Meral Crifasi over at the Heritage Key site asks the question: How much fun is edutainment? Meral wants to know specifically "how best to grab - and keep - the attention of the GTA generation. Is it possible for online virtual educational projects to compete with mass market entertainment? If so, how?"
With all due respect, I think this is the wrong way to address the issue, for a number of reasons.
First off, Meral makes the implication that the "guns and sex" of mass market gaming are the opposite of education. I think the reality is much more complex than that. Games that have violent and sexual content aren't by their nature non-educational or without value.
In fact, a lot of learning happens even in the most violent games like "Grand Theft Auto" and "God of War." Often that learning involves systems thinking, strategic focus, resource allocation, and other skills beyond simply reaction time and hand-eye-coordination. Once you are involving multiple players interacting then there are many other learning possibilities, including team coordination, leadership, and time management. Managing a medium-sized guild in World of Warcraft can be as complicated as running a small business!
Most young people who play these games are not aware or not able to articulate that they are learning these things through the gameplay, which is what makes these learning outcomes so worthy of consideration.
I'm not sure exactly what the sexual content that Meral is concerned about, but I would not be quick to judge a game that had some titillating imagery as therefore not educational. I can't think of a single popular game that is about sex, to be honest. And remember that books like Lolita and 1984 have sexual content but are classics of literature. So sex does not equal without value.
Overall, I think Meral conflates the importance of sex and violence as being intrinsically a part of mass market gaming. Let's look at the data. Here's a list of the top 19 most popular game franchises. Each of these has shipped at least 5 million copies:
- Mario
- Pokemon
- Tetris
- The Sims
- Need for Speed
- Final Fantasy
- Madden NFL
- Sonic the Hedgehog
- Grand Theft Auto
- FIFA (Soccer game)
- Legend of Zelda
- Winning Eleven (Soccer, again!)
- Gran Turismo
- Call of Duty
- Tom Clancy
- Dragon Quest
- Bejeweled
- Nickelodeon
- Lego
Of these, I would say only Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty (and Tom Clancy, maybe), feature violent conflict as the main activity in the game. Most of these games are about strategy, simulation, puzzle solving, and sports simulation.
So if we are open to the idea that violence and sexual content in games are not necessarily non-educational, and that the dominant games out there are not in fact solely about violence and sex, then the question becomes:
- How do we create explicitly educational online spaces that are attractive to young people?
- And what lessons can we learn from the most popular games?
The answer it seems to me is to take what makes games the most compelling of media and incorporate that into our educational experience we are creating. If we want to teach someone about climate change or the laws of physics, think about gaming experiences that incorporate the content and have propulsive gameplay. Look at the rich narrative that undergird World of Warcraft, resulting in a WOW wiki with more than 80,000 entries created by players. Think about the compelling systems management actions of games like the Sims. Or the satisfaction of puzzle solving that you get from Legos games. Each of these and more have lessons that can inform your educational project.
Easier said than done, I know.
One example from my own work. I created, along with my co-facilitators, a rich and fun virtual fossil dig for urban teenagers in New York and Chicago called "I Dig Science." The "I Dig" series involves an intensive two-week camp where the teenagers get to role-play in a virtual world as paleontologists on a fossil dig. They are challenged to drive to a dig site, learn about the local culture, prepare their dig tools and materials, unearth the fossils, assemble and preserve them, and put them into museum exhibits -- all within Teen Second Life. Meanwhile, the teens got to interact in real time with a real life team of fossil hunters who were on the ground in Africa looking for similar fossils, ask them questions and get advice about how to complete their virtual quests.
Here's a short video about our first camp, "I Dig Tanzania."
The "I Dig Science" series incorporates gaming elements, including narrative, competition, team work, mini-games, and strategy that kept our teens engaged with the program over two-weeks during the summer. Keeping teens over the summer engaged in a program that involves them sitting in front of computers for hours at a time is not easy task! And yet all of our participants reported that they thought the "I Dig" camps were fun while also educational.
This is just one example, and not even the best one, of how online virtual educational projects can learn from the enormous success of digital games to make their experiences compelling and addictive for young people. Each educator has to decide for herself how to organize her online experience to work for the young people she is targeting. Perhaps the best place to start is simply to start playing more games.
So get out there and play!
