I seem to remember that one of my favorite games as an elementary schooler was Mia’s Big Adventure Collection, an educational game series aimed at elementary school kids to strengthen basic skills: reading, language, science, and math. I played so much of these games that I actually have memories of the story. The Mia Mouse games, as I took to calling them (the playable character is called Mia Mouse), weren’t education pretending to be a game, they were real games. There were full stories, multiple mechanics, exploration, and good characters. They were real videogames, and they were fun.
Since this was my primary experience with educational games, it surprised me to hear people in class complaining that educational games often weren’t fun, or that they didn’t feel like games. I think a common problem is that educational game designers are often too caught up in making the games educational, that they forget that the only way to retain the attention of elementary school children is to get them to have fun. Without fun, an educational game may as well be homework. I think the same can be said for serious games.
Reading through some of this week’s blog posts, it appears that We Are Chicago, while often said to have a good message, didn’t manage to portray that message to the greatest extent because the game just wasn’t fun. The core mechanic, choosing dialogue options, was pretty unengaging. It can work if the content is interesting, but being completely honest, We Are Chicago just didn’t do a good job at telling the story.
If serious games and educational games want to be taken… well, seriously, then they have to learn to be more engaging, more fun. It’s not enough to simply have a message – the message has to be told in an interesting way.
STOP. This screenshot awoke something in me. I had forgotten about it, but I remember spending hours playing this as a kid. I totally agree with you, the storybuilding and spatial narrative was really excellent and I never felt like I was being forced to learn. I felt intrinsically proud when I was able to solve puzzles in the “Mia Mouse game” and I was completely invested because it was so structurally sound in terms of the characters, setting, and plot line. I’m so happy you posted about this I haven’t thought about it in years, but I have lots of fond memories.