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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don't want to play "educational" games. They just want to play fun games.

And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.

Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games.

So, what we're trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.

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I would think Maxis actually tells you the best way to be a success. Maxis doesn't say their games are educational and players don't feel like they're trying to be. But they were, and Maxis wanted them to be. I've heard Will Wright talk about giving his kids things like microscopes as "toys" that let them play and explore which causes them to sort of learn against their best intentions. If I were to get into the educational software space, I would go the Maxis route of making games for gamers, marketing them as wholesome for all ages, and then having a secret educational agenda. That is, I'd try to straddle the line, and maybe if I were good at it, word of mouth would spread and the school administrators would hear positive feedback from their students and teachers about how engaging the games are. You would essentially have to create your own market since one doesn't exist; you'd create a need administrators don't know they have.

Alternatively, you could go Minecraft and hack in education through mods and stuff to existing games kids are already engaged in.

But I fully admit as much as I admire Maxis, I don't work in that space and unless I win the lottery I won't be quitting my job to get into educational software any time soon.

I think the indirect approach is very underrated. Our kids have all learned to read ahead of “schedule” because they wanted to understand what was happening in their games, and they’re all also coming along very quickly at arithmetic because of needing to manage the economy of whatever game they’re playing.

As a kid, I picked up a familiarity with history and geography that was miles ahead of my peers due to games like Total War and Close Combat, which aren’t sold as educational at all.

I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals, and it’s way easier to give people goals and tools than it is to teach them about tools in the abstract.

A personal anecdote: I bought my first English dictionary to understand 1992’s Alone in the Dark. I’d probably not be talking with you guys and girls if not for videogames. I had no interest whatsoever in learning English, I just wanted to beat the games. If someone assigned me the very same game for educational purposes, I’d hate it by default.

+1, I learned English by playing Leisure Suit Larry I-III [1]. Text adventures were really useful in this regard because you had to type in more or less correct sentences. Also, at the core they were built around dialogues, that is, spoken (=not very formal) language and vocabulary.

Al Lowe, lead developer of the Larry series, probably also had some influence on my sense of humor (to this day I prefer grammar-level jokes to kicks-in-the-butt). These games were a great, intellectually twisted, multi-layered introduction to the world of adult people as well. :) Thank you, teacher!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry_in_the_Land...

I learned English in the MMO Runescape, bartering for items and getting help on quests. I basically never had to study for any English class since primary school because I was always slightly ahead of where the class was due to obsessively playing video games.

Same here, fun fact is that even at school and high school I was the only boy that could understand a basic text or do a basic conversation but even with that I always had troubles just to pass any test.

Learned English playing games in the early 90's

In any English test they ask me to put a phrase in passive form and I was like: the f* is that?

And most probably for maths/physics It would be funnier to do some angry birds with numbers than calculating the movement of a random body in a parabolic movement.

I learned English from Guybrush Trephwood, the mighty pirate.

Same here. Early Lucasarts adventure games drove me and my younger brother to learn english as a second language from around the age of 6.

Actual great learning games do exist, but the real awesome ones are rare.

See this 2012 thread on a truly awesome algebra learning game, and this stays relevant to this day. To the best of my knowledge, it is still the best and fastest way to learn how to solve an equation for x. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4188579

From what I know, research does not support the idea that dragonbox is a particularly effective way to teach algebra. Which is too bad, because it seems like it would work really well:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3057889

I've seen first hand how well it works in a study with 40k kids in the US, Norway, and France. The study was led by the Center for Game Science, Washington University.

Paper: Zoran Popović. Achieving 96% Mastery at National Scale through Inspired Learning and Generative Adaptivity. Proceedings of the Second (2015) ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale, 2015. http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=2724684&ftid=1550376&dwn...

Post-test success as used in the paper you mentioned can be a misleading indicator if transfer to pen and paper was done improperly. As kids solving equations in a game are moving terms around by touch on a screen, they need to transfer that learning to pen and paper before being able to write a line by line solution. Failing to do this transfer would predictably lead to a poor post-test performance, without actually measuring properly how much algebra had been learned and understood.

Well, it is not In my experience. Sample size of 1, though.

Civilization 1 was my foundational introduction to world history. I read every single civilopedia tech entry as it came up, and that drove a heck of a lot of follow up reading to find out if what it said was "really real".

This was exactly my experience too! I wanted to separate out the game narrative from the actual history when I played something like the campaigns in Age of Empires II, and it drove a ton of history reading.

> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals

Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum.

They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education.

> > I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals

> Bingo. Both my parents are retired teachers, and both focused on high-risk student populations (my father at adolescent correctional facilities, and my mother with "troubled children that had learning disabilities at specialized facilities). Both with the freedom to implement alternative means of education as opposed to standardized public school curriculum.

> They both found incredible success in teaching by focusing on a individual child's interests and goals. It's easy to do so in the context of parenting, but much more difficult in a school setting. Implementation of such an idea is beyond my pay grade, but I think there's promise in identifying goals/motivation and personalizing education.

I used to teach and had many kids tell me on their first day that they hated reading and _hated_ writing (with their parents echoing the same). I hold the notion that reading is almost like an automatic process once learned—put a cereal box on the table during dinner and you almost can't avoid reading it. People _want_ to read. Aligning the material with the kid's interests is the surest way to progress. Couple that with writing prompts that are in the same genre and even the parents wouldn't believe that this child who is suddenly consuming a book a week is their own.

This is great, I had a friend in college who talked this way about reading and it always felt to me like someone saying they don't like to use their eyes to see... Like how do you even have an opinion about reading? It's just a thing that we can do, like breathing... Whether I enjoy a certain reading session depends on what I'm reading, but reading itself is value-neutral.

> I think people innately want to learn whatever they need to know to accomplish their goals

What if I told you that (morpheus.jpg) this has been common knowledge in pedagogical research for over half a century now, and that pretty much all attempts of reforming education in the light of that simple fact have failed :(

This sounds plausible and if I had to hazard a guess as to why efforts at reform have failed, I'd say it's because people who haven't thought very much about the goals of education have an idea in their heads of what education should look like and it is our current system. I think parents and politicians have a lot of control over the system and just like the "butts-in-seats" theory of business management, a lot of people think if kids aren't doing copious amounts of homework, they're not learning anything.

We're homeschooling our kids and we track their progress compared to the public school curriculum closely, and we do remarkably little that looks like formal education. The kids are easily on schedule with everything, a year or more ahead of the curriculum benchmarks, but people see what we do, and then ask when we're going to start teaching them stuff.

Why do you think it has failed?

I rather agree with the quoted statement. I think that, if it is truly that simple fact which has failed, then it is because 'their goals' are in fact put upon them, not innately 'their goals'.* Students will of course not innately want to learn whatever they need to know to pass the exam. But they want to learn whatever they need to know to beat their friends in Fortnite.

I think more generally the problem is that pedagogy, as in _instruction_, is fundamentally at odds with _agency_ (which is what games excel at giving people). (Imagine playing a game that would explain to you how to play it at every step of the way. How fun would that be?) It's comes down to control. Who should have it: the teacher, or the student? No classroom setting would ever allow giving _all control_ over to students. Yet, that is what games do. And the wonders that it creates.. The control gives players a really _empowering_ feeling of agency and self-determination. Pedagogy, and instruction, is often more paternalistic / patronizing in its core, since it assumes "You can't do this, let me show you". Games say: "Let's see if you can do this!"

* - Education is a way of enforcing society's goals upon the individual (to create "citizens", ideally, but to create "workers", practically), and the individual adapts to it to the extent it helps him later in life, to the level he/she has aspirations and manages to forgo instant gratification.

That sounds very interesting, could you elaborate or provide some links? Aren't there successful 'alternative' school programs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

This was the approach of my company ("games" that are secretly educational).

Even Maxis itself actually failed, they went bankrupt and EA bought them and ditched their educational games (what remained of Maxis started to just pump out The Sims series one after the other).

But unless you are aiming at a really, really wide market, and is either lucky or get exposure help, you won't go far.

I noticed for example "Kingdom Come: Deliverance" has a LOT of information about medieval era in the Holy Roman Empire, still they aimed to be a "AAA" game, and the information is tucked inside the in-game manual.

Maxis games are pretty good in that regard; Sim City was probably the most influential in a list of 'management' games, which teach you about economics, revenue vs expenses, and natural disasters; some of its successors / related games like Transport and Roller Coaster Tycoon make that even more apparent.

And The Sims simplified, but made me (and probably others) aware of quantified personal needs; you need x amount of sleep per night or you'll accrue 'sleep debt' and distress, you need social contact to fill that meter, etc.

Minecraft has an educational mode / version btw, there was one game our son was playing that basically made him go out into the sea and identify various types of sea life. I mean it's all Minecraftified (?) and abstracted, but they do pick up a lot of things from it.

I'd still like him to read more books though, given that his language skills are pretty bad.

> "Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as "educational" games."

And that's the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from "real" educational games.

People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.

If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn't focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.

Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you're trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)

But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that's easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.

> If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn't focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.

That's the problem. I think if you define "educational" as the curriculum taught in school, this is not possible. There's no way around working a ton of math problems to get better at math. You maybe can make it a bit more engaging if you pack it in a video game, but it will never be fun for most people.

Therefore, I think, the educational role of video games must be to spark interest. For example, KSP sparks interest in aerospace engineering, and I bet there's a significant number of people who went on to study rocketry because they played KSP.

Sparking interest is an important function. In fact, I think it becomes increasingly important as a lot of material and courses are now available for little money ubiquitously. Great education starts with a spark of interest.

Let me explain in more detail:

Back in the days, an important part of going to school was having access to knowledge. Now, thanks to the internet and millions of amazing humans, knowledge is accessible all over the place, virtually for no money. Today, the motivation to learn something is therefore more important. To get motivated, first you need to know that something exists, and second you need to know if you like it or not. Before motivation comes sparking interest. And here, video games have an extremely important role to play - and unlike "educational" video games that are math exercises disguised as video games, video games that can try to achieve the spark can be genuinely fun to play.

Geology is a big part of Dwarf Fortress. They take their different stone types very serious.

About 'German Grammar': check out Heaven's Vault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Vault

But honestly, humans don't learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain. Games would be ideal to produce comprehensible input, and test players on their comprehension via actions, instead of making them reply with words.

There's some evidence that trying to produce language to early in your learning just ingrains bad habits. So instead you can just follow increasingly complex instructions to show that you understand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

> But honestly, humans don't learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain.

As a native German speaker, I disagree. For me, the German grammar (in particular the declination system) is what I would consider the type system of the German language. So yes, I do think a lot about German sentences in terms of types/grammar that are/is involved.

EDIT: When I was a pupil at school, the only thing that I loved about the German classes (for native speakers) were the grammatical concepts. At that time, I really couldn't understand why these weren't taught in math classes ...

When you're a native speaker at school you already speak the language, you just learn the rules to better understand some corner cases and to be able to pursue some careers that would otherwise be impossible for you.

But you first learn a language intuitively at home, by using it a lot and developing intuition for what sounds right and what doesn't.

I'm a native Polish speaker (which has a "typesystem" much more complicated than the German one nevermind the English one). I've learnt German for 4 years in secondary school. I remember the system to be pretty intuitive and simple (mostly you change the articles not the words, there's just 4 cases, no verb aspects, just 1 kind of plural, just 3 genders, etc.).

So it was definitely easy to remember the rules and I did at one point (not anymore ;) ). But still to speak German you can't pause every 3 seconds to do a table lookup for the correct conjugation and rules, that would be far too slow. You have to use the language and have that "ouch" feeling when you use the wrong case so eventually you know intuitively which word to use.

A game to teach a language should just be a game using that language and giving immediate feedback.

Well, you did learn to understand German sentences way before school and grammar, I think that was the point. A baby can learn any language without studying its grammar, and in the early period not being able to pronounce the words.

> Well, you did learn to understand German sentences way before school and grammar, I think that was the point.

Learning the first language as a baby takes many years - and even after these years, you are still only on a "baby talk level". That is why I don't consider these "natural" approaches for learning a language to be a good idea - they are far too slow to be economical.

+1 for Dwarf Fortress. That is a mind expanding game no matter who you are or how you approach it. It would be interesting seeing it played among a wide range of children. I know first-hand it really helped me through geology, remembering different rock types and the nuances involved with them.

When Islamic State was up and coming, the news reported that its capital was Al-Raqqa. I didn't bat an eye. I did bat an eye at my own non-eye batting. EU4 and the (save scumming) glorious return of the Byzantine Empire had forever seared into my brain where the place is.

You can make a game about vim keybindings (https://vim-adventures.com/). If that's possible sky's the limit!

A German language game would focus around getting language learners in touch with native speakers. Perhaps something like "Keep talking and nobody explodes" with a German manual?

> I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar.

WWII is a pretty common setting for games. Making the German protagonists communicating only in German would be a first step to incentive learning the language.

Have an English language game where enemies talk in German, where being able to understand them gives you an advantage, for example because you know what they're about to do.

Then mix and match for different languages.

Of course the things they say should be more detailed and diverse than just some standard sound clips.

There's an old adage in screenwriting: Don't give the audience 4, give them 2+2. This is the Kuleshov Effect [0] for scripts.

By giving them the little details, you engage the audience (well, most of them) and make the work more compelling. Medical and Crime procedurals are this in spades. Sherlock Holmes is still idolized.

Educational genres are explicitly against the Kuleshov Effect. The whole point is to get to 4. The audience is not exactly unengaged (video games are engaging by definition), but they aren't drawn in. There are no compelling mysteries or 'flaws' that they help solve with the story of the game. Just a computer holding back an answer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

The progression of the Sherlock subplot in Star Trek: The Next Generation is a good example of this. It starts with Data trying to solve a case too fast, then ends with the computer creating a holographic life form to outwit Data.

The lesson here reminds me of one of my favorite Malcolm Gladwell essays about McDonald's failure to market healthy fast food back in the 90's:

The McLean was a flop, and four years later it was off the market. What happened? Part of the problem appears to have been that McDonald's rushed the burger to market before many of the production kinks had been worked out. More important, though, was the psychological handicap the burger faced. People liked AU Lean in blind taste tests because they didn't know it was AU Lean; they were fooled into thinking it was regular ground beef. But nobody was fooled when it came to the McLean Deluxe. It was sold as the healthy choice--and who goes to McDonald's for health food?

https://web.archive.org/web/20081218211703/http://www.gladwe...

Indeed, wonder how the McLean would land now almost 30 years later? If they sold it as a healthy choice today, would it face a similar failure?

Speaking of choice and marketing, wonder why McDonald’s in the US still lacks a veggie burger. Is it based on a business decision?

It absolutely must be, because they have even vegan options here and there. Sweden, for instance, has had vegan burgers for several years (first McBean and now McVegan). I know other countries have something similar.

It seems to me that US McDonald's must be scared of diluting their brand by also going after the veggie crowd. Perhaps due to McLean failing or that they just bide their time until they can make a whole new set of restaurants under a different brand name like McDonald's Green or something?

> or that they just bide their time until they can make a whole new set of restaurants under a different brand name like McDonald's Green or something?

Would be fascinating if they did something like that. Pret a Manger did this recently by adding stores called Veggie Pret. Might be tough for McDonald’s to pull that off, though, since they also cater a lot to kids. By introducing two stores, veggie vs non-veggie, wonder if that would create signaling issues of healthiness with audiences?

Well, they do have McCafé, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCafé

They can't compete with Fortnite or Minecraft, but Castle of Dr. Brain was so good I played it back in the day and didn't think of it as educational ;)

It's so cool that you can get this on internet archive absolutely free, inside the browser, in a JS emulator!

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Castle_of_Dr._Brain_1991

Review for those who want to see it before playing the entire game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGtw5eOfZ48#t=2m39s

I used to play so many of those educational point and click games as a kid. Don't remember the details well but it seems the style has died out in the last decade.

Every game that contains an element of simulation that strives for realism is educational in that you walk out knowing a lot more about the simulated topic than before, often more than you ever wanted, and often more than what's in the sim. E.g. when I was playing counterstrike I found myself embarrassingly well-read in the Wikipedia pages about the history of modern firearms. Who would have guessed that "the Startgate gun" isn't just a very creative movie prop?

But this kind of knowledge acquisition only ever teaches the lowest hanging fruits, it's no substitute for drilling in the basics. Even lifetimes spent passing KSP won't bring you to a point were you could design your own rocket.

> But this kind of knowledge acquisition only ever teaches the lowest hanging fruits, it's no substitute for drilling in the basics. Even lifetimes spent passing KSP won't bring you to a point were you could design your own rocket.

Yes. Though it can probably teach you enough that you have enough scaffolding already in your brain that you can get through a textbook without getting lost?

I think the real value of KSP is orthogonal to textbooks. Like it says in that one xkcd strip, it gives you an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics by letting you interact directly (and with a goal) with orbital trajectories. I think you'd have a hard time getting the same visual intuition about how the ellipse stretches and rotates depending on whether you burn retrograde or radially out from a textbook.

The great value, here, I think, is that you can have a process completely alien to humans and get an intuition of it about as good as what we can get from playing around with a ball. In high school physics, ballistics (and therefore gravity) is taught using a ball being thrown in the air for a reason- most people have this sort of intuition for that process, and find it easier to get from there to the mathematical model.

Before games/simulators like KSP, the only way to get an intuition of orbital mechanics like that would be to simulate it in your head a bunch, arduously.

I think this is a potential great source of value: games/simulator can give you otherwise-very-hard-to-get intuitive knowledge of (models of) subjects. Not a replacement for the maths and the crunch, but would probably make it easier in a revolutionary way.

I wonder if this is already happening? There must be a generation of aerospace engineering students now who have sent rockets to the Mun.

Again, the scaffolding effect. Greatly illustrated by how the civ games teach about history: they teach absolutely nothing, all their models are fantastically wrong and a core element is the counterfactual nature of how a game plays out (culminating in Gandhi's bomb threats). But they give mental scaffolding that is valuable in those topics where you'd otherwise start from an empty slate. When for example you know nothing about west African history and read a text about it for the first time, just having that image of the Mansa Musa avatar in your mind will give you a retention advantage over someone who doesn't have it. It works much like a condensation seed then, a mental bookmark to which new information can be attached before getting lost as essentially noise.

But I wonder if that might also come as a disadvantage in the classroom, where the remaining facts and methods grind has to be enforced: if, for some reason, you felt the need to make pupils knowledgeable in the sequence of popes, that incredibly boring class would naturally be spiced up with anecdotes of dual antipopes, the cadaver synod and so on. Would that last hope of making that class somewhat bearable be lost on someone who already knew those rare fun parts in between all the numbers, e.g. because of playing CK2?

When you are making pupils memorize sequence of popes and are spicing it up with anecdotes taken out of their historical context just to be interesting, imo, the solution is not to have them play game.

The solution is to work on curriculum and textbook some more.

Or not bother memorizing a sequence of popes, which itself is just a bunch of names without the historical context.

>And, let's be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.

Only if you try to do it very naively. Most of the time, these "games" are "lets put blinky lights around match equations."

That's definitely not how you turn math and science into games. You turn them into games by making engineering games.

There was a really great paper I ran into a decade ago that looked at the theory making by players of World of Warcraft. Players were coming up with complex mathematical models for how to play the game most efficiently. THAT is how you make math a game.

The goal of the game shouldn't be "let's solve these math problems."

The goal of the game should be anything but that, and then you setup the game so that the best way to reach that goal is to use math.

Science opens the door even further, because hypothesis and experimentation is a fundamental part of playing games.

There was a recent post on here regarding the best ways to learn electricity. One of the top replies was to use some minecraft mod. I don't know anything about that mod, but that fact that it was one of the recommendations really said a lot to me.

> For example, Lego comes to mind.

And as a "video game"-like free alternative to 'real Lego' there are LeoCAD app + LDraw Parts Library, which are suitable for creating 'digital Lego' models by kids.[0,1,2]

[0] https://github.com/Symbian9/AWESOME-LDraw

[1] https://github.com/leocad/leozide

[2] https://ldraw.org

This discussion prompted me to write a blog post about this topic: https://shafyy.com/post/education-starts-with-a-spark/

I learned a ton of SAT words just by playing Diablo 2 over and over again searching for magical and unique items. Kind of incredible.

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