| If you're going to make an educational video game, if you teach anything past the high school level, the game is probably going to have to be focused on one subject, unless the aim is just to be introductory in nature. Probably just a quick example, but teaching someone battlefield tactics probably won't do much for about 99.9999% of the people who play it and unless you are teaching something that could be used in every day life, a lot of topics are going to be the same. If you follow that road, in the end the game would probably have about as much educational value as WoW.
This is the way I look at it. If an educational video game is going to work, you're probably going to have to trick your user base into learning for it to be successful. I think the easiest subjects to put in a game are Math and English. Like others have said, I learned a lot of vocabulary just playing EQ as a kid. Whether it was intended or not, I learned a lot of vocabulary just trying to figure out what items or mob names meant. If you take that thinking and apply it to different subjects, then make learning competitive in some way, it could be an educational video game without blatantly trying to teach something specific.
Winning mind games and rewarding the person in some way in game could kinda fall under educational. Games like sudoku, chess, poker, etc. definitely make your mind sharper. People get burnt out of leveling, go play a mini game that does (a little) more for you than sitting there and watch your character kill something on auto attack while your eyes bleed.
If the game very entertaining, you could probably get away with teaching anything as long as the best characters are the smartest ones. Not really sure how you might quantify intelligence in a video game, but if you actually had to be smart to be the wizard, I know people would go through any torture to get to that top spot since I watched people play EQ. |