Learning from...Learning?

Caught this little gem in my Kotaku feed this morning, and found it somewhat confusing.

It seems Neil Thompson from Microsoft doesn't like the idea of educational games, to the point that he is advocating that the games industry completely avoid pursuing the subject, which he considers "dangerous for us as a company and as an industry".

I suppose the idea here, is that he wants the industry to create great games in which people will find educational application, rather than create great learning resources that people can somehow play. This, I agree with wholeheartedly -- the concept is basically the crux of my thesis. Nothing makes a game less fun than the developers forgetting that they're actually trying to make a game. If you actively start out with this mentality, you end up with bad edutainment, interactive stories, and patchy Galaga clones with sums and questions about the Romans instead of boss fights.

So making a game first and foremost is key to successful game development. But as long as this is true, who's to say making some educational content second, or third, or even as a complete afterthought is a bad idea? Provided the gameplay is the primary factor, the educational bits can be included, modified or culled completely based on how well they suit the game-play. Thompson mentions:

"I think for us to quote [the success of certain educational games] as an industry and say let's start producing edutainment type products – we'll lose a lot of money.I don't think it's ever been done in a clever and good way because you lose the focus of it being fun and involving"

This sentiment strikes me as being similar to:

People have made some really delicious cakes in the past, with some really interesting flavours in there. But whenever we make cakes, we always fill them with bees. The bees really hurt when we eat the cake, so I guess none of us should ever make cake again."

I dunno, maybe just don't fill it with bees in future? If your educational games keep going wrong because you forget they're supposed to be games, why not try sticking a Post-It on your monitor to remind you what you're doing? Or glance over at the 360 dev kit sat on your desk, and think why it might be there? By all means make a game first, but don't immediately exclude all ideas of educational content, just because people have messed it up in the past.

The main reason that educational game research is still going, is because the community believes that games can be useful to teach things. They contain complex concepts that the player needs to understand in order to play; they give constant, contextual feedback to keep the player on the right track; contain rich immersive environments to maintain players' "flow" states. All of this is down to the 30+ years of on-the-job research that is The Games Industry.

So why, if educationalists are willing, nay, striving to use the past 30 years of game design research, should The Games Industry actively renounce the past 100 years of educational research? If the two areas do in fact share common mechanics, then surely some benefit could come from collaboration between the fields? While Thompson is correct in saying The Industry is primarily about making "quality commercial products", there is surely some incentive to use educational research that could make the quality of those products even greater.

Annoying, unskippable tutorials; being forced to replay sections of a game you completed perfectly, simply because you failed at the very end; having an NPC berate you for not pursuing an objective that was never properly explained in the first place. Almost all game-players will be familiar with problems like these -- problems of how to teach a player new skills, allow them to practice them, or how to test their proficiency in them.

While game designers have spent the last 3 decades trying to fix them, educational theorists have spent the last century identifying, investigating and solving similar problems. So while The Industry should always be committed to making better, more entertaining games, renouncing educational theory isn't necessarily the best way to do it.