A lot of the ‘educational games’ we played this week, particularly “one-issue” games like Math Soccer, focus on overtly teaching students problems from a narrowly defined issue space. They ask their players to master mental arithmetic, or to memorize a certain trivia answer/question dictionary, and once players have done that, they have the opportunity to effectively become flawless Math Soccer players. The complexity is limited by the games’ mechanics, which are often overtly and disappointingly didactic.
Interestingly, FunBrain also lists chess and sudoku among its offerings. These games have long been used to teach logic and critical thinking, and though I’m skeptical about how effectively they do that, it’s pretty clear that they’re better than nothing. What’s more interesting to me, though, is that games like chess and sudoku have a near-inexhaustible well of difficulty: that is, the learning curve never stops. While it is possible to master, say, Math Soccer, chess and sudoku offer to support players no matter where on the learning curve they are. This was especially obvious this week, when I as a college student was asked to play games designed for children: the games dedicated to teaching children mastery of a very limited and defined content space felt preachy and dull, while the games that were more general and less didactic felt like they still had room for me.
I think that’s mostly a function of the extent to which Math Soccer and the like are overtly didactic. When a game cedes its mechanics to the narrow goal of education, it narrows the extent to which it is educational to within the bounds of those mechanics. When a game obfuscates its educational goals within its mechanics, it unlocks a potential to support educational goals beyond the bounds of those mechanics.
I think you make an excellent point. Throughout the offers of funbrain.com, it seems the game designers weren’t too lazy to come up with something actually fun and engaging: they actively feared it. I expect the logic was that anything too complex and including a learning curve would be inaccessible and scare people off from the true objective: learning. Unfortunately, the unintended consequence was less interest in engaging in the first place.
Nicholas, I totally agree with your conclusion that the designers on FunBrain seem to fear fun or engaging games, but I think the reasoning might be slightly different. The issue here (in my opinion) is really one of marketing. If a parent looking over their child’s shoulder sees them having “too much fun” while playing an educational game, or thinks they’re too caught up in the game aspects to actually learn anything, the parent stops letting their children play those games. So there’s an incentive for the designers of the games to make the educational aspects as visible as possible to the parent over the shoulder. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of any real gameplay or interest for the player of the game. Obviously, this system defeats any possible purpose of a fun educational game, but the existence (and supposed success) of these FunBrain games suggests that this sort of mentality is prevalent and worth marketing to.