World of Borecraft–NOT!

A friend just forwarded me a link to an article by Justin Peters from several months ago on Slate about serious games. The article is titled “World of Borecraft,” and you might guess, it criticized a number of educational games for being boring–and it is absolutely the case that many educational games are boring.

In saying that, I am not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with Peters’ assessment of any specific game in the article. In fact, one of the things that I see over and over is that my own kids (not surprisingly!) like a lot of games that I think are quite boring–including some of the ones that Peters talks about in his article. But I certainly concur that there are plenty of boring educational games out there to be found.

In the article, though, Peters raises a bigger issue about games and learning.

He writes:

All of this noodling about games’ untapped potential raises some philosophical questions: When does a game stop being a game and turn into an assignment? Can a game still be called a game if it isn’t any fun?

Readers of this blog already that my answers is:

YES!!!

Or to be more precise:

A game doesn’t have to be fun all the time to be something that kids (and others) want to play.

As I argue in How Computer Games Help Children Learn,

Fun is not actually the defining characteristic of a game. On some superficial level, we play games because we enjoy the experience overall. But quite often much of the time we spend on a game isn’t about having fun.

Much of being on a football team is doing drills and calisthenics and weight training and running laps… things that, despite the coaches’ protestations to the contrary, aren’t much fun for most players. Video game players spend a lot of time repeating very basic maneuvers to be able to progress to the next level…

Recently I was talking online with a colleague while he was playing World of Warcraft. When I realized he was playing I apologized for interrupting, he replied: “It’s okay. I’m just running some boring errands in the game.” Because it turns out that even in one of the most popular games of all time, judging by the total number of simultaneous players, you have to do a lot of things that don’t, on their own, seem like much fun.

What, then, makes a game a game?

My answer has been the fact that it has some particular set of rules that a player has to follow. That’s an idea that comes from developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who argued that “there is no such thing as play without rules.” What Vygotsky meant is that in all play–even in what seems like open-ended play among very young children–a game creates some imaginary situation that has some implicit or explicit set of norms that determine what players can and cannot do.

In other words, the value of games–to both players and to society–and the reason that people play games–is not that they are fun. (I’ve posted on some recent studies that make this case as well.)

Rather, as I argue in How Computer Games Help Children Learn:

Their value is in letting children live in worlds that they are curious about, or afraid of, or want desperately to be able to try out. As Vygotsky explains, all games are ‘the realization in play form of tendencies that cannot be immediately gratified.’ In playing games, children are doing explicitly, openly, and socially what as adults they will do tacitly, privately, and personally. They are running simulations of worlds they want to learn about in order to understand the rules, roles, and consequences of those worlds. They are learning to think by examining alternatives in play, and from those experiences they are learning what it might mean to be… real and imagined characters in the world.

And it turns out that learning about how the world works and what their place in it might be is something that kids want to do.

Now I agree completely that there are too many educational games out there that are boring. BUT…

They are still games; they are just BAD GAMES.

And more important:

It is possible to build educational games that are good games.

But we have to start by realizing that whether they are “fun all the time” isn’t what makes them good games. Or, rather, they are fun because they are good games, not the other way around.