Games as a Learning Tool

My 131 class is spending an hour and a half on games on Tuesday and it reminded me of a train of thought that I came across a while ago: How games have EFFECTIVELY been used as learning tools in the past. The list that I've come up with so far isn't very deep, but interesting:

There's really two categories of games in the teaching area. The first was, for me, Number Munchers and whatever typing teaching game that I used fifteen years ago that taught me how to touch type. The same touch typing i've used ever since (that, i must admit, is a bit flawed since I ALWAYS use the left shift instead of the right one for the letters on the left...). I'm not saying the entire genesis for my abilities in those areas is from games, but they certaintly helped.

But, nevertheless, it's only learning instinctive, subconscious actions that that stuff is good for. You tell yourself to type "Hello, World" and your fingers do the fun little dance, not actually thinking about the route the fingers will have to take to hit the various buttons in the required order.

But there's little room for improvement here. Yeah, you can learn to type better and all that, but who cares? Learning to type is a neccessary tool these days, but it isn't sexy. No, group two is the sexy little mynx (and, yes, I will kill this metaphor before it gets out of hand).

Group two is SimCity and Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail was in all of the school computers since it taught kids about how dangerous traveling cross-country before trains, airplanes, and SUVs existed. As much fun as killing a hundred Buffalo were, after a few kills you were just wasting bullets. Bullets that you had to buy. You had to buy spare parts for your wagon because there was a damn good chance something would break.

SimCity was a lesson in Urban planning. Had to build roads and supply water. Had to deal with taxes effectively. Needed power. All of that fun stuff. In order to be successful, you had to learn what to do when building a city.

Simulations are rather common in video games, kinda evident given the fact that the US Army spent taxpayer dollars on the development of a free video game: America's Army. Full Spectrum Warrior was initially a training sim for the Army before the developers realized how much fun it was, so they made it a little easier and a bit more fun and sold it for $50.

This can be abstracted to non-simulation games, though. What simulations do is they teach the player the rules of this little aspect of life. A flight sim teaches what a player has to do in order to fly a plane. SimCity teaches what's required to create, grow and maintain a successful city.

But the many, many strategy games teach fundamental aspects of strategy. While the tools may indeed be different, many of the concepts can easily be abstracted to a real life war. One of Starcraft's strategies for the Terrans is called the Tank Push. In starcraft, you have units called Seige Tanks that can act either as tanks, which they are okay at, or as long range artillery, which pretty much annihalate the enemy. Players made a slow push against the enemy by switching some of their tanks out of seige mode, moving them up, using hte rest of the tanks as cover. The point was that there was no way the opponents could mount a ground based counter attack, as pretty much 75% of their force would get destroyed before even making it to the tanks.

Other strategic elements are there too: High ground is essential to victory, securing choke points near the entrance to your base key to holding off enemy attacks. Stuff like that.

So, how do you make an educational game?

You don't.

Well, not really.

Games haven't been that good at teaching facts. There really is no effective way to teach the dates of the battles of the Civil War. However, what you COULD teach in games is the rules of the world. If you make a Civil War strategy game, you're teaching how war was fought back in the mid-19th century. How the Union was much better equipped and more numerous, but the Confederacy was defending their homes. You could even teach aspects of Lee's personality, theoretically. How he was a brilliant general when fighting in the Conferderacy, but how he was defeated by far less intelligent generals whenever he fought in the North (Antietam and Gettysburg).

So stop making games that are boring as hell that try to teach the formulas of physics. Give us something that actually shows us what they all mean.

Preferably with explosions. Lots and lots of explosions.