Games and Learning

According to an article in today's (2/10) New York Times Circuits, on an average day over 200,000 people are playing in the on line World of War craft. And these are players over 13 -- maybe not adults, but not 7 year olds either. My 13 year old son is regularly playing in the on line version of Halo 2. And through the headset system he can talk to, and hear the other players talking. He's played with people from China, Texas, Ireland, Iran, but the English are his favorites -- loves the accent. Other on line games, such as the SIMS, have their own followings with hundreds of thousands of players.

The SIMS are going to college, but is college going to the SIMS? It seems that the role of games and game environments is something we'll need to deal with in higher ed over the next 10 years.

We are certainly moving towards a teaching environment that is much more heavily technology dependent. In another article in yesterday's Times (2/9), on the front page, they told to story of a high school in Branson, Colorado, a town of just 77 people, who now have over 1,000 student registered in their online school. The state pays them almost $6 million a year for educating these students. There are many similar example around the country of the popularity of online learning opportunities.

There is a great presentation from IT Conversations on the role of games in education. The speakers are Jaron Lanier is the Founder of VPL Research and Advisor to the National Tele-Immersion Initiative and Will Wright a Co-Founder of Maxis; and Creator of Sim City. Actually the title of the talk is Interface, or something like that. But they raise a lot of good point about game play and its role in education. For instance they introduce the idea that experiencing a virtual world makes you hungrier for real-world experiences. As complex as they are getting, virtual worlds are still a poor imitation of reality. But they also offer a safe environment, where failure have little actual consequence, to experience and explore new ideas.

I don't think games or a game environment will take over online education. But as we move in this direction we need to work towards understanding how games work, and how they can be added to our "tool box" of resources that make up the overall virtual classroom.

Some other resources:

Gamasutra
Serious Games Summit
GameMaker