I’ve been making edu-games since 2006; they have been about half of the games I’ve worked on. From a small Flash game company in college to big corporate offices, I’ve worked on topics from programming to math, reading to Van Der Waal’s forces, entrepreneurship to dementia care.
Getting good at The Oregon Trail will not make you skilled at traveling the Oregon Trail. The optimization challenge of the computer game is not even remotely the challenge those travelers faced. But by cleverly inserting names, places, and imagery into a quick and cruel strategy game, ‘Oregon Trail’ contextualizes the challenge of the historical journey.
Aesthetic structures around games are often where we teach things. Name a game resource something like “air quality”, and you can show it getting better or worse.
But labels and imagery are half of the equation, symbols placed upon abstractions. We also get something from “playing” a game. As various people have said, games do something to us. But what?
More accurately, what does “play” do?
Playing with a ball is juggling, kicking, passing, not just holding it and moving it to its goal. Playing with numbers or math or arithmetic, is about doing non-optimal things with them. The same goes for play within business, or any other field.
The act of play is about exploring sub-optimal paths; doing the unusual, the unexpected, the more challenging thing.
If you’re certain about the path you should take in an activity, then that activity is a test of skill and performance. Exercise, practice and tests are important features of improvement and learning. But they are not “play”.
I would argue that a playful game, in contrast, emphasizes and exaggerates the boundary between optimal and sub-optimal. It tempts and asks the player, “At what point can we entice you away from the direct or optimal solution?”
A game emphasizes the uncertainty of an optimal solution.
If you have the ball, should you shoot?
Well, how good are you at shooting? Who else on your team is good at shooting? Are they closer? Are they open? What does your defender think you’re going to do?
A perfectly skilled player could shoot a basket from a distance, under pressure, to earn 3 points. But this is really difficult. So the game is designed to support other ways to earn points effectively, under different contexts. A game remains interesting when it is balanced to prevent an ideal solution.