Educational Game Development on consoles and the web
Several emails bounced around today regarding educational gaming on all three major consoles as well as flash game development.
The first story comes from Kotaku, where a writer sent a list of questions to Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo executives dealing with the companies stance on educational games on the respective platforms. As you could guess, Nintendo stressed the Brain Age series, Sony talked a lot about the PSP and Microsoft hyped the soon-to-be-released XBOX LIVE Community Games Portal. Each organization also mentioned special initiatives designed to engage universities or partnerships with other groups to include educational content on consoles. Personally, I think Microsoft may have the best approach: relying on the community to build XBOX LIVE games with the freely available XNA studio via the Creator’s Club. From the article:
That means we’ll see games that intentionally have an educational focus like “City Rain,” “Future Flow” and “Clean Up” which were all created by teams of university students to teach concepts of environmental sustainability.
On another front, casual gaming giant Kongregate released free tutorials on their site for creating flash-based games. I hadn’t realized this, but they have built a sizable developer community of flash developers submitting games for publication on the Kongregate site.
Of the 3,000 developers that have contributed 8,000 games to Kongregate, the vast majority of them are garage developers who don’t work for companies. Greer estimates that only about 1 in 100 games come from professional studios.
Considering Kongregate has only been in existence for 18 months, this is staggering! Building a game, by yourself, in flash is an extremely time consuming endeavor. With a community of 3,000 people often developing multiple games for Kongregate, as well as the tutorials for beginner developers, I’m looking forward to many more creative, engaging games to play during Friday morning faculty meetings 
