6 ms·

I would think Maxis actually tells you the best way to be a success. Maxis doesn't say their games are educational and players don't feel like they're trying to

by c3534l 6y ago

I would think Maxis actually tells you the best way to be a success. Maxis doesn't say their games are educational and players don't feel like they're trying to be. But they were, and Maxis wanted them to be. I've heard Will Wright talk about giving his kids things like microscopes as "toys" that let them play and explore which causes them to sort of learn against their best intentions. If I were to get into the educational software space, I would go the Maxis route of making games for gamers, marketing them as wholesome for all ages, and then having a secret educational agenda. That is, I'd try to straddle the line, and maybe if I were good at it, word of mouth would spread and the school administrators would hear positive feedback from their students and teachers about how engaging the games are. You would essentially have to create your own market since one doesn't exist; you'd create a need administrators don't know they have. Alternatively, you could go Minecraft and hack in education through mods and stuff to existing games kids are already engaged in. But I fully admit as much as I admire Maxis, I don't work in that space and unless I win the lottery I won't be quitting my job to get into educational software any time soon.

ksdale 6y ago
I think the indirect approach is very underrated. Our kids have all learned to read ahead of “schedule” because they wanted to understand what was happening in their games, and they’re all also coming along very quickly at arithmetic because of needing to manage the economy of whatever game they’re playing. As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games like Total War and Close Combat, which aren’t sold as educational at all. I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals, and it’s way easier to give people goals and tools than it is to teach them about tools in the abstract.
- bananamerica 6y ago
  A personal anecdote: I bought my first English dictionary to understand 1992’s Alone in the Dark. I’d probably not be talking with you guys and girls if not for videogames. I had no interest whatsoever in learning English, I just wanted to beat the games. If someone assigned me the very same game for educational purposes, I’d hate it by default.
  - diegoperini 6y ago
    I learned English from Guybrush Trephwood, the mighty pirate.
    - photonemitter 6y ago
      Same here. Early Lucasarts adventure games drove me and my younger brother to learn english as a second language from around the age of 6.
  - marttt 6y ago
    +1, I learned English by playing Leisure Suit Larry I-III [1]. Text adventures were really useful in this regard because you had to type in more or less correct sentences. Also, at the core they were built around dialogues, that is, spoken (=not very formal) language and vocabulary. Al Lowe, lead developer of the Larry series, probably also had some influence on my sense of humor (to this day I prefer grammar-level jokes to kicks-in-the-butt). These games were a great, intellectually twisted, multi-layered introduction to the world of adult people as well. :) Thank you, teacher! 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land_of_the_Lounge_Lizards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land...
  - polytely 6y ago
    I learned English in the MMO Runescape, bartering for items and getting help on quests. I basically never had to study for any English class since primary school because I was always slightly ahead of where the class was due to obsessively playing video games.
  - VSerge 6y ago
    Actual great learning games do exist, but the real awesome ones are rare. See this 2012 thread on a truly awesome algebra learning game, and this stays relevant to this day. To the best of my knowledge, it is still the best and fastest way to learn how to solve an equation for x. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579
    - 6y ago
- ryneandal 6y ago
  > I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum. They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education.
  - vageli 6y ago
    > > I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals > Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum. > They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education. I used to teach and had many kids tell me on their first day that they hated reading and _hated_ writing (with their parents echoing the same). I hold the notion that reading is almost like an automatic process once learned—put a cereal box on the table during dinner and you almost can't avoid reading it. People _want_ to read. Aligning the material with the kid's interests is the surest way to progress. Couple that with writing prompts that are in the same genre and even the parents wouldn't believe that this child who is suddenly consuming a book a week is their own.
    - ksdale 6y ago
      This is great, I had a friend in college who talked this way about reading and it always felt to me like someone saying they don't like to use their eyes to see... Like how do you even have an opinion about reading? It's just a thing that we can do, like breathing... Whether I enjoy a certain reading session depends on what I'm reading, but reading itself is value-neutral.
- GuiA 6y ago
  > I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals What if I told you that (morpheus.jpg) this has been common knowledge in pedagogical research for over half a century now, and that pretty much all attempts of reforming education in the light of that simple fact have failed :(
  - amatic 6y ago
    That sounds very interesting, could you elaborate or provide some links? Aren't there successful 'alternative' school programs?
    - GuiA 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
  - ksdale 6y ago
    This sounds plausible and if I had to hazard a guess as to why efforts at reform have failed, I'd say it's because people who haven't thought very much about the goals of education have an idea in their heads of what education should look like and it is our current system. I think parents and politicians have a lot of control over the system and just like the "butts-in-seats" theory of business management, a lot of people think if kids aren't doing copious amounts of homework, they're not learning anything. We're homeschooling our kids and we track their progress compared to the public school curriculum closely, and we do remarkably little that looks like formal education. The kids are easily on schedule with everything, a year or more ahead of the curriculum benchmarks, but people see what we do, and then ask when we're going to start teaching them stuff.
  - redbar0n 6y ago
    Why do you think it has failed? I rather agree with the quoted statement. I think that, if it is truly that simple fact which has failed, then it is because 'their goals' are in fact put upon them, not innately 'their goals'.* Students will of course not innately want to learn whatever they need to know to pass the exam. But they want to learn whatever they need to know to beat their friends in Fortnite. I think more generally the problem is that pedagogy, as in _instruction_, is fundamentally at odds with _agency_ (which is what games excel at giving people). (Imagine playing a game that would explain to you how to play it at every step of the way. How fun would that be?) It's comes down to control. Who should have it: the teacher, or the student? No classroom setting would ever allow giving _all control_ over to students. Yet, that is what games do. And the wonders that it creates.. The control gives players a really _empowering_ feeling of agency and self-determination. Pedagogy, and instruction, is often more paternalistic / patronizing in its core, since it assumes "You can't do this, let me show you". Games say: "Let's see if you can do this!" * - Education is a way of enforcing society's goals upon the individual (to create "citizens", ideally, but to create "workers", practically), and the individual adapts to it to the extent it helps him later in life, to the level he/she has aspirations and manages to forgo instant gratification.
- XorNot 6y ago
  Civilization 1 was my foundational introduction to world history. I read every single civilopedia tech entry as it came up, and that drove a heck of a lot of follow up reading to find out if what it said was "really real".
  - ksdale 6y ago
    This was exactly my experience too! I wanted to separate out the game narrative from the actual history when I played something like the campaigns in Age of Empires II, and it drove a ton of history reading.
speeder 6y ago
This was the approach of my company ("games" that are secretly educational). Even Maxis itself actually failed, they went bankrupt and EA bought them and ditched their educational games (what remained of Maxis started to just pump out The Sims series one after the other). But unless you are aiming at a really, really wide market, and is either lucky or get exposure help, you won't go far. I noticed for example "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" has a LOT of information about medieval era in the Holy Roman Empire, still they aimed to be a "AAA" game, and the information is tucked inside the in-game manual.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Maxis games are pretty good in that regard; Sim City was probably the most influential in a list of 'management' games, which teach you about economics, revenue vs expenses, and natural disasters; some of its successors / related games like Transport and Roller Coaster Tycoon make that even more apparent. And The Sims simplified, but made me (and probably others) aware of quantified personal needs; you need x amount of sleep per night or you'll accrue 'sleep debt' and distress, you need social contact to fill that meter, etc. Minecraft has an educational mode / version btw, there was one game our son was playing that basically made him go out into the sea and identify various types of sea life. I mean it's all Minecraftified (?) and abstracted, but they do pick up a lot of things from it. I'd still like him to read more books though, given that his language skills are pretty bad.

by c3534l 6y ago

ksdale 6y ago

I think the indirect approach is very underrated. Our kids have all learned to read ahead of “schedule” because they wanted to understand what was happening in their games, and they’re all also coming along very quickly at arithmetic because of needing to manage the economy of whatever game they’re playing. As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games like Total War and Close Combat, which aren’t sold as educational at all. I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals, and it’s way easier to give people goals and tools than it is to teach them about tools in the abstract.

bananamerica 6y ago
A personal anecdote: I bought my first English dictionary to understand 1992’s Alone in the Dark. I’d probably not be talking with you guys and girls if not for videogames. I had no interest whatsoever in learning English, I just wanted to beat the games. If someone assigned me the very same game for educational purposes, I’d hate it by default.
- diegoperini 6y ago
  I learned English from Guybrush Trephwood, the mighty pirate.
  - photonemitter 6y ago
    Same here. Early Lucasarts adventure games drove me and my younger brother to learn english as a second language from around the age of 6.
- marttt 6y ago
  +1, I learned English by playing Leisure Suit Larry I-III [1]. Text adventures were really useful in this regard because you had to type in more or less correct sentences. Also, at the core they were built around dialogues, that is, spoken (=not very formal) language and vocabulary. Al Lowe, lead developer of the Larry series, probably also had some influence on my sense of humor (to this day I prefer grammar-level jokes to kicks-in-the-butt). These games were a great, intellectually twisted, multi-layered introduction to the world of adult people as well. :) Thank you, teacher! 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land_of_the_Lounge_Lizards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land...
- polytely 6y ago
  I learned English in the MMO Runescape, bartering for items and getting help on quests. I basically never had to study for any English class since primary school because I was always slightly ahead of where the class was due to obsessively playing video games.
- VSerge 6y ago
  Actual great learning games do exist, but the real awesome ones are rare. See this 2012 thread on a truly awesome algebra learning game, and this stays relevant to this day. To the best of my knowledge, it is still the best and fastest way to learn how to solve an equation for x. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579
  - 6y ago
ryneandal 6y ago
> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum. They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education.
- vageli 6y ago
  > > I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals > Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum. > They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education. I used to teach and had many kids tell me on their first day that they hated reading and _hated_ writing (with their parents echoing the same). I hold the notion that reading is almost like an automatic process once learned—put a cereal box on the table during dinner and you almost can't avoid reading it. People _want_ to read. Aligning the material with the kid's interests is the surest way to progress. Couple that with writing prompts that are in the same genre and even the parents wouldn't believe that this child who is suddenly consuming a book a week is their own.
  - ksdale 6y ago
    This is great, I had a friend in college who talked this way about reading and it always felt to me like someone saying they don't like to use their eyes to see... Like how do you even have an opinion about reading? It's just a thing that we can do, like breathing... Whether I enjoy a certain reading session depends on what I'm reading, but reading itself is value-neutral.
GuiA 6y ago
> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals What if I told you that (morpheus.jpg) this has been common knowledge in pedagogical research for over half a century now, and that pretty much all attempts of reforming education in the light of that simple fact have failed :(
- amatic 6y ago
  That sounds very interesting, could you elaborate or provide some links? Aren't there successful 'alternative' school programs?
  - GuiA 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_education) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
- ksdale 6y ago
  This sounds plausible and if I had to hazard a guess as to why efforts at reform have failed, I'd say it's because people who haven't thought very much about the goals of education have an idea in their heads of what education should look like and it is our current system. I think parents and politicians have a lot of control over the system and just like the "butts-in-seats" theory of business management, a lot of people think if kids aren't doing copious amounts of homework, they're not learning anything. We're homeschooling our kids and we track their progress compared to the public school curriculum closely, and we do remarkably little that looks like formal education. The kids are easily on schedule with everything, a year or more ahead of the curriculum benchmarks, but people see what we do, and then ask when we're going to start teaching them stuff.
- redbar0n 6y ago
  Why do you think it has failed? I rather agree with the quoted statement. I think that, if it is truly that simple fact which has failed, then it is because 'their goals' are in fact put upon them, not innately 'their goals'.* Students will of course not innately want to learn whatever they need to know to pass the exam. But they want to learn whatever they need to know to beat their friends in Fortnite. I think more generally the problem is that pedagogy, as in _instruction_, is fundamentally at odds with _agency_ (which is what games excel at giving people). (Imagine playing a game that would explain to you how to play it at every step of the way. How fun would that be?) It's comes down to control. Who should have it: the teacher, or the student? No classroom setting would ever allow giving _all control_ over to students. Yet, that is what games do. And the wonders that it creates.. The control gives players a really _empowering_ feeling of agency and self-determination. Pedagogy, and instruction, is often more paternalistic / patronizing in its core, since it assumes "You can't do this, let me show you". Games say: "Let's see if you can do this!" * - Education is a way of enforcing society's goals upon the individual (to create "citizens", ideally, but to create "workers", practically), and the individual adapts to it to the extent it helps him later in life, to the level he/she has aspirations and manages to forgo instant gratification.
XorNot 6y ago
Civilization 1 was my foundational introduction to world history. I read every single civilopedia tech entry as it came up, and that drove a heck of a lot of follow up reading to find out if what it said was "really real".
- ksdale 6y ago
  This was exactly my experience too! I wanted to separate out the game narrative from the actual history when I played something like the campaigns in Age of Empires II, and it drove a ton of history reading.

speeder 6y ago

This was the approach of my company ("games" that are secretly educational). Even Maxis itself actually failed, they went bankrupt and EA bought them and ditched their educational games (what remained of Maxis started to just pump out The Sims series one after the other). But unless you are aiming at a really, really wide market, and is either lucky or get exposure help, you won't go far. I noticed for example "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" has a LOT of information about medieval era in the Holy Roman Empire, still they aimed to be a "AAA" game, and the information is tucked inside the in-game manual.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Maxis games are pretty good in that regard; Sim City was probably the most influential in a list of 'management' games, which teach you about economics, revenue vs expenses, and natural disasters; some of its successors / related games like Transport and Roller Coaster Tycoon make that even more apparent. And The Sims simplified, but made me (and probably others) aware of quantified personal needs; you need x amount of sleep per night or you'll accrue 'sleep debt' and distress, you need social contact to fill that meter, etc. Minecraft has an educational mode / version btw, there was one game our son was playing that basically made him go out into the sea and identify various types of sea life. I mean it's all Minecraftified (?) and abstracted, but they do pick up a lot of things from it. I'd still like him to read more books though, given that his language skills are pretty bad.