Posted: May 27th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, game-based learning, videogame studies | Tags: CCT, Education, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, video games, youth | No Comments »
Considerations at CCT–Pedagogy, domain, school, medium, and age
Designs for ordinary schools and teachers and reluctant learners
Working on 7th grade science and literacy games
Focused on educational need–what will help teachers in a classroom? In this case, popular misconceptions–the research will focus on can the game dispel a particular misconception?
Initial game designs for photosynthesis game permitted (accidentally) the player to succeed without ever learning abut photosynthesis
Next game idea focused on metaphors, moved away from reality, instead focused just on chemical change
All this is fodder for PFL, game produces a visualization and experience of a phenomenon that can be unpacked by a teacher
The role of the instructional designer is to take all these different interests and foci, see the affordances of the medium (in this case DS games) and decide how it can support current educational practices.
Posted: May 27th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, game-based learning | Tags: Education, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, science fiction, video games | No Comments »
He’s the “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – guy
In 1968, talked with Seymore Papart and drew a sketch of kids working on laptops designing a versio of Spacewar.–40 years later, here we are
Big A.C.’s bangin quote “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Most people basically use computers and the internet to admire their own reflections (like a monket with a shiny brass microscope”
Anthropologists have noted about 300 human universals–some of these universal cultural characteristics seem to be genetic
Make a technological amplifier for any of these universals and you’ll become a billionaire
Non universals: progress, writing and reading, deductive abstract math, democracy, slow deep thinking, model based science, etc.
We’re naturally inclined to remember and case based reasoning is universal, but other types of thinking are not universal
Schools seem to be designed to deal with non-universals–the things we’re not wired for
It may take a genius to invent a non-universal, but then almost anyone can learn them and think in that way once discovered
Science: the process of developing and testing increasingly accurate models
Looking at school we see a phenomenon like Guitar Hero, tech glommed on with no real learning.
Rocky’s Boots–amazing old Atari Game
Robot Odyssey–another amazing old Atari Game
Games today are generally the wrong pace and about the wrong ideas–too much about universals, not what education should be about (non-universals)
One person asking questions says that games based on feedback loops instead of branching structures may be better for learning
Posted: May 27th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, State of the Art, game-based learning | Tags: Education, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, video games | No Comments »
Katherine Isbister – NYU Poly
Games are customiable, provide rich data, and are popular with kids so should be good for learning
Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy to make terrible games
So, G4L! is trying to develop useful theories for making good learning gmaes
Trying to get best practices from commercial developers – interviewed 41 professional game developers and reserach-practitioners mostly at professional events
Focus on design tactics
Donald Schon’s “The Reflective Practitioner”
Found recurrent recommendations, and now has a massive archive of these interviews
Key concepts include:
Fun – hate the term engaging, and think most learning games are crap
Polish – most learning games not polished enough
Mechanics aren’t ‘bolted on’ – learning games fail to integrate learning and mechanics
Inviting commercial developers to critique learning games
Katie Culp – CCT
Looking at building research into the front end of game design–designing based on who the audience is
Looking at building inquiry skills in middle school students
Too many games make assumptions about student/player thinking skills without considering where kids are developmentally
Kids at this stage have trouble recognizing what they don’t know/what they need to learn
In order to understand this, formative research–a type of research pioneered by Sesame Workshop is useful.
The methodology is very early in the design process use activities and content that’s central to the game concept and bring it to kids to play with
This does not create broad understanding, is not like a RCT, but does allow particular insights into specific audiences’ specific thinking
Researcher may already have an understanding based on the literature about kid misconceptions, but formative research brings forth the specific language and cognitive associations and ways of thinking.
Greg Chung UCLA/CRESST/CATS
How can meaningful information be extracted from a high volumen low quality data set? (I’m paraphrasing, may be off)
Developing math game focusing on fractions and addition of fractions
Worked with USC to develop game ideas and what gameplay info will show player understanding of fractions
Sorry…Zoned out here
Jan Plass NYU/G4LI
Looking at design patterns for good learning
Building Augmented Reality games for science learning, Adventure games for science learning, math games,
Looking for general solutions to commonly occuring problems in learning game design
–Strong narratives provide sufficient incentive to solve hard puzzles
–One challenge is we don’t know how to measure engagement well–behavioral, cognitive, social, and emotional
Individual engagement–self report, survey, interview, biomentirs, video observation, user logs
group engagement–video observation, classroom observation, user logs
One challenge is that studies on a certain scale it becomes impossible to always observe
Requires Theoretical model of Interactivity – some paper with plass, schwartz, and another guy
Using a lot of bio data to measure enegagment
Important: triangulation–each measurement only measures a certain kind of engagement in a certain context, and a theorietical framework is needed to tie it all together–but it’s still setting, task, genre, and platform specific
Posted: May 26th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, game-based learning, nonsense | Tags: Alternate reality game, art games, documentary video games, Education, failures, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, Mass Effect, video games | No Comments »
Ushahidi – Crisis Mapping
Interested in using games to improve crisis mapping
So far the mapping has been massive manual information. Trains tons of people to use the platform, received info from texts from haitians and then crowdsourced translations.
Interested in how services can be microtasked, turned into Human Intelligence Tasks manageable through Mechanical Turk or WoW.
Wants to develop altruism scores, re-vision labs and going from crowdsourcing to playsourcing.
Richard Lemarchand lead designer for Uncharted 2
Charles Dickens knew first hand how crappy 19th Century London was. He wove comedy and tragedy, chifhangers, but he didn’t sermonize or offer solutions. As Orwell said, “He managed to attack everybvody and antagonize nobody”
Max and the Magic Marker
Good game story telling is very challenging-all the challenges of normal narrative plus the unique structure of games
Challenge is to align the peaks and troughs of gameplay experience with narrative peaks and troughs
Dickens of games is probobly not a single person but a collaboration
Jessica Hammer – game designer/reseracher
People tend to lie about who they are. Really, people lie about everything, like all the time. “Social desirability bias” We want to look appealing to others.
As a designer, you must take SDB into acount. With games for change we want games to be processing deeply. With SDB, though, people are often doing what they think they should be doing, behaving how they think they should be behaving, and so they will be less likely to really think about what your trying to communicate. If your game is about telling people what they should be doing, it will not be received.
Give people legit choices, make them balance one social good against another, give them challenges about how much, when, etc.
Ntiedo Etuk – Dimension U – a portal to educational games
“Student -Centric Learning”
Trying to make learning a lifestyle
Games are good for learning. Kids are not
African Americans and Latinos actually play games more than white kids
Games designed so kids need academic skills in game, but can access resources in real time to help their problem solving.
Brian Reich – Managing Director some media company
Why is what we’re doing not working? –good question
Expectations for what people have for games is determined by everything out there–shoe commercials, music etc.
We don’t understand our audience well enough
We need to understand why people play other games? Why do they like them?
We need to work with people of various skills.
We need to stop typing what we’re hearing because it seems inconsequential.
Too many words on powerpoint slides.
Jane Pickard–Foundation 9
Designing for the total limbic games
We used to ask what does the player do, now we ask what does the player feel while doing it?
Games are good at stimulating reptilian and neo cortex, but less good at stimulating limbic system (love, emotion)
In most games, if there’s love, it’s like discovering a love story written for you
Dragon Age is complex enough that it feels legit
Designing for love/What to do on a first date:
Make player smile
Adreniline-filled moments
Let the player express herself
Allow for vulnerability
Love is a battlefield and there’s a lot of room for conflict
Rob Dubbin – writer the Colbert Report
robdubbin@talkingpet.org
Aphorism = a constraint on reality
Game design is a constraint on reality
Any aphorism can suggest a game design.
Elegance can yield complexity if you poke it enough
Games 4 Change Korea
Running out of battery! Emergency Incomplete Post!
Posted: May 26th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Games for Good, game-based learning | Tags: Alternate reality game, Education, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, video games | No Comments »
Direct Action games “organize real civic action using games”
Tracy Fullerton
Part of what she loves about games is that they’re a safe space to rehearse or transgress and thinking of them as ways to take real actions changes this. Definitely thinking that games should do this is problematic. Free Rice is the obvious example of a game having real world impact. Problem is that it’s not about rehearsing real activities, you’re just practicing sitting in your living room. This is the first example she can think of, even though she doesn’t think it’s a good one
Stephen Duncombe
Loves games, but fears that even the best intentioned social action games often end up being “ether activism” lots of sound and fury but signifying nothing. As an organizer working on traditional direct action like marches got bored with standard actions. These standard strategies often lost their efficacy. The standards protest actions can actually reinforce the status quo, and this is why he’s interested in alternative forms of organizing and protest. One common problem is that we lump together lots of disperate activities as direct action games that may in fact be very different actions.
Tracy
Organize these activies on a grid: Motivated by in game outcomes <--> Motivated by Social or Civic Outcomes; In games rehearsals as actions <--> Real world immediate actions
Scouts (Boy and Girl) is like role playing a civic life, and you have leveling, game-like rewards
Stephen
GTA San Andreas is the opposite of a Direct Action game (hopefully)
Critical Mass is an interesting example because it has a kind of magic circle, a “real world game” where your actions are in the real world, but the experience is largely symbolic “prefigurative politics”
Ben Stokes:
Civic “Player Assets”
Time (volunteering)
Material Assets (donating)
Political Voice (advocacy)
How could designers play with these affordances?
Tracy mentions Urgent Evoke, which is not clear how successful it really is
A Force More Powerful – also about rehearsing real world actions. My criticism of it has always been that it’s a top down model of organizing. Player is like an organizing general.
Rosario Habitat–using games to train people to be involved in urban planning process.
INTERRoBANG – service learning game. Real world actions that you document and earn points for
Stephen–One thing you have to keep in mind when discussing ethical games is “Who’s ethics and how are they applied?” “How do you make a fun game to play in which what players learn from playing is how to take democratic action?”
Oh Dear God–Microsoft tester proposing “Patriot Points” so you get points for doing “patriotic” acts.
Tracy responds that actions need context, so scouts works because there is a rich context, advancement is meaningful within a community.
Stephen–Democratic games are not just those that promote democracy, but are actually created through democratic processes.
Posted: May 26th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, State of the Art, game-based learning | Tags: Education, game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, Iraq, video games, videogame violence | No Comments »
OK, so for this panel we have two hipster/nerd white guys and a woman in army fatigues. Interesting.
Kurt Squire
There’s a gap between the legacy institution of schools and modern technology. Handheld devices will radically change schools. The Generation Mobile study is significant in terms of explaining how pervasive mobile device use is among kids. Kids today almost all have mobile devices and access the internet via them, and multitask on them to cram more media activity into less time.
Right now, schools ban mobile media (which is an unsustainable decision) and the solution is instead to encourage media multitasking and different educational tasks for different students.
Squire and his team worked in an alternative school with 12-18 students, but with that caveat, the experiment was very successful,they saw very pro-social behavior, the devices amplified learning.
Devices amplify subject interest, self, social network and learning.
With mobile devices students are multitasking in interesting ways and combining the affordances of different apps in creative ways.
Students talked about using Facebook to escape from school clicks. Kids use mobile device to take advantage of teachable moments and participate in the adult world in new ways (give directions to mom using gps when she’s lost).
Games!
Neighborhood game design project–integrated course in a design studio context
Started with place based inquiry, game design, and collaboratively building an ARG. Used the context of working with city planner, learned about the challenges of this field, and then went to game design studio–learning game design process, then applying it to their city. Kids decided to make a game about a bike path behind their school being paved. Interesting process was that while they disliked the change before starting the process, by the end they understand why the government did what they did.
Devices can leverage learnign not anywhere anytime, but rather specific places.
Arisgames.org–platofrm for developing iphone arg games.
Made a game about Lake Wingra, and tried to build in some transgression, but in fact none of the kids wanted to transgress (destroy the lake) only wanted to save it.
Kids in 5th grade made a game about a destroyed neightborhood and then drafted and got passed a city resolution
Interested in helping kids learn to be community organizers
Ken Perlin
“We have an entire society dedicated to putting people into pigeonholes” “You’re an artist, scientist, engineer, designer”
We establish dialectics between exploration and implementation, analytic and asesthetic, when in fact all people have these abilities within them.
Maybe in the future we’ll all be more in virtual reality.
Just called an iPad a book. We’re seeing the proliferatino of digital books, which eventually will all have cameras so that they can facial recognition.
Technology always ends up converging with magic. devices shouldn’t take over our lives. Future shouldn’t be about the machine, but about how we can connect.
People who ask the right questions get to the future first.
Shit yeah! talking about Diamond Age. In the primer, the book only works because there’s a person behind it–not AI. Kids love toys and games but will always respond best to mentors and humans.
Humans are wired in some way to diferentiate between human and not human but acts human–we have limited/no empathy towards artificial intelligence.
As long as you create a compelling charachter, media will converge around it.
All tech has an exponential phase, but eventaully levels off. Whatever is exponential now wil llelvel off and what’s interesting is the things just starting.
“In the future we will still play with plastic dinosaurs, but my hope is we’ll get to keep doing it all our lives.”
Army Brigadere General Lorree K. Sutton
I’m having a hard time. We’re getting some “next greatest generation” stuff here about the nobility of service in the military.
“Perhaps the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.” Sebastian Jung. “If that’s true, perhaps the ultimate war game is the one that compels us to return to the scene of the battle,” and acknowledge that wound and move towards healing. “Being together virtually is far more real than being together face to face.” Really?
This lady is hoo rah! all the way. And yet, believes that mental health for soldiers requires moving from “suck it up” to treatment and ommuninty involvement, and reaching out for help is an act of strength.
Sesame Workshop working with the military to help families grieving or adjusting to suffering.
“Theater of War” bringing Greek warrior ideals to life in a way to help soldiers.
Honestly, I have no idea what the hell is being talked about here. We’ve heard the phrase “down range” about a dozen times, which seems to indicate a place where armed conflict takes place. I understand that there are games trying to help soldiers deal with mental health issues, but I know that going in to the talk and I’ve heard virtually nothing of any substance about these.
Sutton has been following war games over the years (down on one knee speaking into the mic like Elvis on stage). Is scared by the latest generation of war games. Brainstorming with Alan Gerschenfeld about how to make war wounded characters from these games and bring them to a space where they can learn about psychological health. Say what?
I got nothing against individual soldiers, but let’s be clear here: These wars we are engaged in (which are not even official wars declared thourough Congress as is mandated in the Constitution!) are tragedies justified by lies. They are destroying millions of lives, they are economically damaging our country, they are perpetuating a culture of fear and justifying the loss of our civil liberties.
Posted: May 26th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, Games for Good, game-based learning | Tags: Education, game-based learning, Games for Change, video games, youth | No Comments »
OK, so I tried doing this yesterday and it didn’t work at all, but I’m going to attempt to liveblog the conference today. Sandy D. just walked on stage looking pretty spry I must say. Now she’s making grandma jokes about her lack to tech literacy, but has become an advocate of games because she’s seen them work with Our Courts.
She’s saying our government only works when people understand how the government works. Citizens need to be educated about civics every generation. Public schools were founded to teach civics (really?), but now only half of the states require civics for high school graduation. This is a crisis. Native born citizens couldn’t pass the immigration test (good point). She’s railing against old boring civics education from the 60s and dumb old big textbooks.
One of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind was that by offering money for reading, math, and science, schools dropped their focus on American History and civics.
Sandy D loves Jimmy G “He’s a genius in this field.”
As someone who grew up on a farm, she’s more interested in things that work than things that are beautiful, but maybe Our Courts is both (uh, maybe).
Our Courts was meant to help teachers liven up their teaching and the results have been shockingly good. Now it’s called iCivics and there are tons more games planned for different branches of government. It’s very challenging to get the games in schools because every state has its own bureaucracy.
OK, so I really don’t have much analysis for Justice O’Connor’s talk. She complained about the lack of civics knowledge in the US (valid) cheered the educational potential of games (good) and said she wants a game that makes kids care about nature (nice). Not a lot of controversial statements here. I’m not in love with the iCivics game suite, but in the grand scheme of games for change it’s fine, and I look forward to seeing what else they come up with. OK, that’s it.
Posted: February 17th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Games for Good | Tags: Education, failures, game design, Games for Change, sex ed | No Comments »
As the serious games movement spreads, there are bound to be awkward moments. There will be instances when, well, maybe I should just describe the game. In “Adventures in Sex City” the player can assume a position within the Sex Squad and be either a virgin woman who promotes abstinence, a woman who is sexually active, a man who is short, looks like a child, and has the super power of “rock hard strength” or another man who because of a lab experiment gone wrong is now half condom, whatever that means. The player chooses a character and then sets off to fight the Spermanator, a giant Mexican wrestler with an STD who has penises for hands and attempts to ejaculate on the player. His sperm have shark mouths. The only way to avoid the danger is to correctly answer safe sex questions in a quiz.
Uh huh.
This is just wrong. Do I really need to analyze why? I hope not. Please serious game designers, you can take challenging content and wrap it in an edgy, cool, funny, context, but no Mexican wrestlers with penis hands please. And no more quizzes with animation, that’s barely a game and nobody’s fooled.
Posted: February 15th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: game-based learning | Tags: game-based learning, Games for Change, Homo Ludens, Sports, video games, youth | No Comments »
I’m going to be turning this into a longer, scholarly article for the I/S Journal, but to keep my thoughts organized until then, I’d like to write this blog post explaining my presentation at the I/S Symposium.
Spoil-Sports play an invaluable role in game design and in society as a whole, and to examine the dynamic between spoil-sports and rule makers, I’d like to begin with an excerpt from the essay The Heresy of Zone Defense by Dave Hickey.
It’s in the third quarter. The fifth game of the 1980 NBA Finals. Lakers versus Seventy- Sixers. Maurice Cheeks is bringing the ball up the court for the Sixers. He snaps the rock off to Julius Erving, and Julius is driving to the basket from the right side of the lane against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Julius takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and then under the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind; and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side!
When Erving makes this shot, I rise into the air and hang there for an instant, held aloft by sympathetic magic. When I return to earth, everybody in the room is screaming…. Kareem, after the game, remarked that he would pay to see Doctor J make that play against someone else. Kareem’s remark clouds the issue, however, because the play was as much his as it was Erving’s, since it was Kareem’s perfect defense that made Erving’s instantaneous, pluperfect response to it both necessary and possible—thus the joy, because everyone behaved perfectly, eloquently, with mutual respect, and something magic happened—thus the joy, at the triumph of civil society in an act that was clearly the product of talent and will accommodating itself to liberating rules.
Consider this for a moment: Julius Erving’s play was at once new and fair! The rules, made by people who couldn’t begin to imagine Erving’s play, made it possible…. [T]he maintenance of such joys requires that we recognize, as Thomas Jefferson did, that the liberating rule that civilized us yesterday will, almost inevitably, seek to govern us tomorrow, by suppressing both the pleasure and the disputation. In so doing, it becomes a form of violence itself.
This passage, besides just being a beautiful piece of writing, perfectly illustrates the goal of all game designers, and I’d hope, all rule makers. A game is essentially a set of rules and a goal. The rules constrain the means by which players may attempt to reach the goal. These constraints, if well designed, promote emergence, the process whereby simple actions repeated can create patterns of great complexity. An elegant rule set uses the fewest number of rules to encourage emergence and allow for innovation, while creating a system lacking contradiction and ambiguity. As Hickey writes, Erving’s play was both new and fair within a rule set designed by men who couldn’t possibly have imagined what Erving would do. This is excellent rule design.
A government can also be seen as a rule making body. Our society is a game with a variety of goals (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to name a few) and perhaps an even larger number of rules constraining how we may attempt to reach those goals. Those rules, at their best, create a fair playing field where everyone can attempt their finest moves. All too often, however, the rule makers cease to design elegant rule sets and instead create rule sets that solidify the advantage of some to the detriment of others. The rule sets are cumbersome, bloated, so that players are constantly involuntarily breaking the rules and subject to punishment. As Edmund Burke said, “Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.”
To explain how spoil-sports fit here, I turn to Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian who in 1938 published a book entitled Homo Ludens. In this book, Huizinga explained how play has served a fundamental role in the development of human culture. According to Huizinga, many of our most important institutions like art, religion, and writing are essentially play with different media. He also investigates the role of the spoil-sport. To paraphrase:
All games have rules which are absolutely binding. While players follow the rules, a magic circle is created within which the game is reality, but if the rules are transgressed, the spell is shattered. The player who trespasses against these rules or ignores them is the spoil-sport. This is not the same as cheating for the cheater pretends to honor the rules while subverting them and so still acknowledges the magic circle. While cheaters are scorned, it is interesting to note how much more harshly spoil-sports are treated. They are ostracized, cast out because their actions have revealed the fragility of the play world and so destroyed the shared illusion–a word which literally means “in play.” In ordinary life, spoil-sports are treated similarly, and they are known as apostates, heretics, radicals, etc.
I would differ with Huizinga only in pointing out that in ordinary life, society has two options when faced with spoil-sports: they can be cast out or in time they can be understood as harbingers of necessary reform to flawed rules. The motivation of the spoil-sport is key here. There are those who wreck the game purely out of malice, insecurity about their inability to play well, or even simply an urge to be destructive. Another type of spoil-sport, however, disrupts the game because she understands it to be unfair. The rules are flawed, and while other players would prefer to continue along as if all were well (because of personal gain form the inequality, fear of change, or obliviousness) the spoil-sport chooses to disrupt play in order to force recognition and improvement.
Frederick Douglass is an excellent example here. The United States was a slave country justifying the system of slavery because of an established rule set. African-Americans were naturally inferior, naturally savage, naturally lazy, etc. and so it was only right for whites to dominate them. These truths were contradicted every day but most people ignored or were oblivious to the contradictions and the game went on. Douglass chose to become a spoil-sport, and his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass exposed how deeply flawed the logic of slavery was. Here was an obviously highly intelligent former slave describing white savagery and African-American humanity. Douglass deeply unsettled millions of people, and in time America’s rules had to change.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: January 26th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Education, game-based learning, games in the news | Tags: game design, game-based learning, Games for Change, Mass Effect, science fiction, STEM | No Comments »
Science
With Games For Change’s recent inclusion in the White House’s
STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) initiative, this seems like a good time to talk about games and science.
Scientific American has a short article today on the use of dark matter as a plot element and weapon in the Mass Effect video game series. According to Casey Hudson, the project director for Mass Effect 2, it was important to the developers to incorporate science into the game in a way that “that didn’t offend people who know about science.” While the designers didn’t consult any scientists, they did read all they could about dark matter, and intentionally chose it because it remains such a mysterious phenomenon. There was room to fudge the science in the name of fun gameplay because there is still so little known about dark matter.
Science fiction writers have always taken liberties with their use of science but for serious game developers, or those using games in education it’s not always clear how to strike a proper balance between science and fiction. As an article from the sci fi blog I09 points out, so called hard science fiction that focuses on scientific accuracy, often presents unrealistic social situations because authors neglect their character development. The result can be glorified science textbooks with lackluster casts. Science games that aren’t fun won’t get played, and then they can’t help anyone learn.
Science Fiction
Even worse, as another I09
article discusses, sci fi that plays fast and loose with its facts while focusing on a strong plot can actually contribute to misconceptions about science. One geologist quoted in the article laments that the TV show CSI is science fiction disguised as cop drama and when viewers of the show sit on real juries they have unrealistic expectations for the prosecution to produce magical evidence discovered by imaginary technology. In this case, educational materials too focused on being fun or engaging can end up ingraining misconceptions. For game designers working on STEM education projects, then, there are a few important constraints that can lead to engaging, educational games.
First, STEM games must use solid science. A game can have one main subject, core principle, or idea it’s trying to explain or explore, and it must be presented accurately. It’s neat the Mass Effect uses dark matter in the plot, but (without having played it) I’m pretty certain it doesn’t teach anything. This doesn’t detract from the game because it’s only meant for fun, but educational games can’t be so cavalier.
While being totally accurate, the material also needs to be age appropriate. I found a free game online that seems to be aimed at middle schoolers, but is teaching a random collection of concepts from Einstein’s theory of relativity, to teleportation (admitting this may be impossible) to the Higgs-Boson particle. Why a ten year-old should be learning about relativity is beyond me, and I highly doubt that any substantive information can be delivered by a wacky platformer-shooter game.
Second, games teaching STEM can’t become so mired in factuality that they neglect to be compelling, engaging or fun. Granted, there is an audience for hard core simulations, but it is limited. Any game that’s going to be used in-class, out of class as an assignment, or as part of an informal learning environment needs to have mass appeal. That means less Eve Online and more Auditorium or Flow. Yes, Eve Online is a highly developed economic simulator set in a sci fi world, and my latter two examples aren’t STEM focused at all, but they could be easily tweaked to educate and engage (instead of just engage) while Eve is simply too intimidating for most people.
Finally, STEM games have a constraint that applies to no other educational medium: the mechanic must be the message. In the relativity game I referred to earlier, the site in which the game is embedded has a list of scientific concepts that are referenced in the game, but the game itself doesn’t involve science exploration at all. I played a different game about geology that could be described as Galaga + rock collecting + rock-related quiz questions. The gameplay was completely disconnected from the the subject matter.
For an educational game to really be successful, what the player does in the game must connect to the subject matter. In the geology game, learning the geological processes that cause different rocks should be the key to progressing in the game. It should feel relevant. I think Crayon Physics Deluxe and World of Goo are good learning games that could be great if they integrated metacognition into the gameplay. If Goo were a learning game, it could encourage players to reflect on their design process (how was the solution developed?) or consider tensile strength, cohesion and adhesion, etc. as they build.
Designing a good educational game is enormously challenging. I can think of very few that effectively integrate factuality and fun into meaningful gameplay. Most educational games lapse into rehashing tired tropes and painting science themes onto old mechanics. Developing effective, engaging STEM games is an exciting challenge though, and I look forward to working on this problem more in the future.
