In class, we discussed some of the benefits of serious games, but I wanted to express my thoughts on how I think using the medium could sometimes limit education on the desired topic. From my understanding, the goal of We Are Chicago is to allow people to experience life through the lens of a teenager struggling with poverty and living in a dangerous area in the South Side of Chicago. In theory, a game like this could help raise attention to address the problems people similar to the game’s protagonist experience. Only once someone knows about and understands a problem can it be addressed. However, I think that a videogame is a challenging platform to tell a story that can raise attention to someone’s day-to-day struggles.
Firstly, a videogame is technologically challenging to create. As evidenced by some people in our class struggling even to run We Are Chicago. If you want a message to reach an audience, the potential audience needs to be able to receive it in the first place. For this to happen in a videogame, it would ideally run on as many platforms and softwares as possible, but at least in my experience, developing something for an additional platform creates a lot of extra work.
Secondly, for a videogame’s message to reach an audience, it actually has to retain that audience for at least a significant portion of its gameplay. Often this can be done through unique gameplay mechanics, but again, can be difficult to implement. Additionally, if the audience is so consumed by the gameplay mechanics, it may risk the message being lost to them. We Are Chicago goes the route of a simpler mechanic: choosing dialogue options. I felt that this mechanic did not add a lot to the story in some situations where the options would be very similar. Of course, I cannot know for certain how important these small differences make without playing out every situation possible. Nevertheless, I personally found myself wanting to experience the story through a different medium like a movie. I think that the same messages can be told in a movie or some video form. Furthermore, it may be less difficult to reach a wider audience because a video can be shown on most platforms without additional legwork for each platform.
Another area where I am curious about is the effects of videogames used for education. It is no surprise that videogames help people learn by making the learning process more enjoyable. I played a lot of games to learn math when I was in lower and middle school, and as a result, math was always my favorite subject. However, once I reached a level of math where I was no longer able to learn through video games, the learning process began to be a much bigger struggle. This thought is purely speculative, but I wonder if I may have been more prepared if I was more used to learning through raw lectures and textbooks. Of course, the case could still be made that a better solution yet, would be to create more games for the higher-level topics that currently do not have any games developed to teach them. Ultimately, the transition from learning through a mix of games and lectures to only lectures and textbooks was difficult, but it is still better for someone to learn a subject through an educational medium that is not available for higher topics than for someone to not learn a subject at all.
I’ve also been thinking about the audience engagement factor of serious and educational games. I agree with you that it’s harder for educational games to retain consumer attention for long periods of time. I think it’s because educational games frequently lack what games need: fun. Obviously, this can be hard to accomplish, especially if the message you are trying to send isn’t fun in nature. I remember when we were discussing Curtain in class and one of the main complaints was that the graphics were overwhelming and took away from the gameplay experience. I wonder if there’s a way to not necessarily make serious games more fun, but more engaging, perhaps through more critical design.
I think that the general opinion of videogames has changed significantly in recent years, particularly in an educational context, which is why I found this post so interesting. I remember that when I was in elementary school, videogames in general had a bad reputation and were often criticised by teachers, even though we actually played games on computers to learn how to type – slightly hypocritical. On the other hand, my brother recently finished elementary school, and his experience was vastly different. He played a variety of games, both at school and for homework, including both academic games and creative games, particularly during COVID19 remote learning. I wonder what caused this mentality change considering videogames, and their increased use in academic environments.
I find myself agreeing with your views on games as an educational medium. As mentioned in class, once you set the goal of the game to be an educational tool- that very classification contradicts the inherit definition of a video game. However, I still think games can still be a vessel to help educate players on different topics. For example, the God of War series taught me more about greek and norse mythology better than most of my classes in school/university. Not because of the narratives, which were probably riddled with numerous historical inaccuracies, but more so the fact that the game was so immersive and entertaining. I found myself naturally curious and wanting got learn more about the context of the game I was a spending so much time playing and it motivated me to learn and research on my own. I think that’s what educational games should focus on, not transforming games to fit in the mold of education, but rather, use them as a tool to help educate the users.