Category Archives: Theory

I’m trying out a bunch of geography games at the moment. There are countless alternatives out there, some quite good. This is not surprising: geography is a subject well suited for rote learning and rote learning is an activity well suited for gamification. I shouldn’t need to explain why. Rote learning is after all really boring (and pretty hard to some of us) but relatively simple to make more fun by introducing basic game mechanics.

Rote learning is also very important. Sure, knowledge without comprehension is worthless, but comprehension without knowledge is impossible. Critical thinking without comprehension is likewise impossible.

Rote learning is certainly better suited for gamification than “higher-order thinking” or “21^st-century skills” and other buzzwords that are the subject of much low-order thinking from politicians and gullible slogan parrots in the serious games and educationalist in-crowd.

Furthermore, critical thinking is fun; it makes you feel smart and good about yourself. It is an intellectual adventure in itself and doesn’t need a superficial layer of point-and-click adventure mechanics to be exciting and inspiring. Still, an aid to improve your critical thinking skills would, of course, be very neat; but I am not sure games are the appropriate medium for that. Seems like buying yourself A rulebook for arguments and joining a serious debate forum online would be a smarter approach – cheap, uncomplicated and available for everyone.

To sum up:

• Rote learning is hard, boring and necessary, but easy to gamify.
• Critical thinking is fun and important, but depends on rote learning and is hard to gamify.

A sketch of a typology of educational games from the viewpoint of the relationship between game skill and subject knowledge.

The purpose of score in games is to provide feedback and motivation. The more your score reflects your skills, the more motivated you will be to improve your skill; and the more your score reflects how much you have learned, the more motivated you will be to learn.

In the rightmost category of our typology, your learning won’t affect the score at all. This is very common in all educational games that try hard to not be “chocolate covered broccoli”. They end up as “broccoli covered chocolate” instead: traditional game genres with a superficial educational veneer. Their main flaw is that they offer absolutely no incentive to improve your knowledge – you are only motivated to improve traditional gaming skills. Of course, learning might come as a byproduct, as it might in all games, movies and novels about real subjects.

Dressed-up quizzes are the archetypical “chocolate covered broccoli”/drill-and-skill of the leftmost category. If their design is sufficiently fine-tuned, they can work very well for some subjects. They will really motivate you to learn more, but will seldom be very immersive and will thus struggle to keep your attention for long stretches.

The middle category has the most potential to tackle a diverse array of subjects and to offer real entertainment as well as real education. Note that simulation games are included in this category. They can however be considered for the leftmost category if they are very well done and if they teach you ”mastery of a process” rather than mere facts.