Okay, okay, this is a hackneyed question, and we've been playing Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego and Where's Mario for years. But an interview with
Will Wright in The Onion made me start thinking about it again. (There is a similarly interesting interview with
Howard Scott Warshaw. It's nice to see that The Onion has added a video games section.)
Wright is the mind behind games like SimCity, SimEarth and, of course, The Sims. I never got into that last one, but I spent much of my childhood playing nearly every Sim game that existed at the time. In hindsight, I realize that most of the concepts in no way resembled my ideas of what a game would include-- I would have never thought that running an ant colony or a skyscraper would be interesting. But as a result of playing these games,I actually learned a lot about them.
After reading the interview with Wright, I now realize this might have been one of the games' purposes. He says that most of his ideas for games are based on some natural or social process that intrigues him, that he wants to teach other people about. This is the reason I became a journalist and why I want to be a teacher... it is also a reason why I am interested in metaphors. Wright's remark reminded me of something Adam Hochschild said when he was here -- he said an important park of being a good journalist or nonfiction author was allowing yourself to become obsessed with a subject, then figuring out *why* you were obsessed, then using that feeling to construct a narrative. It sounds like Wright does a similar thing with games.
Anyway, I would argue that "simulation" games like SimAnt and SimTower teach us much more than "trivia" games like Carmen Sandiego. (Where does Oregon Trail lie? It's not open-ended enough to be a sim or even an RPG...) The games would seem to promote a nontraditional philosophy of education, though, maybe something closer to
Montessori. It's much harder to stick to any sort of lesson plan. After all, you don't *have* to learn about urban planning principles when you play SimCity-- you can just destroy New York again and again and again. Still, I feel like students would learn more -- or at least learn how to learn more -- if we had played SimCity instead of, say, Algeblaster.
Another interesting question is how these games can be used to teach history. This doesn't seem like an obvious application -- social and natural processes are easily adapted to models, whereas history is notoriously difficult to model, and it is particularly important than things went one way and not the hundreds of other possible ones. Yet one of the problems with contemporary history education is we don't emphasize contingency, the idea that history could have gone a different way. (People always bring up
Harry Turtledove when I talk about this, but I'd prefer a more sophisticated approach.) There are a few examples, like this BBC simultion of the
Battle of Hastings, which would be good for individual lessons. But what could approach the dynamism of the Sim games?
There have always been games like Civilization, one of my personal favorites. But I have never thought that Civ (or even games with a smaller historical frame, like Caesar) were good historical models. Civ, for example, overemphasizes the importance of technology. It doesn't do a very good job of teaching contingency, as there are fairly simple strategies for winning and, unlike the Sim games, winning is defined (even if there are a few different ways of doing it). A better example from the Sid Meier line might be Railroad Tycoon-- now that I am studying the history of railroads a bit, it seems right on. Another good one is Aerobiz, which is like Railroad Tycoon for the skies. But the problem with all these games is that they put you in the role of god, the general, the ruler, the CEO. This isn't a good way to think about history, especially social history.
A better model might be the RPG (role-playing game). Another game I played a lot as a kid was Uncharted Waters: New Horizons. This game was set during the 16th century-- the "Age of Exploration." You could be an explorer, pirate or merchant. While you had a lot of control over what your ship or character was doing at any given moment, you still had to react to real historical events like the Spanish Armada. Most of what you learned from the game wasn't names and dates, though, but what it might have actually been like to be a 16th-century navigator. So maybe that's a better model for teaching what history would have been like for normal people.
I've about thought myself out on this one... perhapse more later...
