Institute For The Future

Games and Education / Games as Education

Last week the New York based Games for Learning Institute, in conjunction with NYU, hosted a lecture by game developer Will Wright. I've been thinking a lot about games and education for our upcoming Future of Persuasion conference, and my ears perked up when I saw that the lecture had been put online, and after watching the hour long video, I was definitely not disappointed.

 

Right off the bat, Wright is asked "Why are serious games not fun?" To Wright, the value of games is being able to put ourselves in others' shoes. This capacity for changing perspective is one of the most potent tools a game designer may employ, and is a partial explanation for why many "serious games" end up being completely un-engaging. The fault lies primarily in the serious game designer's inability to change the perspective of the gamer's experience.

 

Rather than creating a game, to use Wright's example, in which the gamers plays as a peace corps volunteer trying to combat malaria, why not create a game in which the gamer plays as malaria. Playing as malaria, the goal of the game might be to be the most effective communicable disease, with gamers competing against swine flu, ebola, and other pathogens. The fun element here is that gamers get to experience a complete shift in mindset, while simultaneously being educated about, for example, the dynamics of disease pandemics.

 

The Malaria-as-serious-game example typifies what emerged as one of the central themes to Wright's talk. To Wright, from an early age we as humans we develop a number of schema, or models, of how events in our lives are likely to unfold. There are three distinct ways that we can build these schema. First and foremost, we obviously build models in our minds based on examples that we draw from our own experiences. But, the range of experiences that we have access to is fundamentally limited by factors ranging from our geography to the number and type of people we interact with.

 

The second way to acquire experiences to build schema is through toy experiences, which Wight says are "experiences that aren't real, that we can build abstractions and patterns out of, and later [we can] apply those abstractions to real life experiences." Finally, we are able to build schema by learning about the experiences of others.

 

Toy experiences, or play, and others' experiences, or stories, are, in Wright's model, "fundamentally educational technologies." Given our inherent limitations on what we can experience first hand, Wright posits that humans have evolutionarily developed play and stories as ways to educate us about experiences that we cannot actually experience.

 

I find this framing of games as education technologies quite compelling. As an avid gamer, it is heartening to find out that my hours of playing FIFA soccer and GTA IV have been fulfilling a strong evolutionary. But more seriously, models that outline how games is culturally and behaviorally important are helping legitimize the games for social good movement (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention IFTF's own Jane McGonigal and her belief that games can fix real-life problems.

 

I plan to return to this lecture (and in further blog posts, but if you have any interest in Games and Education (or, Games as Education), the talk is definitely worth while. While you are at it, be sure to check out the Games for Learning Institute.