The Ivory Tower

October 2003

To Inform AND Entertain

by Henry Jenkins

I was speaking the other week to a leading game designer about the work we have been doing through MIT's Education Arcade. The designer asked me, "Why should commercial designers care about educational games? Aren't these simply two different industries? It isn't as if Hollywood spent a lot of time thinking about educational movies."

In fact, mainstream Hollywood has made significant contributions over the past eighty or ninety years to support the educational use of movies. As the cinema emerged as a powerful economic and commercial force, it faced push-back from various reform groups. Parents and civic groups blamed the new medium for its negative effects and accused the cinema of competing with teachers and parents. Starting in the 1920s, the film industry responded with a concerted effort to court teachers by making Hollywood films available for classroom use, developing teacher materials to accompany current releases, organizing Saturday matinees where kids could be ensured age-appropriate content, creating short educational films to accompany their features, and producing feature films based on literary classics. Today, Steven Spielberg funds documentaries focused on the holocaust (since Schindler's List ) and World War II (since Saving Private Ryan ) and James Cameron supports instructional materials on oceanography and the Titanic.

Previous Ivory Tower contributors have called for greater dialogue between the academic and commercial sectors. The research and development of educationally-valuable games is something we can and should be doing together.

Often, we hear that there is no market for educational games, but in fact, some of the most commercially successful games - Sim City , Civilization - inform as well as entertain. These games are already being used in classes, but industry and academic researchers can develop customized modifications, curricular materials, instructional activities, and teacher training programs to expand their use. Kurt Squire, for example, has been introducing Civilization 3 into high school geography and history classes, enabling students new insights into the role of geography and resources in shaping political and economic developments - and inspiring them to turn textbooks into cheat books. In a recent book, James Paul Gee makes a strong case that good pedagogical principles underlie the best designed contemporary games and that educators should be studying game design to know how to sequence tasks, develop goals that challenge learners, provide just-in-time information, and build dynamic learning communities.

We need to build on those foundations to develop games which contain advanced content, operate according to sound pedagogical principles, enable classroom customization, and create real excitement within the core game market.

Through a MIT-Microsoft iCampus project, Games to Teach, faculty and students in the Comparative Media Studies Program have spent the past two years developing conceptual prototypes for over 15 games that would use state of the art design principles to teach core concepts across the high school and early college curriculum. We were not looking for the one right answer - rather, we think there will be many different kinds of games produced according to many different pedagogical models for use in many different kinds of classrooms to convey many different kinds of content. These prototypes, in the form of detailed design documents, are published on the web to spark discussion.

Imagine a multiplayer game, developed in collaboration with Colonial Williamsburg, which situates players as townsfolk as they face the personal and collective decisions leading up to the American Revolution. Instead of smashing pedestrians with baseball bats, characters could be sneaking out of their homes in the middle of the night and dumping tea into the harbor.

Imagine game levels being used as homework and then being discussed and dissected in classroom lectures. Imagine kids staying up late at night not just to master a level but to master electromagnetism or psychology.

The launch of the new Education Arcade project represents the next step towards the realization of that vision -- developing playable prototypes that can be tested in classrooms to get assessment data. We are working this year to model Williamsburg using the Neverwinter Nights engine. Some of these projects have implications well beyond the classroom. Collaborating with the Carnegie Melon Entertainment Technology Center, we have developed some mods for the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, designed to help prepare emergency workers for public biohazards.

Our project has benefited enormously from pro bono consultations and critiques by professional designers. While small teams of graduate and undergraduate students can achieve astonishing results working with little money, limited training, and poor equipment, professional-grade games are going to require professional skill sets and toolkits. Game companies could join forces with educational institutions to develop content that makes use of already existing assets and allows them to create a secondary revenue stream. (For example, see the wonderful Typing of the Dead game). Game companies join a consortium that does for games what the Workshop for Children's Television has done for broadcasting - support experimentation and implementation of fresh new ideas which might not emerge otherwise in the current commercial context.

Nobody expects the games industry to do all of the hard work. Just as game designers like Will Wright have stressed the importance of giving gamers the tools and allowing them to develop their own content, the Education Arcade is also working to enable learners and teachers to create their own games. Eric Klopfer is developing hand-held augmented reality games that use GPS sensors to trigger data sets in the context of the player's real world surroundings. Part of this project involves building toolsets that will allow teachers to customize those games for their own local geography or to redesign their content to reflect their specific curricular goals.

On other fronts, educators are helping students to design their own games. Students learn by mapping domains of knowledge and deciding the best way to share what they know with other learners. Working with Hispanic students in Los Angeles , Jessica Irish and her collaborators produced a rich and distinctive Flash game, Tropical America, which deals with the process and politics surrounding the colonization of Latin America.

The academic community and the games industry have already made modest progress working apart. Now, we need to be talking and working together. Looking to next spring, there will be special events held at the Game Developers Conference and E3 designed to bring key stakeholders together, to examine the existing research, share best practices, and figure out how we can work together. We hope that you will join us for these important events.

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Henry Jenkins is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and a Principal Investigator for the Education Arcade project. He is co-editor with Justine Cassell of From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games and co-author with Kurt Squire of a monthly column, "Applied Game Theory," for Computer Games .