Games have already had enormous educational impact and that satisfying to use tools can help pull us towards a better understand of a thing is well known.
The list of games with widespread educational impact of some sort is already much larger than most people think. As is usually the observation when edutainment of any sort is written about, the point is really that there are many important fields of education excluded from this revolution. Part of that is probably that the cross section of people that are interested in making a game and those who understand the topic well enough to start with is often not large. Persisting cultural relevance for your creation is very rare, which can be crushing. That a game like Snake Pass exists exposing more people to the uniqueness of snake movement is a near miracle.
Games aren't currently categorized by what a player can learn from them, just as movies rarely are. Sometimes even putting into words what you came away with after an experience is difficult, but you know your perspective on yourself or the world changed in some way. Check any of the movie or game storefronts and see if they have any comprehensive sections to let you filter by what people thought they learned from them. Valve is the most well positioned to implement something like this through Steam, because they rapidly iterate with experiments and have a strong variety of games available with an engaged audience willing to do the tasks necessary.
At the moment, you have to guess what you might learn based on the genre or first impressions. Even still, the ratings for a product aren't there to rate educational value and the time played doesn't tell you how long you have to spend in the game to get that learning experience. You can have a 1-2 star game teach you something priceless, while a 5 star game is a nearly vapid lifeless husk of manipulation. Stores like Steam almost need a completely separate perspective view with its own ratings, own tags and own reviews to make these aspects of games more discoverable. There are people that would be more than thrilled to populate that information in good faith.
I think there are hidden riches waiting to be described when people are encouraged to explain to others what it was that they learned rather than what bugs they encountered or whether the production quality was bad and changes like that could over time apply meaningful pressure to add more important educational moments into their games for measurable marketing value.
Being father's day, it wasn't that long ago that my dad was reminiscing about old TV shows where every episode tried to deliver some moral education. How hard is it to find those old episodes categorized by what it tried to teach? Seinfeld was also saturated with educational value through a bevy of unique situations. South Park is probably more educational than Big Bang Theory, because oddly enough I see BBT as more of a facade.
In short, it's not only the standard academic teachings that are underserved or have poor discoverability in all media and I do think continuing to neglect the explicit identification of this value as newer generations pass up old media of all types will have a cascading cost that will impact generations of families.
The side effect is that there will be some educational value that will be polarizing, like inauthentic diversity education that could become an avoid flag for many (for both good and bad reasons). That could be a good thing if it pressures political activism in media to be less overt in order to have more widespread subtle impact without preaching to people louder than the art itself is able to genuinely speak.
There are exciting times ahead and I'm optimistic of the many educational avenues that will be opening up as people wake up to how they learn over the course of their lifetime, be it calculus or empathy.
The list of games with widespread educational impact of some sort is already much larger than most people think. As is usually the observation when edutainment of any sort is written about, the point is really that there are many important fields of education excluded from this revolution. Part of that is probably that the cross section of people that are interested in making a game and those who understand the topic well enough to start with is often not large. Persisting cultural relevance for your creation is very rare, which can be crushing. That a game like Snake Pass exists exposing more people to the uniqueness of snake movement is a near miracle.
Games aren't currently categorized by what a player can learn from them, just as movies rarely are. Sometimes even putting into words what you came away with after an experience is difficult, but you know your perspective on yourself or the world changed in some way. Check any of the movie or game storefronts and see if they have any comprehensive sections to let you filter by what people thought they learned from them. Valve is the most well positioned to implement something like this through Steam, because they rapidly iterate with experiments and have a strong variety of games available with an engaged audience willing to do the tasks necessary.
At the moment, you have to guess what you might learn based on the genre or first impressions. Even still, the ratings for a product aren't there to rate educational value and the time played doesn't tell you how long you have to spend in the game to get that learning experience. You can have a 1-2 star game teach you something priceless, while a 5 star game is a nearly vapid lifeless husk of manipulation. Stores like Steam almost need a completely separate perspective view with its own ratings, own tags and own reviews to make these aspects of games more discoverable. There are people that would be more than thrilled to populate that information in good faith.
I think there are hidden riches waiting to be described when people are encouraged to explain to others what it was that they learned rather than what bugs they encountered or whether the production quality was bad and changes like that could over time apply meaningful pressure to add more important educational moments into their games for measurable marketing value.
Being father's day, it wasn't that long ago that my dad was reminiscing about old TV shows where every episode tried to deliver some moral education. How hard is it to find those old episodes categorized by what it tried to teach? Seinfeld was also saturated with educational value through a bevy of unique situations. South Park is probably more educational than Big Bang Theory, because oddly enough I see BBT as more of a facade.
In short, it's not only the standard academic teachings that are underserved or have poor discoverability in all media and I do think continuing to neglect the explicit identification of this value as newer generations pass up old media of all types will have a cascading cost that will impact generations of families.
The side effect is that there will be some educational value that will be polarizing, like inauthentic diversity education that could become an avoid flag for many (for both good and bad reasons). That could be a good thing if it pressures political activism in media to be less overt in order to have more widespread subtle impact without preaching to people louder than the art itself is able to genuinely speak.
There are exciting times ahead and I'm optimistic of the many educational avenues that will be opening up as people wake up to how they learn over the course of their lifetime, be it calculus or empathy.