CS3540
Dr. Brian Durney
by Justin Peters, June 27, 2007
“Never play a video game that’s trying to
teach you something”
Peters asks these “philosophical questions”:
• When does a game stop being a game and
turn into an assignment?
• Can a game still be called a game if it isn't
any fun?
http://www.slate.com/id/2169019/
“The training games that I tried are
unsparingly, terrifyingly banal. Take Stone
City, a game Persuasive wrote to train Cold
Stone Creamery employees. You play a
scoop jockey who has to customers' orders.
At the end of the game, you're told just how
much ice cream you wasted, and how much
your poor performance will end up costing
Cold Stone over the span of one year. The
only fun to be had in Stone City comes from
deliberately mishandling the orders. (At my
Cold Stone franchise, everyone gets
Justin Peters
“The California-based company called Seriosity,
for one, claims to be brainstorming a virtual work
environment that mimics online worlds like
Second Life and World of Warcraft. "[T]oday's
multiplayer games," the company explains,
"embody tasks that are analogous to corporate
work." Imagine: a virtual office, with virtual
paper to be filed, virtual meetings to be
dreaded, and virtual gossip to be shared over
virtual coffee. I have seen the future, and it
makes me want to go back to chisels and stone
tablets, or at least get a job working construction.
This is not fun. This. Is. Evil.”
Justin Peters
“… the fundamental conceptual problem still
remains: Animating mindless, boring
repetition doesn't make the repetition any
less mindless or boring. No sane Cold
Stone employee will be fooled into thinking
that Stone City is anything other than a soulcrushing training exercise.”
Is there a better way to make
educational games?
Stay tuned…
Meanwhile, we’ll look at a differing point of
by Lee Wilson, August 22, 2008
“many … perceived barriers to integrating
video games into learning are ill-founded. In
fact, there are a number of well-circulated
myths that have reinforced widespread
negative attitudes toward games”
http://www.techlearning.com/article/7826
 Early edutainment games: animated flash cards
 Mavis Beacon typing, Math Blasters
 “fairly rigid, linear, and reward answering a question
quickly rather than thinking through complex problems”
 Recent games
 “Players are challenged to tackle deeply nested problems,
and there are multiple paths to success. Meanwhile,
they're attuning themselves to the game's culture, the
human social context.”
 Railroad Tycoon, Making History
http://making-history.com/products/mhgold
 Simulates Europe just
before World War II
 Reading, math, social
studies
 teamwork, initiative,
creativity, problem solving,
and leadership
“Teachers have reported finding groups of students in
the lunchroom arguing about the Potsdam
Conference.”
“In the examples given above there is no right answer,
only multiple paths to success, and there is as much to
be learned from failure as from success. Most
important, the games encourage students to use core
academic skills in the pursuit of solving complex
problems. Thinking deeply, not flicking buttons, is key.”
• Do you know of any games where this is
true?
• Are they fun games?
• Can games like this be made for any
educational topic?
Author mentions Grand Theft Auto, Postal
“In fact, there have always been lots of video games
that don't fit this profile.”
 Oregon Trail, Civilization, SimCity
Three games isn’t “a lot.” Do you know of other
games that fit this category?
 Serious games:
 Peacemaker, Food Force, ReDistricting Game, Quest
Atlantis
 WolfQuest http://www.wolfquest.org
“A related concern is the perception that any game
used in the classroom has to compete with the slick
production values of commercial games. This too
turns out to be false.”
Redistricting Game
http://www.redistrictinggame.org/
“Chocolate-covered
broccoli”
Poor game design will
cripple any game, serious or
commercial. Many of those
creating educational games
have not grounded
themselves deeply enough in
games and gaming culture to
grasp what makes a great
game.
It's also a myth that video games are all about instant
gratification. The most popular video games of all time
are actually extremely complex puzzles, and they
succeed because deep and difficult learning is fun in
itself (the Zelda series, Myst, and Prince of Persia by
Nintendo, Cyan, and Ubisoft, respectively, are just a few
examples).
If “deep and difficult learning” is fun, why isn’t
college like one big video game?
Can entertainment games make use of this?
(assuming that it’s true, of course)
This isn’t really an issue for us.
The author quotes a couple of studies,
but in my opinion they aren’t particularly
impressive.
“The basic issue here is that it's easier to make
a fun game educational than it is to inject fun
into an educational game. In his 2005 book,
Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven
Johnson argues that games like The Sims and
Grand Theft Auto make us smarter by training
the mind in adaptive behavior and problemsolving. Most overtly educational software,
though, ignores the complexities that make
games riveting and enriching. The seriousgaming types think they can create educational
software from whole cloth. In reality, they have a
What makes a
game
educational?
What makes a
game fun?
From a 1979 presentation by C. Durney and D. Harris
 Effort is proportional to commitment, and commitment in
turn is proportional to both confidence in ability to succeed
and impression of usefulness of what is to be learned or
done.
 Behavior changes only when it is occurring. People learn
just the ability they practice, not a related ability.
 Transfer of a learned ability from a school setting to reallife usage is proportional to the degree of identity between
the practice conditions and the usage conditions.
 Feedback is necessary for learning to occur.
 Conceptual meaning cannot be transmitted from a teacher
to a learner.
Sensation
Fellowship
Fantasy
Discovery
Narrative
Expression
Challenge
Masochism
(Getting into the
game)
I Have No Worlds & I Must Design, Greg Costikyan 2002
+
+
?
Maybe not. What about
…?
Or
+
The Continuum
Educational
Entertainment
Coming soon to a Moodle page near you…