Video Games Entertain and Educate

An industry veteran discusses the "positive benefit" model for game design, an approach welcomed by consumers, who (consciously or not) learn as they play

by David Perry

Recently, I've begun to consider whether there's something more to games than just convenient entertainment. In more than 25 years of making games, I realize that I've thought primarily about the game playing, the gamer's reactions, the technology, and the marketing of games more than anything else. In other words, I saw games as entertainment products to be consumed, not as socially defining phenomena. I didn't often see, firsthand, how players responded to my games, and I rarely thought about how video games might impact players in an educational way. Now I do.

Now games are a legitimate academic subject, with many university courses around the world offering degrees in video game design and development. And many game designers and researchers are seeing how games influence cognitive and other skills. This summer, the MacArthur Foundation board announced it will give a $1.1 million grant to fund the Institute of Play, a new middle/high school in New York City focused on making video games. Why? The foundation has found that games are an effective tool to teach information management and other critical skills.

I wish these courses had been around when I was trying to learn how to make games! Back then, if someone had asked me the primary role of video games, I would have replied: "Games are for fun, books are for education."

Learning Tool

A turning point for me came about three years ago, when I first saw a video (recorded by the assistant professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University) of a 6-year-old girl explaining with great passion her experience using a medieval siege weapon called a trebuchet. In this video, she explained the trebuchet's inherent weaknesses. Because she had used a trebuchet in a game, she didn't just know about it, she had experienced it and had an opinion on its design. Would she feel that way or even care after just reading about historical weapons from a book—at the age of 6?

And last year, when I gave a speech at the 2006 TED conference, I showed a short video made by a student named Michael Highland. This video revealed just how potent gaming really is for teens and young adults, who use games to learn about, for instance, a historical war (World War II combat is recreated in Call of Duty) or city driving (realistic simulations of New York and London streets are found in Project Gotham Racing). In his film, Highland compares fighting virtually in war zones with reading about wars, and he talks about how he has driven more miles in virtual cars than in real-world cars. I've found myself calling the creation and development of games that have a teaching or learning aspect the "positive benefit" model for game design—and also for sales.

Skilled Players

It's actually easy to think of successful games that teach you skills or about history: Age of Empires, Brain Age, SimCity, The Sims, Civilization, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and many others have all been major hits. But what about non-educational games that weren't created with teaching—whether indirect or direct—in mind? In his insightful book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), James Paul Gee discusses the learning process that goes on in the mind of someone playing a non-educational game such as Nintendo's Pikmin.

As Gee writes, the game requires a great deal of focus, critical thinking, multitasking, and problem solving to succeed. Players must manage teams of characters, assign them tasks appropriate to their behavior patterns, guide them to work together smoothly, and strategize how to optimize resources such as virtual food. Yet, even a 6-year-old can play it. Imagine, teaching a first-grader pretty complex, real-time, problem-laden resource management. Then think how effective this could be when used as a fun, immersive learning tool for adults.