Learning Through Games

Marc Prensky, a very good writer who articulates his thoughts very well on the relationship between games and learning, has some new articles posted on his site. How Kids Learn to Cooperate in Video Games is a great read, especially for me since all of my nieces appear to be addicted to ToonTown. ToonTown is Disney's version of a MMORPG for kids. Your character (nearly anyone from the Disney universe) conducts tasks in a persistent virtual world, where upon completion of the tasks the character receives jelly beans (the currency in toontown). One interesting attribute of toontown is that you can turn on/off the ability of characters to communicate with one another via text (a critical feature from a parent's standpoint). So my nieces run around without being able to communicate with other players, which is fine since my oldest niece is only 6.5. So the cycle of activity in the world seems to flow something like this:
- Do menial tasks to collect jelly beans
- Use your jelly beans to buy tricks (like pies, that can be tossed at enemies)
- Go and find Cogs (the cartoonish enemies in the game that you throw your pies at)
- Defeat the Cogs for reward
These steps seem to be repeated, except the Cogs you encounter become increasingly stronger.

The amazing thing to me was that even without being able to communicate, my nieces realized that they could not defeat some Cogs alone. If they found a Cog that could not be defeated solo, they would go find the nearest player, and begin jumping up and down in front of him/her to get attention, then try and lead the person to the Cog, taking into account that they would have a better chance with more players.

These are 6.5, 4.5, and 3 year olds. The fact that they figured all this out without help from parents is fascinating.

Marc also has an article about The Seven Games of Highly Effective People...a nod to Steven Covey. This article outlines how games, from both an individual and group perspective, make people successful. This almost feels like a predecessor for the soon-to-be-released book, Got Game. Personally, I haven't come across many instances where a game's design, from a learning perspective, jumped out at me. Then again, I've been mostly into FPS games recently. The Call of Duty tutorial was probably the only example that really grabbed me from an instructional design standpoint, but that was it. But this weekend, I downloaded and installed the Demo for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. After about 45 minutes of playing, I still hadn't even passed the tutorial. I haven't really played any RTS games since WarCraft III came out...this genre isn't one of my favorites. But the sheer number of variables you need to simultaneously take into account, and quickly act upon, is insane. This game seems to really emphasize the "S" in RTS, because the player can take any number of strategies in the game due to the sheer number of actions available. I haven't even gotten into the game yet, but have been using the tutorial as a sandbox at this point. The tutorial itself could have probably been designed a bit better (the narration was misleading at times, and the interface ques were not always straight forward), but learning to play this game will definitely give your mind a workout.

I can see how playing a variety of games like this attribute to Marc's 7 games of highly effective people. Managing all the variables takes a sharp mind, one that can think about a variety of different objectives in parallel, see how various objectives relate to one another, prioritize actions, and always be thinking how to best move closer to the end-game.