Educational games

As a teenager, I once had to stay in bed with a fever. Now and then, one of my brothers would help me pass the time by playing “Battleship” with me. (Today, you can play it online http://en.battleship-game.org/).  You probably know it. Both players locate their ships on a paper with 10 by 10 fields, which the other cannot see. They then take turns to “shoot” at each other’s fleet by indicating the coordinates that they aim at, like “A4” or “F2”. The other side then has to indicate whether a ship was hit or not. I did not find the play very realistic. In my fever dreams, I invented a version in which some ships were submarines and could only be hit by “waterbombs”. And I made the ships able to move, so their position could change in between rounds.

Yes, it became more realistic, but it was no longer fun to play. In became too complex, and it took too long.

About three decades later, I had a similar experience. I got involved in making a game that should be exciting, while in the background making the gamers familiar with the interventions of the European Union in conflict countries. Of course, we only had a shoestring budget. We called our game  “Are you a 007?” and integrated a kind of psychological test into it to make it more interesting. But we soon realized that there was an important trade-off:  If you make the game more educative, it’s no longer fun to play. If you go for more fun, it becomes less educative. And with a very limited budget, it will be neither fun nor educative. The game was downloaded not more than 300 times, and we left it to that.

This makes me very curious, how the present project at the University of Amsterdam to make education more effective, especially for boys, by integrating aspects of gaming  is going to succeed.