The Hard Problem of Making Educational Games
The first time I heard the name Adam Smith was while playing Sid Meyer’s Colonization, the same goes for John Paul Jones and Bartolome de las Casas. My childhood was spent playing PC games from the 16-bit era. There are many ways one can learn about the geography of the Caribbean and Central America, but if you spent hours trying to raid Maracaibo in Pirate’s! Gold, you are sure to remember where that city is, even decades later. My generation learned English by trying to figure out the dialogues of Lucas Arts and Sierra Point and Click adventures. We cut our teeth on our first management problems by playing SimCity and Caesar. I didn’t play Oregon Trail, but that game is still a cultural icon for a generation of kids from the ’80s and ‘90s.
I am also a parent now. My son learned what copper is, that iron ore needs to be smelted, and that sugar is made by processing sugar cane by playing Minecraft. The complexity of designs that he and his 9-year-old friends make in that game is staggering. The game is more than an infinite box of virtual LEGOs, it is an exercise in spatial orientation, aesthetics, and abstract thinking. It’s one thing to learn about simple machines from a textbook, it is quite another to try first hand to combine them in ever more complex contraptions.
My son, my childhood friends, and I have learned tremendously much by playing games. The type of skills and knowledge that we acquired this way is broad and diverse. However, most of that knowledge wasn’t presented in a form readily recognizable as learning content.
This is not surprising. We humans learn by playing. There are many ways one can define games, but among other things, they are learning tools.
KEY IDEA: A game world is a small laboratory, a subset of the real world from which a lot of unnecessary complexity has been stripped away. This abstraction, simplification of the world is what allows us to focus on the primary objective of learning.
A game of basketball is all about dexterity, coordination, and situational awareness. Players’ actions on the playfield are focused entirely on those elements. Nothing else of the infinite complexity of the real world, outside of the court matters. Other rules, constraints, and necessities are suspended for the duration of the gameplay.
Learning through games and gameplay is natural and intuitive, yet there are very few companies that manage to successfully develop games as learning tools. The reason for this is not as obvious as one might think.
I joined Rovio in the summer of 2012, at the moment when Angry Birds as a brand were at the peak of popularity. Rovio had lofty ambitions. The characters appealed to kids and the company had the ambition to act as a force of good in the world. The idea was to combine Rovio’s strengths as a game development powerhouse with a world-famous Finnish educational model and create something that would become Rovio’s Way of Learning.
The company was collaborating with the likes of NASA and National Geographics. Indeed, the first project that I was working on, was supposed to be an educational application that would straddle the world of games and learning.
Nothing really came out of all of this. The project got canceled. Rovio simply was not able to create a sustainable business about learning apps. The reason is not the lack of trying, nor the lack of skill. The reason was deeper and conceptual.
KEY IDEA: If you are making a learning game, you are making something that will need to address the needs of two distinctly different groups of people the children and their parents.
The users of your game are going to be the children. For them, your creation needs to work as a game. The quality of the gameplay is going to be what is important for them. If the game is boring, tedious, or repetitive, they will abandon it.
However, the parent is the one with the credit card. The customers of your product are going to be the parents. What they want to see is something presented obviously as the educational content.
They don’t want to see a point-and-click adventure through which their kids might learn English. They want to see an English teaching app.
It is this dichotomy between the customer and the user that makes creating educational games so hard.
Most of our didactic content in traditional media, such as school books, is limited by technology and pedagogical methods that are still stuck in the 19th-century mentality. They don’t translate well to the digital world. They are also not appealing to kids. School books were not fun when you were growing up. If we make software that closely mimics their content, it is not going to be fun either. It will fail its own users. Most educational software makes exactly this mistake.
On the other hand, if its content is not readily identified by parents as something ostensibly educational, and good for children, it will not fly as a business.
Until parents learn to appreciate that things like Minecraft are great learning tools, we will have a problem in making educational games. This process is going to take a long time.
Perceptions and expectations are reinforced by cultural norms. Games are such a good learning tool that we do not perceive that we are actually learning without at least some self-reflection. This is the best kind of learning, but the hardest one to appreciate. Even people that learned from games during their childhood, grow up to expect to see the classical textbook content modeled in educational games.
Things might change if enough generations grow up playing games. Evolution takes generations.
