"Serious Games" and modern edutainment

[Xarpho's Return]

I mentioned this in the thread Old PC kids games but changed the topic as I was developing it a bit more.

Most of us remember the "edutainment" games from the 1990s, made from the likes from The Learning Company, Brøderbund, Edmark, Davidson & Davidson, and a few others. There were two main problems with it, mostly, one of which it wasn't very fun or educational (the "chocolate-covered broccoli" analogy was coined back in 1999 when edutainment was at its peak, Mattel had just bought The Learning Company Inc. for $4.2 billion), the other problem was it was just shovelware completely saturating the market, within a few years that would mostly disappear from the marketplace.

Every now and then I hear how it's still a good idea in theory, how games could be if divorced from educators and focus groups, stuff that could teach you useful stuff rather than rout memorization math problems and better integrated into the system.

Unfortunately, I still haven't found much. There's some programming games on Steam, but most of those don't really teach you programming other than having programming as a core feature and wouldn't appeal to the masses. (I don't know who it's supposed to appeal to.)

There's some games that take applied education to in-game functions, like My Summer Car but that doesn't really take the time to explain how to do it, nor allows any expansion of repairing and fixing cars other than specific model of a mid-1970s Datsun.

An article I found from 2014 (archive) on a site called Edutopia, called the closest living relatives of edutainment, "Serious Games" but their "best" examples are basically propaganda from government or NGOs. While I'm sure there were government/NGOs involved in the edutainment of olden times, they weren't soliciting for donations through mobile game trash or trying to get me to sign up for the country's deteriorating armed forces.

Papers, Please is also brought up in the same page, but it almost feels like it's cut from the same cloth, it feels like some sort of pretentious social experiment that was changed fairly late in development to actually be a marketable product that you can win at. Either way, you don't actually LEARN anything.

Part of me thinks that actually trying to make something fun and something learnable has diminishing results. Someone at McGraw-Hill Home Interactive actually went through the trouble of designing over 100 real-life chemicals and how they all interact with each other in Dr. Sulfur's Night Lab (you can synthesize, say, nitrogen triiodide) but as a comment talks about, they were constrained by development time, and the chemical stuff was just a small part of the game.

I'm sure there are actually good games hiding out on Steam somewhere that are good examples that actually teach you stuff rather than just abstract concepts (or is some sort of NGO trash) but I'm struggling to think of any examples.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

I don't know about anything modern modern but back when flash games were big I remember there was this flash game about cells that kicked ass where platypi people were trying to solve some sort of crisis by genetically modifying a cell that pretty much carried me through my biology classes on cells. The name escapes me at the moment but if I could remember it I'd be tempted to pull it up on flashpoint.

 

[Nicholas Gur]

I used to fuck on some racing game in my typing class. When you're going 800wpm typos are just speed bumps

 

[Judge Dredd]

I'm sure there are actually good games hiding out on Steam somewhere that are good examples that actually teach you stuff rather than just abstract concepts (or is some sort of NGO trash) but I'm struggling to think of any examples.

Two that spring to mind. The original Kingdom Come Deliverance which was autistically historically accurate, and some game I forget the name of where you play as Chernobyl liquidators. I've not played either game.

As tools for teaching kids math or something like that, they aren't that, but they're somewhat informative about a historical topic. Kind of like Oregon Trail back in the day. You learn the history by playing through it.

 

[fartsnstuf]

around at 2008 - 2010 the games decided to undergo the "this isn't a baby's toy, this is art!" cringe phase where alot of games released during it took themselves WAAAY too seriously for my interest

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Two that spring to mind. The original Kingdom Come Deliverance which was autistically historically accurate, and some game I forget the name of where you play as Chernobyl liquidators. I've not played either game.

As tools for teaching kids math or something like that, they aren't that, but they're somewhat informative about a historical topic. Kind of like Oregon Trail back in the day. You learn the history by playing through it.

I know a while ago I came across some autistic space simulation that had all sorts of real calculations and stuff; unfortunately, I've forgotten the name of it.

 

[Shart Attack]

The only modern dedicated edutainment game that comes to mind is Shashingo:

It has you walk around a virtual city and learn basic Japanese vocabulary by photographing in-game objects and playing some minigames.

 

[Elf Supremacist]

I think where a lot of publishers/games mess up is when they try to force feed you the "education" in their game rather than let a natural interest grow from the game.
When I was younger I wore out Total War: Rome II and in doing so, became extremely interested in Rome, Carthage, Greece, Macedonia, and other places. I learned about their cultures, religions, how they fought, not just through the game but because of the game. "Is that really historically accurate?" The answer was normally yes, and I learned more from it.

Kingdom Come Deliverance is another great example though I didn't play it as much nor did I learn as much from it.

I've got an autistic friend who has played KSP since it launched and ended up being an engineer because of it. He can describe really niche subjects in rocketry and orbital mechanics pretty much because of that game. Not because you're required to become a rocket scientist, but because it becomes more enjoyable when you learn the same topics a rocket scientist would need to know.

The thing is, none of those games shove the learning down your throat, they don't force you to memorize anything beyond gameplay mechanics. The quality and enjoyment of these games are subjective, but the gameplay and the immersion are all geared in such a way to make someone want to dive deeper into those subjects. Don't force a player to learn, put them in an environment that encourages it.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

I think where a lot of publishers/games mess up is when they try to force feed you the "education" in their game rather than let a natural interest grow from the game.
When I was younger I wore out Total War: Rome II and in doing so, became extremely interested in Rome, Carthage, Greece, Macedonia, and other places. I learned about their cultures, religions, how they fought, not just through the game but because of the game. "Is that really historically accurate?" The answer was normally yes, and I learned more from it.

Kingdom Come Deliverance is another great example though I didn't play it as much nor did I learn as much from it.

I've got an autistic friend who has played KSP since it launched and ended up being an engineer because of it. He can describe really niche subjects in rocketry and orbital mechanics pretty much because of that game. Not because you're required to become a rocket scientist, but because it becomes more enjoyable when you learn the same topics a rocket scientist would need to know.

The thing is, none of those games shove the learning down your throat, they don't force you to memorize anything beyond gameplay mechanics. The quality and enjoyment of these games are subjective, but the gameplay and the immersion are all geared in such a way to make someone want to dive deeper into those subjects. Don't force a player to learn, put them in an environment that encourages it.

Even if a game inspires you to learn more, not all of that is particularly useful--in the thread Not Just Bikes / r/fuckcars / Urbanists / New Urbanism / Car-Free / Anti-Car you can see the result of people who played SimCity-style games and took away the completely wrong lessons.

Inspiration to learn yourself isn't a bad thing—watching the anime Food Wars might get you to try real cooking (or at the very least learn what beef bourguignon is) but it isn't exactly educational television even if some of its principles are sound (like using honey as an enzyme to tenderize meat).

The real secret is getting it to work the opposite way, a game programmed well enough that knowledge in the subject would cause you to be better in the game. In the case of Roman history, most of the critical decisions came down to choices and would veer quickly into alternate history (we all know bringing the hammer down on Judaea would have disastrous effects on world history long-term).

For some of the older edutainment titles, it does work...knowing some world geography makes Carmen Sandiego (at least the first version) a breeze; provided you have a working knowledge of pre-Euro currencies and even then there's probably only one plausible option by process of elimination. On other games, it's mostly knowing the game's mechanics as to how things actually functioned. Leave Independence around May, have wagons go at medium speed, but rest when people get sick or injured, and so on.