I have a love/hate relationship with outreach events. I love them because most of my work is public-facing but done behind a curtain, so getting direct feedback from the people using my work is always nice. I hate them because you have to be on your tiptoes for hours on end, never knowing what’s next and if anything is about to go catastrophically wrong – or right!

Me setting up the "corner of boring video games" at Science4All.

There have been several such moments during Science4All 2023, where I was exhibiting my little corner of “boring video games” with the rest of my lab. Three things stuck with me.

  1. That guy that glanced at the title screen of “Cash or Card?“, went «I’ve already had a shop and it’s already failed,» and ran away. OK buddy. Sorry your shop failed. Not my fault. Had I been quicker, I’d have asked him to take my survey anyway.
  2. That kid who sat down to play and proudly declared «I’m going to have everyone pay by cash so that the bank doesn’t steal all my money!» At the end of they day he went to deposit his hard-earned cash into the bank «so I lower my risk of robbery.» I then proceeded to point out that his bank deposit wasn’t free and that the bank took a fee, and his face dropped as he was babbling something along the lines of «but… but… but… I thought…» Suffice to say he drastically changed his strategy and went on to victory!
  3. Kids in the age rage of about 8 to 13 were fiercely more passionate about the game than their 13-19 peers, and way more than other adults. It is true that this particular event is mainly done for kids, so any chance they get to be hands-on, they’ll take it. But I was still a bit taken aback by the enthusiasm! At this point I’m not even sure that “they’ll play anything that looks like a game” is not true!

A few considerations are in order. On the kid from point 2, I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one of his parents or relatives owned a shop or had to otherwise handle payments, and exposed him to a way too common anti-electronic-payments rhetoric which he sucked up like a sponge and parroted back with limited understanding. Kids are definitely not stupid, but neither they are the most proficient critical thinkers when it comes to information descended from a figure they perceive as authoritative even if it is not. Which is sadly not too different from what happens with adults anyway, and a very good reason for more research on educational video games. More on this later.

Still on point 2, the cash deposit fees in the game are computed more or less randomly based on limited data I found online and from my personal experience. Many banks have cash deposit fees if you go to a human teller, but some also have ATMs that handle cash deposits, typically for free, so applying a random fee to all the deposits in the game is not necessarily realistic. However, if you consider a mix of non-zero fees and account fees, the approximation of a fee randomly chosen between 2 and 4% is more or less realistic at the end of the year. All in all, in Italy it’s still very hard to find a basic bank account that costs nothing. If you are lucky, you can zero the costs if you meet certain conditions – like, pay in a certain amount, and have a certain number of direct debits per month – and despite this the bank is still required to pay a small annual tax which they’ll be damned if they don’t pass it on to their customers.

“Better” video games

One adult I had a pleasant chat with stated the obvious: «they already play video games a lot, and taking them away is useless and counter-productive, so might as well make better video games, right?» Yes, you are right. This adult was impressed with the fact that someone was doing this kind of work, but wasn’t entirely impressed with “Cash or Card?” – although they were quite impressed with their kids interest in the game, which frankly flabbergasted us both.

It’s conversations like these, and countless others I’ve had, both on- and offline, that remind me of the importance of doing this kind of work – and doing it in the rigorous framework of academic research. Yet, the sad truth that emerged during the Science4All day is that video games still carry a lot of stigma in 2023 – although fortunately the times, they are a-changin’. One could chalk this up to people not being up to speed with the latest trends, the latest research, and the marvelous world of indie games. But let’s be honest: if all they have is their outsider’s perspective of seeing kids spending hours on the latest trendy first-person shooter, or on the most frivolous aspects of Minecraft, it’s hard for them to imagine that the medium can give them more than a few hours of mindless distraction. And it’s even harder for adults to imagine their role as video game players instead of confused spectators, and to imagine what they can gain from playing video games.

Going forward

I come to this point one month from the end of my first of two years of funding on this project, so I feel like I have to evaluate where I am and where I am going from here – and what are the chances of grabbing more funding, or having to find a “real” job in a year’s time 🙂

The plan has changed quite a bit from what I proposed in my original MSCA application, and that’s fine. If we knew everything in advance, the work we do wouldn’t be as interesting and challenging. At this point, I was planning on having a game out, experimental data collected, a paper out, and be working on the next iteration. Save for the experimental data – more on that later – I have a game out and I have a paper out, which is great news. It’s just that the game was not developed in the way I hoped for within this project, and the paper is a good paper but not about the game.

However, as one attendee to the GoodIT conference said, «and what are you teaching us? That educational games suck?» so which I replied «yes» with all the gravitas I could impart to it on the implication that sometimes, in research, we have to the obvious because no-one had done it yet. I’m not sure I conveyed the message, but I made sure to let them know that a game prototype was coming out shortly.

Going forward: The Next Iteration

And as far as the next iteration, that plan has changed a bit too. I have a proof of concept, but I haven’t worked with educators nor game designers on it, which is kind-of the whole point of this project. To be perfectly honest, “Cash or Card?” started out as my own frustration vent about the insistence of some shop keepers of demanding cash payments despite the law in Italy saying they have to accept electronic payments too. The subject is complex and it’s not worth going into here. By the start of summer, I had enough of people claiming that the fees were too much or that the card machine was broken or offline, so I decided to run a simulation to see how bad it was. Spoiler: it wasn’t. Considering that it is possible these days to take out contracts with very low fees – bordering on zero, sometimes – I just went ahead and made the game. I gathered a roughly realistic estimate of the costs, and turned my simulation into a “Papers, Please” inspired game.

In all this, I had to wear three hats: the domain expert, in gathering the fundamentals to make the game feel plausible; the game designer, in making the game challenging and engaging enough – I’m not sure I achieved that but hey; and the researcher, in collecting behavioral data and feedback from the players. Being a technologist and a researcher, I think I did an OK job, but the game could have turned out better. It definitely feels like a lecture, and doesn’t have very much of a replay value – although early feedback from Science4All attendees was mildly encouraging.

Going forward: The Struggle

I keep saying to anyone who listens that the next step in the project will be gathering educators and taking their perspective, expertise, hopes, and wishes, and the step after that would be to involve game designers, sit everyone in the same room, and produce at least one game at least vaguely related to the theme of disinformation. I have already started reaching out to educators and I got some decent feedback, but I am struggling to get and sustain enough attention and momentum – and with educators, they’ve got plenty other things to do and a hard enough job without having to work with me! 😬

The other issue is that there are very few and very small incentives to make educational video games. There isn’t enough money to entice game developers, and there isn’t enough expertise to turn educational content into good games. I often hear that «educational video games are sold to parents and teachers, not to players» and that would be the reason for why these games suck. I’ve never played any of the titles by Humongous Entertainment, but I hear they were very much appreciated by players, so there must be ways of making games that don’t suck – I just don’t know what they are, and I’ll never repeat this enough: I need the help of game designers and educators to figure it out.

Going forward: The Call To Action

Get in touch!

  • If you are an educator, not necessarily a school teacher, and/or a domain expert, and especially if you already use video games as part of your work, I want to know how you use them, what games you use, and how they benefit your work. I want to know what you wish educational video games would be like and what they could teach, and I want to help you make your dream edugame. But most importantly: let’s have a chat!
  • If you are a (video) game designer, I promise there is a lot you can get from this project, and a lot you can contribute! I want to make educational video games for players, not for their parents or teachers! Actually, I also want to make them for their parents, their teachers, and their grandparents too – but as players, not as parents, teachers, or grandparents. Disinformation is something we are all exposed to, and we are even more at risk of falling victim to it once we leave school and hit the road, so finding ways of incorporating bits of “vaccine” into everyday life is a great way of promoting lifelong learning, and that requires replayability and continual engagement. I’m sure you know something about these, right?
  • If you are a (video) game researcher, I want to learn how you evaluate educational video games, their efficacy, their entertainment value, and everything there is to learn to make sure we don’t just let new games fall flat on their bellies. Educators and game designers want to get feedback after they pour their precious time and expertise into a project, and we are uniquely placed to help with that.

I want us all to sit in the same room – or in the same conference call at least! – and bring out our best ideas to create, use, and evaluate “better” educational video games. I want us to learn things from each others, and I want us to distill what we learn in practice, development, and evaluation guidelines to help us make more, and “better,” educational video games. Whatever “better” means.

If you are interested, you’ll find more information here, or get in touch! 🙂

Bonus track – or how things can go catastrophically wrong

And now for some light entertainment and lessons harshly learned!

If you went through the source code for “Cash or Card?” you might have noticed some amount of data collection. Just to be clear, no personally identifying information (PII) is collected at all, just action logs of pretty much everything that happens during a game along with an anonymous ID to tie a game together. I set the game up to log events to a CouchDB server I host on my VPS  – the same VPS on which this web site is hosted – so I know that the data aren’t leaving my control. And I also set up a very simple visit counter with Matomo – also hosted on my server, just in case.

The problem is that I tested everything thoroughly running the project from the Godot editor, but never thought of testing it while deployed online. I chose to deploy the game online so I could have people scan a QR code and bring the game home on their phones, and the idea worked fairly well as far as I could see with my own eyes.

As far as I can see through the logs: no idea. Having misconfigured my CORS headers, the logging code wasn’t able to connect to the CouchDB server because it technically resided on another domain, and so I pretty much lost all the game data from the day. And as far as Matomo goes, it turns out that uBlock Origin is far better than I thought at blocking trackers and so I should at least have disabled it from the browsers I was using on location.

So, I have absolutely no idea how many people played my game on its launch day 😰 No, actually I have a few hints thanks to good old server access logs, but those are hard to parse.

Oh, well.

If you happen to be in Padova, Italy, on the 30th of September, make sure to come around for Science4All, a whole day of scientific public outreach where many researchers and research groups of the University will do their best to showcase the cream of the crop of their research.

And then there will be me, presenting “Cash or Card?” a little game to learn about choices and consequences of using cash or electronic payments in your everyday shopping! I will be somewhere in the students room at the Palazzo del Bo in via VIII Febbraio 2 to answer all your questions, and with a few questions of my own for you if you’ll be so kind to play. I look more or less like in this picture (but less pixelated) and I’ll be sure to have a silly t-shirt.

This will also be an opportunity for players, non-players, parents, educators, and everyone else to discuss the educational role of video games, and how and why they do not have to be of the boring kind we too often see peddled around. I’m very much looking forward to hearing everything you have to say about this, all your concerns, all your ideas, all your wishes and everything else!

Come on in, I can’t promise cookies but I can promise games 🙂

PS The game is also be available online if you won’t be in Padova on the day.

8 September 2023 » Status update

Day 3 of GoodIT done and dusted, some great presentations in the last two sessions that I’ll definitely catch up with. Overall, great experience, great conference, great people! See you in Bremen?

8 September 2023 » Status update

Day 2 of GoodIT was… interesting. New contacts made and a renewed awareness that blockchains will never die soon enough.

6 September 2023 » Status update

Alright, day 1 of GoodIT 2023 done, presentation done, let’s see if I’m still standing for the welcome reception.

I’ve been waiting for someone to write this article for a very long time, but at some point I couldn’t wait any longer so I stepped up and wrote it myself.

I talked a little bit about it in this previous post and the resulting conversations over social media were very informative and enjoyable, so I’m very happy with this.

The article goes into a bit more detail on the literature surrounding video games that can be used as educational interventions, both games made for entertainment and games made for research. The most interesting observation is that there is a lot more research published on the educational applications of entertainment and edutainment video games than there is on video games built for education research. This is interesting but not surprising, though! A so-called COTS1Commercial Off-The-Shelf, not that I like the term but that’s what it is… video game is widely and easily available, and allows for multiple applications, research angles, and hopefully makes it easier for more people to adopt and adapt the methodology developed by others. On the other hand, like with every other piece of software built for research, research video games are harder to obtain, harder to adapt, having been built for one specific purpose, and sometimes even hard to run, as they may be single platform and built in haste with poor attention to code and deployment QA.

I am sure I missed a whole bunch of video games in the article, but going for total representation would have been impossible, and probably not very useful either. I talk about this in the article too.

If you push the link below, you may or may not be able to find the PDF available for download. If you can’t find it, I’m happy to share a pre-print, just ask 😬

—

Andrea Franceschini and Antonio Rodà. 2023. Play to Learn: from Serious Games to just Games. In ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’23), September 06–08, 2023, Lisbon, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3582515.3609525

@inproceedings{10.1145/3582515.3609525,
  author = {Franceschini, Andrea and Rod`{a}, Antonio},
  title = {Play to Learn: From Serious Games to Just Games},
  year = {2023},
  isbn = {9798400701160},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3582515.3609525},
  doi = {10.1145/3582515.3609525},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good},
  pages = {117–127},
  numpages = {11},
  keywords = {entertainment, video games, digital games, serious games},
  location = {Lisbon, Portugal},
  series = {GoodIT '23}
}
  • 1
    Commercial Off-The-Shelf, not that I like the term but that’s what it is…

I try to avoid using the term Serious Games as much as I can, but I can’t escape the fact that this is a term often used when we talk about educational games, though the overlap isn’t always complete. Let’s see what this is all about.

Pandemic (2008) — A cooperative game in which players attempt to kill off four diseases across the world. Photo CC BY-SA 2.0

A “serious game” is broadly defined as “a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment” and many agree that the American researcher Clark C. Abt is responsible for coming up with the term and formalizing the concept as known and used in modern times.

While this is true, the notion that play can be for more than entertainment is an not a new one. In fact, there’s a quote from Plato’s Laws that’s going around in which the Athenian Stranger argues in favour of giving children tools that mimic the function and working of tools used by adults, so that they can begin practicing a future work activity from their early days through play1The only translation I could find freely online doesn’t match the quote I’m seeing going around, but the spirit is intact.. But the idea makes sense even without bothering the classics, and it’s a topic for another day anyway.

These days, a serious game is mainly an educational or instructional video game, but it hasn’t always been the case, it’s just we didn’t use to call The Landlord’s Game a serious game, yet educational it was. For example, Magic: The Gathering and SimCity can both teach you strategy, planning, and resilience in the face of random adverse events because both games exploit the card draw mechanic in which you never know what could happen at any given time, whether your opponent is a human, in the case of MTG, or the game world, in the case of SimCity, but we don’t call these serious games either. More interestingly, in the early days of digital computing, video games were created as part of research, to develop and test new algorithms, improve programming techniques, and as ways to show the public that computers could be fun and interesting, and not scary at all, which is quite serious business if you ask me…

But let’s stick to video games. There came a time, between the 1980s and the 90s, when video games began to be marketed to – and perceived by – the public as toys for children. At the same time, a new type of video game began to emerge: the educational one. I’ve already talked about this and, while there have been some valiant efforts in edutainment video games, there has also been push-back from the playing and non-playing public due to misconceptions and misportrayal of video games, and, generally speaking, educational video games don’t exactly have the best reputation among players. Tacking on the label “serious” to educational video games does nothing but reinforce the idea that this type of video games are not going to be fun but you should play them anyway because “it’s good for you” or, worse, because “teacher says so.” It’s funny that even Clark C. Abt himself couldn’t see any reasons why “serious” games shouldn’t be fun, but hey, here we are.

Let’s play the definitions game

This is where we are: 1. serious games are games; 2. games are generally fun. Both these things are hard to argue against. The way I see it, serious games retain the entertainment aspect of games by virtue of, well, being games, and slap an extra aspect of education on top of that. So, a better definition of serious games should sound more like games that have an extra purpose on top of entertainment.

And let’s not confuse “fun” with “funny” here, or “entertainment” with “mindless enjoyment” or “children’s play” and whatnot, because if we want that no theme should be off-limits from the game medium, then we have to accept that some themes demand to be treated with respect. At the top of the page, I put a photo of a game of Pandemic, a cooperative game where the players try to eradicate a number of infective disease outbreaks around the globe, working together towards several goals such as finding cures and vaccines, deploying medical resources, exchanging knowledge and resources, and so on. I have fun playing Pandemic, but I don’t find it funny. I find it entertaining, but in a challenging way. It makes me appreciate the difficulties of organizing research and development on a new disease and guess what, the game is from 2008, and we are just now coming out of a similar scenario.

The label “serious” can sometimes overshadow these games’ true potential. It may seem superficial but, by removing this distinction, we let serious games take back their place in the gaming space, as products of a medium that can be as informative as they can be entertaining. While we may never get rid of poorly designed educational games, changing the perception of serious games among educators, players, researchers, and game designers should promote more synergy between all these figures, and help produce engaging and entertaining learning experiences that are more effective and better received.

So, can we stop calling serious games “serious?” The better question is whether we should, and the answer is yes. Can we do it? That’s going to take work and a party of willing participants from all the areas of game design and the gaming industry at large, to engage with each other and seek a design and evaluation process that can ensure that entertainment and educational values fit together in the final product, and can be evaluated with rigour for educational effectiveness and engagement value.

Sounds like a quest? Well, get on board! My contact info are all over this place 🙂

—

This post is loosely based on a conference paper that I will present at GoodIT 2023 where I will also co-chair a special track on games. If you happen to be in Lisbon, Portugal, between the 6th and the 8th of September, be sure to get in touch and I’ll be happy to chat! The article will be published as follows, so bookmark it now.

Andrea Franceschini and Antonio Rodà. 2023. Play to Learn: from Serious Games to just Games. In ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’23), September 06–08, 2023, Lisbon, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3582515.3609525

@inproceedings{playtolearn,
  author = {Franceschini, Andrea and Rod\`{a}, Antonio},
  title = {Play to Learn: From Serious Games to Just Games},
  year = {2023},
  isbn = {9798400701160},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3582515.3609525},
  doi = {10.1145/3582515.3609525},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good},
  pages = {117–127},
  numpages = {11},
  keywords = {entertainment, video games, digital games, serious games},
  location = {Lisbon, Portugal},
  series = {GoodIT '23}
}
25 May 2023 » Status update

In writing the article I mention below, I’ve amassed quite a few references and you can find them here.

I sure have not written a lot lately on here but I have been busy! I have successfully proposed a special track on “Games as Entertainment and Educational Instruments” at the ACM 3rd International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’23) which is going to be in Lisbon in September. The call for paper is out and I’m hoping to attract both academics and industry people to create more synergy between the two sides of educational technology and games.

In other news

I lied, I have been writing a lot, just not on here, and boy do I wish I could share this on here, but I’m working on a position paper for this project and, let me tell you, it’s not easy.

An academic literature review is never easy, if only because of the sheer amount of existing literature to sift through — and I have over 170 references between games and literature as of now, and the list is growing. The real problem is that, with every new references, the arguments and points one tries to make shift ever so slightly in a tense game of academic Jenga played against a cat. So, I’m trying a new writing technique: write. Just… write it all out, [citation needed] and all, and the references will come.

Two reasons why this works (for me): first, it’s hard to reason about things in your head and even harder is to organize them, create arguments, and make points while everything keeps bouncing around. Once you take things out of your head and place them in front of your eyes, they stay a lot more still and it’s easier to move them around. Second, if your arguments make sense, chances are someone else out there agrees with you and probably has written about it, so you can take their arguments to support yours, but until you have a clear picture of your own argument, there is no point in drowning in a sea of unrelated references. Caveat: none of this means that you should only pick the references that support your argument. In fact, try to think about counter arguments, make them too, make them make sense on the page, and then find references that support the counter arguments. If your arguments are strong enough, they’ll withstand the assault, and if not… back to Jenga, but at least this time your opponent won’t be a cat 🙂

I made a game!

Well, I didn’t design the game but I made a version of it. The game is called robotfindskitten and it’s considered a “Zen simulation”. The game is simple: you play as robot, your task is to explore a field full of boxes that contain non-kitten items until you find the one that contains kitten. Once you find it, you can start over or quit the game. And what’s best? You can play it online!

robot ready to find kitten

The game was originally written by Leonard Richardson for MS-DOS using ASCII art, and has since received countless re-implementations for various platforms.

This doesn’t look like an educational video game, at least on the surface, but it can teach you three important skills:

  • patience: it may take a bit to find kitten…
  • spatial orientation: most of the playing field is outside of the screen and you need to keep track of where you are
  • memory: so you don’t keep trying the same boxes

and in any case it’s a nice and calming pastime to wind down with from time to time – unless you can’t find kitten, in which case it might become frustrating…

Yes, but why?

At the start of any project, there is a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy to get through – boooring – and this is exactly what I’ve been doing for most of the first two months on this project!

But also, I am hoping to use Godot as my main go-to engine on this project, and I want to learn the basics so I don’t get too delayed when the time comes to do actual work. You can find the source code in my GitHub in case you are interested. So… have fun!

5 January 2023 » Status update

I made a game! New blog at 14:25 GMT+1, see you then!

16 December 2022 » Status update

Mostly doing paperwork at the moment but also exploring the video game making landscape and found a very good review of accessibility in video games.

Hello world!

Making games is hard. Making educational games is also hard. Making educational games that are actually fun to play and keep the players coming back is harder, and I’m here to make them video games – difficulty: nightmare.

Play is real-life practice in a controlled and safe environment, with plenty of opportunities for making mistakes and learning from them, exploring alternative choices and their consequences, and learning all sorts of things. Doesn’t it make sense to combine gaming and education, then? Well, everyone and their cats seem to think so, and there is an endless supply of “educational games”, be they video games, board games, card games, party games, playground games, puzzles, quizzes…! But are they good educational games? Such a small word, so much to unpack.

Setting expectations

Just what can we learn with games? Apparently, a lot, but it helps to set expectations. There are two broad categories of things one can learn: notions and skills. Notions are mostly bits of information, ideas, and concepts that one can acquire and store away to be recalled when necessary. These are the things that Sherlock Holmes loves to store in his carefully curated mind palace, for example the fact that Earth revolves around the Sun. Skills are one’s capacity to do something to any degree of proficiency, for example reading, writing, woodworking, riding motorcycles, or playing a musical instrument. Both notions and skills can be acquired with games, up to a point, though it makes intuitive sense that notions might be a bit easier to embed in a game than skills, if we compare, say, trivia with flying planes.

Notions and skills are equally important but, historically, notions-based educational games have been… let’s just say not very interesting. We’ve all played those games where progress is tied to answering mostly unrelated questions

Maths Gran Prix (1982) – not a good start when you can’t even spell Grand Prix right

or where the educational content is interspersed with mostly unrelated mini-games

Adi Maths (circa 1991) – though I did kind of like this one, mostly because of the quirky alien Adi

or where you mostly die of dysentery because the game is so hard that you can only finish it in rage-mode and by the time you reach Oregon you have forgotten pretty much all the educational content that the game was trying to teach you – but at least you learned how to spell “dysentery”!

The Oregon Trail (1985) – if you get to the end, you might learn a thing or two, or you can just buy ammo and shoot bears

But notions do have a place in educational games. They are crucial in setting the scene, building the world, and creating a narrative foundation to drive the gameplay. Without having to explore the game’s world in painstaking detail to learn how it works, Riven would be a pretty boring game.

Skills are harder than notions to incorporate in gameplay, but their influence on the gameplay itself can be huge, both in terms of mechanics and, more importantly for learning, in terms of immersion and enjoyment, because it isn’t a secret that we learn better when we have fun than when we don’t.

What makes games fun?

Ah, the age-old question, the Holy Grail of game design, a question we’ve been pondering for decades, maybe centuries, who knows? So, being the good researcher that I am, I set out to do a very scientific survey1I also did it on Instagram and Mastodon in case you were wondering… triangulation! (No, I know this isn’t triangulation, don’t murder me please…).

I’ll summarize the results I got so far but I’m still looking for answers so don’t be shy, leave a comment, reply to tweets and toots, everyone’s welcome!

  • Exploration, surprise, finding secrets – A rich world to explore is a world well built, it feels real, living and breathing, not just an empty container to roam in. There’s nothing better than an environment that invites exploration and treasure hunting, and provides interesting and surprising rewards.
  • Customization – Much on the same line, players want to feel that they are part of the game, and that the game is around them. Being able to customize the player, to choose what to wear or use, but also being able to customize some areas of the environment to call home is very important for immersion and willingness to spend time playing the game. While this is more typical for role-playing games, where players build their characters and their lairs to their hearts’ content, a certain degree of customization can be implemented in pretty much any other genre, provided it makes sense.
  • Easy and concise rules – While for some games it makes sense to have hefty rulebooks, and some players might even like that, I suspect the vast majority of gamers don’t want to spend an hour reading through the rules and debate their respective interpretation of each entry before they can start playing. If a game is rule-heavy and there’s no way around that, one should make it possible to learn the rules while playing.
  • Humour – This should be a no brainer, but humour is quite hard to get right and quite easy to screw up. Sometimes, a flat joke is better than no joke, but also a dad joke is way ahead of a bad joke.

The Good Ones

From the examples and list above, one might think that educational games are terrible and we’d be better off just burying the idea in the desert and forget we ever tried. This isn’t true. At all. Humanity managed to churn out a few good educational games, whether intentionally or not2I suspect mostly not but some were definitely intentional – who am I to judge?.

Sandbox games centred on problem solving, planning, and building are probably my personal favourites. Whether the game presents a defined set of goals or lets the player create their own goals, the content and mechanics that leads to achieving these are instrumental in creating a good or bad educational experience.

You can learn quite advanced logic circuits with Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox, open world, (almost) open-ended game where you get to gather resources (planning) to build stuff (problem solving), fight monsters at night for loot, or stay in well-lit indoors for safety, and learn all sorts of notions and skills like electricity and circuits through the vanilla and educational editions, or go wild with countless community mods.

“Yikes! At least no-one died!”

Kerbal Space Program is a space program simulator. You don’t just get to build whacky rockets and see if they fly under the very realistic orbital physics engine where you can practise real-world manoeuvres, you also need to manage the business and scientific sides of a space program, thus learning about experiments and budgeting among other stuff.

“You’re going to get stuck occasionally; it’s a fact“

LittleBigPlanet is a series of puzzle platformers where players can build entire game levels to play by themselves, with friends, and share them online. Building levels is no joke and requires planning, critical thinking, and creativity, and by the end of a gaming session one can feel like they created their own little game by overcoming tons of challenges.

Aperture Science: we do what we must because we can

If Portal and Portal 2 weren’t already brilliant puzzle games to learn and practise spatial reasoning and problem solving in 3D space, Valve went a step ahead with their Perpetual Testing Initiative in which players can build their own test chambers. One thing is to figure out a 3D puzzle that kills you if you fail, a whole other thing is to figure out how to use the (fairly simple) portal mechanics to build challenging and fun rooms.

Democracy 4 – complex socio-political and economic simulator
Papers, Please – play a border agent in a soviet-like dystopia

Critical thinking, information parsing and evaluation, and quick decision making in a fast-paced, ever-changing political and social environment? Check. Democracy (series) and Papers, Please provide all that and more, with the opportunity to explore alternative history and the consequences of actions and choices made by the player. I don’t think I need to say more.

What about the skills?

The games I just listed are only a few good examples of how to embed skills (and notions!) in gameplay so players effectively learn them as they play3And please appreciate my restraint in not mentioning any point-and-click adventure game like the Monkey Island series 😬. When I proposed this project, I proposed to work on the Critical and Computational Thinking skill set. These are often criticized as “too vague” and, to some extent, I agree. Digging out well defined, practical, and teachable and testable skills isn’t always obvious, but there are some “constituent components” that may fit the bill, in the broad areas of literacy, numeracy, and logic. I’ll talk more about these soon, once I have a clearer picture of how I can use these in games, but for now I think it’s important to just state where my motivation for working in this area comes from.

I love conspiracy theories. There, I said it. Not as a conspiracy theorist but as an external observer. I am fascinated by the mental gymnastics required to create and believe in conspiracy theories. But at the same time I am painfully aware of the risks of giving a pass to conspiratorial thinking because “what harm can it do if good ol’ Bob believes NASA faked the moon landings?” Well, let me tell you the harm it can do.

My first draft for this project was somewhat different. It was about teaching and practicing musical concepts with video games. As I was writing it, I was not entirely satisfied with it, and I realized that a good slice of misinformation related to the pandemic we were going through was being spread not by malicious actors but by people in good faith. Misinterpretation of the data, an impaired ability to detect logic flaws in arguments, and a general distrust of expertise that’s been mounting for quite a few years are all contributing factors, to different extents. And so it clicked: what if there was a way of providing people with access to learning and improving basic skills such as maths and logic reasoning, and what if this way was fun and didn’t necessarily require a huge time investment? It just so happens that the EU has tackling online disinformation as part of its digital strategy for the future, so here I am, trying to find out how I can help.

  • 1
    I also did it on Instagram and Mastodon in case you were wondering… triangulation! (No, I know this isn’t triangulation, don’t murder me please…)
  • 2
    I suspect mostly not but some were definitely intentional – who am I to judge?
  • 3
    And please appreciate my restraint in not mentioning any point-and-click adventure game like the Monkey Island series 😬