The idea of using the
cool modern computer games for serious, particularly
educational purposes is thrilling educators, researchers,
and developers. The genre of learning games has become
a major field of psycho-pedagogical research and quite
certainly those games will play an important and accepted
role in the future educational landscape.
But why is this educational
medium so popular? In the first instance, it is rooted
in the popularity of computer games in general. Computer
games have become the preferred leisure activity;
statistics say that about 70% of European households
play computer games, the average player spends one
to two hours a day on playing those games, and multiplayer
online games like World of Warcraft developed a community
of several million active subscribers.
Of course, the phenomenon
of quickly utilising new media and new technologies
for educational purposes is not new – just think
about television or computers and the internet. Most
of these new technologies seriously changed everyday
life and the educational landscape. Computers and
the internet, for example, have given birth to the
economically and educationally enormous field of e-learning.
And in this tradition, I am convinced, also educational
computer games will change when and how people learn.
Computer games won’t
solve all our educational problems and they won’t
be a Nuremberg funnel but as opposed to previous –
even interactive – media, computer games provide
entirely new possibilities: They combine a terrific
visual appeal with radical interactivity and user
control, they combine clear goals and tasks with fascinating
stories, they combine enthralling fantasy with curiosity,
or they combine social interactions with strong yet
positive competition. And this is significantly more
than previous media could. In a stunningly natural
way, computer games can make learning meaningful and
important and make knowledge a desirable and relevant
good.
On this playful basis,
we might make learning a more pleasant activity, maybe
a more effective activity (for which we occasionally
find evidence), maybe more suitable for the “digital
natives”, but definitely we can reach those
children and adolescents we could not reach satisfyingly
with conventional educational measures.
As a matter of course,
we are facing significant challenges on our way to
create successful educational computer games and we
have to invest in further research. Examples are the
challenge of controlling the immense costs of learning
games that can compete with their commercial, non-educational
counterparts, the challenge of finding a suitable
balance of gaming and learning, the challenge of real-time
adaptation that is so important for the fragile motivation
to play, the challenge of finding the subtle balance
between challenges and abilities, or the challenge
of utilising the educational potential of social interactions
through (massively) multiplayer games. Significant
efforts are made addressing these challenges, for
example in the context of 80Days (www.eightydays.eu)
an interdisciplinary research project funded by the
European Commission.
I am convinced about
the educational potential and the educational future
of games and I am curious to see the upcoming cool
new learning games. Since, as Marshall McLuhan, Canadian
philosopher and scientist, pointed out, “Anyone
who makes a distinction between games and learning
doesn't know the first thing about either”.
