Kaj Sotala has an interesting anecdote about the game DragonBox in this blog post. Apparently it’s a super fun puzzle game that incidentally teaches kids basic algebra.
@Kaj_Sotala wrote that post 11 years ago, titled “Why I’m considering a career in educational games.” I’d be interested to see if he still stands by it and/or have more convincing arguments by now.
Games are designed first and foremost to be fun—or beautiful, or engrossing, or exhilarating. Games are an aesthetic medium, and (generally speaking) they compel our participation insofar as they compel us aesthetically. It’s true that in some games, players end up developing certain skills or understandings along the way. But that doesn’t mean we can make a great game that teaches anything. You’re seeing the survivors. These games’ designers tried and discarded dozens of gameplay ideas in search of something aesthetically compelling. Then, only after they’d satisfied the primary constraint of making something fun, or beautiful, or whatever, the designers figured out how to ensure people would learn what they need as they play. Most mechanisms are not fun. Good games come from a demanding selection process which works the other way around: first, find the fun. There’s no reason at all to believe that for any arbitrary abstract topic, one can always “find the fun” which implicitly teaches it.
On the other hand, in principle it still seems to me like you should be able to make games that significantly improve on current education. Even if an edugame wasn’t as fun as a pure entertainment game, it could still be more fun than school. And people still watch documentaries because they value learning, even though documentaries can’t compete with most movies and TV shows on pure entertainment value.
But then again, for some reason DragonBox seems to have been an exception rather than the rule. Even the company that made it mostly just made games for teaching simpler concepts to younger kids afterward, rather than moving on to teaching more complicated concepts. The fact that I haven’t really heard of even reasonably-decent edugames coming out in the 11 years since that post seems like strong empirical evidence against its thesis, though I don’t really understand the reason for that.
Nope, not sure at all. Just vague impression.
@Kaj_Sotala wrote that post 11 years ago, titled “Why I’m considering a career in educational games.” I’d be interested to see if he still stands by it and/or have more convincing arguments by now.
I think that some of the bits in that essay were too strong, in particular this line
was probably wrong, for reasons Andy Matuschak outlines:
On the other hand, in principle it still seems to me like you should be able to make games that significantly improve on current education. Even if an edugame wasn’t as fun as a pure entertainment game, it could still be more fun than school. And people still watch documentaries because they value learning, even though documentaries can’t compete with most movies and TV shows on pure entertainment value.
But then again, for some reason DragonBox seems to have been an exception rather than the rule. Even the company that made it mostly just made games for teaching simpler concepts to younger kids afterward, rather than moving on to teaching more complicated concepts. The fact that I haven’t really heard of even reasonably-decent edugames coming out in the 11 years since that post seems like strong empirical evidence against its thesis, though I don’t really understand the reason for that.