JMoe: The Mastermind

During my work at the GAMBIT Games Lab, the topic of educational games came up. The question was whether or not educational games were a valid genre. That got me thinking, which led to this. My conclusion is that in fact, all games are educational. Some have a more explicit purpose, teaching concepts which are applicable outside the game realm (whether this be games like Number Munchers, Word Munchers, or Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), but any time you are playing a game, you’re learning.

This learning can be quite explicit, when you’re playing a tutorial, which teaches you the game, or it can be much more subtle. When done well, the entire game is a tutorial, and you never notice the guiding hand of the designer. When done poorly, it’s a terrible experience, which neither does a good job teaching, nor does a good job at being a game. I’ll get to more concrete examples in a bit, but first it’s time for a bit of theory.

The idea of learning in games isn’t a new one. Educational games have been around as long as games have. The framework that I intend to use for exploring learning in games however is the joint ideas of active and critical learning. Active learning is learning how to play the game. Critical learning is applying what you’ve learned about the game to change it. Now, that’s an oversimplification, but it’s good enough for what I’m going to explain. Onto the examples.

The best example of learning in a game that I can cite is Portal. The entire game is more or less one massive tutorial. They’re teaching you both how to think with portals, and also how to know when to apply your knowledge. The developer commentary in Portal is wonderful, and it’s an example of just how concious of this the developers were. From the very start of the game, you’re learning how to play it. The first level requires you to put a block on a button. From there, you know when you see a large floor button, you need to find something to push it.

That’s the key to learning in Portal. You learn how to solve a problem (place block on button) but you also learn the design cues to know when to apply what you’ve learned. That’s active learning, and in some ways critical learning. The real test of critical learning shows up in fans creating new levels for Portal. When people have played the game, and learned the design cues of Portal, they are able to create new levels (assuming they can navigate Hammer, the level editor, but that’s a different problem altogether) that use those same design cues, and even introduce new ones. That’s the ultimate level of understanding a game. When you know enough about the systems to modify and extend it. Portal does this wonderfully.

On the other hand, a game that did this horribly is Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. The tutorial mission for the game was 25-30 minutes long, which is several levels in Portal, and only taught the bare basics of the game. It included needless repetition of tasks (I built one mass extractor, I get what to do, why do I need to wait for my guy to lumber around and build more?) and at best a superficial explanation of the mechanics. The economy in Supreme Commander is somewhat complicated, with both rates of production and resource consumption, and stockpiles of the resources. The tutorial glosses these over, simply pointing out the UI element that displays them, without explaining what it means. Having played Supreme Commander, I understood the concepts, but it was disappointing. The tutorial also ignored several of the most important features of Supreme Commander. The ability to queue up commands was completely ignored, which is one of the keys to successfully managing a base in the game.

Coming out of the tutorial of Supreme Commander, I felt able to play the game, at the most superficial of levels. I could move around the map, and build things, but I didn’t understand a lot of the systems. Things like researching technology, and upgrading, which are important parts of the game, weren’t even covered. However, that is probably a good thing, since the tutorial was already far too long.

Those are just two examples of learning in games, but I’m sure you can look at any game that you’ve played, and see the ways it teaches you. Even tetris, a very simple game, is educational. It’s all about learning how the different pieces fit together, and ways to optimize how you stack them. That’s why I say that the debate about educational games is hardly worth having. All games are educational.