You are probably all aware by now that one of my pet peeves is the stereotype of the "geek" and the world's general opinion of our kind and the games we play. I have spoken before in the defense of our group as people, but we are, to a large extent, defined by the games we play. Ever since the first computer game was designed, and its players became engrossed with it, spending hours, days, weeks trying to beat that one level (you know which one I'm talking about), games have been seen as little more than a fun time-waster at best and a life-destroying addiction at worst. There is an aspect to games that consistently gets underestimated though, and that is the potential to actually learn something from games.
The argument has been made before, both from the educational side - "Let's make education fun!" - and from the game side - "Let's teach our players something!" The best-laid plans of were-rats and men, and all that. Games have a great potential to capture one of the best learning experiences out there - to get people to learn without realizing they're being taught. I'm not talking about the bright and pixellated games meant for toddlers and preschoolers - I'm talking about real, popular games that teenagers, young adults, and not-quite-as-young-but-still-cool adults would play. Let's go with a couple examples:
Games in general have the potential to teach just about anything: puzzle-solving and little logical twists are pretty common in just about any genre, which helps to stretch the ol' brain. Our favorite genre, role-playing games, teaches us about plot, themes, characterization, message, and all the other literary goodness we ignored or skimmed over in highschool. Even your average first-person shooter can teach you about reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and teamwork (if you're really looking to call those things "education). There's a whole other side to games that makes them a little more useful on tests, though, and the way they manage to stick is because they are not formally "taught" to the player, but rather are things that we observe and note and absorb without realizing that they have real-world application.
The first example of this I can remember is from my young and reckless days of playing the original Diablo. Ahh, the halcyon hours I spent gibbing goat-men and slicing up succubi - and, without realizing it, absorbing vocabulary and practicing basic math. The trade system of Diablo was nothing truly special - find gold, spend gold, get lootz. A true staple of any role-playing game since forever - but also, for a child in junior high, a good way to keep my brain in shape by tracking numbers and doing small math problems in my head. "Do I have enough gold to buy this, that, AND these? If I sell my chainmail, will I have enough to buy plate armor? Is it cost-effective to trade in my flaming axe for one that does damage over time instead?" Not exactly high finance, but it was more than you could expect from a pre-teen without any worldly responsibilities. And, at the same time, I got to slaughter a bunch of hell-spawned demons, save the world, and let Deckard Cain regale me with vocabulary-building quest introductions.
I distinctly remember getting the Diablo manual, and reading up on some of the latter-game quests, namely the one where you have to go collect mushrooms from the depths of the Cavern tileset. The manual described finding the mushrooms by telling the player to look for an "incongruous" spot on the dungeon floor. "In-con-groo-us?" I thought. "What the heck is in-con-groo-us?" Well, if not knowing the definition meant that I couldn't find the mushrooms and thus couldn't solve the quest, I had darned well better learn what "incongruous" means! And so I did. And so I learned something that, come to think of it, I was never actually taught in school. Years and years of vocabularly lessons, and I don't ever remember covering "incongruous" in class. To this day, I look back fondly on Diablo and its method of teaching me things without actually teaching me anything.
There are some more recent examples, for those of you who have or are expecting small children, games and methods that you might enjoy playing as well. The first of these are games like Sid Meier's Civilization V, many maps of which take place in the real world. These maps, as well as the civilizations and scenarios that go along with them, teach us at least basic geography, history, and sociology. (Africa is over there, not over there.) They also, if you want to get a little meta about it, teach us about cultural stereotypes, historiography (the study of history and how it is presented), and preaching social values. (Who out there never chooses Commercialism as a Social Policy, hmmm? HMMMMM? Funny how it doesn't conflict with any other Policy tree, and that it's good for just about any empire concept out there, isn't it?) Other games, like the massive financial experiment that is EVE Online, the raging politics of Game of Thrones: Genesis, the coordination and puzzle-solving in Portal 2, or the moral ambiguities of games like Mass Effect 2 and the BioShock series, all have something in them for their players to study and learn. In fact, the more a game has to teach, generally the better it is - I don't know of too many gamers out there who like totally simplistic games, where everything is perfectly visible and inconsequential.
"But," critics of games say, "how can we make sure that games are teaching us and our children the right things?" Aside from the sheer ambiguity of the term "right", there's not really anything in place to make sure any of us are learning anything at all. There's nothing making us learn anything at all in school, either, or making us become better people. I cannot tell you how many cases I've seen in my own life where a student doesn't even touch computers or consoles, and they still just barely pull through a class (or don't). From my own experience, playing computer games and doing well in school are pretty independent of one another. That doesn't mean that computer games have nothing to offer in the way of education, however, just like there's the slim and overlooked possiblity of having fun in school. There is nothing making game developers put in learnable content, or asking the player to have to observe and study something in order to progress. However, it is the very nature of even the oldest games to ask us to strategize and learn, to grow both mentally and, for the more social games, to grow as people. Chess, perhaps the longest-running competitive game in existence, is still around, and being good at chess is taken as a sign of intelligence and foresight. Funny thing - playing games can win you international renown and respect. (And I'm not just talking about Korea.)
So the next time you finish an RPG, or look your opponent in the eye as you're about to buy up Park Place, take a moment to reflect on the skills that led you to the victory and where you might have learned these skills. Then crush your opponent!
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Willow Desidare
254 days ago
I learned english in video games. Especially VTMB.
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252 days ago
You learned English from Smilin' Jack, Fat Larry, and Mitnick? That's gotta be some kind of awesome. ---- I myself have been meaning to reinstall some of the really old games I'm very familiar with, but in a different language, like German. That way I could at least struggle through the game again and have at least a vague idea what was being said, and get more familiar with the language. Turning the focus away from sitting there and studying and towards something that entertains you can make all the difference.
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HfxTenor
257 days ago
Nice blog, Rick! While not as educationally-minded as yours, any time someone tries to come at me with the "video games rot the mind" argument I let them know that there is no difference between playing a video game, reading a book, or watching television or a movie. Criticizing one form of entertainment and not all others is hypocritical.
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256 days ago
I'm still a firm believer in making games fun first and foremost, don't worry. Especially for games set in the real world, though, there's nothing stopping the developers from making them educational by accident.
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Rivina
259 days ago
Well said, Rick, Well said.
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