[...] Raph’s Website » Slate surveys serious games Koster reacts to the Slate article on serious games and thinks the future is less bleak than they describe. (tags: gamedesign RaphKoster seriousgames gaming games play) [...]

[...] is a maxim I hear frequently in the serious games circles, most recently repeated by Tim Holt in a discussion of the Slate article on Raph Koster’s website. Says [...]

[...] is a maxim I hear frequently in the serious games circles, most recently repeated by Tim Holt in a discussion of the Slate article on Raph Koster’s website. Says [...]

[...] Slate had an article yesterday on educational video games that I think serves as a pretty good high-level survey of the ongoing discussion right now, especially since it pointed to Koster’s key point from some time ago that adding an artificial incentive to perform an educational activity isn’t very effective but requiring learning in order to achieve a genuinely interesting goal does. (Koster responds directly to Slate’s article here.) [...]

Of course, I don’t feel that way at all. I feel that technology is merely another tool for teaching, and the most important tipping point in learning is the quality of the instructor.

When people analyze games and whether they’re “fun” or “boring”, those are somewhat subjective assessments. I don’t think the success of serious games solely depends on “fun”. I think the success of games in education, like most technology tools, will depend on the quality of the instructor at least as much as the “fun factor” of the game.

I’ve always found that a good professor will enable me to learn about a subject that I previously found uninteresting or too dense. If a game is used properly within the context of the class, it doesn’t have to be as exciting as Half-Life. I think this focus on “boring” versus “fun” obscures the fact that a good instructor will always seek ways to engage their students. I don’t have too many professors asking me for the most boring way to present 19th century art history to their students.

[...] Don't Compare These Games to “Civilization”   [...]

I said this on Slate and will repeat it here: These games are boring – how is that going to help anyone?

Learning needs to be fun and interesting. A dry, academic paper written on global warming doesn’t nearly have the same effect as An Inconvenient Truth, for example.

And despite the fallacies and misrepresentations in that film, it achieved it’s goal of getting people and politicians talking about Climate Change.

I appreciate the fact that you’re making serious games, and the analogy between docos and regular movies may be apt, but not all docos are boring.

When people talk about your games, they just talk about how boring they are. Not the same thing.

I’ll go further and say with your games you’re just preaching to the converted. Who’s going to play a game that deals with the FDA apart from those who 1) know what the FDA is and 2) knows what it does anyway?

Who’s going to play the games apart from those with the same position as you if the game has no other draw apart from the dry topics? It’s like reading New Internationalist Magazine – you know what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it before reading the content.

Prokofy Neva:
Most games put a “world view” over you, whether you realise it or not. Take a look at any First Person Shooter game to get the US military ‘might is right’ world view for example.

I’d go far to say even a game as seemingly innocuous as Civilization posts a western christian ideal of what constitutes a ‘good society’.

I could go on but this is a topic for greater discussion.

[...] 06-27-2007, 6:35 PM # Reply (the following is a synthesis of comments I made on Raph Koster’s website and on one of my own, which the Slate editors suggested I post here) I was sort of honored to have [...]

[...] criticisms leveled by Peters. He outlined his stance in a nice discussion over at Raph Koster’s blog, then left a general summary on the comments section of the Slate [...]