deny that I’d say no to an iPhone if someone decided to give me one just for playing a game.
What does matter to me is that there’s a chance this game will capture a little something of the spy genre, in an armchair sort of way. (Not real spying, of course.)
I can’t think of any truly great spy video games (Am I wrong? If so, please tell me. I’d love to try them out), but perhaps, if this game is a success, some daring and innovative game house could build on it to develop a sort of internet-based, global, massively-multiplayer version of “Assassin.” A top-notch game development crew could make this very, very fun.
EA ran Majestic. Supposedly, you would sign up and get phone calls, e-mails, and even faxes! And these would lead you to clues in a conspiracy game. It didn’t last, maybe because the price didn’t seem justified by the execution.
The Lost Experience did something similar. Unfortunately, it did it at a time when Lost basically sucked, so I didn’t pay much attention. Plus, the “game” wasn’t very fun and did require you to buy too much stuff, or much off other geeks on the internet who were willing to spend their money. So I didn’t participate.
Technology is better now, and we understand it better, too. Even if a game like the one I’m imagining would be heavily driven by advertising, it’d be fun. And if it weren’t—for example, if you had to buy a box in the game store just as you do with World of Warcraft and to pay a modest monthly fee—it just might become a success that would drawn the attention of people who don’t call themselves gamers.
What would make such a game work? A truly great ARG needs to use not just e-mail and phones, but the tools developed for multi-player FPS games and MMORPGs. A quick brainstorm turns up:
- A console website (or separately executed program, though that may eliminate some markeshare) as the single source of access
- Daily challenges (like the Google game) to find something online, succeed at a particular action goal, or achieve some other end; if there are real prizes, they could be tied to this
- Constantly available content, consisting mostly of the same sorts of things that make up the daily challenges, but tied to in-game rewards only (character advancement, revelation of plot, the chance to actually affect the ongoing plot, etc.)
- Action-based mini-games (building on FPS games, presumably)
- Puzzle-based mini-games with a spy feel to them (decoding messages, for example, or hacking a computer)
- The daily challenges add up to an ongoing narrative
- Rewards in the form of mini-episodes (three minutes?) of an ongoing spy drama tied to the game
- A strong community tool, to allow users to share stories
- Challenges unique to each player, so they can’t be “spoiled”
- The ability to group into a “cell” for team missions, where each participant must complete a certain challenge live, and all will be rewarded together
- Possibly ways to develop your character down different paths, so that, for instance, one cell member might disarm traps in the action mini-games while the other does the sharpshooting, while in appropriate puzzle games characters could have “clues” that make resolution of difficult, timed bits easier
- PVP in the form of competition with other players or cells on mutually exclusive goals, such that one cell might be trying to protect an ambassador’s life while the other is trying to assassinate her
- Possibly the ability to control a team of NPCs, at least in certain mini-games (like map-based games, where agent placement determines success)
- Possibly real prizes from sponsors (if the game is 1/10 as successful as something like WoW, daily giveaways of geeky, spy-like prizes from companies interested in the free advertising, branded with the game so that winners can boast about their success, might not actually ruin the game)
- An opportunity to delve into roleplaying while playing, with story-choices, text and voice chat, avatars, and so on
Okay, it’s all just a bunch of crazy ideas, at this point, poorly drafted and dumped on the page. But I think there’s real potential for a tremendously fun, successful game. Not long ago, I bemoaned the fact that all new games really seem to be new coats of paint on old games. A well-designed internet spy ARG—with daily challenges, demands that reach outside the game (like finding translations, locations, and so on)—could fit the bill.
In fact, I think after I hit “Publish,” I’ll draft an e-mail to an old friend of mine who’s a writer for several video game companies (some of which have spy themes), to see if what he thinks about the viability of this idea.
July 16th, 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!)
June 28th, 2007
