I’ve been designing, building, playing and promoting educational games (both digital and non-digital) all my working life. Starting out as a TEFL teacher, games were a huge component of my classes: from number games with little kids to complex role plays with adults. As I began to work more with digital media I started to design games for web and mobile: everything from location-based drawing games to a million-selling multi-level world for kids to learn English. Games provide a unique environment in which students can step out of their everyday persona and try on new ways of thinking and behaving. I’ve never had to think too hard about whether games are a good thing for learning – it’s a no-brainer for me, and should be for anyone with an ounce of common sense.
And yet, for all my tub-thumping about how great games are as a tool for learning, I’ve found myself let down time and time again by the quality of most educational games. A great many of the games and apps that I see and play are, quite frankly, crap. Why is this, and what can we do about it?
Too many educational games are no better than traditional teaching methods
We make educational games for the wrong reasons
Too many games start from the desire to build something cool, to be in an educational technology startup, or from some vaguely conceived idea about fixing a broken educational system with tech. Lots of developers have said to me ‘I’m sick of working in the entertainment industry: I want to make something meaningful.’ Noble that may be, but a lot of the resulting products don’t meet any real learning or teaching need. Too few developers are talking to learners and teachers and trying to understand what problems they really have. Too few developers are testing their ideas and abandoning the ones that don’t work.
Experience tells me there are two routes to making a good educational game: (1) start from the desire to make a great entertainment game, then let teachers and learners adapt it to their needs if they want (Once Upon A Time, Minecraft and Sodaconstructor are great examples of this) [Disclaimer: I work part-time for the agency that designed Sodaconstructor]; (2) start from a real learner need and break this down into learning outcomes which can be met within the game – do your research then test, test and test again (Zondle, Teach Your Monster to Read and Little Digits are just a few examples of this).
We aren’t ambitious enough
Building great apps and online experiences is time consuming and can be very expensive, but a little imagination and resourcefulness can go a long way. I’m tired of seeing flashcard apps and multiple choice quizzes.These simplistic game engines (actually they aren’t really games at all) miss out on all the best features of games – they aren’t immersive, they don’t encourage learning for its own sake, there’s no space for imagination or exploration. If you want some varied inspiration look at Nightzookeeper, Machineers and Timocco.
Students using the Sodaconstructor app
We think we know what learners want
Some people think that a good educational game needs a 50/50 balance of fun and learning, but this isn’t necessarily true. Some kids want exam prep, pure and simple, and they don’t want to shoot fire from a unicorn’s horns in order to get it. If you want to help kids and teachers with their exam prep, talk to them and ask what they want, then make that thing, even if it’s not what you wanted to make – even if what you make isn’t actually a game! In the past I’ve been guilty of sneering at certain types of educational games and apps, only to see learners utterly engaged by them. We all tend to think that we know best – we need to recognise this and check our assumptions.
We work alone
A scene from Pearson’s Our Discovery Island game that shows the value of working collaboratively
It can be very tempting to work alone. I thought that I worked better on my own for years, until Pearson stuck me in a room with Rob Stringer and we made something amazing that neither of us could have made on our own. Educational game designer Shachar Oz thinks you have to have at least three people in your team if you’re going to make a good game, and I can see his point. If you can’t afford to hire anyone else right now then you need to be networking like crazy and making friends in schools or learning communities so that at the very least you know you’re working on something useful and have some means of getting regular feedback on what you’re doing. (You also need to get out and about to stop yourself going bonkers!)
We avoid the meatiest challenges
Too many developers are making games and apps that already exist, or which deal with topics which have already been covered over and over. This makes it harder for consumers to find good ones, and harder for developers to sell them. Unless you’re doing it significantly better, why bother? Games are all about challenge – yet I see a lot of games developers avoiding the challenge of dealing with non fact-based subjects or of creating systems which are open rather than closed.
How do we fix it?
Here are some simple steps to get us all back on the right track:
- Find a real problem to solve
- Test your assumptions
- Design from outcomes
- Challenge learners
- Challenge yourself
- Test, test and test again!
What did I miss? All feedback welcome!
Nice Post. One more thing to think about: use a runtime interoperability specification like TinCan to return outcome data to a learning record store or learning management system. There are not many of them around at the moment that will do much with the data, but hey – someone has to get the ball rolling, and if it isn’t the chicken, then it had better be the egg.
Something else occurs to me after going to another non-games conference (in this case on museums) where people were talking about games, is that there can be bit of a disconnect between these specialist areas where people are making games and the games industry. Frankly, I don’t see many of those people who work on games in the areas of museums or culture, science communication, education and informal learning turning up at more general games events and conferences (some do, but not many).
But I really think anyone interested in games for whatever purpose really needs to be at these events, to see the quality that is out there and that they should be aspiring to and learn from those who have created successful commercial games. I don’t just mean the biggies, such as Develop or GDC, though that would be good. There are plenty of really great, inexpensive games events (gamecamp, wild rumpus etc etc).