I always feel a twinge of unease when I think about games for learning. Part of it is my Puritan streak — anything that is fun is a bit suspicious, and vice versa — anything that is valuable will be a bit difficult and painful. I know this is off-base, but it hits me when I am least expecting it.
The other part of it is my husband’s philosophical attitude about the value of a game. Ultimately, a game is a liberal pursuit. It should not be FOR something. It ought to be good in itself, though liberal pursuits ought to have indirect benefits for the person involved in them — formative or other benefits. So the object of a good game of tennis is sheerly the good game of tennis, but in the process of wholehearted engagement you also provide yourself with aerobic benefits and improved hand-eye coordination, comradeship with your teammates and opponents, etc. On the opposite notes, you know the dreary Victorian “morally improving” stories for children. Story is used to teach some kind of moral lesson. Thereby, the story and the moral are both damaged and trivialized. It can be the same with an “educational game” or “educational toy”. You end up with something that is neither very educational NOR very fun.
However, recently I have been trying to let go of these reflexive instincts thinking that there may be a real place for games in learning. After all, in Latin, the word “schola” itself originally meant both “leisure, spare time” and “school” and “ludus” meant again, both “game” and “school”. I think the philosophy behind this (being brief and simplistic here) is that education and learning in the liberal sense is about something done out of a surplus, best done in a enjoyable, exploratory spirit rather than out of fear or gritty necessity.
Melissa Wiley has put a list of games on her website as a “curriculum for unschoolers”. If you can get past the word “curriculum” (a word that usually depresses me a bit) there are some valuable resources that move past my concern about mingling “education” and “game”. The ones I know are fun in their own right and also benefit the person who is playing them.
On a rather more trivial level, I have been using the grade level skills games here as a starting point or consolidation for some academic-type skills. The page goes from kindergarten to 8th grade and classifies online games and resources against conventional standards of learning. Some of the games are better constructed than others. I think it is in some ways an advantage that some of the games have design flaws in them. My husband learned a lot of his game design sense from the simplistic games in the quarter arcades (remember those?) and the primitive mainframe type games back in the ancient days before PCs. I think it is harder nowadays for beginner programmers to see the individual elements in a very sophisticated, multi-level game such as the ones published by the big game companies nowadays. What often happens is that the high school or college age novice game designer can only think in terms of grand design and sophistication which he is at that stage incapable of actually implementing.
Since our home is in effect a laboratory for game design (my husband works at home as a freelance game designer and implementer, and includes us all in his thinking and working process) I have been thinking it’s good that my kids get experience working with and critiquing a variety of game types.
My ten year old has been enjoying online mad libs. Here are Wacky Web Tales and he also likes Create Your Own Adventure . He does them for fun. I am thinking that these very simple online games are roughly equivalent to the kinds of word puzzles and paper games that I used to do sometimes as a child. I always thought that they, along with lots of reading and music at home, gave me a good grounding in academics once I got to school. In fact, the thrill I get from memorizing those Latin paradigms now is somewhat the same as the fun I had back then completing a crossword. Not that that was what I was doing it FOR. But it was a side benefit : )
