I wrote this piece way back in August of 2008, during my early years with video game site Nintendojo, on the relationship between gaming and education. Like many articles, the march of technology makes many of my comments at the time seem vintage. Also, because of the age of the article, some of the links are broken; nevertheless, I present it as is. The original link (hopefully) can be found here.
Cerebral Gamer: Games and Education
It’s mid-August, which means that schools are either back into session or will be in short order. (Gone, for the most part, are the days of schools that started after Labor Day.) Lazy summer days filled with bike rides, trips to the water park, mundane summer jobs, and twelve consecutive hours of Grand Theft Auto IV are now history, displaced by daily allotments of math, English, science, social studies, and a healthy sprinkling of electives. Of course, since the average age of a gamer is 35 years old, we also suspect that more than a few teachers only reluctantly gave up controller time for a return to the daily grind of chasing children.
Gaming seems a popular target for false dichotomies, including hardcore or casual, gaming or art, and even gaming or God. The notion that gaming and education are somehow mutually exclusive is a fallacious but common belief in our country, especially among parents. This is sadly reflected in politicians who in one breath seek to ban games they know nothing about, while in the next seek to control an educational system they know nothing about — that’s how sloppy Minnesota game bans and myopic education legislation like No Child Left Behind get passed. Gaming, though, is not antithetical to the larger business of learning. In fact, video games are relevant to education on a variety of levels.
Some of them, like “edutainment,” are more obvious. Older gamers no doubt recall Donkey Kong Jr. Math on NES, the Carmen Sandiego franchise, or the immortal Oregon Trail with its parade of forts and typhoid fever. More recently, the rise of causal gaming has fueled a surge in edutainment that includes Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree and New York Times Crossroads. A few companies have even tried their hand at action-adventure edutainment; Tabula Digita mixes first-person shooting and multiplayer combat with math, with the end result proving more effective than traditional instruction. The Army has similarly followed suit; America’s Army is designed to be an introduction to the realities of military life.
Less obvious are games which manage to educate without being strictly “edutainment.” In the 1980s, for example, Sierra’s Police Quest was a basic primer in police procedures, while EA’s StarFlight was glimpse into cosmology 101. Many simulation games like Civilization and Age of Empires gave kids valuable lessons in history and geopolitics. (I know teenagers who can describe the Battle of Agincourt simply from playing Age of Empires.) More recently, adventure title The Longest Journey and the FPS hit Deus Ex were forays into the nuanced world of philosophy. Even action titles like God of War borrow from Greek mythology and offer players some incentive to sink into The Iliad.
The life lessons of choices and consequences have become an increasing component of games as well, especially with RPGs. One of the most famous is BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which provides many opportunities to make ethical decisions and consequences that are based on those decisions. To a certain extent, The Sims is a lesson in time management, financial planning, and career choices, while many MMOs (especially older ones like EverQuest) require strong communications skills and — for guild and party leaders — good management skills. At one time, EverQuest was also notorious for its strong death penalties, and while such penalties are largely passé in gaming, they certainly taught EQ users the value of caution and planning ahead.
Gaming has also influenced education in more subtle, indirect ways. Many aspiring computer programmers today — a field America is sorely lacking in — are motivated by the desire to create games like those they’ve played, just as Star Trek raised a generation of NASA staffers. Many teachers have found ways to incorporate Wii and DS in the classroom, whether it be for geography using the Wii Weather Channel globe or language with the Ubisoft’s language games for DS. Even the field of psychology has benefitted from studying the goings-on of gamer culture.
Conclusions:
There was a time when gaming was viewed as sucking the intelligence out of a brain that education had previously put in. I think that this view is erroneous. To be sure, not all games have educational value — not every food is nutritional, either — but games are far more valuable to the educational process than we once thought. This is especially true now, given that the casual market promoted by DS and Wii has opened up new avenues for “non-game” games like word coaches and cooking manuals.
As the game space continues to expand and grow, it seems certain that the educational relevance of many such games will also grow. It’s also quite possible that games may come to play a more prominent role in mainstream education itself, as we’ve already seen with the likes of Oregon Trail in the United States and DS language games in Japan. Any way you look at it, it seems that video games are becoming more and more of a classroom in and of themselves — and the lessons taught are proving worthwhile.