A 90-minute speech about how to improve education using video games -- how to actually do it, in contrast to what is currently being tried. Followed by a Q&A session.
Modern education in America is stuck in 1930s pedagogy at best. There were several major paradigm shifts since then in pedagogy. Like, in teaching Languages... In the 1890's, there was a the grammar-translation approach, where people just translated whole books using a translation dictionary. In the 1920's there was the direct approach. People would move to other countries because travel was cheap then. They would just learn the names of things when someone pointed at that thing and said it in their language. In the 1930's there was the Reading approach, where standardized testing became popular. Teachers gave students word lists to study at home, and they would read books in the alternative language. In the 1940's there was the military method. The U.S. military had people say the same words over and over. They also had their soldiers fill in slots in a sentence, like, "Hello, my name is ______." In the 1970's there was the affective-humanistic approach where teachers started to account for emotions. So, in this style, teachers had kids write plays, songs, and other artforms. The kids would participate in the plays for each other. The 80's also had the cognative psychology which influenced teaching in teaching grammar rules. The 90's had the internet, which caused the communicative approach where kids were encouraged to communicate to each other in a kind of free network. Then, kids were encouraged to go online and talk to kids in the target language. So, today the established government schools are stuck in the 30's, and foreign English teachers are trained the the communicative approach. There were other approaches. However, the communicative approach takes many of the methods from prior approaches. A standard class under the communicative approach would be... Warmer: Some activity to build energy. Something exciting. presentation: Introduce the examples, and see if the kids can figure out the application and rules. drill: Repeat over and over the application of the target grammar or vocabulary. CCP: Let the kids play a game where they can interactively practice the target lesson. One example is to have the kids form a circle and toss 2 balls. One kid says a sentence, throws the ball, and the reciever gives the responding senence. Production: Each individual kid produces the target language. This could be a test. So, in the end, there is plenty of room for games. The TESOL community is setup to recieve these games, as long as they fit into modern communicative pedagogy. Books, and whatnot still play a role in modern teaching. However, games are important. Hopefully, this knowledge helps you understand a little bit on how to make an educational game.
I have a feeling educational games will be more effective in VR. VR is an off-shoot of video games, but it's served in a different, but more immersive medium. Like at 46:35, when he talks about the mechanisms of an AK, the motion and immersion of handling an AK in VR would be miles better than in flat games. Still, both are not as good as actual handling of a rifle. However, the person who's exposed to VR will know the motions of how to reload it properly. At 52:21, when he talks about "being on-the-nose is dangerous", this is the limitation for flat games since it's not as immersive as VR. It takes students away from their current environment and places them in a controlled environment which could be designed to be engaging. For instance, if there was a VR equivalent of Shenzhen I/O in VR, students may manipulate it with their hands and peer at it closely. Spatial memory and kinesthetic learning are engaged, which are better than a mouse and keyboard. At 1:18:09, I think VR enhances this "drive to explore" since you're virtually displaced from your current environment to a new environment. This excites the student. However, like all video games, it's efficacy is dependent on its design. A virtual field trip would be ineffective if the stimuli is overwhelming. At 1:33:47, If video games will be the future of education, then VR should be leading the way. Already VR is being used in military, medical and corporate training, and there are proof that it is more efficient and effective in training people. If flat educational games are having a hard time grabbing a foothold in the industry, then I think it's time to sunset that attempt and focus it on VR.
VR is an anti-game. When you increase the amount of information aimed at the sensorium in ways that do not communicate the game state, it lowers the rate at which the game feedback loop takes place. That is what is happening with VR - most of the tech and processing power is going to trick your senses and the higher level aspects of a game, say logistics, tactics, and strategy, have not been figured out yet. They can't do anything that a single screen user interface can't handle more effectively.
@@ProductofSeebach But to overwhelm the student with too much information and/or configurations would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? Keeping things simple and controlled are better to guide students with material. Also, VR can handle higher aspects. I currently play Civ6 in VR exclusively now through Virtual Desktop with hand-tracking. I think turn-based strategy games would find a great home in VR. And virtualization of board games would be good too.
@@misterhorse8327 You are attached to VR. I was too because at first glance it seems to offer so much, but it really doesn't once the novelty wears off. All the stuff you are thinking about with respect to boardgames and immersive interactions is best accomplished with AR, which is already being done in a lot of schools already, even superficially with things like smart boards.
@@ProductofSeebach The technology is getting better, and the novelty hasn't worn off. I use VR everyday for work and for my writing. I also use it for location research, using Google Earth to get a feel for a place that flat can't do. The Oculus Quest is bringing a lot of people to VR finally, and it seems like it's full steam ahead. There are reports that a new standalone hybrid headset is on the works this month. And AR is cut in the same cloth as VR. Both utilize space, but VR overlays the environment with something different. AR has strengths and weaknesses, and so does VR. I think both are progressing in tandem, and soon we could have XR where you can switch from AR to VR easily.
00:00 Intro 01:41 Start of the talk. 02:18 Language as technology, importance of language and it's limits. 07:15 Fiction, storytelling, laws and documents. 11:36 Written language. Symbolic language. 17:20 Music, Video language. 21:31 Specifics of videogames as a medium. 22:41 Non-linguistic communication. Board Games. 24:10 Pac-man. 27:10 Videogames and learning. 27:44 PUBG. Empirical learning. 35:10 Educational games, real world applicability. 36:20 Braid. Guiding the attention of the player. 38:42 The Witness. Experiments in non-linguistic communication. 45:03 Tacit knowledge. Difference between factological knowledge of books and intuition of games. 49:50 Problems with educational games. 53:47 Zachtronics and Shenzhen I/O. Iterative engineering. 58:57 Opus Magnum. 1:01:41 Miegakure. 1:05:27 Mini Metro. 1:06:58 John's attempt at educational game. 1:13:37 Harnessing the games' abilities. on 'gamification' of scholarship and 'schoolification' of games. 1:19:40 Achievements and trophies as manipulation. 1:20:26 Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. 1:24:15 Learning systems thinking through games. 1:28:30 Problem: unconventionality of learning through game. 1:30:22 Game should be enjoyable on it's own. 1:31:15 Problem: Social signalling of schooling through conventional education. 1:34:43 Recap. 1:37:15 Final words. Cave paintings. Symbols. 1:41:40 QUESTIONS section start. 1:41:42 What about adding required to play games in school program? 1:42:01 Cavemen and mind-altering substances. 1:42:25 Isn't Miegakure educational game? 1:44:46 Optimizing work process as game designer. 1:46:50 Can games replace books as narrative carriers? 1:47:10 Can games be educational about sociolinguistic skills? 1:48:00 Should music and movies have a bigger role in future of education? 1:49:27 Gamification's impact on logistics of teaching. 1:50:36 Thoughts on KSP. 1:52:56 Does simplifying things in games equals lying? 1:53:18 Thoughts on sitting down and trying to make a teaching specific skills game. What's interesting about it? 1:56:28 Thoughts on non-systems learning in games, e.g. historical stuff in the strategy games. 1:57:50 Minecraft as educational game. 1:58:15 Games for teaching language. 1:59:15 Application of game design in managing courses and other learning programs. 2:00:17 Can system thinking game deliver some certain message about the system? 2:00:45 Is there an underlying issue involved in allowing children to explore learning themselves and not control the conclusion. 2:04:31 Are games deficient at conveying stories? 2:05:14 Is there space for medals when they are only given through hard and worthy goals? 2:05:47 Letting the game slide where it's the best. 2:06:32 Are gacha VN real games? 2:07:29 Are experts of existing thing needed for creating good game about it? 2:09:27 How we walk the edge in using games for education and not for creating more destructive game addiction? 2:11:16 Can increased privatisation of schools help create opportunities for new interesting types of learning? 2:12:27 Is it better to do real thing instead of simulating experience through the game? 2:13:20 Does gamification try to fight one vice with another? 2:13:47 When it comes to math and physics checking if answer is correct is the integral part of these disciplines and you cannot get rid of it. Simulations do not look good in this sense. 2:14:39 What systemic interaction in the game would look like? 2:15:37 Are utility and art separate entities when it comes to games? 2:20:05 Games as way to criticize social systems? 2:20:43 Game making as useful pedagogical tool? 2:21:35 Problem of knowledge transfer isn't fully solved yet. 2:24:17 Risks and costs of designing an interesting game instead of regular big selling games. 2:25:05 Risk of system thinking game not being accurate to real world. 2:27:20 Toys for babies, thoughts on Montessori schools. 2:29:27 Role of tacit knowledge and it's underappreciation in current education system. 2:30:54 Multiplayer games and their ability to find flaws in the system. 2:33:57 Thoughts on explaining philosophical concepts through videogames. 2:34:58 Are grades good or bad? 2:35:50 Is big part of learning still an essential repetative drudgework? 2:36:23 Goal is to make systems that provide deep expertise. 2:37:00 Making systems fun is the whole point. 2:38:17 It isn't about making a player memorize facts. 2:40:10 on curiosity. 2:41:05 all games are educational. 2:42:14 training the space of intuition.
As someone who spent many years being unemployed and playing video games 16 hrs per day, it definitely felt like an addiction. However, in retrospect, I think I was just depressed, and that time could have been filled with any kind of escapism. That being said, I'm definitely way more productive now that I have uninstalled video games from my computer. I used to finish work and play 2-3 hours of DotA, Minecraft, PoE, whatever with my friends, then stay up for a few more hours by myself. For people like me, balance is probably not possible, so it's either you spend all your time playing or none of it.
I wish you addressed how hard it is to create good games. You've dedicated your life to being a good game designer -- and for this to work we need someone who is a great game designer (hard on its own) AND an expert in whatever the educational subject is (ex: macroeconomics). We are talking very few people.
He talks a bit about this being difficult at around 1:35:00. But does the game creator really have to be an expert in the educational subject? There's several mentions to games being suited to communictate intuition, not necessarily the exact rules as defined by nature/socity. For example, Macroeconomics might be taught in an intuitive way through something like "Democracy 3", where the exact way things are affected is less important than the fact that a policy-change on alcohol will have a cascading effect on taxation, crime and populist support. The makers of Democracy doesn't seem to have any macroeconomic credentials, although they probably researched the topic quite a bit. As long as the designer has a decent understanding of the subject matter, it should still be possible to utilize a game like this in an educational setting. (Definitely still not easy though, I just think the pool of talent able to create something like this is a bit larger than what you stated)
Sorry I haven't listened to the full talk... but did he say somewhere people can't work with others? Jon works alone but most every other game developer has some sort team, designers, artists, programmers. Plus plenty of modern wave of programmers are people who are self taught or bootcampers but came from a different field, such as music and the arts or one of the humanities. And plenty are already STEM field, and used programming in some daily or weekly fashion. This is a criticism that comes off as more as you wanting to gate keep or feel special, people are a lot more capable then you think.
Making a good game is hard. Making a good game that also teaches effectively is hard*hard. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try making them, it just means we should expect a lot of lousy ones on the way to making the great ones.
This is true for books. You have to be a good writer and knowledgable in the subject. To write a good physics textbook, you need to know physics and writing which are basically orthogonal.
Hi! I'm an educational games designer. I agree with a lot of what you say, but you keep saying it as if it's new information. Educational games designers and researchers have known all of this for about 20 years. I can give you a reading list if you'd like to learn more.
A quote about KSP: „I knew KSP was something special when I watched a young kid - probably less than 8 years old - playing KSP and using words like apogee, perigee, prograde, retrograde, delta-v; the lexicon of orbital mechanics. To the layperson orbital mechanics is a counter-intuitive world of energy, thrust, velocity, altitude that this kid - just by playing Kerbal - had managed to get his head around“. (visualizations producer Doug Ellison, NASA's JPL)
But did the kid understand these as concepts or just happen to remember the terminology? VERY different outcomes to distinguish there. If the goal is to get kids interested in orbital mechanics, that is distinct from the goal being to actually teach physics.
TavishHill I think you and Jon both are making a mistake in emphasizing correct physics in KSP. While a certain amount of correctness is important and necessary, The physics system itself is just one part of the control systems that so much of KSP is about. I think I can agree that accurate physics would be an unambiguous good, but I am not convinced it is a necessary prerequisite for it to be valuable in teaching what it teaches.
@@syzygy6 Fair enough. In my view, if the intention is to teach a segment of physics, it needs to be accurate in those areas. If it intends to teach the spirit of engineering, like Zach's games, that is different. Depends on what the intention is and how folks are using it in education. I agree in the right context it can be instructive, so long as ppl are honest about what it does well and what it doesn't.
Even teaching an fictional system is worthwhile, as long as the system has internal logic (i.e. it's actually a system and not arbitrary like story games).
@@willmcpherson2 Not always. Students can learn the wrong lessons from some systems. The fictional system should be a direct analog to the system you intend to teach about. Students are not generally unaware of systems in the sense of never encountering them. They counter them in games all the time as is. As such, there is little novelty in doing more of that unless there is a purpose in doing so. An example would be stuff from electromagnetism, where diagrams can be made to represent invisible fields that interact with one another. You can mask that as a puzzle game involving the interaction of these fields and let players organically learn the rules governing them. You need not disclose to players that they are learning about EM at all at the outset. That can be layered in gradually. In my view, it's most helpful for systems to be positioned to morph in this way akin to how it is done in Dragon Box.
Great talk, as usual. But you're a bit harsh on Kerbal Space Program. It doesn't have perfect physics, but they are more than adequate, especially with mods, which add soo much to the game. KSP makes learning many principles of mechanics and physics an absolute breeze. I learned about orbital mechanics and techniques about how to do orbital rendezvous, how to bring satellites into the same orbits but with different positions (eg for continuous LOS of my rockets) or how to get into orbit of another body. It also taught me how planes fundamentally work. How to build them to get enough lift and stability and why certain designs are more or less stable. All of that I would have never learned without this game. And it also made me dust of my calculator for a few things like figuring out how to get my new craft to land close to my previous one on the Mun etc. It was one of my most fun times with a game in addition to and because of the learning experience. And I also think it shows that your game doesn't have to be perfect to be educational. There's a mod to get way more realistic aerodynamics but that makes the game rather more challenging than better. So I very much disagree that you need "great" physics in order to teach about physics. I feel like it's pretty much this 80/20 rule. You can teach a whole lot about the fundamentals of something with relatively "primitive" systems.
I agree. The simplicity of the physics makes it easier to get to space which is where the interesting orbital mechanics learning opportunities are. If it were more realistic then the barrier to entry would be too great to get to the real educational meat of the game.
I find it odd how he used all those game examples of "not teaching practical knowledge, but concepts" but balked so hard at KSP not having perfect physics.
He just had wrong expectations about what KSP is about, KSP is definitely not a game about physics. It's as you said, about orbital mechanics and rocketry
Yup. I definitely wanted to have more teachers like you back then. When I'm was passing my development degree I had to pick a subject and talk about it. I choose : Serious Games. And during my pitch I was in front of one of my dev teachers, an old man tired by his work and hating the new generation, and a young woman actually working as an IT specialist in a company. I began to speak about the interest of video games in the matter of education, and my teacher was raising his eyebrows like "sweet dreams, but you don't know LIFE, a job has to be learned in a SERIOUS way, not with some gamy stuff". He said that it was unrealistic. On the other hand, the professional by its side said something like "Yes, we are actually testing some serious game in our company for newcomers, and even the older employees" I remember her interest as an encouragment. Today I am an indie dev and even if I'm not yet designing serious games, but more "classical, only fun matters" ones, I always think about the educational potential. I know I will get into it someday. You are a master more people should listen to.
While I think that some serious games might be useful, say learning human bones in some kind of medical game - I have to disagree with the definition. The whole business of putting Serious together with the word Games, seems very naive. Games don't need to be injected with any adjective to make them less or more serious. Games are just games. Also, I think the best kind of learning is the learning you do without knowing. Branding games as serious might ruin the aesthetic for the learner all from the start. Best "educational" games are those that not branded or designed as such.
I would love to see a talk that is just a conversation between you and Zach Barth, because he has also given very interesting talks about games as education.
I think Opus Magnum is Zachtronic's Magnum Opus. I love every game they've released to bits but Opus Magnum is my favorite because it is the most permissive. You have all the space and time you need to make the machinery as complicated and hideous as necessary to get that first solution made. Then you can iterate and make it nicer all you want. The other games are fantastic but all have much stricter playfields/limits that prevent more people from being able to complete a single solution. I can't recommend Zachtronics enough. Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans were also very nice programming games that even beginners can learn from.
hmm. You make a good point about it being permissive. I had been helping someone learn programming, and I started him with Human Resource Machine (which he finished), then SHENZEN I/O, then when he was done with that one, Opus Magnum. Maybe I should have started him with Opus Magnum first, but I found that one to be harder myself than the other two, so maybe I was just biased by he fact that it was a spatial puzzle instead of more linear instruction-based code.
@@BlueEyedSexyPants Ah yeah. Opus Magnum definitely has the spatial component which I could see being challenging. I was never able to fully complete TIS-100 because I couldn't fit some of my solutions into the code limits but I was able to finish Opus Magnum even if I had to make some really horrific layouts and only later improve on them. I guess I was also biased :)
Exapunks gets a similar kind of mileage out of massively relaxing its line limits, and building a ruleset that allows you to spawn arbitrarily many exas (or at least as many as will fit, which is usually more than you need). There's something to be said for the hardcore limitations of a game like TIS-100, but they do bring it a bit closer to traditional puzzle-solving and further from the kind of engineering process that you typically experience working on real-world problems.
Zachtronics games, the Portal series, KSP, and Factorio have all reshaped how I think about problem solving and even the world in general. Even if none of their lessons have been specifically applicable to the real world, there is still so much potential in the medium to at least get us to start thinking critically already.
@@kw1ksh0t Even if you're not just thinking about orbital mechanics. Like, KSP is really good at demonstrating how motion under gravity and trajectories, even from the ground, work. Also, learning how to build a space plane.
I loved this talk. The part when you mentioned how games shouldn't teach you specific facts about the world, but just give you an example, intuition or motivation reminded me so much of my relationship with traditional education. Let's take physics as an example. I liked physics classes in school when we were talking about things like classical mechanics, gravity, forces, conservation of energy and momentum, but when it came to electricity, magnetics and stuff, I found it so boring. The reason being that gravity and energy is something you have a good intuition for because you encounter it so often in your day, but electricity, for a kid like me at least, was a giant black box - all I knew was that if you plug something in, it runs, and if you touch it, you die. In other words, if I had played a game that introduces you to the intuition behind electricity, I would have enjoyed those physics classes much more since it wouldn't have felt like such a foreign subject. Nowadays, due to the fact that I have a certain intuition for electricity and electrical current, I'm actually very enthusiastic about learning more about it. And that's true for many, many things that I was taught.
This is a good example. I probably could have used that too. I completely failed to ever develop a mental model for electricity and electronics at school.
You don't need to restrict yourself to only the intuition of physical interactions. You can develop that first and then layer in more precise meaning. Jon is wrong about that element imho. There is no real reason to avoid the 'real' version of whatever phenomena you are trying to teach students. You DO need to carefully scaffold the topic and start with the broader themes and intuition and metaphors/analogies though. If ya can help the concepts make sense first, then math can be layered in to represent the elements of said concepts that get measured for computations. James Paul Gee has discussed this kinda thing before. You need meaning to be situated in a context for it to stick. Saying 'we are gonna learn about X...X is blahblahblah' is not helpful. Instead, students should get to investigate systems thru games and can then decide what ideas they think are important to their experiences and THEN they can get named. In the physics courses I teach I do this as much as I possibly can.
@@TavishHill Aren't you saying the exact same things? You say "Jon is wrong" but I can't see any disagreement, neither with the talk video, nor the comment. Really, it seems the idea is common or similar; my summary: make a foundation of intuition and build on top of it with bricks of knowledge.
@@buttonasas I think my previous comment was not real clear, on second pass looking at it. I meant that you can use games and game-like simulations to get not just the basic intuitions under your belt, but also to get experience with solving real world, fully applicable problems. Most folks don't realize this, but in the real world math and often times complex physics problems that are super tough get solved in precisely this kinda fashion with toy model systems. Feynman diagrams are examples of precisely that, in fact. I'm saying you can get intuition AND ALSO build up to applications all within a gaming experience. He seemed to say it was good for intuitions only and real problem solving had to stem from other modes of learning once you've become motivated by the fun intuitions gains via games. I've seen children as young as 7 learn the basic operations of manipulating algebraic equations by playing Dragon Box. They had no idea it was ever supposed to be an educational game or had anything to do with math. Ex: If ya wanna learn about electricity, games can absolutely help ya get a feel for simple models of the phenomena in a fun, engaging way. And after ya develop that though, you can extend it naturally using evolutions of the same game experience transitioning gradually to more real world applications.
Fascinating talk. It is funny to me though that Jon can so definitively say games are bad at story, but games are good at teaching and we just aren't making educational games right. As if there isn't a direct parallel where we could also get better at making games that tell stories in a way that is totally divorced from other mediums. Not to mention half of the film industry sights playing rpgs as how they learned to develop characters and narrative.
I think about two separate tasks for an education game: 1.teaching the concept or idea and 2. The interactive exploration of that idea. Both appear possible within the medium of video games, however I think the latter is easier to achieve as the application of an idea can be much more broad than the specific scenario in which it can be intuitively "born". I think about games like Math Blaster which never taught you math, but perhaps presented it in a universe that made it slightly more interesting than a page of equations. But the game never taught you mathematical notation, just let you explore them a bit. So in that light there is some "low-hanging fruit" in the form of mastery exploration. Create game universes that create a dependency on mastery of an idea as a means to thrive/excel much more so than the real world. This sort of aligns with this idea of "games then books" but I'd add to that "instruction, games then books". Although it is entirely possible to present the birth of intuitive knowledge within a game, it is difficult to match that one-to-one with the real world. For example The Witness does a fantastic job of creating knowledge within the player without explicit instruction, however that knowledge is still limited to the scope of the universe it was created within. I'm not sure I can name a single game which both introduces an entirely foreign concept (which is true to reality) to the player, teaches them and explores the mastery of that idea. Perhaps just the task of creating that knowledge implicitly within a person could take the entirety of a single game, I don't know.
Playing Fract OSC is still the best video game learning experience I have received. It is a ~6h game about synth music. Only very late into the game did I realize I actually learned some skills while playing. It was not generic knowledge, it was much more like learning to walk - starting with mimicry and taking small steps but also gradually reducing in hand holding. The learning was very efficient (6 hours!) since I paid my fullest attention and I don't believe I could've learned that by any other means than interactive, yet, also couldn't have learned it as effectively by dabbling with professional tools.
around 49:00, with the concept of games having precise facts in them mimicking books, I think there is an appreciable difference. As an example, let's say PUBG gives you the precise stats of a weapon in a little popup on the weapon, to link into what was talked about just before that point in the video. I somewhat agree that, yes, it is "mimicking books" in the sense that you are using the "correct" medium for conveying precise facts about something: descriptive/factual text. The reason I see them as different is that in a game, this precise textual information is given _within_ that context of intuitive knowledge, and in "proximity" to it as well. It could be argued that this is just a difference in scale, and I could agree that that might be the case, but I think there's something more to it. I think it might be easier if you subdivide media more and put this kind of text into a category of "informational text". There are books that contain informational text, and they are good at giving you a large amount of it in an easily referrable format, but having a book that tells you "this substance is corrosive to your skin" is a lot less effective than a large sign saying "Corrosive material" (usually combined with "informational iconography"). This ties into the stuff about cinema, it's multidisciplinary, but there's something "other" that emerges from that specific combination of other media which results in a new, distinct type of media. I'm not sure where this entire thought train was actually headed, so sorry for the slight ranty nature, but I think there's enough stuff there to move some thoughts =P
2 years later I'm reading your thought train and enjoying it. About guns in PUBG, I wonder if it's useful to have that information at all. Obviously we're going to. Obviously there have always been car games with exact stats and colors and the works, or sim games with semi-realism at every edge. There's no denying it. But when I play a game, the situation/context and controls are all that seem to matter. I can play a hyper-realistic game and be amazed at that aspect, but when it comes to gameplay, those guns in PUBG could give me complete gibberish and I doubt it would change my experience in the slightest (except maybe a little immersion broken from having gibberish appear, but if it appeared in, say, Russian characters, I probably wouldn't even glance twice). Kinda like a movie phoning it in on computer science stuff like Network protocols. The only people who notice are those with experience in the field, and only then because the movie tried rather than waving it off as "we did network stuff". My point is, with regard to game design, maybe we *should* keep real information out in order to maximize the meaning behind ideas and scenarios being presented within the game. 'Show, don't tell' and such.
I think the Oregon Trail series is actually a good example about this more systems-focused, simulationist approach to edutainment. Same goes for Sim City for civic planning or the Tycoon series for business management (that might be stretching it, a bit).
Honestly a lot of sim games have potential to be edutainment-like games. They offer the user with a taste of what the profession might be like, but cut out a lot of the boring/complicated bits of the job.
Surprised no one mentioned Poly Bridge. Learning physics by intuition is one of the best things games are good at. Hope he takes another shot at Kerbal in the future.
There may not be an institution of people doing this yet, but there are certainly some orbiting studies. In particular "Bret Victor" has done a lot of work in regards to trying to lean towards this more visual learning through experimentation/play and "intuiting" rather than through direct knowledge transfer. There is a similar feeling in the P5JS and JSFiddle style communities. Again, not games but the general systemic "play learning" ideas are definitely out there.
There's definitely others working on this and having similar ideas. Nicky Case (explorable explanations) and Dan Meyer (Demos activities) come to mind.
Runescape has helped me develop a good intuition on economics, far before I even knew what economics mean. The motivation to learning the game was that there was actual risk involved, dieing, losing gear, getting scammed.
I remember Guitar Hero 3 taught me rythm and left right-hand timing back in ~2008, which helped me immensely once I got into playing real guitar. It also introduced me to old school rock with sick solos, hence why I even got interested in learning the actual instrument.
do not forget RockSmith games that are actually teaching you to play a real electric guitar ! (this is the way my son really started to learn playing guitar)
Watched the whole talk and find Jonathan's insights very good. But he kinda "lost" me at 02:09:40 when he says: "I'm not sure to what extent destructive game addiction is a thing" ... It's very much a thing. And someone in the Video Game Industry is turning a blind eye to it. We have a cousin in our family who is so hooked on video games he cannot *function* as an adult. Lives at home. never leaves his room. plays games obsessively. no (IRL) friends. "gaming disorder" is recognised by the World Health Organisation and _many_ people suffer from it. This is a classic case of: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ~ Upton Sinclair Otherwise great insights. Thanks.
Nice talk! Around 21:00 Jon makes a famous point, originally by Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message." Around 40:00 it's a very nice topic as well. Image is read in a different way (and perhaps processed easier, I'm not knowledgeable about this) than the letters and language. For example video game medium also has immersion (spatial presence) that is wired differently in our brain as well. Around 1:13:11 he touches upon abstraction of real world phenomena in video games. One of my favorite topics. So basically not carrying real world complexity of things into a video game, rather simplifying to focus communication. Though he is not talking about this topic in particular of course, I just caught a reference. Around 1:38 basis for iconography
@@ashnur Oh yeah you're right! The book has that title, but the original phrase is with "message." When I mentioned this in Twitch chat Jon said it's not what he meant but Mcluhan's book goes so wide on the topic of medium, it's not only about the effect of TV on society or something. I just meant saying "maybe you shouldn't make that a movie, right?" is basically underlining the importance of type of medium you use, alongside your content. This is 'also' a thing McLuhan says.
McLuhan said lots of things I don't agree with, but he saw this one thing about the different effects media has and that they involve people differently. Obviously both a book and a game are 'cold' in the sense McLuhan categorizes things, so I agree that Jon was probably saying something more specific here, but the McLuhan reference is important because it carries :)
School/ educational institutions could be seen as Live Action Role Play where students grind for better grades. That students learn something besides how to get good grades, is a happy coincident.
I don't know. Maybe I am incredibly privileged by attending good state schools but all stages of education had optional activities, both parallel and orthogonal to regular classes. They never yielded grades and possibly taught something. Admittedly, the potential in classes with grades mostly came down to how good the teachers were and since wages are close to lowest, most were not amazing.
@@buttonasas I'm sceptical about your American sentiments of being privileged, but here in Russia we have about ZERO choice pretty much throughout the whole education from elementary school to universities. Only MANDATORY stuff. :D
@@buttonasas I wasn't really implying your nationality, I just hear this sentiment about being privileged from Americans so to me it's an American thing. :) As far as I can tell in 30 years passed since USSR we've ruined our education at least by 2/3. It's really cool if you improved your educational system instead. :)
It's a lot of time and effort to speak on this and listen to it, but is the educational system really trying to teach a skillset or real knowledge? The real lesson they want to teach is compliance. The corporate state that supports public education wants obedient labor, not necessarily someone who loves knowledge. It should not take 6 years to teach a child to read and write plus do basic math. but taking all this time keeps the kids occupied while the parent do the labor for the corporate state. So I guess we're assuming this is all a problem the state also sees as a problem.
Very interesting talk, Also I think that one overlooked detail is what happens outside the game. After you play, and the discussions that arise. In a healthy environment people like to share their strategies and experiences. What's great about this is that there can be extrinsic motivations to play a game that doesn't require "gamification" There is a natural tendancy to think that if your friend could finish some part of a game that you should be able to as well. In the context of the classroom, a single player game can grow into a social experience, one that you can share with the teacher and the other students. When I was younger I would play with my brothers, and we would all watch and comment as one of us played. This got a bit ramblely, but my point is that we need to remember that adding games into education does not have to be associated with the trope of someone by them-self playing at home. It can easily be a rewarding shared experience in more ways than 1.
I think what you said about schooling not working is very accurate. I left University when a professor told me my opinion of a movie scene was wrong and that I was reading too much into it....even though he did the same thing 5 minutes later for the next scene in the movie. University is supposed to encourage one to learn and form their own opinions...I find the system in cataclysmically damaged and unrepairable in the current form.
I'm on it. I'll have a working example in a few years. In 10 years, I'll be changing programming and education in a way you couldn't even predict here.
My thinking: Games have the ability to teach you via Trial-and-Error, that is something books or movies can't do. Learning by T-E has it flaws though. A good example I can think of is Bridge Builder. You can learn how to design a bridge that does its job, but you will not learn about structural analysis and the math behind it.
But isn't John arguing that Bridge Builder would then give you the inspiration/reason to actually dive deeper into structural analysis? Or a better foundation to understand it when/if you decide to do so. Or that Bridge Builder could be a good tool to learn a subset of bridge-theory. It doesn't seem to me he's arguing that games should be a one-stop shop to learning. (Even though I realise you're not explicitly saying that either)
@@NegatioNZor Yea I think Bridge Builder in its current state isn't the best example because a lot of the intuitive knowledge you could gain through play can be achieved much more simply through directed play with physical objects(wooden blocks), Bridge Builder is fun because almost everyone who plays already has that intuition and you are testing that knowledge in wacky ways. A game used to jump start a students education about bridge construction might be one that emphasizes the exploration of various building materials for different applications never even mentioning a bridge or a game that teaches how well designed bridges can connect and fundamentally change communities so that when you start to teach a student how bridge locations are selected they can already intuiit some of what factors need to be considered.
@@lamelikemike Fair points, and definitively more in line with what Jon is talking about :) As an anecdote, I myself tried Bridge Builder (or an equivalent) at the tender age of 10-12, which inspired some underlying sense/knowledge that maths could have some practical application. That's obviously highly subjective and might be reasoning in hindsight, but I belive playing Bridge Builder (which isn't a perfect learning tool), had higher value than simply the gameplay in itself. Playing with blocks can help a child understand the basics of building a structure, but Bridge Builder highlights that construction might come with several challenges based on size/distance in a more intuitive way when you can see the stress points of the bridge. It also lets us learn that we need to be methodical (use maths?) in our approach, if we're to fulfill the specs of a given level. Iteration time might also be shorter than constructing something out of blocks, allowing us to explore quicker. I think the approach you highlight is a lot better at teaching some deeper aspects of bridge building that I have no knowledge of though :)
@@NegatioNZor We don't really know and I certainly don't claim to, we are cavemen trying to hypothesize about poetic verse. Bridge Builder has value beyond fun but does it fit into a curriculum? When, how and for who? Should it be required or part of an optional "summer reading" list. Maybe games should be used to determine a curriculum on a student by student basis and their ability to teach intuition is only helpful early in figuring out what a person is wired to understand intuitively.
There are reasons besides efficacy why Montessori (which I've already never experienced and can't claim is better or worse) hasn't replaced traditional education. In the US at least, public schooling is effectively a monopoly for low-cost education. Your options are: go to the school in my district for free, or pay large sums of money for a private school. The public school's methods don't have to be superior to the private school's methods if the private school is prohibitively expensive. The fact that Americans somehow find it easier to move houses to get into a better school district than to just pay for private school is telling.
I really appreciate the distinction between "system games" and "story games". I've never enjoyed the idea of a game that forces you down a certain path. Not because it's inherently bad, but because other media already do that really well. If I want a structured story I'll watch a film. Games are good at systems, environments, simulations, emergent behaviour and chaos theory. I also think we need to identify reward-based games that are designed to hack your dopaminergic system. It's not just the points and medals, but also kills and victories. Not that we can't have those sorts of games, but I don't think they have the same potential as purely exploratory games where the reward is provided by the player, i.e. the player feels good for solving a problem.
Perhaps beside the point but I think it's important not to discount what interactive tools can add to linear storytelling. For example, one of the things that linear mediums are poor at is pacing and volume of information. If a story beat goes too fast for you in a movie then you're done, the train has left the station and all you can hope to do is infer what happened through future events. If you're watching something like a mystery story where it's critical that you follow all the information available, then missing a piece can be the undoing of the story. In a visual novel or a game with click to advance cutscenes, for example, you can control the pace of the story, and often rewind it, or get summaries of what happened. You might have menus that keep information of all the characters and everything that's happened thus far. All these things allow you to be able to keep up with stories better and with more convenience, as well as facilitate the telling of stories of bigger scopes.
When I studied Computer Science at uni, all people talked about was how much money they gonna make after they graduate and which companies are the hottest. There was no spirit of engineering.
There is an issue with education and games which has bothered me for a while: I think that games come with a tacit worldview, and when we learn games we learn with them an understanding of how to navigate the world in that worldview. With that in mind, I struggle with the question with respect to social systems: should we attempt to model the world as we believe it is, imparting more practical knowledge at the risk of reinforcing problematic assumptions? Or should we model perhaps idealistic alternatives, giving an unrealistic model which primes people’s minds to think more concretely about how the world could be better? I imagine the answer is somewhere between and slightly orthogonal to those solutions, but I haven’t seen it discussed.
For example: game economies usually presume private property as an intrinsic part of the world. That is: your personal inventory is secure and protected by the nature of the world itself, so nobody can take anything from you without a process of voluntary exchange. Which is perfectly fine, but if, say, you had a game about ants in an ant colony, it wouldn’t make sense for an ant to “own” anything: the ants instead would have to cooperatively organize to manage material resources to their mutual benefit. Not necessarily saying anarcho-syndicalism with ant-like characteristics is an ideal society, but the bigger issue is priming people to think about how alternative systems can work instead of simply assuming the systems they know are intrinsic to the world.
What better place to explore idealistic alternatives than the world in a video game? Seems like the perfect place to try something which you may think is unrealistic, but in reality may just be hard to achieve from where we currently stand.
@@syzygy6 "Anarcho-syndicalism with ant-like characteristics" is my new favorite meme ideology. But in all seriousness, I think historical grand strategy games are a great example of how this goes wrong in exactly the way you're talking about, and those games have frequently been critiqued from that angle by historians. Grand strategy games tend to systematize a lot of common wrong ideas about the driving forces behind historical events and the nature of societal change.
Wow. I wish I could save RUclips comments like you can on Reddit specifically for comments like this. This is one of the things as a leftist that has really been grinding my gears about Civ and Paradox games, especially Stellaris, for quite a while now. We're never really given am opportunity to meaningfully explore alternative systems or the way alternative systems interact with what these games would assume is the default. I am in the very early stages of prototyping something that might be a little more open-ended in that regard. I was seriously so fed up that I just had to start getting it out of my system lol. We'll see if it goes anywhere...
what you're talking about is literally my dream. im a beginner programmer and game maker and one day i want to do this! i want to make games that dont suck and can be used to impart understanding
I find it astounding that Jon doesn't think games are good at storytelling when one of the most profound things I took away from playing Braid was how a player has to mirror the obsessive actions of Tim (the player character) to find the secret ending and complete his arc. I guess that's equally compelling an argument that games are poor at telling stories, since 99% of players aren't going to find that ending organically.
IMO for a classical, linear storytelling, the interactivity is often nothing more than an irritating problem that a lot of wannabe filmmakers and other ambitious storytellers often try to design around (like in Order 1886, David Cage's games, even some shooters that wen full "Hollywood"). Interactivity is a super powerful tool for experiencing stories more like a simulation than actually telling the story. Because of that stories experienced in some video games can potentially be more powerful than any book or a film. Different medium, different trade-offs. But what one defines as "storytelling" can change this perception a lot.
@@kazioo2 > experiencing stories more like a simulation I advise anyone who likes that idea to look into Prey 2017 and it's mooncrash DLC, I think those are superb examples of that, for spoilery reasons I won't get into.
Games provide a miniature, fictional version of some core concept, so people can get intuition about how it all functions. Where books are about specific concrete info. People get good at tings when they know both how it generally functions and specific important details. If you only read books, you feel overwhelmed by the amount of specific information that you see no use for... Destroys motivation.... very bad If you only play games, you get an intuition about a fictional system but not much about what is usable... but it is "fun" so you can take in alot of information If you do both(starting with games)... Games make Books much more understandable as you can link concepts together to make a coherent whole... While Books make Games more concrete and easier to apply irl along with giving you ideas to test ingame... Very good Students are not wrong when they ask "Why do I need to know this?" and it should not be dismissed... All in all a great talk!
You could summarize the principle of building an educational game as "Like what or who do you want your player to feel playing your game?". I think it is what mr. Blow ment under the "spirit". Shenzhen I/O- spirit of engineering = how it feels to develop smth as enginer. Mini metro- spirit of civil construction engineer = how it is to build a metropolitan network. And so on. I hope someone would find this interpretation useful to carry forward an idea of making educational games better.
One last comment: I suggest getting someone to curate your questions for you, Because I think it would save you time and improve the quality of your Q&A session. First, it could save the many minutes of dead air in your stream while you read through the chat. Second, redundant questions could be grouped together or simply ignored. Third, questions could be collected during the stream (which might not obviously seem beneficial but in my experience it is). Fourth and last, your question curator might be able to clarify confusing and poorly-worded questions before they reach you.
Someone wrote about the Advantages and Disadvantages of Montessori education. But quick summary why haven't become the universal norm, too expensive and not suitable for every student, and doesn't produce factory line workers. foundersguide.com/the-pros-cons-of-montessori-education/ My take on the matter is that if we want't to maximize the learning of students it would be beneficial to have different type of schools based on personalities and IQ. The downsides of that would be longer commute taking time away from learning and the society fractioning to groups that do not really understand each other based on those lines since they don't interact with each other during childhood.
A Montessori preschool is designed in such a way that, when I describe the Witness to some people, I say it's like a virtual Montessori school for adults. In a similar manner to how Montessori materials afford a gradual introduction to life, physics, written language, and mathematics, the Witness affords a gradual introduction to ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and theology.
Samuel Costa true. But 60 hours of a tv show with the same plot would be far more detailed and engrossing than 60 hours of playing hzd. Watch a let’s play of it and it takes forever for the plot to progress.
Great talk! I've been saying this stuff for the past 5-6 yrs or so since I began teaching. I do think the presumption that games giving specific facts is inherently worse than something more akin to metaphorical representations is misguided though. That appears to be based on the idea that it makes students feel forced to engage with the game, but that is not the only way to deliver these experiences! You can start with metaphor and then transition gradually into real world applicability. See Dragon Box for a great example of this. In Dragon Box, players start the game as a puzzle game that just so happens to operate under the same rules as algebraic manipulation of equations. It initially uses images to represent the mathematical objects being shifted around but then later gradually things shift to numbers and eventually to letters and mathematical operators. You can have continuity and coherence between the metaphorical game representation and the more realistic simulated game scenario. What ultimately matters is what mental model the students form in their heads. There's no reason to presume that such models can never contact real world applicability. Your reference to Feynman diagrams itself is literally an example demonstrating this! There is nothing physically real about the diagrams. They are tools to develop mental models with that in turn allow someone to write more intuitive equations from. I understand why you prefer not bothering to respond to questions about what the low hanging fruit topics are, but I'd like to note that imo there are legitimately low hanging fruit topics w/in STEM fields specifically. They are already formatted and framed intellectually as puzzles to solve and systemic by their nature. They also have well defined underlying mechanics that can (and often times are!) mimicked in game design (physics, specifically but also math and engineering too).
Good talk! To add about gamification and engagement, I think there is an important feature that video games have, and schools don't that much. People may want to become engineers not because of the spirit, but because of a *goal*, not gamification-ish short-term rewards, but overarching one, maybe a fantasy, unreachable one. Interest might not be the reason to learn, but a consequence of already starting to learn. For example, the cliche "by the end of this game you'll become a hero and save the world", now make it a game about real history. Actually there is already at least one educational game like that - Oregon Trail (not about saving the world though, but surely about becoming a hero). A lot of people believed that they could too develop games, and that's how they became artists, programmers. The most interesting thing would be to just continue to play them all the time instead, but they chose differently. A lot of people's brains were washed by politicians about "enemies of the state" that have to be urgent outcompeted (like USA vs USSR "we are first" kind of things) - and that's how they became engineers, scientists. Even if a goal is not achieved in the end or will be acknowledged useless in future, the very trying to achieve the goal is already giving huge results. I believe my school teacher of English (not my native tongue) used this approach in some way. She liked to say - let's work harder now, do more tasks, and when you reach last years in the school, you'll just rest instead of studying English. It was a lie, we studied hard until the end of school. And everyone hated her for the amount of tasks she gave and how critical she was on failure to deliver on them. But in retrospect, I now think she is actually the best of all my teachers (including University ones). No other teacher taught me as much as she did.
1:08:04 Kind of amazing. I never knew about this. When I played The Witness, something about the puzzles made me think that you could make a similar puzzle game out of tying knots. The puzzles themselves almost felt like a 2D slice of tying a knot (also ties back to Braid's namesake). I've always thought that someone could make a really good puzzle game based on the complexities of tying or untying increasingly complex knots, nearly similar in scale to The Witness. Knots have always had this weird space in my mind where, despite understanding their usefulness, I find it incredibly difficult to grasp even basic knots. That sort of practical mystery is usually a good space for puzzles.
to me the main problem about school is that you have a large amount of students of different levels packed together with different learning speed. if you don't regroup better ones together and less good ones together at some point, dumb ones either slow the learning rate of the entire group either accept they fate and learn less than they should, because it's too fast for them, same goes for the ones above the average. in an hypotetical class where each student had his pc playing a game, it gets everyone it's own bubble with is own virtual personnal teacher, with a learning pace that fits, this is by far the real weight of video game in education imo (given the fact that the game is well made) also when it comes to learning the rate of the cycle "testing hypothesis + getting a return" is key factor. in that regard, a computer game can tell you instantaneously what you have tried works or not (if designed properly), wich is by far better than having to raise your hand and ask something to a teacher whose attention is split between lot of other students (or to wait a week that the teacher corects the quizz)
A very interesting talk. I would be very interested to know if/how the systems taught in the video games Mr. Blow cites favorably map onto the kinds of real-world systems in which we want to perform well. In other words, I want to see the Venn diagram that shows the overlap between the systems-thinking taught in PUBg and Fortnite et al and the systems-thinking required of a 21st-century citizen. If what Mr. Blow says is true, that even games like PUBg and Fortnite teach systems-thinking to some degree, then, given the ubiquitousness of these games and games like them in the last fifteen-or-so years, we should soon see (or be seeing already) an improvement (not just a change, but an improvement) in some area of life we care about. It's possible that such an improvement has taken place and we simply haven't gone looking for it, or we haven't correctly sourced it to the prevalence of systems games like these. It's also possible that the systems-thinking taught in even the most dynamic systems game is too parochial to be expressed in any other system than that game's system. We see this in other disciplines; as far as I know, proficiency in the systems of, say, architecture does not usually express itself in the systems of, say, market economics. I worry that Mr. Blow's central assumption is that systems-thinking is a thing that exists, a broad style of thinking that is flexible and useful and adaptable to many scenarios. I suspect that the truth is much more granular and difficult; that systems-thinking is Balkanized into discrete domains that have some use to their adjacent domains but rapidly diminishing use, approaching 0, as distance increases, and thus, a curriculum that included even the best and most effective kind of video game would only kick the can down the road, the can being the difficulty of teaching people how to think effectively and be generally competent grownups. That said, I fully agree that education needs to move away from its emphasis on information and toward an emphasis on what Mr. Blow might call systems-thinking. Very grateful for this talk.
Players try to win and to have fun, the trick for an educational game to make the skill you want them to learn the best and most fun way to win. Mimic logic is a logic puzzle game with some RPG elements around it to flavor everything. Satisfactory is a logistics planner with some fancy lights and buttons and beautiful scenery to look at while you play it. League of Legends teaches you how to be miserable and hate both yourself and your teammates Fighting games like Tekan teach you how to predict other people and practice motor skills and repetitive input sequences. Dark Souls teaches a player patience and perseverance, the reward you get after trying over and over again. Sometimes the skills are more specific and sometimes they are more general/conceptual or emotional. In a way our genre names for games are often descriptive of the skills you use, and therefore have to learn, in order to play them. Fighting games, strategy games, role playing games, puzzle games, etc. One issue I do see with games in education is that often the measure of a good game is one where the playerbase can play how they want to play. There is no one game that every single type of person loves to play, everyone has preferences for that. But in education you have to learn things you don't want to learn or care about learning, which means that those games probably won't be fun. I don;t know how much you can learn from a game that's not fun, but then I also don't know how much you can really learn from a lecture that you fall asleep to.
Personally, I think a game like Outer Wilds teaches the *intuition* of orbital mechanics much better than KSP. Super quick restarts after hitting a fail state. Interesting and fun goals for successfully flying and landing (safely) your rocket.
IMO the biggest benefit of games for education is that a single game can be experienced differently by each individual playing it, with books, video and audio everyone is forced into the same experience but game and their interactivity allow everyone to have a completely different experience. People are very different, there is no method of education that would be ideal for everyone (not even games), some people prefer reading about a subject on their own, others prefer a hands on approach, and some will prefer watching a demonstration. Even within though groups there is likely a split between those that prefer theory and those that prefer the practical application of the subject. Games is a medium that allows each individual to tackle the objectives in the way that suits them best allowing them to learn how they choose, rather than being forced into less ideal methods. Even the way you interact with games can be altered to suit an individual's preference, VR, keyboard, mouse, or controller. You can even have an AI run in the background learning how a particular user learns best and tailor objectives to better suit that method.
42:20 I think this is a really interesting insight, the fact that information going in through non-language takes time to process and translate in order to come out as language. I'd be really interested in seeing that studied more, especially when you add on that some people can just explain immidaitly. I wonder what the correlation is with internal monologs and also how things like IQ impact everying related to games. 53:10 Something I think is extra interesting about games and developers is their understanding of motivates a player. The best way to learn something is to want to learn it and gmaes do a pretty good job at getting players to want something by design. I could easily see a game being effective that was playable and fun without specific knowledge, then you demonstrate that with certain specific knowledge you can play it even better and more effectively, thus answering the classic question "when am I going to use this" even if just a emotional sense. Lots of RPG can be minmaxed using math, and plenty of rougelikes can be better played if you understand probabilities. One limit to this is that games arem ost fun when you are actively playing them, as opposed to long sessions of planning and calculation, but then again other games thrive in that environment like puzzle or strategy games. I wonder if the way to make a fun educational game is to just make a really hard game. Then give the pallyers/students the tools required to succeed at the game. Maybe not though, lots of different theories to test out. 56:35 I think this is it exactly. It's hard to describe the difference I sometimes see in my peers between those that grew up playing certain kinds of games and those that didn't. Its like there is a higher rate of drive, or at least knowledge on how to improve at a task that other people seem to lack at times.
My main takeaway: making good educational games that are good games and don't conform to conventional (broken) educational conventions is hard. We need to recognize that we are at the beginning of attempting this. We're so early in this process that we need to give ourselves permission to experiment and try things out, rather than thinking we can head straight toward success. Agreed. At this point the problem is funding. How can I afford to experiment at this level?
Thanks for this great talk. I've been a fan of Blow since I knew the Witness which makes me want to make educational games about physics. I'm currently in graduate school and being depressed very often, and lost my passion for physics which I used to have. I believed that if I cannot continue doing research, the knowledge I've learned will eventually be useless, which makes me even more depressed. But then I realized making games might be a way. I'm inspired a lot by the Witness and Manifold Garden, and this talk just provides me more examples and principles. Now I need to put my concrete effort to pave my way.
The kind of disruption to traditional education discussed around 1:31:15 reminds me a lot of Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory, but applied to school instead of companies.
Chants of Sennaar is a great game that distills the fun of learning languages by having you decipher symbols. I could see how it could inspire people to learn real languages. I'd love to see your take on a full blown "educational" game. I hope that you get a chance to make one one day.
If math uses reeeeaaaly unreadable variable names shouldnt we do to? maybe its a mistake to try to give bits of code readable names, maybe it is impossible to make a name that is better than reading the code itself, maybe we just need crazy one greek letter names for everything and some elaborate comments explaining what they actually are, either that, or math is wrong
Saying "right?" after making a point is the most annoying trend in public speaking. It's like saying "um" repeatedly. Stop doing this - it doesn't help your presentation; it detracts.
On a side note, and perhaps against your argument, videogames and videos make people lazy by rendering images and sounds making them spare the mental effort of imagining and creating simulations in their own mind, daydreaming, if you will. It's a false dichotomy, obviously one can play videogames and spend some time alone imagining stories and dynamics, but because of the hedonistic nature of some people, they might be lured more easily by the flashy, immediate gratification route, which tends to be videogames and videos.
Almost 20 years ago, my 5th grade class and I learned how to type just by playing Mavis Beacon a couple times a week in class. By then, Mavis Beacon was already 20 years old itself, maybe that's how long it takes for schools to adopt educational software, even with demonstrable educational value.
May I suggest a simpler explanation: schools have budget restrictions, Mavis Beacon was well-tested and shown to be sufficient to the task of teaching typing, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, spend the money on something else! Seriously, as much as I’m a tech geek making my living with software development, there is such a thing in many contexts where something is more than good enough, so it has severely diminishing returns when trying to make it “better” so when you find that, spend resources making something else better.
Outer Wilds is a great example of teaching from videogames, to a certain degree. You can learn about and experience fundamental concepts like gravity fields or quantum imaging. Edit: I'd like to add I just think the game taps into that potential for education.
I don't think gamification should be entirely written off. I completely agree that it's not going to make apathetic students suddenly interested in a subject, but for students who are already invested, to have silly things like XP and achievements which represent how much work you've done can actually be very encouraging. I don't know if you've ever used it, but I think Duolingo is a really good example of this being done right. You have a "streak" publicly displayed to show how many days you've practiced in a row, and you lose your streak if you skip a day of practice. You have an XP leaderboard which shows how much work you've done compared to your friends, which encourages you to put extra work in. "Leveling up" in certain categories gives you a very clear-cut sense of progression and achievement which is much better than a vague sense of "oh yeah, I can sort of read this sentence now". All of these things add up. At the end of the day, we're humans, and we like earning stupid trinkets. The Farmville strategy works for certain subjects, and applying that addictiveness to something that's actually productive is fine by me. It seems to work. Great talk though, really enjoyed it. There are a lot of subjects that could really benefit from being taught more through intuition, and I'm excited to see how proper educational games evolve through the next few decades.
What's interesting is that some of the best educational games I can think of are very VERY much the kind of games Jon would enjoy. When I was a kid, I was in "enrichment classes" (aka the room behind the library that they didn't know what to do with, full of freshly purchased computers they didn't know what to do with, where they dumped all the bored smart kids they didn't know what to do with). So in these "classes", we mostly fucked around and played games. One of those games was West Point Bridge Designer, a 2D physics simulator where you build bridges and then a little truck tries to drive across them (and 99% of the time the bridge collapses spectacularly). Sort of a proto-proto-proto Kerbal Space Program. It's a great game, and it teaches basic architecture better than any book EVER could. I remember thinking even at age 8, "Why isn't all of school like this?" I could name a few others that prove the point just as well, because games have this fun self-selection thing where no one wants to play the shitty ones, but the great ones kids gravitate to.
1:07:10 " _if i was doing an education game, what would it be like_ ?" ...my first thought (altho probably not in the spirit of what you're trying to convey) would be a *_simulation._* Like a wood/metal shop OR chem-lab (for example) because you wouldn't have to invest tons of money to buy all the tools, equipment, & materials. So, it would make it extremely accessible for kids to jump into & play around with... But without a risk of actually getting injured.
Somewhere between an hour and 90 minutes. Famous last words.
Let it never be said that Jon Blow left even a single philosophical tangent unexplored to its fullest.
To be fair, it's pretty close to an hour **and** 90 minutes, which would be 2.5 hours
It was 100 minutes followed by a Q&A session.
He meant in 2x :)
No, he meant the talk itself. The remaining time is him answering questions.
Modern education in America is stuck in 1930s pedagogy at best. There were several major paradigm shifts since then in pedagogy. Like, in teaching Languages...
In the 1890's, there was a the grammar-translation approach, where people just translated whole books using a translation dictionary.
In the 1920's there was the direct approach. People would move to other countries because travel was cheap then. They would just learn the names of things when someone pointed at that thing and said it in their language.
In the 1930's there was the Reading approach, where standardized testing became popular. Teachers gave students word lists to study at home, and they would read books in the alternative language.
In the 1940's there was the military method. The U.S. military had people say the same words over and over. They also had their soldiers fill in slots in a sentence, like, "Hello, my name is ______."
In the 1970's there was the affective-humanistic approach where teachers started to account for emotions. So, in this style, teachers had kids write plays, songs, and other artforms. The kids would participate in the plays for each other.
The 80's also had the cognative psychology which influenced teaching in teaching grammar rules.
The 90's had the internet, which caused the communicative approach where kids were encouraged to communicate to each other in a kind of free network. Then, kids were encouraged to go online and talk to kids in the target language.
So, today the established government schools are stuck in the 30's, and foreign English teachers are trained the the communicative approach. There were other approaches. However, the communicative approach takes many of the methods from prior approaches.
A standard class under the communicative approach would be...
Warmer: Some activity to build energy. Something exciting.
presentation: Introduce the examples, and see if the kids can figure out the application and rules.
drill: Repeat over and over the application of the target grammar or vocabulary.
CCP: Let the kids play a game where they can interactively practice the target lesson. One example is to have the kids form a circle and toss 2 balls. One kid says a sentence, throws the ball, and the reciever gives the responding senence.
Production: Each individual kid produces the target language. This could be a test.
So, in the end, there is plenty of room for games. The TESOL community is setup to recieve these games, as long as they fit into modern communicative pedagogy. Books, and whatnot still play a role in modern teaching. However, games are important. Hopefully, this knowledge helps you understand a little bit on how to make an educational game.
I have a feeling educational games will be more effective in VR. VR is an off-shoot of video games, but it's served in a different, but more immersive medium.
Like at 46:35, when he talks about the mechanisms of an AK, the motion and immersion of handling an AK in VR would be miles better than in flat games. Still, both are not as good as actual handling of a rifle. However, the person who's exposed to VR will know the motions of how to reload it properly.
At 52:21, when he talks about "being on-the-nose is dangerous", this is the limitation for flat games since it's not as immersive as VR. It takes students away from their current environment and places them in a controlled environment which could be designed to be engaging. For instance, if there was a VR equivalent of Shenzhen I/O in VR, students may manipulate it with their hands and peer at it closely. Spatial memory and kinesthetic learning are engaged, which are better than a mouse and keyboard.
At 1:18:09, I think VR enhances this "drive to explore" since you're virtually displaced from your current environment to a new environment. This excites the student. However, like all video games, it's efficacy is dependent on its design. A virtual field trip would be ineffective if the stimuli is overwhelming.
At 1:33:47, If video games will be the future of education, then VR should be leading the way. Already VR is being used in military, medical and corporate training, and there are proof that it is more efficient and effective in training people. If flat educational games are having a hard time grabbing a foothold in the industry, then I think it's time to sunset that attempt and focus it on VR.
VR is an anti-game. When you increase the amount of information aimed at the sensorium in ways that do not communicate the game state, it lowers the rate at which the game feedback loop takes place. That is what is happening with VR - most of the tech and processing power is going to trick your senses and the higher level aspects of a game, say logistics, tactics, and strategy, have not been figured out yet. They can't do anything that a single screen user interface can't handle more effectively.
@@ProductofSeebach But to overwhelm the student with too much information and/or configurations would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? Keeping things simple and controlled are better to guide students with material.
Also, VR can handle higher aspects. I currently play Civ6 in VR exclusively now through Virtual Desktop with hand-tracking. I think turn-based strategy games would find a great home in VR. And virtualization of board games would be good too.
@@misterhorse8327 You are attached to VR. I was too because at first glance it seems to offer so much, but it really doesn't once the novelty wears off. All the stuff you are thinking about with respect to boardgames and immersive interactions is best accomplished with AR, which is already being done in a lot of schools already, even superficially with things like smart boards.
@@ProductofSeebach The technology is getting better, and the novelty hasn't worn off. I use VR everyday for work and for my writing. I also use it for location research, using Google Earth to get a feel for a place that flat can't do.
The Oculus Quest is bringing a lot of people to VR finally, and it seems like it's full steam ahead. There are reports that a new standalone hybrid headset is on the works this month.
And AR is cut in the same cloth as VR. Both utilize space, but VR overlays the environment with something different. AR has strengths and weaknesses, and so does VR. I think both are progressing in tandem, and soon we could have XR where you can switch from AR to VR easily.
2:17:40
00:00 Intro
01:41 Start of the talk.
02:18 Language as technology, importance of language and it's limits.
07:15 Fiction, storytelling, laws and documents.
11:36 Written language. Symbolic language.
17:20 Music, Video language.
21:31 Specifics of videogames as a medium.
22:41 Non-linguistic communication. Board Games.
24:10 Pac-man.
27:10 Videogames and learning.
27:44 PUBG. Empirical learning.
35:10 Educational games, real world applicability.
36:20 Braid. Guiding the attention of the player.
38:42 The Witness. Experiments in non-linguistic communication.
45:03 Tacit knowledge. Difference between factological knowledge of books and intuition of games.
49:50 Problems with educational games.
53:47 Zachtronics and Shenzhen I/O. Iterative engineering.
58:57 Opus Magnum.
1:01:41 Miegakure.
1:05:27 Mini Metro.
1:06:58 John's attempt at educational game.
1:13:37 Harnessing the games' abilities. on 'gamification' of scholarship and 'schoolification' of games.
1:19:40 Achievements and trophies as manipulation.
1:20:26 Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn.
1:24:15 Learning systems thinking through games.
1:28:30 Problem: unconventionality of learning through game.
1:30:22 Game should be enjoyable on it's own.
1:31:15 Problem: Social signalling of schooling through conventional education.
1:34:43 Recap.
1:37:15 Final words. Cave paintings. Symbols.
1:41:40 QUESTIONS section start.
1:41:42 What about adding required to play games in school program?
1:42:01 Cavemen and mind-altering substances.
1:42:25 Isn't Miegakure educational game?
1:44:46 Optimizing work process as game designer.
1:46:50 Can games replace books as narrative carriers?
1:47:10 Can games be educational about sociolinguistic skills?
1:48:00 Should music and movies have a bigger role in future of education?
1:49:27 Gamification's impact on logistics of teaching.
1:50:36 Thoughts on KSP.
1:52:56 Does simplifying things in games equals lying?
1:53:18 Thoughts on sitting down and trying to make a teaching specific skills game. What's interesting about it?
1:56:28 Thoughts on non-systems learning in games, e.g. historical stuff in the strategy games.
1:57:50 Minecraft as educational game.
1:58:15 Games for teaching language.
1:59:15 Application of game design in managing courses and other learning programs.
2:00:17 Can system thinking game deliver some certain message about the system?
2:00:45 Is there an underlying issue involved in allowing children to explore learning themselves and not control the conclusion.
2:04:31 Are games deficient at conveying stories?
2:05:14 Is there space for medals when they are only given through hard and worthy goals?
2:05:47 Letting the game slide where it's the best.
2:06:32 Are gacha VN real games?
2:07:29 Are experts of existing thing needed for creating good game about it?
2:09:27 How we walk the edge in using games for education and not for creating more destructive game addiction?
2:11:16 Can increased privatisation of schools help create opportunities for new interesting types of learning?
2:12:27 Is it better to do real thing instead of simulating experience through the game?
2:13:20 Does gamification try to fight one vice with another?
2:13:47 When it comes to math and physics checking if answer is correct is the integral part of these disciplines and you cannot get rid of it. Simulations do not look good in this sense.
2:14:39 What systemic interaction in the game would look like?
2:15:37 Are utility and art separate entities when it comes to games?
2:20:05 Games as way to criticize social systems?
2:20:43 Game making as useful pedagogical tool?
2:21:35 Problem of knowledge transfer isn't fully solved yet.
2:24:17 Risks and costs of designing an interesting game instead of regular big selling games.
2:25:05 Risk of system thinking game not being accurate to real world.
2:27:20 Toys for babies, thoughts on Montessori schools.
2:29:27 Role of tacit knowledge and it's underappreciation in current education system.
2:30:54 Multiplayer games and their ability to find flaws in the system.
2:33:57 Thoughts on explaining philosophical concepts through videogames.
2:34:58 Are grades good or bad?
2:35:50 Is big part of learning still an essential repetative drudgework?
2:36:23 Goal is to make systems that provide deep expertise.
2:37:00 Making systems fun is the whole point.
2:38:17 It isn't about making a player memorize facts.
2:40:10 on curiosity.
2:41:05 all games are educational.
2:42:14 training the space of intuition.
Dayum
thanks bro for the effort
Thank you, captain hero.
A fun game that can teach you a bit about programming in Assembler Language is Human Resource Machine. By the same guys that did World of Goo.
As someone who spent many years being unemployed and playing video games 16 hrs per day, it definitely felt like an addiction. However, in retrospect, I think I was just depressed, and that time could have been filled with any kind of escapism.
That being said, I'm definitely way more productive now that I have uninstalled video games from my computer. I used to finish work and play 2-3 hours of DotA, Minecraft, PoE, whatever with my friends, then stay up for a few more hours by myself. For people like me, balance is probably not possible, so it's either you spend all your time playing or none of it.
I wish you addressed how hard it is to create good games. You've dedicated your life to being a good game designer -- and for this to work we need someone who is a great game designer (hard on its own) AND an expert in whatever the educational subject is (ex: macroeconomics). We are talking very few people.
He talks a bit about this being difficult at around 1:35:00.
But does the game creator really have to be an expert in the educational subject? There's several mentions to games being suited to communictate intuition, not necessarily the exact rules as defined by nature/socity. For example, Macroeconomics might be taught in an intuitive way through something like "Democracy 3", where the exact way things are affected is less important than the fact that a policy-change on alcohol will have a cascading effect on taxation, crime and populist support. The makers of Democracy doesn't seem to have any macroeconomic credentials, although they probably researched the topic quite a bit.
As long as the designer has a decent understanding of the subject matter, it should still be possible to utilize a game like this in an educational setting. (Definitely still not easy though, I just think the pool of talent able to create something like this is a bit larger than what you stated)
Sorry I haven't listened to the full talk... but did he say somewhere people can't work with others? Jon works alone but most every other game developer has some sort team, designers, artists, programmers. Plus plenty of modern wave of programmers are people who are self taught or bootcampers but came from a different field, such as music and the arts or one of the humanities. And plenty are already STEM field, and used programming in some daily or weekly fashion. This is a criticism that comes off as more as you wanting to gate keep or feel special, people are a lot more capable then you think.
Making a good game is hard. Making a good game that also teaches effectively is hard*hard. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try making them, it just means we should expect a lot of lousy ones on the way to making the great ones.
This is true for books. You have to be a good writer and knowledgable in the subject. To write a good physics textbook, you need to know physics and writing which are basically orthogonal.
We only need 1 each. We just have to reach and encourage them! Or better, make them ourselves through lectures like these.
Hi! I'm an educational games designer. I agree with a lot of what you say, but you keep saying it as if it's new information. Educational games designers and researchers have known all of this for about 20 years. I can give you a reading list if you'd like to learn more.
Give us one plz.
A quote about KSP: „I knew KSP was something special when I watched a young kid - probably less than 8 years old - playing KSP and using words like apogee, perigee, prograde, retrograde, delta-v; the lexicon of orbital mechanics. To the layperson orbital mechanics is a counter-intuitive world of energy, thrust, velocity, altitude that this kid - just by playing Kerbal - had managed to get his head around“. (visualizations producer Doug Ellison, NASA's JPL)
But did the kid understand these as concepts or just happen to remember the terminology? VERY different outcomes to distinguish there. If the goal is to get kids interested in orbital mechanics, that is distinct from the goal being to actually teach physics.
TavishHill I think you and Jon both are making a mistake in emphasizing correct physics in KSP. While a certain amount of correctness is important and necessary, The physics system itself is just one part of the control systems that so much of KSP is about. I think I can agree that accurate physics would be an unambiguous good, but I am not convinced it is a necessary prerequisite for it to be valuable in teaching what it teaches.
@@syzygy6 Fair enough. In my view, if the intention is to teach a segment of physics, it needs to be accurate in those areas. If it intends to teach the spirit of engineering, like Zach's games, that is different. Depends on what the intention is and how folks are using it in education. I agree in the right context it can be instructive, so long as ppl are honest about what it does well and what it doesn't.
Even teaching an fictional system is worthwhile, as long as the system has internal logic (i.e. it's actually a system and not arbitrary like story games).
@@willmcpherson2 Not always. Students can learn the wrong lessons from some systems. The fictional system should be a direct analog to the system you intend to teach about.
Students are not generally unaware of systems in the sense of never encountering them. They counter them in games all the time as is. As such, there is little novelty in doing more of that unless there is a purpose in doing so.
An example would be stuff from electromagnetism, where diagrams can be made to represent invisible fields that interact with one another. You can mask that as a puzzle game involving the interaction of these fields and let players organically learn the rules governing them. You need not disclose to players that they are learning about EM at all at the outset. That can be layered in gradually.
In my view, it's most helpful for systems to be positioned to morph in this way akin to how it is done in Dragon Box.
Great talk, as usual. But you're a bit harsh on Kerbal Space Program. It doesn't have perfect physics, but they are more than adequate, especially with mods, which add soo much to the game. KSP makes learning many principles of mechanics and physics an absolute breeze. I learned about orbital mechanics and techniques about how to do orbital rendezvous, how to bring satellites into the same orbits but with different positions (eg for continuous LOS of my rockets) or how to get into orbit of another body. It also taught me how planes fundamentally work. How to build them to get enough lift and stability and why certain designs are more or less stable. All of that I would have never learned without this game. And it also made me dust of my calculator for a few things like figuring out how to get my new craft to land close to my previous one on the Mun etc. It was one of my most fun times with a game in addition to and because of the learning experience. And I also think it shows that your game doesn't have to be perfect to be educational. There's a mod to get way more realistic aerodynamics but that makes the game rather more challenging than better. So I very much disagree that you need "great" physics in order to teach about physics. I feel like it's pretty much this 80/20 rule. You can teach a whole lot about the fundamentals of something with relatively "primitive" systems.
I agree. The simplicity of the physics makes it easier to get to space which is where the interesting orbital mechanics learning opportunities are. If it were more realistic then the barrier to entry would be too great to get to the real educational meat of the game.
I find it odd how he used all those game examples of "not teaching practical knowledge, but concepts" but balked so hard at KSP not having perfect physics.
He just had wrong expectations about what KSP is about, KSP is definitely not a game about physics. It's as you said, about orbital mechanics and rocketry
Yup. I definitely wanted to have more teachers like you back then.
When I'm was passing my development degree I had to pick a subject and talk about it. I choose : Serious Games.
And during my pitch I was in front of one of my dev teachers, an old man tired by his work and hating the new generation, and a young woman actually working as an IT specialist in a company.
I began to speak about the interest of video games in the matter of education, and my teacher was raising his eyebrows like "sweet dreams, but you don't know LIFE, a job has to be learned in a SERIOUS way, not with some gamy stuff".
He said that it was unrealistic.
On the other hand, the professional by its side said something like "Yes, we are actually testing some serious game in our company for newcomers, and even the older employees"
I remember her interest as an encouragment.
Today I am an indie dev and even if I'm not yet designing serious games, but more "classical, only fun matters" ones, I always think about the educational potential. I know I will get into it someday.
You are a master more people should listen to.
While I think that some serious games might be useful, say learning human bones in some kind of medical game - I have to disagree with the definition. The whole business of putting Serious together with the word Games, seems very naive. Games don't need to be injected with any adjective to make them less or more serious. Games are just games. Also, I think the best kind of learning is the learning you do without knowing. Branding games as serious might ruin the aesthetic for the learner all from the start. Best "educational" games are those that not branded or designed as such.
@@pixboi this ☝
I would love to see a talk that is just a conversation between you and Zach Barth, because he has also given very interesting talks about games as education.
I think Opus Magnum is Zachtronic's Magnum Opus. I love every game they've released to bits but Opus Magnum is my favorite because it is the most permissive. You have all the space and time you need to make the machinery as complicated and hideous as necessary to get that first solution made. Then you can iterate and make it nicer all you want. The other games are fantastic but all have much stricter playfields/limits that prevent more people from being able to complete a single solution.
I can't recommend Zachtronics enough. Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans were also very nice programming games that even beginners can learn from.
hmm. You make a good point about it being permissive. I had been helping someone learn programming, and I started him with Human Resource Machine (which he finished), then SHENZEN I/O, then when he was done with that one, Opus Magnum.
Maybe I should have started him with Opus Magnum first, but I found that one to be harder myself than the other two, so maybe I was just biased by he fact that it was a spatial puzzle instead of more linear instruction-based code.
@@BlueEyedSexyPants Ah yeah. Opus Magnum definitely has the spatial component which I could see being challenging. I was never able to fully complete TIS-100 because I couldn't fit some of my solutions into the code limits but I was able to finish Opus Magnum even if I had to make some really horrific layouts and only later improve on them. I guess I was also biased :)
Exapunks gets a similar kind of mileage out of massively relaxing its line limits, and building a ruleset that allows you to spawn arbitrarily many exas (or at least as many as will fit, which is usually more than you need). There's something to be said for the hardcore limitations of a game like TIS-100, but they do bring it a bit closer to traditional puzzle-solving and further from the kind of engineering process that you typically experience working on real-world problems.
Is there a written transcprit or a blog which could be read?
You could always upload the audio to Otter.ai for free to have it made for you.
Zachtronics games, the Portal series, KSP, and Factorio have all reshaped how I think about problem solving and even the world in general. Even if none of their lessons have been specifically applicable to the real world, there is still so much potential in the medium to at least get us to start thinking critically already.
KSP is the most clear example for me. So many people learnt orbital mechanics by pure intuition through that game.
@@kw1ksh0t Even if you're not just thinking about orbital mechanics. Like, KSP is really good at demonstrating how motion under gravity and trajectories, even from the ground, work. Also, learning how to build a space plane.
I loved this talk. The part when you mentioned how games shouldn't teach you specific facts about the world, but just give you an example, intuition or motivation reminded me so much of my relationship with traditional education. Let's take physics as an example. I liked physics classes in school when we were talking about things like classical mechanics, gravity, forces, conservation of energy and momentum, but when it came to electricity, magnetics and stuff, I found it so boring. The reason being that gravity and energy is something you have a good intuition for because you encounter it so often in your day, but electricity, for a kid like me at least, was a giant black box - all I knew was that if you plug something in, it runs, and if you touch it, you die. In other words, if I had played a game that introduces you to the intuition behind electricity, I would have enjoyed those physics classes much more since it wouldn't have felt like such a foreign subject. Nowadays, due to the fact that I have a certain intuition for electricity and electrical current, I'm actually very enthusiastic about learning more about it. And that's true for many, many things that I was taught.
I feel the same way for biology and chemistry (but not physics).
This is a good example. I probably could have used that too. I completely failed to ever develop a mental model for electricity and electronics at school.
You don't need to restrict yourself to only the intuition of physical interactions. You can develop that first and then layer in more precise meaning. Jon is wrong about that element imho. There is no real reason to avoid the 'real' version of whatever phenomena you are trying to teach students. You DO need to carefully scaffold the topic and start with the broader themes and intuition and metaphors/analogies though. If ya can help the concepts make sense first, then math can be layered in to represent the elements of said concepts that get measured for computations.
James Paul Gee has discussed this kinda thing before. You need meaning to be situated in a context for it to stick. Saying 'we are gonna learn about X...X is blahblahblah' is not helpful. Instead, students should get to investigate systems thru games and can then decide what ideas they think are important to their experiences and THEN they can get named. In the physics courses I teach I do this as much as I possibly can.
@@TavishHill Aren't you saying the exact same things? You say "Jon is wrong" but I can't see any disagreement, neither with the talk video, nor the comment. Really, it seems the idea is common or similar; my summary: make a foundation of intuition and build on top of it with bricks of knowledge.
@@buttonasas I think my previous comment was not real clear, on second pass looking at it.
I meant that you can use games and game-like simulations to get not just the basic intuitions under your belt, but also to get experience with solving real world, fully applicable problems. Most folks don't realize this, but in the real world math and often times complex physics problems that are super tough get solved in precisely this kinda fashion with toy model systems. Feynman diagrams are examples of precisely that, in fact.
I'm saying you can get intuition AND ALSO build up to applications all within a gaming experience. He seemed to say it was good for intuitions only and real problem solving had to stem from other modes of learning once you've become motivated by the fun intuitions gains via games. I've seen children as young as 7 learn the basic operations of manipulating algebraic equations by playing Dragon Box. They had no idea it was ever supposed to be an educational game or had anything to do with math.
Ex: If ya wanna learn about electricity, games can absolutely help ya get a feel for simple models of the phenomena in a fun, engaging way. And after ya develop that though, you can extend it naturally using evolutions of the same game experience transitioning gradually to more real world applications.
Fascinating talk. It is funny to me though that Jon can so definitively say games are bad at story, but games are good at teaching and we just aren't making educational games right. As if there isn't a direct parallel where we could also get better at making games that tell stories in a way that is totally divorced from other mediums. Not to mention half of the film industry sights playing rpgs as how they learned to develop characters and narrative.
I think about two separate tasks for an education game: 1.teaching the concept or idea and 2. The interactive exploration of that idea. Both appear possible within the medium of video games, however I think the latter is easier to achieve as the application of an idea can be much more broad than the specific scenario in which it can be intuitively "born". I think about games like Math Blaster which never taught you math, but perhaps presented it in a universe that made it slightly more interesting than a page of equations. But the game never taught you mathematical notation, just let you explore them a bit.
So in that light there is some "low-hanging fruit" in the form of mastery exploration. Create game universes that create a dependency on mastery of an idea as a means to thrive/excel much more so than the real world. This sort of aligns with this idea of "games then books" but I'd add to that "instruction, games then books". Although it is entirely possible to present the birth of intuitive knowledge within a game, it is difficult to match that one-to-one with the real world. For example The Witness does a fantastic job of creating knowledge within the player without explicit instruction, however that knowledge is still limited to the scope of the universe it was created within. I'm not sure I can name a single game which both introduces an entirely foreign concept (which is true to reality) to the player, teaches them and explores the mastery of that idea. Perhaps just the task of creating that knowledge implicitly within a person could take the entirety of a single game, I don't know.
1:06:50
Me: Oh neat a Feynman diagram
JB: This is a game about tying knots
Me: LIAR
Playing Fract OSC is still the best video game learning experience I have received. It is a ~6h game about synth music. Only very late into the game did I realize I actually learned some skills while playing. It was not generic knowledge, it was much more like learning to walk - starting with mimicry and taking small steps but also gradually reducing in hand holding. The learning was very efficient (6 hours!) since I paid my fullest attention and I don't believe I could've learned that by any other means than interactive, yet, also couldn't have learned it as effectively by dabbling with professional tools.
around 49:00, with the concept of games having precise facts in them mimicking books, I think there is an appreciable difference. As an example, let's say PUBG gives you the precise stats of a weapon in a little popup on the weapon, to link into what was talked about just before that point in the video. I somewhat agree that, yes, it is "mimicking books" in the sense that you are using the "correct" medium for conveying precise facts about something: descriptive/factual text. The reason I see them as different is that in a game, this precise textual information is given _within_ that context of intuitive knowledge, and in "proximity" to it as well.
It could be argued that this is just a difference in scale, and I could agree that that might be the case, but I think there's something more to it. I think it might be easier if you subdivide media more and put this kind of text into a category of "informational text". There are books that contain informational text, and they are good at giving you a large amount of it in an easily referrable format, but having a book that tells you "this substance is corrosive to your skin" is a lot less effective than a large sign saying "Corrosive material" (usually combined with "informational iconography").
This ties into the stuff about cinema, it's multidisciplinary, but there's something "other" that emerges from that specific combination of other media which results in a new, distinct type of media.
I'm not sure where this entire thought train was actually headed, so sorry for the slight ranty nature, but I think there's enough stuff there to move some thoughts =P
2 years later I'm reading your thought train and enjoying it. About guns in PUBG, I wonder if it's useful to have that information at all.
Obviously we're going to. Obviously there have always been car games with exact stats and colors and the works, or sim games with semi-realism at every edge. There's no denying it.
But when I play a game, the situation/context and controls are all that seem to matter. I can play a hyper-realistic game and be amazed at that aspect, but when it comes to gameplay, those guns in PUBG could give me complete gibberish and I doubt it would change my experience in the slightest (except maybe a little immersion broken from having gibberish appear, but if it appeared in, say, Russian characters, I probably wouldn't even glance twice).
Kinda like a movie phoning it in on computer science stuff like Network protocols. The only people who notice are those with experience in the field, and only then because the movie tried rather than waving it off as "we did network stuff".
My point is, with regard to game design, maybe we *should* keep real information out in order to maximize the meaning behind ideas and scenarios being presented within the game. 'Show, don't tell' and such.
As somebody who works in education, I was very sceptical of games for education especially because of the bad rep from "edutainment".
I think the Oregon Trail series is actually a good example about this more systems-focused, simulationist approach to edutainment. Same goes for Sim City for civic planning or the Tycoon series for business management (that might be stretching it, a bit).
Honestly a lot of sim games have potential to be edutainment-like games. They offer the user with a taste of what the profession might be like, but cut out a lot of the boring/complicated bits of the job.
I would add Kerbel to this list. Really helped me gain an intuition for basic physics and orbital dynamics.
Yeah, they might be about Sim and Tycoon. I would say, the same goes for the Papers, Please to be for the graduating airport customs officer:D
Surprised no one mentioned Poly Bridge. Learning physics by intuition is one of the best things games are good at. Hope he takes another shot at Kerbal in the future.
"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
This is a great quote, I always wanted to find the source for it, but couldn't...
God damn, this is the first YT video where I've literally wanted to take a sledge hammer and absolutely fucking *_smash_* that *_Like_* button !!!
There may not be an institution of people doing this yet, but there are certainly some orbiting studies. In particular "Bret Victor" has done a lot of work in regards to trying to lean towards this more visual learning through experimentation/play and "intuiting" rather than through direct knowledge transfer. There is a similar feeling in the P5JS and JSFiddle style communities. Again, not games but the general systemic "play learning" ideas are definitely out there.
There's definitely others working on this and having similar ideas. Nicky Case (explorable explanations) and Dan Meyer (Demos activities) come to mind.
from googling nicky case, seems more preachy than teachy
Lou Nowell I don't get that from Nicky Case at all
Runescape has helped me develop a good intuition on economics, far before I even knew what economics mean. The motivation to learning the game was that there was actual risk involved, dieing, losing gear, getting scammed.
I remember Guitar Hero 3 taught me rythm and left right-hand timing back in ~2008, which helped me immensely once I got into playing real guitar. It also introduced me to old school rock with sick solos, hence why I even got interested in learning the actual instrument.
do not forget RockSmith games that are actually teaching you to play a real electric guitar ! (this is the way my son really started to learn playing guitar)
Wow, very happy to see Miegakure here. Haven't heard much about it lately but I love the soundtrack used in the trailer.
Mandatory game: Braid. Case closed period! It should be in every elementary school curriculum.
Watched the whole talk and find Jonathan's insights very good. But he kinda "lost" me at
02:09:40 when he says: "I'm not sure to what extent destructive game addiction is a thing" ...
It's very much a thing. And someone in the Video Game Industry is turning a blind eye to it.
We have a cousin in our family who is so hooked on video games he cannot *function* as an adult.
Lives at home. never leaves his room. plays games obsessively. no (IRL) friends.
"gaming disorder" is recognised by the World Health Organisation and _many_ people suffer from it.
This is a classic case of:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ~ Upton Sinclair
Otherwise great insights. Thanks.
Nice talk!
Around 21:00 Jon makes a famous point, originally by Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message."
Around 40:00 it's a very nice topic as well. Image is read in a different way (and perhaps processed easier, I'm not knowledgeable about this) than the letters and language. For example video game medium also has immersion (spatial presence) that is wired differently in our brain as well.
Around 1:13:11 he touches upon abstraction of real world phenomena in video games. One of my favorite topics. So basically not carrying real world complexity of things into a video game, rather simplifying to focus communication. Though he is not talking about this topic in particular of course, I just caught a reference.
Around 1:38 basis for iconography
good thing I searched before I commented and I saw that you mentioned McLuhan, and the correct book title is "the medium is the massage"
@@ashnur Oh yeah you're right! The book has that title, but the original phrase is with "message."
When I mentioned this in Twitch chat Jon said it's not what he meant but Mcluhan's book goes so wide on the topic of medium, it's not only about the effect of TV on society or something. I just meant saying "maybe you shouldn't make that a movie, right?" is basically underlining the importance of type of medium you use, alongside your content. This is 'also' a thing McLuhan says.
McLuhan said lots of things I don't agree with, but he saw this one thing about the different effects media has and that they involve people differently. Obviously both a book and a game are 'cold' in the sense McLuhan categorizes things, so I agree that Jon was probably saying something more specific here, but the McLuhan reference is important because it carries :)
In your Special Language School, in what order would your students play Zachtronics games?
maybe this can give you a clue www.zachtronics.com/zachademics/
@@alejandrokronberger6725 WOW thanks. This totally helps.
School/ educational institutions could be seen as Live Action Role Play where students grind for better grades. That students learn something besides how to get good grades, is a happy coincident.
I don't know. Maybe I am incredibly privileged by attending good state schools but all stages of education had optional activities, both parallel and orthogonal to regular classes. They never yielded grades and possibly taught something.
Admittedly, the potential in classes with grades mostly came down to how good the teachers were and since wages are close to lowest, most were not amazing.
@@buttonasas My comment was a bit nefarious
@@buttonasas I'm sceptical about your American sentiments of being privileged, but here in Russia we have about ZERO choice pretty much throughout the whole education from elementary school to universities. Only MANDATORY stuff. :D
@@alexchichigin I'm from Lithuania, practically next door :D
I won't claim I know anything about Russian education.
@@buttonasas I wasn't really implying your nationality, I just hear this sentiment about being privileged from Americans so to me it's an American thing. :)
As far as I can tell in 30 years passed since USSR we've ruined our education at least by 2/3. It's really cool if you improved your educational system instead. :)
It's a lot of time and effort to speak on this and listen to it, but is the educational system really trying to teach a skillset or real knowledge? The real lesson they want to teach is compliance. The corporate state that supports public education wants obedient labor, not necessarily someone who loves knowledge. It should not take 6 years to teach a child to read and write plus do basic math. but taking all this time keeps the kids occupied while the parent do the labor for the corporate state. So I guess we're assuming this is all a problem the state also sees as a problem.
Very interesting talk,
Also I think that one overlooked detail is what happens outside the game. After you play, and the discussions that arise.
In a healthy environment people like to share their strategies and experiences. What's great about this is that there can be extrinsic motivations to play a game that doesn't require "gamification"
There is a natural tendancy to think that if your friend could finish some part of a game that you should be able to as well.
In the context of the classroom, a single player game can grow into a social experience, one that you can share with the teacher and the other students. When I was younger I would play with my brothers, and we would all watch and comment as one of us played.
This got a bit ramblely, but my point is that we need to remember that adding games into education does not have to be associated with the trope of someone by them-self playing at home. It can easily be a rewarding shared experience in more ways than 1.
I think what you said about schooling not working is very accurate. I left University when a professor told me my opinion of a movie scene was wrong and that I was reading too much into it....even though he did the same thing 5 minutes later for the next scene in the movie. University is supposed to encourage one to learn and form their own opinions...I find the system in cataclysmically damaged and unrepairable in the current form.
I'm on it.
I'll have a working example in a few years.
In 10 years, I'll be changing programming and education in a way you couldn't even predict here.
start a blog!
anyway to follow your progress?
My thinking: Games have the ability to teach you via Trial-and-Error, that is something books or movies can't do. Learning by T-E has it flaws though. A good example I can think of is Bridge Builder. You can learn how to design a bridge that does its job, but you will not learn about structural analysis and the math behind it.
But isn't John arguing that Bridge Builder would then give you the inspiration/reason to actually dive deeper into structural analysis? Or a better foundation to understand it when/if you decide to do so. Or that Bridge Builder could be a good tool to learn a subset of bridge-theory.
It doesn't seem to me he's arguing that games should be a one-stop shop to learning. (Even though I realise you're not explicitly saying that either)
@@NegatioNZor Yea I think Bridge Builder in its current state isn't the best example because a lot of the intuitive knowledge you could gain through play can be achieved much more simply through directed play with physical objects(wooden blocks), Bridge Builder is fun because almost everyone who plays already has that intuition and you are testing that knowledge in wacky ways. A game used to jump start a students education about bridge construction might be one that emphasizes the exploration of various building materials for different applications never even mentioning a bridge or a game that teaches how well designed bridges can connect and fundamentally change communities so that when you start to teach a student how bridge locations are selected they can already intuiit some of what factors need to be considered.
@@lamelikemike Fair points, and definitively more in line with what Jon is talking about :)
As an anecdote, I myself tried Bridge Builder (or an equivalent) at the tender age of 10-12, which inspired some underlying sense/knowledge that maths could have some practical application. That's obviously highly subjective and might be reasoning in hindsight, but I belive playing Bridge Builder (which isn't a perfect learning tool), had higher value than simply the gameplay in itself. Playing with blocks can help a child understand the basics of building a structure, but Bridge Builder highlights that construction might come with several challenges based on size/distance in a more intuitive way when you can see the stress points of the bridge. It also lets us learn that we need to be methodical (use maths?) in our approach, if we're to fulfill the specs of a given level. Iteration time might also be shorter than constructing something out of blocks, allowing us to explore quicker.
I think the approach you highlight is a lot better at teaching some deeper aspects of bridge building that I have no knowledge of though :)
@@NegatioNZor We don't really know and I certainly don't claim to, we are cavemen trying to hypothesize about poetic verse. Bridge Builder has value beyond fun but does it fit into a curriculum? When, how and for who? Should it be required or part of an optional "summer reading" list. Maybe games should be used to determine a curriculum on a student by student basis and their ability to teach intuition is only helpful early in figuring out what a person is wired to understand intuitively.
Interesting topic
There are reasons besides efficacy why Montessori (which I've already never experienced and can't claim is better or worse) hasn't replaced traditional education. In the US at least, public schooling is effectively a monopoly for low-cost education. Your options are: go to the school in my district for free, or pay large sums of money for a private school. The public school's methods don't have to be superior to the private school's methods if the private school is prohibitively expensive. The fact that Americans somehow find it easier to move houses to get into a better school district than to just pay for private school is telling.
It sucks that blowcon was all online
I wish I could erase my memory of The Witness so I could experience it again.
yes!
I really appreciate the distinction between "system games" and "story games". I've never enjoyed the idea of a game that forces you down a certain path. Not because it's inherently bad, but because other media already do that really well. If I want a structured story I'll watch a film. Games are good at systems, environments, simulations, emergent behaviour and chaos theory.
I also think we need to identify reward-based games that are designed to hack your dopaminergic system. It's not just the points and medals, but also kills and victories. Not that we can't have those sorts of games, but I don't think they have the same potential as purely exploratory games where the reward is provided by the player, i.e. the player feels good for solving a problem.
Perhaps beside the point but I think it's important not to discount what interactive tools can add to linear storytelling. For example, one of the things that linear mediums are poor at is pacing and volume of information. If a story beat goes too fast for you in a movie then you're done, the train has left the station and all you can hope to do is infer what happened through future events. If you're watching something like a mystery story where it's critical that you follow all the information available, then missing a piece can be the undoing of the story.
In a visual novel or a game with click to advance cutscenes, for example, you can control the pace of the story, and often rewind it, or get summaries of what happened. You might have menus that keep information of all the characters and everything that's happened thus far. All these things allow you to be able to keep up with stories better and with more convenience, as well as facilitate the telling of stories of bigger scopes.
When I studied Computer Science at uni, all people talked about was how much money they gonna make after they graduate and which companies are the hottest. There was no spirit of engineering.
There is an issue with education and games which has bothered me for a while: I think that games come with a tacit worldview, and when we learn games we learn with them an understanding of how to navigate the world in that worldview. With that in mind, I struggle with the question with respect to social systems: should we attempt to model the world as we believe it is, imparting more practical knowledge at the risk of reinforcing problematic assumptions? Or should we model perhaps idealistic alternatives, giving an unrealistic model which primes people’s minds to think more concretely about how the world could be better? I imagine the answer is somewhere between and slightly orthogonal to those solutions, but I haven’t seen it discussed.
For example: game economies usually presume private property as an intrinsic part of the world. That is: your personal inventory is secure and protected by the nature of the world itself, so nobody can take anything from you without a process of voluntary exchange. Which is perfectly fine, but if, say, you had a game about ants in an ant colony, it wouldn’t make sense for an ant to “own” anything: the ants instead would have to cooperatively organize to manage material resources to their mutual benefit. Not necessarily saying anarcho-syndicalism with ant-like characteristics is an ideal society, but the bigger issue is priming people to think about how alternative systems can work instead of simply assuming the systems they know are intrinsic to the world.
What better place to explore idealistic alternatives than the world in a video game? Seems like the perfect place to try something which you may think is unrealistic, but in reality may just be hard to achieve from where we currently stand.
@@syzygy6 "Anarcho-syndicalism with ant-like characteristics" is my new favorite meme ideology. But in all seriousness, I think historical grand strategy games are a great example of how this goes wrong in exactly the way you're talking about, and those games have frequently been critiqued from that angle by historians. Grand strategy games tend to systematize a lot of common wrong ideas about the driving forces behind historical events and the nature of societal change.
Wow. I wish I could save RUclips comments like you can on Reddit specifically for comments like this. This is one of the things as a leftist that has really been grinding my gears about Civ and Paradox games, especially Stellaris, for quite a while now. We're never really given am opportunity to meaningfully explore alternative systems or the way alternative systems interact with what these games would assume is the default. I am in the very early stages of prototyping something that might be a little more open-ended in that regard. I was seriously so fed up that I just had to start getting it out of my system lol. We'll see if it goes anywhere...
Hell yes I love Zachtronics
what you're talking about is literally my dream. im a beginner programmer and game maker and one day i want to do this! i want to make games that dont suck and can be used to impart understanding
I find it astounding that Jon doesn't think games are good at storytelling when one of the most profound things I took away from playing Braid was how a player has to mirror the obsessive actions of Tim (the player character) to find the secret ending and complete his arc. I guess that's equally compelling an argument that games are poor at telling stories, since 99% of players aren't going to find that ending organically.
IMO for a classical, linear storytelling, the interactivity is often nothing more than an irritating problem that a lot of wannabe filmmakers and other ambitious storytellers often try to design around (like in Order 1886, David Cage's games, even some shooters that wen full "Hollywood"). Interactivity is a super powerful tool for experiencing stories more like a simulation than actually telling the story. Because of that stories experienced in some video games can potentially be more powerful than any book or a film. Different medium, different trade-offs. But what one defines as "storytelling" can change this perception a lot.
@@kazioo2 > experiencing stories more like a simulation
I advise anyone who likes that idea to look into Prey 2017 and it's mooncrash DLC, I think those are superb examples of that, for spoilery reasons I won't get into.
1:27:00 this is amazing. exactly the talk and thinker ive been looking for
What a great talk...
Games provide a miniature, fictional version of some core concept, so people can get intuition about how it all functions.
Where books are about specific concrete info.
People get good at tings when they know both how it generally functions and specific important details.
If you only read books, you feel overwhelmed by the amount of specific information that you see no use for... Destroys motivation.... very bad
If you only play games, you get an intuition about a fictional system but not much about what is usable... but it is "fun" so you can take in alot of information
If you do both(starting with games)... Games make Books much more understandable as you can link concepts together to make a coherent whole...
While Books make Games more concrete and easier to apply irl along with giving you ideas to test ingame... Very good
Students are not wrong when they ask "Why do I need to know this?" and it should not be dismissed...
All in all a great talk!
I’m amused that “educational” was missing a letter early on, a clear typo issue, nothing said.
We’re all human!
You could summarize the principle of building an educational game as "Like what or who do you want your player to feel playing your game?".
I think it is what mr. Blow ment under the "spirit". Shenzhen I/O- spirit of engineering = how it feels to develop smth as enginer. Mini metro- spirit of civil construction engineer = how it is to build a metropolitan network. And so on.
I hope someone would find this interpretation useful to carry forward an idea of making educational games better.
One last comment: I suggest getting someone to curate your questions for you, Because I think it would save you time and improve the quality of your Q&A session. First, it could save the many minutes of dead air in your stream while you read through the chat. Second, redundant questions could be grouped together or simply ignored. Third, questions could be collected during the stream (which might not obviously seem beneficial but in my experience it is). Fourth and last, your question curator might be able to clarify confusing and poorly-worded questions before they reach you.
Someone wrote about the Advantages and Disadvantages of Montessori education. But quick summary why haven't become the universal norm, too expensive and not suitable for every student, and doesn't produce factory line workers.
foundersguide.com/the-pros-cons-of-montessori-education/
My take on the matter is that if we want't to maximize the learning of students it would be beneficial to have different type of schools based on personalities and IQ. The downsides of that would be longer commute taking time away from learning and the society fractioning to groups that do not really understand each other based on those lines since they don't interact with each other during childhood.
A Montessori preschool is designed in such a way that, when I describe the Witness to some people, I say it's like a virtual Montessori school for adults. In a similar manner to how Montessori materials afford a gradual introduction to life, physics, written language, and mathematics, the Witness affords a gradual introduction to ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and theology.
Horizon Zero Dawn has an awesome story
Samuel Costa true. But 60 hours of a tv show with the same plot would be far more detailed and engrossing than 60 hours of playing hzd. Watch a let’s play of it and it takes forever for the plot to progress.
@@misterkite i can only talk about my experience and how I progressed through the game and everyone will have a different one.
Great talk! I've been saying this stuff for the past 5-6 yrs or so since I began teaching. I do think the presumption that games giving specific facts is inherently worse than something more akin to metaphorical representations is misguided though. That appears to be based on the idea that it makes students feel forced to engage with the game, but that is not the only way to deliver these experiences! You can start with metaphor and then transition gradually into real world applicability. See Dragon Box for a great example of this.
In Dragon Box, players start the game as a puzzle game that just so happens to operate under the same rules as algebraic manipulation of equations. It initially uses images to represent the mathematical objects being shifted around but then later gradually things shift to numbers and eventually to letters and mathematical operators. You can have continuity and coherence between the metaphorical game representation and the more realistic simulated game scenario.
What ultimately matters is what mental model the students form in their heads. There's no reason to presume that such models can never contact real world applicability. Your reference to Feynman diagrams itself is literally an example demonstrating this! There is nothing physically real about the diagrams. They are tools to develop mental models with that in turn allow someone to write more intuitive equations from.
I understand why you prefer not bothering to respond to questions about what the low hanging fruit topics are, but I'd like to note that imo there are legitimately low hanging fruit topics w/in STEM fields specifically. They are already formatted and framed intellectually as puzzles to solve and systemic by their nature. They also have well defined underlying mechanics that can (and often times are!) mimicked in game design (physics, specifically but also math and engineering too).
43:00
Does this mean Einstein was full of crap when he said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it”
Good talk! To add about gamification and engagement, I think there is an important feature that video games have, and schools don't that much. People may want to become engineers not because of the spirit, but because of a *goal*, not gamification-ish short-term rewards, but overarching one, maybe a fantasy, unreachable one. Interest might not be the reason to learn, but a consequence of already starting to learn. For example, the cliche "by the end of this game you'll become a hero and save the world", now make it a game about real history. Actually there is already at least one educational game like that - Oregon Trail (not about saving the world though, but surely about becoming a hero).
A lot of people believed that they could too develop games, and that's how they became artists, programmers. The most interesting thing would be to just continue to play them all the time instead, but they chose differently. A lot of people's brains were washed by politicians about "enemies of the state" that have to be urgent outcompeted (like USA vs USSR "we are first" kind of things) - and that's how they became engineers, scientists. Even if a goal is not achieved in the end or will be acknowledged useless in future, the very trying to achieve the goal is already giving huge results.
I believe my school teacher of English (not my native tongue) used this approach in some way. She liked to say - let's work harder now, do more tasks, and when you reach last years in the school, you'll just rest instead of studying English. It was a lie, we studied hard until the end of school. And everyone hated her for the amount of tasks she gave and how critical she was on failure to deliver on them. But in retrospect, I now think she is actually the best of all my teachers (including University ones). No other teacher taught me as much as she did.
Chrono Trigger taught me a lot about structures before I ever knew anything about structures.
1:08:04 Kind of amazing. I never knew about this. When I played The Witness, something about the puzzles made me think that you could make a similar puzzle game out of tying knots. The puzzles themselves almost felt like a 2D slice of tying a knot (also ties back to Braid's namesake). I've always thought that someone could make a really good puzzle game based on the complexities of tying or untying increasingly complex knots, nearly similar in scale to The Witness. Knots have always had this weird space in my mind where, despite understanding their usefulness, I find it incredibly difficult to grasp even basic knots. That sort of practical mystery is usually a good space for puzzles.
to me the main problem about school is that you have a large amount of students of different levels packed together with different learning speed. if you don't regroup better ones together and less good ones together at some point, dumb ones either slow the learning rate of the entire group either accept they fate and learn less than they should, because it's too fast for them, same goes for the ones above the average.
in an hypotetical class where each student had his pc playing a game, it gets everyone it's own bubble with is own virtual personnal teacher, with a learning pace that fits, this is by far the real weight of video game in education imo (given the fact that the game is well made)
also when it comes to learning the rate of the cycle "testing hypothesis + getting a return" is key factor. in that regard, a computer game can tell you instantaneously what you have tried works or not (if designed properly), wich is by far better than having to raise your hand and ask something to a teacher whose attention is split between lot of other students (or to wait a week that the teacher corects the quizz)
good talk
A very interesting talk. I would be very interested to know if/how the systems taught in the video games Mr. Blow cites favorably map onto the kinds of real-world systems in which we want to perform well. In other words, I want to see the Venn diagram that shows the overlap between the systems-thinking taught in PUBg and Fortnite et al and the systems-thinking required of a 21st-century citizen. If what Mr. Blow says is true, that even games like PUBg and Fortnite teach systems-thinking to some degree, then, given the ubiquitousness of these games and games like them in the last fifteen-or-so years, we should soon see (or be seeing already) an improvement (not just a change, but an improvement) in some area of life we care about. It's possible that such an improvement has taken place and we simply haven't gone looking for it, or we haven't correctly sourced it to the prevalence of systems games like these. It's also possible that the systems-thinking taught in even the most dynamic systems game is too parochial to be expressed in any other system than that game's system. We see this in other disciplines; as far as I know, proficiency in the systems of, say, architecture does not usually express itself in the systems of, say, market economics. I worry that Mr. Blow's central assumption is that systems-thinking is a thing that exists, a broad style of thinking that is flexible and useful and adaptable to many scenarios. I suspect that the truth is much more granular and difficult; that systems-thinking is Balkanized into discrete domains that have some use to their adjacent domains but rapidly diminishing use, approaching 0, as distance increases, and thus, a curriculum that included even the best and most effective kind of video game would only kick the can down the road, the can being the difficulty of teaching people how to think effectively and be generally competent grownups. That said, I fully agree that education needs to move away from its emphasis on information and toward an emphasis on what Mr. Blow might call systems-thinking. Very grateful for this talk.
profound
Players try to win and to have fun, the trick for an educational game to make the skill you want them to learn the best and most fun way to win.
Mimic logic is a logic puzzle game with some RPG elements around it to flavor everything.
Satisfactory is a logistics planner with some fancy lights and buttons and beautiful scenery to look at while you play it.
League of Legends teaches you how to be miserable and hate both yourself and your teammates
Fighting games like Tekan teach you how to predict other people and practice motor skills and repetitive input sequences.
Dark Souls teaches a player patience and perseverance, the reward you get after trying over and over again.
Sometimes the skills are more specific and sometimes they are more general/conceptual or emotional.
In a way our genre names for games are often descriptive of the skills you use, and therefore have to learn, in order to play them. Fighting games, strategy games, role playing games, puzzle games, etc.
One issue I do see with games in education is that often the measure of a good game is one where the playerbase can play how they want to play. There is no one game that every single type of person loves to play, everyone has preferences for that. But in education you have to learn things you don't want to learn or care about learning, which means that those games probably won't be fun. I don;t know how much you can learn from a game that's not fun, but then I also don't know how much you can really learn from a lecture that you fall asleep to.
the long introspective videos are the best
Personally, I think a game like Outer Wilds teaches the *intuition* of orbital mechanics much better than KSP. Super quick restarts after hitting a fail state. Interesting and fun goals for successfully flying and landing (safely) your rocket.
IMO the biggest benefit of games for education is that a single game can be experienced differently by each individual playing it, with books, video and audio everyone is forced into the same experience but game and their interactivity allow everyone to have a completely different experience. People are very different, there is no method of education that would be ideal for everyone (not even games), some people prefer reading about a subject on their own, others prefer a hands on approach, and some will prefer watching a demonstration. Even within though groups there is likely a split between those that prefer theory and those that prefer the practical application of the subject. Games is a medium that allows each individual to tackle the objectives in the way that suits them best allowing them to learn how they choose, rather than being forced into less ideal methods. Even the way you interact with games can be altered to suit an individual's preference, VR, keyboard, mouse, or controller. You can even have an AI run in the background learning how a particular user learns best and tailor objectives to better suit that method.
42:20 I think this is a really interesting insight, the fact that information going in through non-language takes time to process and translate in order to come out as language.
I'd be really interested in seeing that studied more, especially when you add on that some people can just explain immidaitly. I wonder what the correlation is with internal monologs and also how things like IQ impact everying related to games.
53:10 Something I think is extra interesting about games and developers is their understanding of motivates a player. The best way to learn something is to want to learn it and gmaes do a pretty good job at getting players to want something by design. I could easily see a game being effective that was playable and fun without specific knowledge, then you demonstrate that with certain specific knowledge you can play it even better and more effectively, thus answering the classic question "when am I going to use this" even if just a emotional sense. Lots of RPG can be minmaxed using math, and plenty of rougelikes can be better played if you understand probabilities. One limit to this is that games arem ost fun when you are actively playing them, as opposed to long sessions of planning and calculation, but then again other games thrive in that environment like puzzle or strategy games.
I wonder if the way to make a fun educational game is to just make a really hard game. Then give the pallyers/students the tools required to succeed at the game. Maybe not though, lots of different theories to test out.
56:35 I think this is it exactly. It's hard to describe the difference I sometimes see in my peers between those that grew up playing certain kinds of games and those that didn't. Its like there is a higher rate of drive, or at least knowledge on how to improve at a task that other people seem to lack at times.
My main takeaway: making good educational games that are good games and don't conform to conventional (broken) educational conventions is hard.
We need to recognize that we are at the beginning of attempting this. We're so early in this process that we need to give ourselves permission to experiment and try things out, rather than thinking we can head straight toward success.
Agreed. At this point the problem is funding. How can I afford to experiment at this level?
Thanks for this great talk. I've been a fan of Blow since I knew the Witness which makes me want to make educational games about physics. I'm currently in graduate school and being depressed very often, and lost my passion for physics which I used to have. I believed that if I cannot continue doing research, the knowledge I've learned will eventually be useless, which makes me even more depressed. But then I realized making games might be a way. I'm inspired a lot by the Witness and Manifold Garden, and this talk just provides me more examples and principles. Now I need to put my concrete effort to pave my way.
The kind of disruption to traditional education discussed around 1:31:15 reminds me a lot of Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory, but applied to school instead of companies.
Chants of Sennaar is a great game that distills the fun of learning languages by having you decipher symbols. I could see how it could inspire people to learn real languages.
I'd love to see your take on a full blown "educational" game. I hope that you get a chance to make one one day.
If math uses reeeeaaaly unreadable variable names shouldnt we do to? maybe its a mistake to try to give bits of code readable names, maybe it is impossible to make a name that is better than reading the code itself, maybe we just need crazy one greek letter names for everything and some elaborate comments explaining what they actually are, either that, or math is wrong
Saying "right?" after making a point is the most annoying trend in public speaking.
It's like saying "um" repeatedly.
Stop doing this - it doesn't help your presentation; it detracts.
Counter-point: oregon trail
1:38:00, nah, they don't listen to you because they are drunk, they don't listen to you because they are mediocre minds.
On a side note, and perhaps against your argument, videogames and videos make people lazy by rendering images and sounds making them spare the mental effort of imagining and creating simulations in their own mind, daydreaming, if you will. It's a false dichotomy, obviously one can play videogames and spend some time alone imagining stories and dynamics, but because of the hedonistic nature of some people, they might be lured more easily by the flashy, immediate gratification route, which tends to be videogames and videos.
1:06:59 That's not a knot tying game! That's a Feynman diagram!
Almost 20 years ago, my 5th grade class and I learned how to type just by playing Mavis Beacon a couple times a week in class.
By then, Mavis Beacon was already 20 years old itself, maybe that's how long it takes for schools to adopt educational software, even with demonstrable educational value.
May I suggest a simpler explanation: schools have budget restrictions, Mavis Beacon was well-tested and shown to be sufficient to the task of teaching typing, so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, spend the money on something else!
Seriously, as much as I’m a tech geek making my living with software development, there is such a thing in many contexts where something is more than good enough, so it has severely diminishing returns when trying to make it “better” so when you find that, spend resources making something else better.
If I were going to teach video games, Id teach the old arcade games, and get everyone into hardware straight away!!!
I'm surprised he never mentioned flight simulators
Spacechem is another educational puzzle game
Are you familiar with Nicky Case's work?
Mr. Blow confirmed as a David Lynch fan ;)
Is there any chance someone knows the source on the sequence of symbols at around 1:40:00
Outer Wilds is a great example of teaching from videogames, to a certain degree. You can learn about and experience fundamental concepts like gravity fields or quantum imaging.
Edit: I'd like to add I just think the game taps into that potential for education.
Also a great example of how hard these games are to make. OW took years to make, and you chew through it in a week.
games are terrible at story but they can at least some times be better at it than many star wars or marvel movies.
New JonBlow video. Screamed in excitement!
I don't think gamification should be entirely written off. I completely agree that it's not going to make apathetic students suddenly interested in a subject, but for students who are already invested, to have silly things like XP and achievements which represent how much work you've done can actually be very encouraging.
I don't know if you've ever used it, but I think Duolingo is a really good example of this being done right. You have a "streak" publicly displayed to show how many days you've practiced in a row, and you lose your streak if you skip a day of practice. You have an XP leaderboard which shows how much work you've done compared to your friends, which encourages you to put extra work in. "Leveling up" in certain categories gives you a very clear-cut sense of progression and achievement which is much better than a vague sense of "oh yeah, I can sort of read this sentence now". All of these things add up. At the end of the day, we're humans, and we like earning stupid trinkets. The Farmville strategy works for certain subjects, and applying that addictiveness to something that's actually productive is fine by me. It seems to work.
Great talk though, really enjoyed it. There are a lot of subjects that could really benefit from being taught more through intuition, and I'm excited to see how proper educational games evolve through the next few decades.
I started directly to think about factorio
I like part about AK47 😅
What's interesting is that some of the best educational games I can think of are very VERY much the kind of games Jon would enjoy.
When I was a kid, I was in "enrichment classes" (aka the room behind the library that they didn't know what to do with, full of freshly purchased computers they didn't know what to do with, where they dumped all the bored smart kids they didn't know what to do with). So in these "classes", we mostly fucked around and played games. One of those games was West Point Bridge Designer, a 2D physics simulator where you build bridges and then a little truck tries to drive across them (and 99% of the time the bridge collapses spectacularly). Sort of a proto-proto-proto Kerbal Space Program.
It's a great game, and it teaches basic architecture better than any book EVER could. I remember thinking even at age 8, "Why isn't all of school like this?" I could name a few others that prove the point just as well, because games have this fun self-selection thing where no one wants to play the shitty ones, but the great ones kids gravitate to.
1:07:10 " _if i was doing an education game, what would it be like_ ?" ...my first thought (altho probably not in the spirit of what you're trying to convey) would be a *_simulation._*
Like a wood/metal shop OR chem-lab (for example) because you wouldn't have to invest tons of money to buy all the tools, equipment, & materials.
So, it would make it extremely accessible for kids to jump into & play around with... But without a risk of actually getting injured.