Computers, Education and Games
I've never been a teacher, but a number of my girlfriends over the years have, and recently I did a four year stint as the Chair of the governors of the local primary school. So I have a little insight into educational matters, and, of course, as a games designer, I do know about games. The parents who asked me were deadly serious, they were looking to get their children something which would both educate and entertain in equal measure. Like most parents they took the education of their children seriously and wanted to do what was best for the children. My answer to them was, in retrospect, pretty damning. I told them that all the programs I had ever seem which purported to be 'edutainment' were useless. Either they were not educational, or they were not entertaining, or, in most cases both! Lets face it. There is nothing that can touch a human teacher for firing up children's interest in the world around them and bringing to them that sense of wonder that is the basis of all enquiry. All the computers in all the schools in the world cannot talk to the child as an individual and encourage him or her to think about a topic and develop insights. A single teacher or parent can spark that development. The current fad for installing computers in schools, to my mind, completely fails to understand their limitations, and the fact that they are merely tools that may or may not be useful in teaching certain topics. The unpleasant truth is that the drive to computerise schools is driven not by teachers but by administrators who see it as a method of cutting costs by reducing the numbers of teachers And what of the Internet? A whole world out there - awash with data. Data - not information - you will note. If you want information you have to know how to process the amorphous mass of data to produce useful information. And where are the classes to teach children the techniques to extract information from Internet data, to teach them how to evaluate the results, to teach how to separate the wheat from the chaff? Well, of course, that would require extra teachers... But I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was the relationship between computer games and education. This topic has come up recently with a certain amount of academic interest in my new (real soon now, honest) internet game Age of Adventure. I have had an antipathy to so called 'educational games' (also called edutainment) for a long time. On the one hand they often have no educational content at all and are just pure game (and usually not very good ones at that). Alternatively, the 'game' part is really grim and hopeless, reinforcing the child's perceptions that learning is boring. The truth of the matter is that it is difficult to write a good game. It is equally difficult to write a good piece of educational software. Writing something which is both borders on the near impossible. In some ways this is a manifestation of what I call the 'sofabed syndrome'. Most sofabeds work, but they are neither comfortable as a sofa to sit on, nor as a bed to sleep on - too many compromises have been made to produce the hybrid beast. I can really only think of one piece of software that succeeded - 'Oregon Trail'. This excellent game opened up opportunities for a good teacher to spark a child's interest in the period it was simulating and the issues the game took up. Note, though, that a teacher or parent is still needed - the process isn't automatic, and the game isn't in any sense 'teaching'. It is perhaps this that gives us a handle on what defines a true educational game, and what the limits of the educational part are. It seems to me that first an educational game must be a true game - it must entertain and provide a 'real' world within itself for the player to be immersed in. If it lacks this component then people, young or otherwise, will not play it and its educational value is moot. Secondly, to be educational the game must stimulate curiosity about its subject. Its world may, or may not, be historically accurate, but is should give a feel for its theme that makes people want to know more. It is the latter approach I have opted for in Age of Adventure. Although the game is set in Victorian times, it is an alternate 19th century, where, among other things, the ascension of Queen Victoria had the effect of opening the professions to women. Does this invalidate Age of Adventure from an educational point of view? Well before I answer that I should make it clear that I am a games designer, not an educator, and I didn't set out to write an educational game. I set out to write a game that built a community of players around a Victorian theme. In order to build that community I laid down fairly strict rules about what was acceptable, the key being that the puzzles, quests and such like had to be set within the concerns of Victorians. Thus, for instance, 'magic' in the 'Dungeons & Dragons' sense is not allowed. On the other hand, spirits, ghosts, seances, and such like are allowed, because they relate directly to Victorian spiritualism. But something happened during the writing of the game which was unanticipated. We were forced to confront and deal with contemporary social and political issues in order to create a realistic world. This emerged naturally as part of the process of populating our world, it wasn't something we anticipated. To give a few examples, London is experiencing an anarchist or Fenian (it isn't made clear which) bombing campaign, Paris is gripped by the Dreyfus affair, and Kiev is under marshal law as the Russian Tsarist government struggles to integrate it. As we write up the Balkan countries we will have to face up to the origins of some of the problems that so vex the completely ahistorical President Clinton at the turn of the 20th Century - a hundred years later. But there are not just the grand political themes - there are other themes that cropped up, some of which have not really been fully resolved to this day. For instance, in Cairo players can meet the respected archaeologist Sir Joshua Cassells. Ask him about archaeological expeditions and you will be brought face to face with one of the dilemmas facing archaeologists.
The interesting thing is that we didn't set out to produce a game full of these sort of issues - it just flowed out of the work and the desire to maintain fidelity. So, to go back to my question - does this tampering with reality invalidate the educational value of the game? Well, possibly, depending on what else you are doing in the game. I would suggest that if you can create a climate where your players want to know what really happened, and even better, if you can provide a way for them to find out, then you are on to something genuinely educational. On the other hand, the 'educationalness' of a game is not a given. it will depend on the available outside resources to deepen and stimulate the desire to know more. A historical setting for a game - especially one with puzzles in it - can merely stimulate the appetite for trivia. It is a sad fact that most people view history as an unrelated collection of facts suitable only for use as questions in trivia shows. Along the way the idea of history as a process of the unfolding of interlinked events with cause and effect seems to have been completely lost. So, what advice should we give to parents about buying computer games for their children? My advice would be to tell them that they are rightly sceptical about the educational value of computer games. They should not be dazzled by the high tech marketing machine. On the other hand, it is possible to buy computer programs that have educational value, and it is even possible to buy games that could have educational value. But what they have to understand is that even if they do get software that has educational value, it doesn't absolve them of their own role in their child's education. Without the encouragement of a parent prepared to put the work into developing a relationship with the child, curiosity, fascination, the desire to learn more and to take control of ones own life life will soon wither into hopeless resignation. I'm not an educator. I'm a games designer, so I've no doubt that many educational professionals will take issue with some of the things that I've raised in this piece. I would just offer one observation. I grew up an avid reader. Many of the books I read were fiction, but they were so good that I wanted to know more. I was lucky enough to be brought up in an environment where that sort of curiosity was encouraged. A similar opportunity awaits us in the field of computer games, but only if we maintain our critical faculties, stop pretending that games are a substitute for teacher and parent based interaction, and seize the opportunities offered.
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