 | Readers respond to SirlinFebruary 28th, 2006 |
Gamasutra is posting the letters they got in response to Dave Sirlin’s Soapbox on WoW.
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Reader Comments
I’m surprised that nobody has described how teaching differs from learning, and how education differs from entertainment. I don’t find these discussions particularly insightful or useful when solid definitions for subject keywords are not understood and/or provided.
World of Warcraft is not what would be classfied as an educational or Serious Game. World of Warcraft is a platform for a subscription-driven interactive entertainment service. In consideration of this fact, proper logic suggests that the design of the subscription service correctly consumes play time for the purpose of increasing the longevity of subscriptions. This is the business model that Blizzard Entertainment decided to apply to World of Warcraft, and they have for the most part, succeeded.
Clearly, business models heavily influence the design of MMOG platforms. Instead of arguing the mechanics of individual titles, perhaps a more useful discussion would be more focused on the SWOT of past, current, and future business models for the MMOG platform?
Morgan, I think that the basic premise of the discussion is that “all entertainment carries with it implicit lessons, biases, and morals, whether or not these are intended.” This is certainly something I strongly agree with, particularly given that I defined “fun” in games as a reward for a particular sort of learning.
In other words, all games are educational to some extent, but we often do not think about what they are teaching us.
I quite agree on your points about business model and so on, but I think that business model, design, and even the lessons taught are tightly intertwined. I agree that a SWOT of the current market and possible future titles would be a fun blog post though.
In my view, Raph, games that are marketed as entertainment titles do not teach players implicit lessons, biases, and/or morals. Players can extrapolate content from the game and personally engineer lessons, biases, and/or morals; however, what is learned in this manner is dependent on the player’s experiences inside and outside the game world.
I perceive teaching as the act of providing the environment and effective direction necessary for an audience to learn arbitrary or specific and measurable material. To clarify, the communication cycle flows from sender to recipient who responds to the sender with feedback. If the recipient does not provide feedback to the sender, then communication has failed. In this context, when an edutainment title or serious game provides the environment and direction for the audience to learn and the audience either does not accept the material or inferences a lesson, bias, and/or moral not intended by the design, then the game can be faulted with the failure to teach. Contrastedly, if an entertainment title provides an environment to play, and the players inference real-world lessons, biases, and/or morals from the content, then the players must be faulted with out-of-context learning. Controlling thought isn’t a third-party responsibility, and in most cases, such third-party control would be considered malicious.
I understand that the act of play is a method of learning; however, play is not explicitly educational or serious. World of Warcraft does not teach real-world lessons, biases, and/or morals because World of Warcraft, like most virtual worlds provided on the MMOG platform, are neither designed nor marketed as edutainment or serious games. (We can also learn through habit; hence, my conclusion is that designers should strive to eliminate boring and/or repetitive user interaction that contributes little or no entertainment value since many habits formed through boredom (e.g., eating) and sometimes pure repetition (e.g., smoking tobacco) are not necessarily good habits to learn.)
Game designers should think critically about their game design in order to attempt to extrapolate from the game content what a player might, and perhaps even to increase or reduce possible lessons, biases, and/or morals; however, I think we would only waste time and effort on attempting to eliminate the possibility of players learning from entertainment. Only a deity could modify our cognition to disable our ability to personally engineer arbitrary constructs…
I have given some thought to this over the last week and have come to believe learning from games is very much player dependant.
I can certainly see a relatively high degree of learning in the teen demographic.
For ah.. ‘older’ folks like me, I think it approaches zero.
YMMV
Morgan,
If we speak really rigorously about it, I believe that all games do in fact teach (using your term here) very specific concrete lessons that are embodied in the hard mathematics of the mechanics. I talk about that more in the book, but by and large they teach things like odds, topologies, graph bavigation, game theory, and that sort of thing. I think all games teach those things, always, even if regarded as entertainment. That is what they do, it’s what they are for: training players to recognize complex patterns, and training them how to adjust those patterns towards a desired outcome.
Of the various sorts of lessons that are tossed around in Dave’s article and my lament, just about none of them are actually that sort of thing. 
Instead, the discussion in those is about whether the right choices were made in terms of which game systems (and therefore which mathematical models) to include. In the whole “group or die” case, it’s the choice to have only models that require multiple attackers, versus having models that allow single attackers to succeed. Dave argues that a point is being made by only offering the models that only succeed with multiple attackers, that by omission, Blizzard is advocating a worldview.
I think that goes a bit too far; I agree that subtle advocacy can be done based on what models are presented (and have frequently talked about our need to think about those things more carefully), but at the same time, there’s always other games, and players know it, and therefore those lessons can be found elsewhere.
Other than semantic quibbles, though, I think we’re on the same page…
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