What games around, comes around

I just got back from a very interesting meeting with one of the major game companies. We were talking about strengthening the positive outcomes of games by looking at educational games as models for more traditional game titles. But along the way one of the most interesting parts of the discussion was how to improve plain old action games using lessons from educational gaming.

It’s interesting to me, because of course so much of the discussion of the relationship between commercial games and learning has been framed by Jim Gee’s insightful commentary in What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy. Jim’s argument (rightly) is that games can provide a model for good learning practices.

But that sets up–or so far has set up–a one-way relationship between gaming and learning. What became apparent in my conversations with these makers of commercial games is how problematic a one-way relationship is, not least because, in fact, game makers could benefit from making their games easier to play, more fun for more people, and more accessible by borrowing ideas about learning from educational games.

This, of course, has always been one of the strengths of epistemic games, which are explicitly based on effective learning practices from the real world. But meeting with these folks made it clear that one reason game companies might want to invest in developing explicitly educational titles is because along the way they would learn how to make their other products better….