Video Game Design: Education in Games

Since the early times of video games, education has been an important focus.  In 1983, President Ronald Reagan expressed his hope and expectation that video games would prepare the youth of that day for challenges they would face as technology continues to advance, and in a large part, he was right.  Outside of traditional education, video games have been proven to provide dramatic cognitive and coordination benefits for a wide range of problem solving skills.  These are just natural benefits of challenging real-time video games though.  On a parallel track, we have games designed expressly for the purpose of education in traditional subjects.  Since the '80s, and possibly earlier, we have had video games trying to teach math, science, spelling, history, and many other subjects.  Evidence is mounting that well designed video games can be used for learning that is far more motivating and effective than anything we have done in public schools.

There is a problem in the educational game industry.  The problem is that the industry does not actually know how to make effective educational games.  Yes, we have seen games like Math Blaster teach a good portion of a generation basic math.  A few years ago though, we had a blockbuster game come out that turns out to be more effective at educating than any "educational game," and that game was not designed with education in mind at all.  I am talking about Minecraft.  Parents and schools buy games like Math Blaster to teach children, and those children enjoy playing these games mostly because it is a break from schoolwork.  Minecraft, however, is different.  Children beg their parents to buy it for them, and then they spend hours on end playing it, because they want to!  My parents often had to bribe us to play Math Blaster, but no one has to bribe their children to play Minecraft.  If Mojang can make a game that is both educational and extremely motivating, without even trying, then why can't educational game companies deliberately make educational games that are also motivating?

This is a problem that is starting to get more attention, but no solution has been found.  The first problem is that Minecraft was a bit of an anomaly.  It was wildly successful, because it managed to tap into a huge market that no one knew existed.  It is unreasonable to expect this to happen with every new game.  There are companies, like Blizzard, that consistently make very successful games without getting lucky like this though.  Blizzard makes successful games because it knows what its customers want, and it knows how to make games motivating.  The important factor here is the business model.  Blizzard makes fun and motivating games.  Yes, World of Warcraft actually has significant educational value, but it is incidental.  For example, Wow has a nice auction house mechanic that allows players to buy and sell in-game stuff for in-game currency.  Blizzard did this because people like to trade, and it gives the game a wider market.  In other words, it makes the game more fun for more people.  The fact that the auction house can teach economics and accounting is great, but it was not the reason Blizzard put it there.  Minecraft is similar in that it was made to be fun, and it just happened to be educational.  In other words, the games that are most successful in being educational are games that were designed to be fun and motivating but also happen to have educational value.

The problem with educational games is that motivation is a secondary factor, and it is often ignored.  I believe we need significantly more research into what makes games motivating.  Until that happens though, all we have to go on is observation.  Following is what I have learned from my observations.

Gamifying Education

Gamifying education is what early educational games tried to do.  They start by creating a purely educational activity.  Then, they add game elements to it.  Rarely do the game elements integrate well with the education, but the goal was just to make the education more like a game.  New Math Blaster Plus! offers several great examples of this.

New Math Blaster Plus! has four mini-games designed to teach math.  In one game, you have a practice mode and a solve mode.  The game is nothing more than a simple math quiz.  In practice mode, the solution is displayed before you are required to solve the problem.  In the solve mode, you are quizzed without first seeing the solution.  The quiz is 25 problems long.  The game element is trivial.  Each 5 questions answered correctly adds a component to a rocket ship on the left side of the screen.  Once all 5 components are complete, an astronaut enters the ship and it blasts off into space.

The second game is also a quiz.  Each correctly answered question adds to a meter on the left.  When the meter is full, the player gets a break from the math to shoot garbage floating in space.  Each shot reduces the meter.  Once the meter is empty or all of the garbage has floated past, the quiz continues.

The third game is a simple, one screen platformer.  The player controls a small green astronaut.  The character can walk around and jump.  A jetpack allows the character to sort of fly.  On the left side of the screen an alien slowly descends on the astronout's space pet.  This is a simple gamified timer mechanism.  The character has 5 life (if I recall correctly), and he loses a life if the alien gets to the pet or if he misses a question.  At the top of the screen, there are four...things.  Each displays a number.  Above that a math problem is displayed.  The player's job is to fly the astronaut into the appropriate...thing, before his pet is eaten.  This game is still just a quiz.  This time, it is a timed quiz, and it is more heavily gamified than the other mini-games, but it is still just a thinly veiled math quiz.

We will discuss the fourth mini-game later.  Right now, I want to look at the flaws in the first three.  All three are just math quizzes.  The first provides a mode that shows the player the problem with the answer, so the player can memorize it, but honestly, this is more like homework than actual teaching.  The first game is nothing more than a quiz with a progress indicator.  Calling it a game is actually rather presumptive.  The second one does provide actual game play periodically, but this may actually make it worse.  The game play is interrupting the learning.  It does not do anything to improve the learning, and it is only motivating in that it encourages the player to do math to collect ammo.  A better way of putting is that it makes math a chore.  Welcome to the main problem with U.S. education system: It makes children hate learning.  It turns out that poorly designed educational games can actually hurt education more than they help it.  The third activity, with platformer jet pack flying is probably the best of the first three.  It is straight up a game where you answer math problems.  The math and game elements are not exactly well integrated, but the math does not get in the way of the game play and the game play does not get in the way of the math.

The problem with older educational games is generally that the game play interrupts the learning.  Another educational title from Davison (the maker of Math Blaster), Spell It Plus, has a racing activity where the racer jumps hurdles in response to correctly spelled words.  When the player misspells a word, a hurdle is knocked over, taking attention away from the educational element.  These interruptions also interrupt the brain, and from a learning psychology perspective, the game play, which is the fun part, ends up taking a higher priority than the learning, which interferes with retention.  All of that aside, the games were never that fun.  A game that is not motivating cannot effectively teach, because it becomes a chore.  Yes, students might memorize answers to get it over with, but they won't remember them for any longer than they have to.

Adding Education to Games

At some point, educational game designers realized that their games were just not motivating enough to be effective.  They decided to fix this by creating fun games and then inserting the educational elements.  There is a vast collections of games like this, and some turned out fairly good, but others turned out worse than earlier games.

We will turn to Math Blaster for a case study again.  Many years after the early New Math Blaster Plus!, came Math Blaster Episode I: In Search of Spot.  This new game was a game, not a bunch of thinly veiled quizzed.  I don't recall all of the details, but I distinctly recall one of the mini-games.  It was a platformer.  The player would run around collecting things and trying to get through levels without dying.  Each area had a locked door, and the only way to open it was the answer a math problem.  What they had done was make a game that was probably pretty fun, and they inserted math problems here and there as obstacles.  There are three problems with this.  The first is that the educational element is less dense.  A player spending 30 minutes on the old game would probably complete 60 to 100 math problems.  A player spending 30 minutes on this new game would probably complete 15 to 30 math problems.  The game lost a lot of its educational value, by replacing math time with game time.  Second, this ruined the motivation of the game.  Without the math, the game would have been pretty fun, but the constant interruptions made it get old quite fast (I watched several siblings get bored of it far faster than they did with similar non-educational games).  By inserting the math, they ruined a perfectly good non-educational video game.  Third, interrupting something fun with boring learning makes kids hate learning.  I am not saying that all education is boring, but frequent one problem math quizzes with no practical applications certainly is, and it turns math into an annoyance and a chore.  This game is teaching kids that math is a necessary evil, when it should be teaching that math is a useful tool that can even be fun to learn and use.

This is a common current trend with educational games.  Educational game designers have realized that motivation is important, but they still have not figured out that throwing boring education in the face of students when they are trying to do something fun only makes the problem worse.

Turning Educational Activities into Games

This is where the secret is.  Why are games like Minecraft so successful?  What about history oriented games, like the Age of Empires series?  The reason Minecraft is so successful is that it manages to be motivating and educational at the same time.  The reason the education does not ruin the motivation is because it is part of it.  The trick is to take an activity that is already educational, and focus on the educational aspect.  Minecraft makes people want to learn math, because math can improve their performance in the game, making it more fun.  Age of Empires was ingenious, because it did this intentionally.  History makes an obvious and easy target for this sort of thing, because it takes historical activities and turns them into games, where learning the history is part of the fun.  It turns out that there are a lot of games that do this kind of thing.  None of them really focus on the educational aspect though (not even Age of Empires).  The secret is motivating the player to want to be educated, and then make the game teach the player.  Once the player is motivating, the learning will be much easier, and being able to apply the knowledge gained within the game will help the player to retain it.  It is a simple trick, but everyone seems to be so focused on forcing people to learn that they don't even think about trying to make the learning itself fun and motivating.

So, why does this work?  There are several reasons.  The first is integration.  If the game and learning are well integrated, the player will never feel like the game and educational element are interrupting or interfering with each other.  The second is basic learning psychology.  People learn better when they want to learn, and people retain learning better when they immediately apply it.  So, give someone a game that is motivating, well integrated, makes the person want to learn, teaches the person, and motivates the person to immediately apply what he or she has learned, and you have a truly successful educational game.  And if you can do that, it will probably also sell well.


I said I would discuss the forth mini-game in New Math Blaster Plus!  This mini-game is the only one in the game that is not a quiz.  It is actually more of a puzzle game, and the puzzle is the math.  The player is give 5 columns of symbols.  The first, third, and fifth are numbers, while the second is math operators, and the fourth is equal signs.  Below the columns there are three spaces.  The first is the solution space.  If the symbols in the solution space compose a correct math problem, then pressing Enter will remove the numbers, and the player will be awarded points.  The second space is a recycle space that can contain symbols, and when Enter is pressed, if the solution space has a correct problem, those numbers will be recycled by putting them on the top of their respective columns.  The third space is the zapper.  Anything that gets to the zapper will eventually be destroyed, removing the chance for the player to use them to earn points.  On top of the columns is the green astronaut.  The player can move the astronaut left and right, and when standing on a column, pressing the space bar will cause the astronaut to push the symbols in the column down once (pushing symbols from the solution space into the recycle space and symbols in the recycle space into the zapper).  The ultimate objective of this game is to use all of the symbols provided to create solutions, without zapping any.  It is fun and challenging, and it is an effective application of math skills.  It is also well integrated, because the math is the game.  It may not be motivating to everyone, but for those whom it does motivate, it is actually a good learning tool.  This is the one activity New Math Blaster Plus! did right.  The game still does not teach math (the practice mode on the first quiz activity hardly qualifies as actually learning math), and it really does not strongly motivate people who have already been conditioned to hate math, but does offer an application of knowledge, and it is motivating to some people.



Designing good educational games has proven to be a very elusive goal, but I think it is much simpler than it is made out to be.  I think the biggest problem is an industry that is stuck on a traditional model of education, and I think we can all see how that is working out for the U.S. education system.  I believe a mix of learning psychology and game psychology are the first step on the road to successfully integrate computer games into our education system, and games like Minecraft seem to support this.