Culture Clash

(October 2003)

Professor Warcraft

Games are better educators than we think

The September issue of Game Developer sports a Soapbox column on the subject of games as "learning machines". This piece, written by cognitive scientist James Paul Gee, argues that games are ideal tools for learning since they communicate information in a retainable way and make that process fun. Games, according to Gee, possess many of the ingredients of good learning tools: ingredients which "reflect what cutting-edge cognitive research has discovered about what causes deep human learning". Gee goes into greater depth in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), positing that the experience of the video game is an ideal environment for learning. So games are a good foundation for teaching; study after study is proving this, and world is taking notice. How, then, do developers make games into the learning machines that Gee describes?

The obvious answer is that they already are. We learn volumes from our game experiences every time we play. I'm not referring to "edutainment" titles or tutorware (neither is Gee); I mean mainstream, top-shelf games - especially story-driven games. The fact that they generally teach us about fictional worlds or nonacademic issues is secondary to the fact that history, literature, geography, art, and pretty much anything else can be taught effectively in a game environment. And not only will the learner absorb and retain the knowledge, he will do so without even realizing (consciously) that he is learning at all - learning is implicit in play. Video games can become the electronic equivalent of The da Vinci Code - educational while fun.

Any one of us who played through Morrowind could easily ace a quiz on Vvardenfell geography, religion, politics, flora, whatever. We could analyze Tribunal laws, assess the impact of Daedra worship on Dwemer/Dunmer relations, and produce sociological postulations on Ashlander tribal structure. Meanwhile, a lecture course on the same subject would be so dense and so soporific that even the most dedicated student would have to generate reams of notes to reinforce and retain the information. Morrowind takes about 120 hours to finish, almost certainly less than a student would spend in class, study groups, office hours, reading texts, and studying course notes to achieve the same grade in a classroom setting. More importantly, the learner who gathers this knowledge from the game has fun doing it, while learners who gather knowledge from traditional education occasionally feel resentment toward the subject: nothing makes a worthwhile topic more unpalatable than making it obligatory. The point is that though Morrowind happens to be about a fictional culture in an imaginary world, there's no reason why games must be limited to that.

Role-playing games in the Morrowind vein are capable of transmitting knowledge far more sophisticated and extensive than "100-level" stuff, marking the learning experience as superior to most e-Learning solutions, which are best for overview and general theory knowledge. Because the player is directly immersed in the environment, and expected to make specific decisions based on information provided and interpreted, the education is naturally more oriented to knowledge application than to rote memorization. The player is also more likely to retain knowledge gleaned in a game context, since application and interpretation of that knowledge has direct consequences. The same is not true from a volume of class notes.

Pioneers in e-Learning are looking very closely at the potential of what the business is calling "games-based education". Everyone agrees it has value, but corporations and schools interested in educating through games look at the price tag, project length, and lack of scalability in a Fallout or Morrowind and cringe. The e-Learning industry is moving toward processes that produce affordable, disposable learning modules so easy and cheap to create that it's better to produce new courses than update old ones when additional material becomes available. Games-based learning is not appropriate for every training need, but then, neither is e-Learning itself.

Imagine a game designed to immerse the player in a work of literature. Characters and settings could be recreated, the challenges the player faces could be tooled to represent themes from the story. Such a game, if well-made, would go a long way toward enhancing understanding, retention, and appreciation of the literature. And whether or not the game is played in conjunction with reading the book is frankly irrelevant - games can be that powerful as educational tools.

American McGee tried a variant on the above with his vastly underappreciated game Alice ; he's trying it again with the upcoming Oz . Alice does not recreate Carroll's novels, but could have just as easily. And this from a game that most consider little more than a twitch title, a 3D action game - heavy on moodiness but lacking depth. There's no reason why "American McGee's Narnia " or " Magic Mountain " couldn't be fun and contain all the thematic and narrative elements of those pieces of literature.

Other titles with more obvious educational grist appear with astonishing regularity. The Caesar series and Pharaoh have inaccurate in-game educational elements but sport vast libraries of knowledge available for the curious; the games would have done better to incorporate that knowledge into the play experience. More in-depth and historically accurate titles such as Medieval Total War and the upcoming Rome Total War promise a solid foundation in history and culture. SimCity, Civilization , and their cousins continue to engross and educate players. Even bargain-bin titles like Shark: Hunting the Great White educate in their own charming way - the included Shark-opedia and specific shark-hunting goals all but guarantee that by the end of the game, you'll be able to identify by sight the species of behemoth about to ingest you.

The challenge for developers who wish to pursue the application of learning capabilities to their games is one of accuracy. Games are going to make people learn no matter what; education-focused games have a responsibility to be well-researched and correct. A learning machine is not a Disney film or TNT miniseries; the facts are not vague guidelines to be included when convenient and ignored when troublesome. For those developers who wish to experiment with making learning fun, and for those who already have, the technology has long since been validated. Only the creativity to make the education work is required.