I never finished writing up my summary of last year's DiGRA conference to post, but never mind; some of the major threads keep coming up anyway.
One prominent theme was that academics and game industry folks don't usually mix well. At the lone industry panel, both sides made noises of disdain abut each other (OK, I admit, I myself was among those who led the hissing when the panelists patted themselves on the back for achieving 25% female hiring rates); academics asked why industry members didn't read our publications more, to which the panelists responded that if they saw another damn article on player practices, they'd hurl.
Regarding educational games, one or two panelists were scornful. The panel consensus was that it wasn't existing companies' job to produce educational games; besides, everyone knows educational games suck. The former claim is likely a good thing, but as for the latter, I keep wanting to believe the suckiness could be overcome by good educational developers. Even though while I play Katamari Damacy, DDR, World of Warcraft, Nintendogs, and Vib Ribbon, there's some nagging doubt in my head that we can ever transcend the suck. Certainly Jim Gee has given us tomes full of reasons why games teach better than schools often do; I'd like to believe them.
But this semester I'm taking a class with a developer from Atari, and today he said some things which I couldn't ignore about how an engaging game is made. Many of them go counter to what educators seek to accomplish; some of them even contradict some of Jim Gee's claims.
I'm not about to make an argument that we scrap doing research on digital games in education; for motivational reasons alone, I'm still pretty sure it's worthwhile. But we need to go into game development without illusions about the forms of gaming players are used to, being clear that it may be very difficult to get them engaged in educational games -- which should be very, very different in structure from commercial games.
Warning 1: "Just because it's realistic doesn't mean it's fun."
One of the supposed benefits of gamelike education, according to Jim Gee, is that it is situated in a believable, immersive world where players can learn through hands-on practice. However, our teacher emphasized that realism must often be watered-down in order to be any fun at all.
Specifically, he noted that artificial intelligence which resembles real-world situations too closely can be a real drag in games. If you're a covert agent sneaking into an enemy camp and you encounter a guard, the guard is likely to shoot to kill. But such a quick game-over is a real buzzkill in play. So AI in games is programmed to shout a warning, fire shots calculated to miss, be a little slow on the uptake and forget about you quickly if you go out of range.
"You don't want to make players do real work," our teacher summed it up, "but you want to give them a sense of accomplishment." If we make games which are really educational, in which kids do real mental heavy lifting -- think about SimLife, which had a very realistic model of ecologies, but which a peer of mine lamented was so accurate as to be no fun at all -- will we be able to retain the much-touted motivational element of video games? If the prospect of losing their attention yet again doesn't sober you up, imagine explaining "We didn't want the kids to do real work" to the people who are already all het up about standards and want to eliminate social promotion.
Warning 2: Watch it, you're standing in the Magic Circle
Having established that realism can be problematic, the teacher later suggested in passing, as we tried to collectively define the word "game," that game activity involves goals which do not fulfill the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of human needs. He later withdrew the reference to basic needs, but I don't feel he needed to, particularly in the case of digital games. Games are generally bounded by a "magic circle;" they are fun expressly because they do not have an impact on your "real" life. If they did, they might be uncomfortable, if not dangerous.
I'm still enough of an optimist to believe most educators mean to have a positive impact on students' real lives. Thus a transfer question arises: if students see games as outside their mundane affairs, would they even use the things they learn outside of the game environment?
Warning 3: Games only teach games.
It was along these lines that the teacher himself directly confronted and dismissed the possibility of educational games. At one point he put up a list of things which he thinks games teach. This included:
These are, of course, things Jim Gee also suggested games could do. But the teacher warned that players are learning to win the game, so gaming to learn is a tricky problem.
It's one which we've confronted in trying to develop a study about the effects of games in our lab. We've been looking at the game Insaniquarium, in which you manage a fishtank. A few of us younger lab hotshots think it could be used to teach abstract principles about economics or ecology, but teachers we've run the game by don't see that in it. They get hung up on how fast they have to move to feed fish and protect them from predators. And maybe they're right. What if all the player is experiencing is the speed of the game or some other part of its mechanic? Well, I suppose we could slow the game down. But even then, will they learn skills and content, or will they just press buttons?
Warning 4: Winning is all that counts.
The teacher also warned our class of prospective designers that no matter how cool we thought our game features were, players would not play them if they did not directly contribute to winning. If there were multiple ways to win, players would still concentrate on the optimal one. And even if it decreased their enjoyment of the game, they would cheat if they really wanted to win. He gave numerous examples of this goal-orientation from game development cases.
This is what's been bugging me about WoW. Despite all the side activities, the beautiful landscapes, the storyline, the opportunities for socialization, the one way to be successful and see all of the game is to level to 60. Despite all the academic literature on player styles and social interaction, the norm in game playing is to WIN.
And should we hand kids an educational game and say, "Here, play this," do you think they'll pause to mull the complexities of a historical situation or an idea? That's not what most of them do outside of class. If there are kids who want to play otherwise (as most of the girls I've surveyed for my masters' thesis seem to), they're likely to be marginalized while people who are actually "gamers" set the rules for success. Anyone else doesn't really play games.
* * *
I don't mean to imply our teacher said nothing to bring hope to the prospect of educational games. He did tickle my perennial interest in the teaching potential of "breaking" games, a childhood practice remembered fondly by the computer programmers I interviewed for my undergraduate thesis; players inevitably exploit bugs, and he urged us as designers to be prepared for this contingency. Sometimes I wonder whether educational game designers shouldn't be developing the brokenest games possible, in order to encourage players to pick them to pieces and learn how they work.
Like I said, I don't think we should scrap the project of researching games in education. But I do think it's important to listen to the working knowledge of industry professionals like my teacher. They see how games get used; they make the mechanics which make them run. And mind you, the games he was talking about weren't bad games. He was advising us how to make good games which keep people engaged for a long, long time -- some of them the very same games Gee mentions in his book. If, as educational game developers and theorists, we continue to treat games as monolithic and ignore the finer points of mechanic which could be teased out and analyzed, we set ourselves up for failure. We may not always like what industry professionals have to say, but we'll have to deal with it when our games make it to the classroom.
Posted by Gus at February 01, 2006 10:23 PM