I realise it’s a constructed example, but a videogame that would be even remotely accurate in modelling the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as unrealistically ambitious. I would at any rate start out with Easter Island, which at least is a relatively small and closed system.
Another point is that, if you gave the player the same levers that the actual emperors had, it’s not completely clear that the fall could be prevented; but I suppose you could give points on doing better than historically.
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational games could devolve into, instead of “guessing the teacher’s password”, “guessing the model of the game”… but is this a bad thing?
Sure, games about physics should be able to present a reasonably accurate model so that if you understand their model, you end up knowing something about physics… but with history:
actually, what’s the goal of studying history?
if the goal is to do well on tests, we already have a nice model for that, under the name of Anki. Of course, this doesn’t make things really fun, but still.
if we want to make students remember what happened and approximately why (that is, “should be able to write an essay about it”), we can make up an arbitrary, dumb and scripted thing, not even close to a real model, but exhibiting some mechanics that cover the actual reasons. (e.g. if one of the causes would have been “not enough well-trained soldiers”, then make “Level 8 Advanced Phalanx” the thing to build if you want to survive the next wave of attacks.)
if we’d like to see students discover general ideas throughout history, maybe build a game with the same mechanics across multiple levels? (and they also don’t need to be really accurate or realistic.)
and finally, if we want to train historians who could come up with new theories, or replacement emperors to be sent back in time to fix Rome… well, for that we would need a much better model indeed. Which we are unlikely to end up with. But do we need this level in most of the cases?
TL;DR by creating games with wildly unrealistic but textbook-accurate mechanics we are unlikely to train good emperors, but at least students would understand textbook things much more than the current “study, exam, forget” level.
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational games could devolve into, instead of “guessing the teacher’s password”, “guessing the model of the game”… but is this a bad thing?
If what they learned about “evolution” comes from Pokemon, then yes.
Pokemon is an example of what an educational game which doesn’t care about realism could look like. People should be expected to learn the game, not the reality, and that will especially be the case when the game diverges from reality to make it more fun/interesting/memorable. If you decide that the most interesting way to get people to play an interactive version of Charles Darwin collecting specimens is to make him be a trainer that battles those specimens, then it’s likely they will remember best the battles, because those are the most interesting part.
One of the research projects I got to see up close was an educational game about the Chesapeake; if I remember correctly, children got to play as a fish that swum around and ate other fish (and all were species that actually lived in the Chesapeake). If you ate enough other fish, you changed species upwards; if you got eaten, you changed species downwards. In the testing they did afterwards, they discovered that many of the children had incorporated that into their model of how the Chesapeake worked; if a trout eats enough, it becomes a shark.
It’s true that you don’t need a model that lets you form new theories of the downfall of the Empire; but my point is that even the accepted textbook causes would be very hard to model in a way that combines fun, challenge, and even the faintest hint of realism. Take the theory that Rome was brought down partly by climate change; what’s the Emperor supposed to do about it? Impose a carbon tax on goats? Or the theory that it was plagues what did it. Again, what’s the lever that the player can pull here? Or civil wars; what exactly is the player going to do to maintain the loyalty of generals in far-off provinces? At least in this case we begin to approach something you can model in a game. For example, you can have a dynastic system and make family members more loyal; then you have a tradeoff between the more limited recruiting pool of your family, which presumably has fewer military geniuses, versus the larger but less loyal pool of the general population. (I observe in passing that Crusader Kings II does have a loyalty-modelling subsystem of this sort, and it works quite well for its purposes. Actually I would propose that as a history-teaching game you could do a lot worse than CKII. Kaj, you may want to look into it.) Again, suppose the issue was the decline of the smallholder class as a result of the vast slaveholding plantations; to even engage with this you need a whole system for modelling politics, so that you can model the resistance to reform among the upper classes who both benefit by slavery and run most of your empire. Actually this sounds like it could make a good game, but easy to code it ain’t.
It gets even more complicated when these causes interact. A large part of the reason for the decline of smallholders and the rise of vast manors using serfs (slavery was in decline during that period), was the fact that farmers had to turn to the lords for protection from barbarians and roving bandits. The reason there were a lot of marauding bandits is that the armies were to busy fighting over who the next emperor was going to be to do their job of protecting the populace.
Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while heavily stylized and quite frequently diverging from actual history, nevertheless do a pretty good job of conveying the basics of the time period and region.
A big part of education today is memorization. Perhaps it is wrong, but it is going to stay here for a while anyway. And at least partially it is necessary; how else would one learn e.g. a vocabulary of a foreign language?
So while it is great to invent games that teach principles instead of memorization, let’s not forget that there is a ton of low-hanging fruit in making the memorization more pleasant. If we could just take all the memorization of elementary and high school, and turn it into one big cool game, it would probably make the world a much better place. How much resources (especially human resources) do we spend today on forcing the kids to learn things they try to avoid learning? Instead we could just give them a computer game, and leave teachers only with the task of explaining things. Everyone could get today’s high school level education without most of the frustration.
Recently I started using Anki for memorization, and it seems to work great. But I still need some minimum willpower to start it every day. For me that is easy, because with my small amounts of data, I get usually 10-20 questions a day. But if I tried to use it in real time for high-school knowledge, that would be much more. Also, today I know exactly why I am learning, but for a small child it is an externally imposed duty, with uncertain rewards in a very far future. So some additional rewards would be nice.
It could be interesting to make a school where in the morning the students would play some gamified Anki system, and in the afternoon they would work in groups or discuss topics with teachers.
These games already exist for many things, good enough that watching Letsplays of them are probably more efficient than most deliberately educational videos. It’s just finding them and realizing it’s that tricky.
Games relevant to this discussion include Rome: Total War and Kerbal Space Program. Look them up.
Have you played the Portal games? They include lots of things you mention… they introduce how to use the portal gun, for example, not by explaining stuff but giving you a simplified version first… then the full feature set… and then there are all the other things with different physical properties. I can definitely imagine some Portal Advanced game when you’ll actually have to use equations to calculate trajectories.
Nevertheless… I’d really like to be persuaded otherwise, but the ability to read Very Confusing Stuff, without any working model, and make sense of it can’t really be avoided after a while. We can’t really build a game out of every scientific paper, due to the amount of time required to write a game vs. a page of text… (even though I’d love to play games instead of reading papers. And it sounds definitely doable with CS papers. What about a conference accepting games as submissions?)
I’ve played the first Portal game for a bit, and I liked it, but haven’t finished it because puzzle games aren’t that strongly my thing. I wonder whether not liking them much is a benefit or a disadvantage for an edugame designer. :-)
the ability to read Very Confusing Stuff, without any working model, and make sense of it can’t really be avoided after a while
True enough. But I don’t think that very much of education consists of trying to teach this skill in the first place (though one could certainly argue that it should be taught more), and having a solid background in other stuff should make it easier when you do get to that point.
What I found fascinating about Portal is the effort they made in testing the game on players. There is a play-mode with developer commentary (thought perhaps it’s only available after the first play-through) in which they comment on all the details they changed to make sure that the players learned the relevant concepts, that they didn’t forget them and that they have enough hints to solve the puzzle (for example, it’s difficult to make a player look up). It’d be awesome if educational material (not necessarily just edugames) or even whole courses were designed and tested that well.
One point is that while memorizing specific causes of the fall of the roman empire may not be especially useful, acquiring the self-discipline necessary to do this without a game to motivate you might be very useful.
Perhaps, but if the task doesn’t also feel interesting and worthwhile by itself, then we’re effectively teaching kids that much of learning is dull, pointless and tedious, detached from anything that would have any real-world significance, and something that you only do because the people in power force you to. That’s one of the most harmful attitudes that anyone can pick up. Let’s associate learning with something fun and interesting first, and then channel that interest into the ability to self-motivate yourself even without a game later on.
There are many people having thoughts along these lines, I think. Before forging ahead too much on your own it would be worth poking around to see what’s already being done (e.g. Valve started some kind of initiative to get Portal played in schools as part of physics classes or something).
I’ve been writing blog articles on the potential of educational games, which may be of interest to some people here:
Why I’m considering a career in educational games
Videogames will revolutionize school (not necessarily the way you think)
I’d be curious to hear any comments.
I realise it’s a constructed example, but a videogame that would be even remotely accurate in modelling the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire strikes me as unrealistically ambitious. I would at any rate start out with Easter Island, which at least is a relatively small and closed system.
Another point is that, if you gave the player the same levers that the actual emperors had, it’s not completely clear that the fall could be prevented; but I suppose you could give points on doing better than historically.
Do we need a realistic simulation at all? I was thinking about how educational games could devolve into, instead of “guessing the teacher’s password”, “guessing the model of the game”… but is this a bad thing?
Sure, games about physics should be able to present a reasonably accurate model so that if you understand their model, you end up knowing something about physics… but with history:
actually, what’s the goal of studying history?
if the goal is to do well on tests, we already have a nice model for that, under the name of Anki. Of course, this doesn’t make things really fun, but still.
if we want to make students remember what happened and approximately why (that is, “should be able to write an essay about it”), we can make up an arbitrary, dumb and scripted thing, not even close to a real model, but exhibiting some mechanics that cover the actual reasons. (e.g. if one of the causes would have been “not enough well-trained soldiers”, then make “Level 8 Advanced Phalanx” the thing to build if you want to survive the next wave of attacks.)
if we’d like to see students discover general ideas throughout history, maybe build a game with the same mechanics across multiple levels? (and they also don’t need to be really accurate or realistic.)
and finally, if we want to train historians who could come up with new theories, or replacement emperors to be sent back in time to fix Rome… well, for that we would need a much better model indeed. Which we are unlikely to end up with. But do we need this level in most of the cases?
TL;DR by creating games with wildly unrealistic but textbook-accurate mechanics we are unlikely to train good emperors, but at least students would understand textbook things much more than the current “study, exam, forget” level.
If what they learned about “evolution” comes from Pokemon, then yes.
When did Pokemon become an educational game about evolution?
Pokemon is an example of what an educational game which doesn’t care about realism could look like. People should be expected to learn the game, not the reality, and that will especially be the case when the game diverges from reality to make it more fun/interesting/memorable. If you decide that the most interesting way to get people to play an interactive version of Charles Darwin collecting specimens is to make him be a trainer that battles those specimens, then it’s likely they will remember best the battles, because those are the most interesting part.
One of the research projects I got to see up close was an educational game about the Chesapeake; if I remember correctly, children got to play as a fish that swum around and ate other fish (and all were species that actually lived in the Chesapeake). If you ate enough other fish, you changed species upwards; if you got eaten, you changed species downwards. In the testing they did afterwards, they discovered that many of the children had incorporated that into their model of how the Chesapeake worked; if a trout eats enough, it becomes a shark.
I’d like to hear more about that Chesapeake result.
I’m seeing if I can find a copy of their thesis. I’ll share it if I manage to.
The GAMER thesis is here. (Also looking for an official copy.)
The ILL thesis is here.
It’s true that you don’t need a model that lets you form new theories of the downfall of the Empire; but my point is that even the accepted textbook causes would be very hard to model in a way that combines fun, challenge, and even the faintest hint of realism. Take the theory that Rome was brought down partly by climate change; what’s the Emperor supposed to do about it? Impose a carbon tax on goats? Or the theory that it was plagues what did it. Again, what’s the lever that the player can pull here? Or civil wars; what exactly is the player going to do to maintain the loyalty of generals in far-off provinces? At least in this case we begin to approach something you can model in a game. For example, you can have a dynastic system and make family members more loyal; then you have a tradeoff between the more limited recruiting pool of your family, which presumably has fewer military geniuses, versus the larger but less loyal pool of the general population. (I observe in passing that Crusader Kings II does have a loyalty-modelling subsystem of this sort, and it works quite well for its purposes. Actually I would propose that as a history-teaching game you could do a lot worse than CKII. Kaj, you may want to look into it.) Again, suppose the issue was the decline of the smallholder class as a result of the vast slaveholding plantations; to even engage with this you need a whole system for modelling politics, so that you can model the resistance to reform among the upper classes who both benefit by slavery and run most of your empire. Actually this sounds like it could make a good game, but easy to code it ain’t.
It gets even more complicated when these causes interact. A large part of the reason for the decline of smallholders and the rise of vast manors using serfs (slavery was in decline during that period), was the fact that farmers had to turn to the lords for protection from barbarians and roving bandits. The reason there were a lot of marauding bandits is that the armies were to busy fighting over who the next emperor was going to be to do their job of protecting the populace.
Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while heavily stylized and quite frequently diverging from actual history, nevertheless do a pretty good job of conveying the basics of the time period and region.
A big part of education today is memorization. Perhaps it is wrong, but it is going to stay here for a while anyway. And at least partially it is necessary; how else would one learn e.g. a vocabulary of a foreign language?
So while it is great to invent games that teach principles instead of memorization, let’s not forget that there is a ton of low-hanging fruit in making the memorization more pleasant. If we could just take all the memorization of elementary and high school, and turn it into one big cool game, it would probably make the world a much better place. How much resources (especially human resources) do we spend today on forcing the kids to learn things they try to avoid learning? Instead we could just give them a computer game, and leave teachers only with the task of explaining things. Everyone could get today’s high school level education without most of the frustration.
Recently I started using Anki for memorization, and it seems to work great. But I still need some minimum willpower to start it every day. For me that is easy, because with my small amounts of data, I get usually 10-20 questions a day. But if I tried to use it in real time for high-school knowledge, that would be much more. Also, today I know exactly why I am learning, but for a small child it is an externally imposed duty, with uncertain rewards in a very far future. So some additional rewards would be nice.
It could be interesting to make a school where in the morning the students would play some gamified Anki system, and in the afternoon they would work in groups or discuss topics with teachers.
Sure, that’s big too. I just didn’t talk about it as much because everyone else seems to be talking about it already.
These games already exist for many things, good enough that watching Letsplays of them are probably more efficient than most deliberately educational videos. It’s just finding them and realizing it’s that tricky.
Games relevant to this discussion include Rome: Total War and Kerbal Space Program. Look them up.
I think I would really enjoy watching civ 5 lps that simultaneously discuss world history.
That would be super cool.
Yes, these are good examples.
Have you played the Portal games? They include lots of things you mention… they introduce how to use the portal gun, for example, not by explaining stuff but giving you a simplified version first… then the full feature set… and then there are all the other things with different physical properties. I can definitely imagine some Portal Advanced game when you’ll actually have to use equations to calculate trajectories.
Nevertheless… I’d really like to be persuaded otherwise, but the ability to read Very Confusing Stuff, without any working model, and make sense of it can’t really be avoided after a while. We can’t really build a game out of every scientific paper, due to the amount of time required to write a game vs. a page of text… (even though I’d love to play games instead of reading papers. And it sounds definitely doable with CS papers. What about a conference accepting games as submissions?)
I’ve played the first Portal game for a bit, and I liked it, but haven’t finished it because puzzle games aren’t that strongly my thing. I wonder whether not liking them much is a benefit or a disadvantage for an edugame designer. :-)
True enough. But I don’t think that very much of education consists of trying to teach this skill in the first place (though one could certainly argue that it should be taught more), and having a solid background in other stuff should make it easier when you do get to that point.
What I found fascinating about Portal is the effort they made in testing the game on players. There is a play-mode with developer commentary (thought perhaps it’s only available after the first play-through) in which they comment on all the details they changed to make sure that the players learned the relevant concepts, that they didn’t forget them and that they have enough hints to solve the puzzle (for example, it’s difficult to make a player look up). It’d be awesome if educational material (not necessarily just edugames) or even whole courses were designed and tested that well.
Thanks, I saw the developer commentary option but didn’t try it out. Now that you’ve told me what it consists of, I’ll have to check it out.
One point is that while memorizing specific causes of the fall of the roman empire may not be especially useful, acquiring the self-discipline necessary to do this without a game to motivate you might be very useful.
Perhaps, but if the task doesn’t also feel interesting and worthwhile by itself, then we’re effectively teaching kids that much of learning is dull, pointless and tedious, detached from anything that would have any real-world significance, and something that you only do because the people in power force you to. That’s one of the most harmful attitudes that anyone can pick up. Let’s associate learning with something fun and interesting first, and then channel that interest into the ability to self-motivate yourself even without a game later on.
There are many people having thoughts along these lines, I think. Before forging ahead too much on your own it would be worth poking around to see what’s already being done (e.g. Valve started some kind of initiative to get Portal played in schools as part of physics classes or something).