The future of educational games…. I really don’t know if  can say. It seems like for the last 5-6 years they have always been on the “emerging in 1-2 years” list. But they never seem to quite do that. They will probably at the least stay in their niche, at least for the immediate future. At some point, virtual reality will take hold in some form (holograms, occulus rift, etc) and take games themselves to the next level. When you as the user can be fully immersed, I think there might be something there for simulations. For skills and information, I’m not sure if there will be much more in the future. It seems to take a lot of time and money to develop a game. But with educational games, you have to force certain ideas and concepts in their. That sometimes seems to take away from the game. When designing a pure entertainment game, the game play can follow what ever looks “cool” and/or makes sense. Why did we go talk to a giant turtle at the end of Level 10 of World of Warcraft? Because it looked cool and carried the story forward. But sometimes that is not the educationally valid option.

I’m not fully sure if we can study them to determine their impact. The game environment and the classroom environment are just so different. I enjoy games and feel that they do develop skills and knowledge to some degree depending on design, but I’m just not sure we can prove anything other than student preferences and differences in what is learned. For example, in a standard classroom there are ways to communicate specific tasks in a behaviorist fashion and then test the transfer through a standardized test. I don’t see facts like that transferring the same in games. But I could see skills like collaboration and problem solving skills.  But you can only really “test” those by having gamers accomplish tasks in the game. How can you compare those to similar tasks in a classroom?

New technology always seems to have backlash, so I assume there will be. I think that if you focus on what games can be used for (collaboratively or individually solving problems), the backlash will come from those that are more behaviorist in mindset. They will want the standardized test results and won’t be able to get that from a more constructivist learning design that would seem to pervade most games.

World of Warcraft was fun and frustrating. I enjoy games like that, but there was a huge learning curve. Ultimately, however, most of the learning was about the game itself. I really only ran into one huge problem to solve on level 9, but Google helped me solve it when I realized that I had missed a hidden quest. That would have been nice to have known that was a possibility. Overall, it was good…. but I died a lot. Combat just seemed like a very slow process where I never really knew exactly what my weapons would do. I’m having trouble trying to figure out how a game like this could be turned into a true educational game. Maybe if the problems to solve became less and less structured or obvious as you advance, there would be some use for problem solving skills. Maybe if we had to work together to solve problems, there would be some collaborative uses. I could also see some uses for teaching other about cultures.

Basically, everything I learned was about the game and the story in the game. The quests that we completed really catered towards teaching us skills to survive that specific part of WoW. I learned how to kill various mythical creatures, how to pick up objects, how to walk across giant ropes, how to hop on poles (even though the game seemed to do most of that for me), etc. I learned these through trial and error, probably with a lot of constructing going on. Skills and ideas learned in a past task were used to complete ones in the future. Maybe there was even an aspect of social constructivism if you consider the input of various characters… even though most of that was pre-programmed. But, the main method for learning probably came down to stimulus and response (despite all of the attempts at problem solving). You die during an attempt to complete one quest, and your response is to try it a different way.

Overall, I did enjoy the process of learning how to play World of Warcraft, even though it took a huge chunk of time and I am now behind on other classes and projects in this class 🙂