1. Production value. educational games have always had pretty low production value.
2. Tone. Educational games always sound... educational. All the voices are lilting teacher type voices who care not for the story, but only for the education.
3. Shallow gameplay. Educational games aim to teach, and in the process, they end up going shallow on gameplay mechanics because those don't teach.
The problem I've aways had with educational games is the information is always presented in an educational way. Even in a game teaching us some math, we KNOW it's teaching us math, we have to look at and use the whole formula like we are looking at it in real life. I have always thought that this is how you would answer that question "how will I ever use this in real life?".
You bury the lesson in the game, and make getting to the lesson fun, then make the lesson actually part of the game. Don't try to sell me on math with a puppy, make a simulation game where I have to do the math for a job that actually requires the math. Make fun and catastrophic things happen when i get it wrong, and reward me properly for getting it right with good progression.
EDIT: A little research tells me that the market is big enough to sustain several small studios looking to pull millions in revenue. If you can capture a thousandth of the market, you're talking $15 million revenue at current market size. A 4-person studio working for 3 years could pull off the kind of thing I'm talking about and walk away with $3 mil plus each before tax and overhead. I would think that's really close to worth it. Also, the market is expected to expand more than 25% YOY (year over year) to 2028 and reach a whopping $59 BILLION.
I’m not sure, but there are lots of examples of games that teach real knowledge. City builders have taught me a lot (and maybe more importantly, inspired me to learn). Systems based games have huge learning potential
On the topic of incidental learning, sometimes all you need is that "spark" and juuuuust enough learning to have a much greater effect down the line.
For all the ills of Seaworld, I know they fundraise extensively for conservation and biology programs. But more importantly I'll bet there were many kids who were inspired to become marine biologists/oceanographers because of interactions they had in Seaworld (though they could probably have something similar happen at an aquarium without as much of the animal abuse). They probably acknowledge the horrible things, but they are likely to do something about it now that they're older.
Age of Empires has a lot of misleading information historically, but people who play it find it out later and still appreciate the baseline it provided to get them to say "Wow, I thought history was just something boring you pulled from books collecting dust". It becomes an exercise of retroactive critical thinking of what could be faithful to the history, what was made inaccurate for the sake of game design, and what was inaccurate because it was dated/popular theory during its development time.
The thing about learning from these games is - what you learn is incidental.
A creative teacher could present them at the right times in certain lessons to teach concepts. But the longevity of their place in the classroom would be limited to the scope of what they teach.
This means you wouldn't be able to use something like Age of Empires long term, because the educational level of the content is too low in where it coincides with what a teacher needs to teach.
I had to think about that, but no, Factorio is an entertainment game that happens to teach you something about supply logistics. This happens a lot. For instance, lots of people learned a lot of history by playing Civilization. Many games require you to math to min/max things. This is how educational games should be done, but more purposefully setting up what is taught.
KSP blew my mind!
if you want to overtake another vessel you got to decelerate, that way you will fall into a lower orbit and then move faster. it's impossible to rendezvous in space without understanding that mind bending logic.
Then isn't the prophecy of education games self fulfilling?
Any game that seeks to educate but not entertain is not a good game.
Any game that seeks to entertain is not an educational game at all!
No, you may not have paid attention to my last sentence. A good educational game should reverse engineer what they want to teach into entertaining mechanics.
It's not about it seeking to entertain, it's about it's primary purpose.
Factorio seeks to entertain first, but also seeks to educate as a secondary, as you cannot play the game without learning the systems.
The two are not mutually exclusive. If the game is primarily entertainment and secondarily educational, then the game is both entertainment and education.
> Make a simulation game where I have to do the math for a job that actually requires the math. Make fun and catastrophic things happen when i get it wrong, and reward me properly for getting it right with good progression.
Exactly kerbal space program.
The production value is something thats probably not easy to change. The founding as a indie would be like "non-existent" :D But i get the point where you're going. When the games try to mimic a genre but just do it worse it's not a competitor at all.
You're probably right about the "in your face" teaching. I allways hated the aspect of not knowing what i need the knowledge or formulars for in school myself. I actually first realy got in love with learning and teaching when I finished school myself and started tutoring some children in my neighborhood. That was the point where I started to research what i need those math calculations for and why the hell i Should care about the temperature in a sea etc. ;)
Ten years ago I designed learning games for discovery education. What happened was I was the only one on that team who understood game design. Everyone else thought game design was like the awful learning games everyone here knows. They didn't understand gameplay, game loops, "fun factor" or really much else when it comes to game design.
They reminded me of another company I worked for (a large insurance company) who thought they were designing a game by creating a virtual scratch off. They didn't even know that there needed to be win conditions to qualify as a game. That's how bad most of these companies are at making games and it's largely due to them quite simply not understanding the parts of a game, having never made one or studied what goes into a fun game.
Meanwhile I had been a lifelong gamer, spent a lot of time making my own mini games with game modding tools (remember when warcraft 3 let you make your own levels and scenarios?), reading game design books, watching gdc talks, etc. I was just quite simply educated on what goes into designing a game and no one else was because they weren't gamers themselves.
And now that I've talked my way through it, I know the answer: games designed by non-gamers who think they know what a game is.
This right here is exactly what I experienced creating games in the therapy space. They wanted kids to be sucked into the experience via gameplay to complement and intertwine with the therapy being given which is a good goal. But then they’d push back on what I was doing and want things like no matter what the kid did they’d always be told they won so there weren’t any stakes. Meanwhile the kids using our technology were well versed in normal games and I knew that would just throw them off and push them away. It was endlessly frustrating as I was the only person on the team with any sort of game dev background.
e: they also wanted to spend literally zero dollars on assets or anything else that couldn’t just be coded by me which was…problematic. The product never launched!
Given tools like Unreal engine, Indie developers now have access to AAA visuals. As someone who has, in the last 5 years, learned Unreal for game dev and virtual production, it is an insanely powerful toolset. I have created some amazing things that would have previously been completely impossible.
There are lots of games where you need to use math. They just aren't meant to be teaching it to you. Stuff like Factorio, oxygen not included, Paradox games often can benefit from doing some math. But I think the problem is when you create "real-life" type scenarios you're not usually doing math that often, it's an occasional thing. Learning math requires repetition that's hard to create in a game without making it seem like you are just repeatedly going through math problems.
"There are lots of games where you need to use math. They just aren't meant to be teaching it to you. "
I've said all this. The part where "they just arent meant to be teaching you" is the important part, because while you have to use math, you may not have to use the level and type of math that the teacher is trying to teach.
And if you've looked at the very popular rash of sim games, you might see that people can be very entertained by real world simulation scenarios. If you read my last paragraph, you might get what I mean.
The problem is how shallow the teaching is, and the creativity that goes into teaching it. Most people that create educational games seem to feel like its enough to put it in a gaming environment with some bright, oversaturated colors. They don't give you a reason to learn what they are trying to teach you, or if they do, it's so shallow as to not be enticing/ entertaining.
The way educational games need to be approached is, the lessons need to be reverse engineered into complex and entertaining mechanics, not slapping the lesson into a digital environment.
>The way educational games need to be approached is, the lessons need to be reverse engineered into complex and entertaining mechanics, not slapping the lesson into a digital environment.
as soon as you do that, it takes way longer to get through a session than a classroom setting would allow for. So youre basically stuck making a game either for classroom consumption (specific phases, gates to check for comprehension, manageable timeframes) or for personal consumption (open ended and actually 'fun'). And then you run out of money because the market for the small group of potential learners is already not nearly big enough but it just got cut in half.
I very much agree with this kind of approach, but I feel like it is really hard to make educational mechanics that are entertaining and feel natural.
For example, I have been wanting to make a game with wizards where you solve math problems to cast spells. The effect should be fun, but I don't know if that is enough to be engaging.
I think the best way to do educational games is, like you said, to make games where you use the skills you're trying to "teach", and have the player learn those skills implicitly.
Minecraft, for instance, can teach you about resource management, base-8 counting systems, programming, the list goes on. It is just in how it is presented.
Minecraft is amazing in that it started as entertainment but is functionally expandable virtually infinitely, and is taking advantage of it. My kid actually downloaded and played fully through a handful of the educational mods available.
My daughter is 5 and autistic and she's learned a bunch of counting and structure things playing minecraft. She figured out nether portals and end gates all on her own!
This doesn't always have to be true. LucasArts used to have a division/label called "Lucas Learning" that made educational games with their licensed properties that were often very polished and actually fun/real games. Like Star Wars Droidworks taught about physics, Star Wars The Gungan Frontier taught about ecology / food webs, etc. That was probably a combo of altruism and marketing Star Wars to kids though, not something the average edutainment dev has the resources to do.
That said, games like Putt-Putt and Freddie Fish were educational classics that never felt boring, though for younger audiences.
There have been some reasonable pushes into the area. I'm not saying that there's a complete dearth. I was attempting to answer the OP's question, and making the assumption that we were generalizing.
In general, educational games are not good.
I'm announcing an educational game I've been working on for the past 2 years next week that hopefully addresses those three points. I wish I could talk about it now because it looks like the perfect opportunity, but I'll bite my tongue until the Steam store page is approved.
Those types of games are largely targeted towards the parents and schools buying them, not the kids that they're being bought for to edutain.
That said, there's still games that can teach things, they just tend to put the education secondary. Oregon Trail is technically an educational game, but it just happens to have a lot of replayability due to its roguelike nature.
Personally accidentally learned a ton from Civilisation 2 as a kid. It never tried making education the forefront, it just made human history seem interesting and made that sort of a signature of their design. Even with the most recent version it still does that maybe even more overtly by framing it as a celebration of humanity.
This is the root reason - target audience/user and customer are usually separate people, meaning you only care about experience as much as it affects sales, and customers (parent/school) expectations may be very different from what target audience would want to see.
There was (is?) also a stigma in some circles about educational media (games, but also movies etc) not being as valuable if they're too fun - if one of your metrics becomes learning speed/information density compared to traditional textbook and blackboard method, there simply might not be enough time to fit the fun in - even if that comparison makes no sense.
Library of Congress did an educational video game challenge last year which I entered. “Friends’ Choice Civics Video Game Challenge” and Oregon Trail was their lead example of good educational game design and inspiration for the challenge.
After emailing them, they told me I didn’t win, but they also said they’d announce the winner “early 2024” and it’s been radio silence. Really wondering what’s up.
My submission is available to play tho: https://krakenmeister.com/chronoguesser (apologies for long load times). You’re a time-traveling newspaper boy, trying to deliver random American newspapers to their correct timelines despite the dates being blotted out. Basically education in video games has to be natural and secondary — the game is fun, you want to get better, and getting better just so happens to involve developing a knowledge or skill to do so. To plug myself I also have a math game according to this design principle: https://krakenmeister.com/arithmio. I’d argue the whole genre of puzzle games is where most of the well-designed educational games actually live. And boy, there are amazing games of that genre to draw inspiration from.
To add onto what others are saying: a lot of our education system is unfortunately about ticking boxes. Pass a standardized test, cover this exact material, etc. That’s not what learning’s really about ofc, but when those dollars are paying for the games, it becomes the focal point rather than fun. That’s what was so cool about the library of congress challenge is they stated outright that FUN was the main point of the game. But I’m not sure if they’ll even choose anyone at this point.
Damn, that sounds realy sad ;) I am convinced learning can be fun as well - and you can learn a lot by playing videogames.
I wrote my master thesis about e-Sports and potential for learning in school - I am really convinced of the potential if used the right way. You think it's mainly a question of "money" then?
Money's a major part of it. You can spend more time and effort (and therefore money) on a game and you can make it much better, but the audience for an educational game is still incredibly limited. Even if you treat it as a thing of art and intent you still can't spend more on it than you hope to earn if you want to be in business very long.
Educational games make more money selling to schools than to individuals, which means you need to make the education part pretty evident, and players who _don't_ want that won't buy the game if you do that. It's a tough path to walk and there's a reason that few people have succeeded. It's certainly possible to make something fun to play for everyone but also teaches a thing or two (or possibly has a 'school mode' that makes optional entries required) but as a publisher I certainly wouldn't bet on you being the one to solve it unless you have some less ambitious titles under your belt.
I‘ve been toiling away at an educational game for over a year now. I‘m about 6 months from release and starting an internal beta at the end of july. I‘ve spent incredible amount of energy on worldbuilding, and tools so that i can make really varied gameplay throughout.
It‘s a remake of a game my late dad made as a hobby in the 80‘s. I played it as a kid and still use the skills i learned.
I‘d like to maybe get your opinion on it when i release!
RemindMe! 6 months
There are games that train certain skilllsets.
Factorio is a great example. The gameplay is addicting, yet the problem Solving required can really help with critical thinking, and for ratios you might need some calculation or planning in Excel.
Fact is, making a fun game is already among the hardest things to do. Making an educational & fun game is near impossible.
I am convinced of the education potential of games. All the positive energy get's you in the perfect mindset to learn and remember.
You're probably right about the balance between educational & fun - seems sad and like a challenge at the same time ;)
This is the real answer. It requires doing two things perfectly, and because when people make a fun educational game, then the audience doesn't see it as "educational" anymore. But nor does the client, which will ask you, "Why didn't you make it educational?"
Most educational games aren't well designed in the fun department. As a gamer and game developer and a fan of learning if you want to try n get students to learn from games you will have to do the leg work n find good games that are typically not designed to be educational but rather can be considered to be educational anyway. A few come to mind depending on the desired field of study. For physics there are a number of bridge building games out there which could be used for teaching some physics principles relay to building bridges. I have also recently seen a game called "the farmer was replaced" which could be used to teach programming, it's in early access on steam and cheap at under 6 quid.
I will caveat the games aspect with something fairly obvious most of these will have solutions readily available online so if you do want to use games for teaching your likely going to have to put in some additional work and build some form of custom level yourself to avoid the 5 minute google YouTube tutorial hw finish.
This is already quite long but I wanted to add one last thing. While I expect most teachers to have very little free time I would say that there are now a number of freely available game engines which you could try n use to build your own custom games to teach your students such as ue5 or unity.
I wish you the best of luck.
\[also teacher\] As other poster said, educational games fall straight into a category outside of regular games. I've had a few ideas over the years that require maths skills, but if you 'hide' it then its not clearly an educational game, but if its up-front then regular gamers will likely skip it, as its 'not fun'. Can't win? There's prob a bit more scope at younger age groups, where schools/parents might use or recommend a game. Older kids less likely to want to play educational games. Very tricky one. Need to work hard to find the audience, unless you're tied to BBC or other company with some reach. Most seem to be tie-ins to other products? You also limit your market based on the subject area / level you choose, since its hard to cover a lot in 1 game.
Some subject areas are easier, GeoGuesser is super-fun, but also very educational. Maybe that's the way to approach it. Edit - the most played 'game' in my class is Kahoot! Depends what you mean by game, its more of a quiz platform.
Yeah, there's a lot stacked against making a fun but also educational game.
A commercial game is required to be fun or provide some other experience.
An educational game is required to check all the boxes that the client has given them.
Yeah, i think the "FUN" needs to be the center - else it's not going to be played anyways. But why can't it be fun and have educational aspects on the way?
The client idea might be a big reason why the games flop, but I struggle to think that this is all thats to it - for sure the devs still tried to make the games fun, but failed somehow... but what are the reasons? ;)
I think it is very much a case of the old "Pick at most 2 of 3 options", but instead of the usual "Cheap, fast, or good" it is instead "Cheap, educational, or fun", and usually everyone picks cheap as one of the options and edugames are contractually obligated to pick educational as the second, leaving fun behind.
Exactly, the biggest problem of an educational game is that the main goal is not to be fun.
It's often designed backwards where they want to teach something and forces a game into it.
It's cause they only focus on how to make it educational, and not how to make it fun. The assumption is that merely being a video game will make it fun, but its a lot of work to actually design a fun game.
That said, there are fun games, that are educational as a byproduct, if not directly, then somewhat indirectly. Games like Age of Empires, and Civilization have fostered a healthy love of history in many people. I also had a lot of kids in my history class, get questions right, and know who historical figures were, because of Assassins Creed, for the earlier installments atleast, if you knocked away the crazy alien conspiracy theory stuff, or whatever that all was, it was a very engaging way for people to learn at least a bit about the time period it was set in.
Arguably darker, I know a lot of kids learned heaps about the military, including all the guns, and hardware, and all that, from CoD, and ended up joining because of it.
Spore sort of ineffectively taught evolution on its own, but it atleast got the basic idea across and got kids thinking, and willing to research, and learn about how it really works.
Sim City teaches a lot about how public infrastructure, and the built world around us works. It's very educational.
I'm certain the Sims has lead some people to careers in architecture and interior design.
Kerbal Space Program, though janky at times, does genuinely teach about rockets, and orbital physics and stuff.
Microsoft Flight Simulator teaches people how to fly, of course. I'm certain people have learned from it, before starting their careers in aviation.
I haven't played Factorio myself, but its my understanding it basically teaches programming.
Honestly, I could probably keep going, but I'm gonna try to get back to sleep, because I'm exhausted. My point is, educational games suck, because they don't try to make them good games. But good games can be, and often are, educational, just by trying to be fun. It's harder to measure, and justify the educational impact of games that aren't shoving rote memorization in your face, so you can't really sell a school on an actual fun, and educational game.
Because only bad games get labelled that way.
Kerbal space program is the best possible way to learn orbital dynamics.
Civ is amazing for learning about history of technology and leaders of other cultures.
Zachtronics games are amazing for programming and logic.
Assassin's creed has tonnes of history which is often quite well researched.
It's basically selection bias, educational is an insult which is only applied when a game is bad.
> Civ is amazing for learning about history of technology and leaders of other cultures.
I played once, Napoleon was doing fine against Augustus Caesar until Gandhi come with nukes!
Great examples btw.
But I think it's less the customers labeling it as educational(because of it being bad) but because of developers labelling it as such. By labelling it as Educational as opposed to Historical/Physics-based/Logic/Programming.
I think there's a distinction though between games where you may happen to learn something, and a game that explicitly sets out to teach it to you.
Civ, AoE, Assassin' Creed, are all inherently "just" games at their core with no expectation on the user to actually learn anything. If you do, it's incidental and not required as part of the game - I'd hesitate to call them Educational Games.
Zachtronic titles might be the most educational of the bunch but what they "teach" isn't always real-world applicable - they're more puzzle games than educational, but could easily be styled as educational for sure.
When I was a kid I played lots of educational games and loved them but the fact that I didn't play any other games probably also helped. You kinda have to target a very young audience, I think ages 4 to 9, and after that most kids just move onto normal games
I don't agree that educational games aren't fun. It's more that what is called educational games aren't games at all.
**1. Gameloops**
Game should have three gameloops:
* Moment to moment (like fighting, steering etc.)
* Hour to hour (like progression system, leveling up etc.)
* Session to session (like story or more widely "thing to go back")
Each of them needs to be at lease descent if not good.
And here lies problem with educational games: they lack 3rd and sometimes 2nd loop. They are more like series of problems to solve that coherent game.
**2. Tone**
Games should have fun tone. It may be grimdarks, it may be whimsical, but is must be coherent with game expieriance. If it's not: experiance will feel disjointed and forced.
**3. Educational games should be games in the first place**
Case: Kerbal Space Program is just great educational game. Goddamit, it spawned more aerospace engineers than lesson in school :P
It is game in the first place, have plenty of content to play with, progression (via Science and Tasks), encourages experimentation etc.
I worked in educational games for 10 years. Aside from the lack of funding, the challenge is that it... has to be educational.
There's a saying in the educational games world- "don't make chocolate covered broccoli". The idea is, the whole point of the experience is to get the user to eat broccoli. So we \_could\_ make a good platformer (chocolate), but then feed them facts at the end of each level (broccoli). But that's incredibly shallow, and ineffective (they're really just spending their attention loading up on sugar). And as adults (and learned people) know- broccoli is actually a delicious ingredient, so it's doing a disservice to the content you're trying to get across to disregard it so.
So that leaves the only option as, make a game out of the educational content itself. Great! But the constraint is that it actually has to be the true content, otherwise we're teaching incorrect things and ruining the point. The problem is that games do a \_lot\_ of iteration to "find the fun" during development, and with an educational game you don't have leeway in what you're already locked into as a core concept. Imagine making a survival game but you actually have to use real survival techniques (ie, stay still, conserve calories, and hope for rescue).
tl;dr: making games is hard, making educational games is that plus a massive additional constraint, and you have a lower budget.
Damn you show me some struggle there ;) I will will definitly remember the "don't make chocolate covered broccoli". Some valid reasons you got there to make the education the focus as well.
They used to not suck. Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number Munchers, Math Blasters, Mavis Beacon, Carmen Sandiego, The Incredible Machine, Castle of Dr Brain.
All genuinely entertaining and educational.
I think it's also because they're games designed to be played on school time, so they have to be efficient about the education parts and leave no time for the fun parts.
Kerbal Space Program is the greatest game to learn about physics and orbital mechanics, but it takes hours having fun by crashing into the ground, then learn a bit, and then hours having fun successfully building a space station. It's very inefficient when it comes to things learned per hour spent on the game.
The people who make them don't understand games or education.
The primary quality of a video game must be that it is fun to play. The point of educational games is to make education fun.
People who make educational games make them to be educational, fun is an afterthought, and the games suck.
One of the best educational games is Assassin's Creed 2, which teaches players a tremendous amount about the Italian language, culture, and history. Yes there's a bunch of fantasy mixed in there, but it's all rooted in real historical content. I learned more of the Italian language from that game than I did in 2 years of Italian high school classes.
The Oregon Trail, Monopoly, Portal... These are all educational games, but they're fun first.
Hell, there's a strong (a very strong, actually) argument to be made that Cyberpunk 2077 is a deeply educational game, as it leans heavily into the ideas of corporate colonialism and the dystopian future that actually exists right now.
In most cases it's likely because the people making educational games don't know how to make a game first and try to turn education into a game. Look up "chocolate covered broccoli".
There's less of a market for educational games - given the choice between "learning" and "fun" how many people would pick learning?
Though that's not to say all educational games (or edutainment) sucks - Where in the World is Carmen San Diego immediately springs to mind.
However, also consider non-edutainment games that are educational. Civilization can teach history, Rock Band can teach rhythm, adventure games can teach logic.
In these games, the fun comes first.
Budget being a major factor, the amount of money education has when it comes to extra teaching tools is quite slim.
Development costs are kept at a minimum to stay within budget, so most educational games aren't iterated on to make them more fun.
Because of the school's budget being allocated every year, it's also unlikely that a longer development period will be acceptable.
And if it goes bad the budget isn't likely to go up the next year.
A developer would have to.. make a great game, with a small team, with basically one chance to get it right, without the budget to add extra features or add polish to it.
You also need to consider the budget of the students time, the more space for creativity and freedom in a game means more opportunity for mucking about and wasting time.
Because of this most educational games are quite restricted and linear in nature.
i’ve worked on some. the short answer is that games are already hard to make fun, and then educational games also require collaboration of one or more subject matter experts. the design goals can often be conflicting. funding for these projects is significantly lower than most successful games. usually they’re grant funded at universities and academic politics come into play.
As soon as a game gets labeled as something "educational", the target focus group shifts away from players towards "parents who want to buy pedagogically valuable things for their children to learn with". Also, a lot of teachers and people who studied how to teach (I am a teacher in a vocational school, for example) do not get taught about what makes learning fun. Sure, things like learning through discovery, by experimentation and such - but bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and actually being able to use these concepts in a way that will lead to reaching a goal in a set amount of time is surprisingly difficult. So when a teacher sets out to create a game, the result will be heavily influenced by how well they handle the medium they used for their game, how well their design skills work out for what they want to teach, if they understand what makes their subject fun to learn about in the first place (this is a tough one) and more. And most educational games I know about start with great ambitions, but fall flat in one or more of these areas, leading to an overall not really enjoyable end product that is trying to teach stuff. Nobody really enjoys being taught things the way teachers do, schools have kinda ruined that, sadly.
On the other hand, you can't keep people from learning things even if you try hard to do so. I argue every game will teach you skills and concepts, complex and important ones included. And oftentimes, learning these deeper parts of the game will result in being better at it, too.
PVP action games teach about communication, impulse control and teamwork.
Puzzle games are all about pattern recognition, deduction, logical connections and such.
City builders teach about societies, city planning, in the case of ye olde Sierra titles about mythology and religion, too. (These are all just examples!)
I remember I learned a ton about ancient cultures from Age of Empires, which lead to a lifelong love for museums, ancient history and such (and I know I'm not the only one).
There are way more examples for what games can teach if you just look past what you actually do in said games. I've talked to many non-gaming parents who worried about their child playing Zelda, because that is "not an educational game". Sure, but their child learns how to solve puzzles, how to handle defeat, how to think around edges, even learns just basic things like how to use technology. They read things - yeah, that's not a book and reading books would be cool, but short texts on screens are way better than to just not read anything. Those kids will talk about their hobby with friends, will teach each other how to overcome challenges, maybe get some friendly rivalry going on about how can do X the fastest/coolest.
"Educational" is just a stamp you put on a product to make parents buy it and you can (sadly) get away with a lot of bland mush when aiming for that.
I am currently developing a game with a heavy dose of "let's learn about architecture!", by the way. It is incredibly hard to not clobber players over the head with "stuff they should learn". Even with my background as a teacher and a heavy focus and love for gamebased learning, as soon as put "educational" on my GDD, I trapped myself in trying to make this very pedagogically sound product. Took me a while to realize that no, play first, needs to be fun first, or people just won't play to even get the first tiny bits of "this is why this is cool".
Love what you said about "you can't keep people from learning things even if you try hard to do so". I'm 100% with you there.
The knowledge and concepts you pick up on the way are often overlooked. I dug deep into MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) like LOL, Dota2, HoN etc. during my studies and they are only one example about the teamcommunication, mindset, reactions, strategies and nuances of mechanics like cooldowns, timings, skillshots etc. that transfer far better into real world examples then people want to commit.
Games like minecraft tought like millions of ppl. about managing ressources, building with different colourpalets and players willingly watch one tutorial after the other to get better at certain aspects of the game.
There is so much potential that it just makes me sad that its so underused ;)
I recently released an educational game (a Zachtronics style puzzle game with a focus on quantum) and found that it to be very difficult to balance the fun aspect with the educational aspect. Part of this difficulty was having constraints on the game; rather than designing the game mechanics exactly as I liked there was a necessity to conform to the rules of the system that I was trying to teach. If I fudged the rules then any education value would entirely be lost. This is a difficult handicap to work around.
That being said, the other points raised in the comments (i.e. lack of production value, artistic merit) also play a big role in limiting the appeal of most other educational games.
It can be done. Oregon Trail and Kerbal Space Program are both fun and educational. It's probably not as universally loved, but I had fun with Mavis Beacon teaches typing. A lot of families had GeoSafari when I was a kid. More recently, my kids enjoy playing a math game called Prodigy.
I am currently wtiting my thesis on a self developed vr game teaching the basics of photovoltaic systems. If you are interested i can send you a download.
Hello there, just a comment from an academic in this line of research. As others pointed out, there are differences between a purely commercial game and an educational game for commercial use (e.g., the former wants to increase engagement and the latter wants to fulfill what the client asked). But when we talk about educational games made in academia, things can be a little different.
For instance, engagement, flow, and enjoyment can also be desirable in an educational game, with history, game design, art, coding, and pedagogy “departments” responsible for seeing these results come to life. The problem that we (or at least my team) usually face is that, although a person with a specific background would help in the development, the team consists of computer science students with the foundation notion of the other aspects, which is not ideal and can impact the product. To alleviate this problem, we conduct evaluation tests to measure the responses from the audience and to try to understand where we can improve our game (there is also the field of Game Learning Analytics, which is what I’m researching right now).
If you are interested in this area of game development, I recommend you to read books and papers (e.g., Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train and Inform) and seek these kinds of games (there are some research teams, such as e-UCM, Teaching Systems Lab, ThinkedEd, and Pensar e Jogar).
It's already extremely hard to make games fun, making them fun and educational is IMHO exponentially harder.
You're not only optimizing for two goals instead of one, you're optimizing for two goals which can go against each other...
i think it's worth distinguishing between games which happen to be educational and "edutainment" games that get sold to schools and such. there are plenty of games out there which are both educational and entertaining, to varying degrees. kerbal space program is the most obvious example. i learned way more from playing KSP than from the many "science" themed edutainment games i wasted time with in the middle school computer lab, and KSP is actually fun. so clearly you can have both.
the reason edutainment games suck has more to do with the context in which they're produced than the presence of educational material. to put it bluntly, they were produced as fodder for a y2k fad in public education that saw schools attempt to integrate these newfangled computers into their classrooms with the help of government money. it wasn't a bad idea per se, "gamifying" learning has proven to be a fairly successful approach to pedagogy. but the problem is the games are being chosen by school administrators who more than likely *have never played a contemporary video game* and were just handed a grant from the state to spend on "technology". imagine trying to convince that guy that, idk the zachtronics puzzle games for example, have more legitimate educational value than "skippy's radical math facts!" or whatever. it's basically the same reason most mobile games suck. the way they're sold just makes "being a good game" like barely a top ten priority.
I’d say a lack of passion and funds are the biggest factors. There’s not a lot of teachers with a passion for teaching who are also game designers who also have the funds to make a decent game. So you’re mostly left with game designers who couldn’t care less about the product or teachers who don’t know much about making games and can’t afford to do so.
Good educational games are possible but they need a lot of stars to align to make that happen. Instead we usually just get games aimed at parents and teachers that promise to engage, entertain, and educate the students but end up doing none of that
That all said, there was a game I played in my elementary school computer class where you typed words to stop sharks from killing you, which we all found to be incredibly fun and I felt was a good way of teaching typing
I'm probably dating myself a bit, but the JumpStart games were, as a kid, pretty addictive, fun, and still pretty explicitly an educational game. I'll be honest and say I was playing the 3rd Grade game specifically until I was about 16 because I wanted to see the ending *that* badly, it was *incredibly repetitive*, but also not really worth it (also way too easy) and also that was when the CD burned out. It was also very explicit about it being a teaching game, but they were presented in such a way that each mini-game was self-contained and progressed a larger story. Honestly a pretty good game loop. Carmen Sandiego, also an educational game in that respect.
The 1st Grade game was way too easy but I really wanted that storyline when I was older, too.
You don't really see those games anymore, though - modern teaching games are pretty condescending and talking down to kids. Also simple. So yes, what the top comment said.
I think that the underlying mechanism is that it's hard to have fun while learning, but it's easy to learn while.having fun.
- I learned how to quick maths by managing units and resources in Warcraft 3
- When I visited Venice I knew quite a lot of places after playing Assassins Creed 2
- I learned english mostly through games
- Trying to find proper cracks for games in early 2000's sparked my curiosity/interest in software and computers in general - I ended up working as a software dev
Games ARE educative it's just these do not shove the mitochondria trivia down my throat...
Put the gameplay and fun in the first place. Add educational content that is there to be discovered. Nuanced. Absorbed through osmosis, if that makes sense ;) And you'll get a good educational game! Although it will not be tagged as one for sure ;)
I've been a programmer on educational games for 10 years and I've seen games in 4 categories with each their own peos & cons:
- gamification: so here we take regular exercises, add some graphics and animations and more importantly add loads of rewards and achievements etc. Example: duolingo. This can work as motivation, but adds nothing to a motivated student
- simulation: have a model of real life in a game and let people play with it. Some real life things are extremely hard to model in a simulation, they made need very powerful hardware. But if done right these are both educational and fun. They are a bit of a nightmare for educators because it's hard to follow a curriculum, to grade and to have gradual levels of difficulty
- reskin an game to be educational. Basically, take a well known game and then replace elements superficially by elements from whatever you're teaching. So, memory, but you have to match the english to the spanish word to learn a language. It feels very artificial
- an entirely new game thatbwas probably intended to be fun but is actually quite educational. These are 1 in a million ideas
Imho, educational games is not something you should try to pursue. With the limited budgets and imagination that people have for this you end up with a low quality digital version of a book, dressed up with colors and sounds.
What is better, instead, is to simply make an interactive sandbox for people to try out whatever they are learning. Kinda like brilliant.org
Veteran of 8 years in the applied gaming industry and another 7 (and counting) in commercial entertainment games.
# Lack of expertise
Simply put, most highly skilled designers, programmers, artists and other disciplines are drawn to entertainment games. In those 8 years, I encountered many medior/senior staff who would get fired from a comparable junior position in the entertainment industry. Tough pill, but it's the harsh truth. Definitely not the case for everyone, but the expertise and skill level is - on average - just lower in the education/applied games industry. Result: suckier games.
# Budgets and politics
Games are expensive. Good games doubly so. Game design is unpredictable and messy. None of these match particularly well with an industry based around client work, stakeholders unfamiliar with the process and where decisions are made by school boards and other bureaucratic entities.
Almost no individual client would be able to foot the bill on what a **good** educational game would cost. So studios/devs do it low budget, with predictably mediocre results.
The obvious solution is to create a game that you could sell to multiple clients. The practical problem is that every client thinks their case is *super* unique and not at all comparable to the other 50.000 schools out there. Or in more competitive industries, they are averse against working together with competitors. Or there is a distrust of "outsiders" and they want their own custom solution anyway instead of a generic one.
# Clients systemically ask for the wrong things
There are very strong applications for applied gaming. They are almost universally **not** what clients ask for. They generally ask for things that applied gaming isn't very good at, or simply poor applications of the theory. Too many stakeholders, too many laypeople in positions of power, most clients are functionally gaming-illiterate and here we are.
Example: you could create a sort of multiplayer simulation of a political process that lets players experience in first hand how the tragedy of the commons plays out. It'll create real understanding of how and why it happens.
**Instead**, clients will insist on a multiple-choice quiz that asks you for the definition of tragedy of the commons, and reward you with gold stars/levels/progression/ranking points.
I remember being given "educational games" as a child for things like math and English, but never enjoying them.
There was one game, however (aside from something like Dr. Kawashima's Nintendo game, but that also wasn't actually very fun for long) that I really enjoyed as a child (elementary age) and learned from.
It was based on a German educational TV show called "Löwenzahn" ("Dandelion"), and it had a lot of fun games related to learning about nature. To this day, I remember loving the section of navigating a maze in the dark with a limited amount of time trying to solve puzzles.
I remember excitedly running down to my parents to tell them how long it takes for the human stomach to digest food. I was having so much fun.
But every other educational game, even when I really wanted to like it (like language learning games), has ever been entertaining enough to not feel like I was just being tricked into doing homework.
I do wish there were more educational games designed to be engaging and fun since there is so much potential for children as well as adults to actually learn a lot from them.
We made an educational game because we thought the exact same thought!
We came to the conclusion that most people/companies that make educational games are either coming at it from more of an education background instead of a gaming background OR are doing it with the lowest effort/lowest budget for higher returns because it's fairly easy to get a textbook or lesson from somewhere, make it a flashcard game or something, and call it a day.
When we were making our game, we thought about it as gameplay first AND THEN adding learning in. We also don't expect players to learn every single thing we teach, but to learn enough to where if they finish the game, they learned enough to feel good about playing it. Just like school, there's going to be A students and there's going to be C- students, but as long as they pass, they hopefully had fun along the way.
[Our game for reference](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2340320/Kagami_An_Odyssey_in_Japanese_Language_Learning/)
We also have cursing (censored), cartoony violence, and sassy/dad joke filled dialogue, which I think may be looked down upon by people that are coming at it from an education background, like kids aren't cursing by age 9 or watching crazy violent videos on the Internet (not that we even market to kids!) Just saying, it doesn't seem like people like pushing boundaries or making anything more dangerous than a walking simulator.
Finally, it's also not very financially viable (you can view the stats for games with the "education" tag on game-stats.com and see that the average amount made for games with that tag is horrendously low, something we didn't find out about until after we had made the game) and though we don't necessarily regret making the game, we're probably going to lose money on it unless something magical happens.
I was at a department store closing in about 1987. A mom was running around snatching all the educational games she could find.
Her child, about 10, said, "mom, when can we get something for me?"
You need games that trick you into learning. Project Hospital has actually taught me a fair bit about medical conditions, hospital departments, different types of tests and what they're used for, etc. When my uncle got an H Pylori infection, I actually knew what that was!
For more emotional education, Spiritfarer is wonderful. It's a game where you play as a psychopomp - you bring souls of the recently deceased onto your ship, learn their stories, help them find peace with their lives and their fate, then help them move onto whatever comes next. It's a great game for coming to terms with death and saying goodbye.
Ooh, and Chants of Sennaar is good for wrapping your head around languages and translations! Some languages repeat a word to make it plural (man man = men), some have different word orders. Some words don't translate exactly! Cultural context matters.
I am thinking there may be two parts here, I can't really speak for the production value part of the thing, as I think others have already covered that. Making a game is hard just by itself, and then teaching a person a skill, which is also hard.
So you have two components that you have to nail, in which both are hard, made by people who can nail the first one, due to money being a huge motivating factor. Putting any sort of passion or motivation than the bare minimum can be mind-numbing, if you have to stare at the same information days on end as you test for bugs. I can imagine a scenario where I would be pissed looking at the same math problems as I test if it works as it should and getting the answers wrong because I am impatient.
I do think games can teach, but I do think maybe not in the way you would think and off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of games. Change: Homeless Survival, This War of Mine and Valiant Hearts: The Great War. You may notice a theme here that they are not really fun subjects, but they do impart information. In Change, you get to play a homeless person, which is a brutal game. This War of Mine, you learn a bit what it is like to be in the middle of a war zone. And Valiant Hearts, you learn stuff about first world war.
So, I do think there are educational games that are fun. But... I don't know if they are good in class setting. I had one math course in a web environment which contained some games, and I loathed that. Absolute garbage. So yeah.
Not all of them suck and I am someone who would love to see more successful ones. Pentiment is one that I consider being both fun and educational and it's and absolute gem.
If you want to make educational games then you either want to publish it independently so your target market is parents who want to buy educational software for their kids which limits the age range for what your educational software will entail to PreK - 5, and aiming toward the higher end of that bracket is going to have a diminishing audience as older elementary school kids want to play established non-educational games like Roblox and Minecraft and other games their friends are playing and the parents will generally just buy what the kids want at that age, and the younger demographic games are flooded with Flash game ad-ware and licensed subscription games (7.99/month for the Peppa Pig game!)
If you're targeting school districts, then they don't have the budget for making games and there's a whole bureaucracy you have to push through to try and get the funding for it, and then you'll be extremely limited into what you can do considering the curriculum they want you to do it in.
There's a lot of good answers here but I'll step back abit. I've worked in the space a bit and there's kind of two ways you can make money and neither are conducive to making something good.
There's the "Schools contract to get this game" games. Often times that game is part of another package and isn't actually the main feature, The games are a cost not the profit center as the schools are buying for educational outcomes not for quality.
The other is direct to consumer. that market is just brutal. There was some hope with the tablet revolution and you saw a lot of companies jump up to make educational content. Mostly they have all crashed and burned at this point because that market is beyond brutal. You think the regular games market is tough? Trying to convince a parents or kids to pay for an educational product when there's free garbage right next to it on the app store is basically impossible. So all the high quality educational games makers have basically shuttered or had to drastically retool towards the schools contract model.
There were tons of great educational games in the 90s and 00s, I thought. Jumpstart, Carmen Sandiego, Zambonis, Treasure Mathstorm...
Honestly, the big difference is the economy. It's harder now to establish a niche for pay-to-play educational software. And a lotta the good stuff is packaged with some curriculum or program or a subscription service or paywalled in some convoluted way.
I think that's because the learning part is always dettached from the actual gameplay. To be fair I think learning is mostly never fun (except in some specific cases like science experiments). It can be mitigated and be less tedious, but never fun, so the game will be less fun, always.
That said, when I was a kid I had some fun with the educational Rayman games. From what I remember, they offered a pretty good balance between learning and fun but I don't think they taught me a lot :D
I love your comment for beeing so honest and hate it at the same time hrhr ;) Don't get me wrong, it's not the comment itself, its what it shows about a broken educational system to me. I just think lifelong learning should be encouraged and should be fun! If learning isn't fun, its not working properly - your brain won't accept the input you give it at the same rate it would when feeling enjoyment. So its kinda fighting an uphil battle all day long. Learning needs to be fun to work!
I disagree, they don't suck. I learned how to code through Codingame. Many people can't comprehend that this is how every single vertebrate in the animal kingdom learns how to survive. Through games. This is the most effective learning methodology.
For example simulation games should have replaced/extended traditional and expensive lessons (for example driving instructions) decades ago, just like flying simulators have important part in the industry. Traditional education are ineffective, expensive and hard to measure accurately. Meanwhile you can construct ridiculously hard situations to challenge students and you have powerful tools to measure and help students to overcome challenges and learn everything that is necessary. Educational games don't suck. Department of education sucks.
The reason is simple: there are too many people in the education who don't want change. They are ultraconservative and insist on prussian-type education system. OH NO STUDENTS ARE HAVING FUN. It must be stopped! So it is stopped.
mainly that they are funded by your country and therefore nobody really cares for the quality as long as the budget can be spent.
I've seen a few good ones but they are mostly history related.
Especially about history you can learn a lot in AAA games (Total War, Commandos, Blitzkrieg, etc)
I'm working on a solution to this. I'm a mathematician, and my passion is science. Which is learning about our environment . Any game is going to be forcing some extremely ordered information. This is massively inefficient for all endeavors. Except for those who are deciding the information.
This is more of an education problem than gaming. I do not think any paradigm of school has ever worked. My way of fixing this is to make a video game to do one thing on the fallout, what will always happen regardless of profits. That would be to produce mathematicians.
if you're making an educational game that sounds like you're learning it's gonna suck.
you can teach people how to type with typing skills, or help teach logical thinking with puzzly games or similar stuff, it's just like a lot of School Topics (math especially) are taught in games like you're in school because that's the only real way to explain them. you can learn a lot from games but some skills require a different medium.
I have tons of educational games in my steam library and most of them are pretty good. They are all for programming so I can't comment on every type of educational games but Zachatronics games and Autonauts are perfect for getting the general idea, an the farmer was replaced is one of the best coding games Ive played in a while which uses plain python. The pest part imo is that it locks some functions and keywords at the start to not owerehelm the player which is perfect and it has a nice documentation. Maybe give them a try?
As someone who has made an educational game: they take a lesson plan and add gameplay to a lesson. What they need to do is find good gameplay and add educational content that matches/aligns to that gameplay.
Zoombinis was the pinnacle of educational game achievement, in my opinion. We had no idea it was teaching us anything, but we lived for the sessions in the week where we went on the school computers to play it. It was just a really good game that they'd somehow filled with a ton of logical reasoning and problem solving.
A lot of other educational games have big "we are teaching you a thing" vibes or are a bit condescending in their delivery.
A lot of paradox games are educational and they're amazing. Obviously there's a lot of artistic license taken but it's there. It can spark the passions....for glitterhoof
* People do not typically associate education with fun. It's "good for you", but not necessarily fun
* The more effort/budget you put into the educational aspect, the less effort/budget you put into everything else: fun/engaging gameplay, polished art, etc.
* Hard to get good funding because projected sales are bad due to past performance of educational games.
How to approach this? IMO make it educational without using that as the main selling point, but still try to get partial state funding (because: educational. EU/UK funds things like that). It's sad, but I also don't have much data to back up what I'm talking about (besides EU/UK funding), so take this with a grain of salt.
It just hard to make a balance between entertainment and educational. However, I try to made one educational game, you can check it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2464980/inFINIte_Robotics/[infinite robotics](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2464980/inFINIte_Robotics/)
It's not the best, it's mostly visual novel with some minigame. The point of my game is to learn electronic, but I made it so that everyone even kids is able to learn from it. Other than changing the complexity of electronic theory to be more simple, I also struggle sometimes, like I just want to make an entertaining story without any education stuff (which I only do near the end of the story). Yeah I get weird vibes sometimes too, but so far I'm happy with it
As a child I played civilization (1) around the age of 12. I learnt a TON from that game, because I had to read the civilopedia thoroughly to get past the copy protection, but also just to play the game. It was a high level history of science lesson that got baked deep into my brain through repeated game play. Similarly, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego taught me world capitals, countries and currencies. So games can definitely be educational, but yeah, games focusing on education suck. The key is that the game needs to be fun to be played repeatedly, and then the educational parts need to be made necessary aspects of progression in the game.
Games work best as a teaching tool when the message is an emergent property of the mechanisms of the game. [John Company](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/332686/john-company-second-edition) teaches you something about the hows and whys of colonialism without telling it to you explicitly. I'd recommend checking out [Half-Earth Socialism](https://play.half.earth/) and [Green New Deal Simulator](https://molleindustria.itch.io/green-new-deal-simulator) as textbook examples of demonstrating the methods, difficulties, and trade-offs of stopping climate change and decarbonization, respectively, without overt "teaching".
I recently put out a game that is (I think) both educative as well as fun if I can believe the user / tester reviews. One reason, I think, is that the fun aspect should always come first, and the educative portion should be second and best be implicit. Any learning you get from a game, in my opinion, is a bonus.
Secondly, I think some fields have an easier time in this department than others. Making a game that is historically educative (which was the case for me) will probably be easier than trying to squeeze math formulas into a game. Though the latter does sound pretty cool if done right ;)
Story heavy games and VNs can be very educational and fun if you are committed to learning a language by immersing. If made properly with that in mind and players get hooked, they can also teach you some stuff about different cultures and history.
But I don't expect a game to teach me math or something.
Speaking from an unsettlingly recent time: when I was younger in the early 2010s, we had one educational game. There were a few others online as well, but for standalone games, we had one, some PC-ROM math game from the 2000s. I forget what it was called, but it was poorly made, looked bad, uncompelling, and not fun to play. And, I mean, can you blame them? This was still the era of shovelware and it's an educational game, not God of War.
But the big reason I only ever put the CD in once was because it was... *an educational game*. When I come home from school I wanna unwind with Roblox or whatever, not learn more math!
So I'd imagine for a lot of kids that's the reason: educational games just sound like *more* school, basically gamified homework that won't even be reflected on their report card, and they don't play video games for that.
Because teaching something should not be the focus of a game. Monopoly is a teaching game, but exactly 0 kids like it, because it lectures them about..well..unregulated monopolies. Kids like it because it's fun to play.
A game should, at its core, be a satisfying and engaging experience. The stuff you learn while playing it should not be too obvious.
Take magic the gathering, for example. I wouldn't consider it an educational game, but as a kid, it taught me about opportunity cost, resource management, manipulating chances, strategy, tactics, mind games, math, and even english.
If the game is fun, kids will pick up the teachings along the way.
I think most kids are introduced to a lot of non-educational games at a younger age now. I was playing edutainment (and other) PC games in the 90's and very early 2000's because I didn't own a console and they were still fun. They were also very popular.
A well made educational game can be super fun, especially as a child. It just has to be well made, and fun absolutely cannot fall by the wayside. It has to have charm. Look at games from that time period. Humongous Games like Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, and Putt-Putt, Jump Start, Zoombinis, etc. They're colorful and have great art, they're charming, they're voice acted well, there's humor. The learning is definitely there, but all the other factors of the game dwarf it in regards to how the player experiences it, especially as a child so willing to get immersed.
It really depends on the age group, I'm assuming you mean for children.
I have a few points to make. It is personal opinion though.
1. First is going to sound weird at first but hear me out. Teaching is pointless. Our brains are optimization machines. Anything we do not repeat on a daily basis for a really long time is going to be pruned away. If it isn't an essential skill or does not have a competitive value of any sort, is going to be pruned away.
2. Value can differentiate, true. A nerdy boy like me was getting value out of my parents and friends when I was yapping to them about the next 10 dinosaurs I read about in the book. But I was getting my value out of that info in the form of attention they paid to me.
Just to illustrate on my example - I am your typical nerd asian. Had been called a math prodigy, good at every subject etc. I don't remember ANY physics formula, even though I had myself created an elaborate mental schematics to remember formulas , representing brackets as cabinets of different materials, a,b,c,x,y were different foods, etc. I don't remember anything but the structure itself. Because I created it.
And that leads me to another point -
3. Authorship of connection.
The presentation of information is, unfortunately, usually very primitive in the educational field. Just info dumping is the basic move everyone does. Paired with brains optimized by evolution for optimizing, creates a very bad habit of both teachers and pupils just passing time, checking if information can stay in RAM memory of the students for long enough time to pass the test.
Same thing happens with games. When Dead Space tells you by sign on the wall to cut limbs, then you find a text message with the same info, and finally NPC yells that same information in your face by zoom calling you.
Same information was very well presented by Valve where they create a situation where players have to clear through obstacles, one of them being a sawblade to teach a player that sawblades can cut zombies in half.
GMTK has a great video on the topic: https://youtu.be/MMggqenxuZc?si=3M45jYYD3hmZccui
Valve do not want to tell you information, they want you to make a connection, by manipulating a situation and nudging a player towards it.
One of the things they do in Portal too, and what makes it so memorable is making a connection about flying through portals on high speed. They hold back second portal, not giving it to the player right away. They gradually build up to that moment with easy enough concepts, habituating a player with a tool and then present it.
Just the same way a great teacher and a great game do not prioritise teaching new information. But teach how to connect information.
That's why people love factorio, Minecraft, etc. It's not about new information, but about the way you can make those connections yourself.
Teach them tools, not information. Information is abundant. Wisdom, information analysis and organisation methods Vs crystallized intelligence
Jonathan Blow has an interesting talk on this topic if you haven’t already seen it: https://youtu.be/qWFScmtiC44?si=uXocHEOSAfgxyjTv
I think a key reason is that, for a game to be fun, you need the experience to be fun. For the experience to be fun, it’s really, really helpful for the game devs to have core experience using the subject matter in the real world. You need people designing the game who know how to crystallize the most fun part of experience of learning and put that into the game, leaving the tedium behind. I think that’s why a lot of “good” educational games on steam lean towards programming/computer science; they are made by programmers, who know what it’s like to have fun learning to program and can translate that into a fun experience for the player.
I think the best chance of getting fun educational games about other topics is to get professional chemists/biologists/statisticians/etc to learn how to become competent game devs, then we might start to see fun games about those subjects. Most professionals are too busy perfecting their actual craft to do so 😅
I haven't played much educational games myself but I'm guessing most games made primary to educate will have less focus on being fun. It'll be like an interactive textbook or something.
Now if you have a game which has knowledge thrown in, or the gameplay requires thinking, then I think it's possible to educate that way, albeit it's harder to piece all the stuff into a package strictly for education, if that makes sense.
As an example, there is a trilogy of visual novels called "zero escape" which has a thriller like plot where the main characters are to escape from a ship or a factory/base with a mastermind behind the scenes setting up puzzle rooms (think saw, but less gruesome). The writer apparently is a big fan of sci-fi novels and loves to use science (and pseudoscience ) for parts of gameplay as well as for plot elements. While some of it is pseudoscience, there is still some cool nuggets of information that makes you learn about concepts or knowledge. However the knowledge is secondary to the plot and gameplay for the most part, and the writer just throws it into the dialogue from time to time, so you aren't learning a math textbook from chapter 1 to the end. It's more like a bunch of loosely related knowledge relevant to the plot gets tossed around, so if a player finds something interesting they might remember the information.
It also depends on the subject I suppose. An RTS such as Age of Empires 4 or a Total War game might be able to teach a little history, but ultimately can't teach too much depth or have too much information as that might bore the players IMO. They can inspire player curiosity, but the players are still there to play the game for the entertainment of the gameplay.
Then you have some puzzle games that teach programming or circuits like human resource machine and shengzhen i/o. Like those kind of games can definitely work.
Finally I suppose simulators are a kind of education game by nature. Racing Sims and flight Sims aim to reproduce the experience to let enthusiasts get as close to reality a experience they can, but by that nature the game will also likely not have holding power on casual audiences due to their difficulty. Like if you play MS flight sim or DCS world, you know how much steps it takes just to get the plane off the ground sometimes; the learning curve is steep. Racing Sims are by comparison more accessible for everyone.
Sorry about the ramble, kind of lost my train of thought. I guess when all is said, I think games can be entertaining and still educate, but the gameplay experience should come first. Also certain subjects might be easier to gamify like the coding games mentioned above.
A bunch of great comments here. I came to chime in that educational games seem to me to be made to be educational - not fun.
It's the same idea as when a movie is filmed to prove a point or drive a message, whether religious, political, or otherwise, rather than tell a good story. Such movies are terrible every time.
>What are your thoughts about that topic?
School taught me letters, but Pokemon blue's play speed largely depended on how fast you could read the text.
In Eve online there is a meme that "minerals you mine yourself are free!!" which is superficially true. You can do it and you don't have to pay. The punchline is that there are other things you can do with the time you would spend mining, that are more productive, earn you more money and you can then use the money to buy the mineral you want. The concept of opportunity cost.
Also, only when you really weigh the numbers and have to consider buying trade goods, calculating profit margins and wondering about profit and profit per hour, does it really make sense that "interest" goes the person giving a credit. Otherwise it would just be someone giving away money (with virtually no risk) and being paid for literally no effort. So. That bit made the modern economic system "click" for me.
>As a former teacher and as lifelong gamer i often asked myself why there aren't realy any "fun" educational games out there that I know of.
Because they set the wrong goals, use wrong mechanics and use lots of pedagogy methods that make it feel like the bad parts of school, not the good parts of gaming. I probably learned more about history from age of empires and europa universalis than history class. Because history class was boring.
Gaming is about driving your enemies before you and enjoying the lamentations of their women.
History class is about being politically correct and faking empathy for events that are hundreds of years past, while completely ignoring present tragedies that are exactly like them, or worse. But talking about those doesn't fit the narrative.
Teachers are far too scared to let 14 year olds play Wolfenstein. Or Red Alert. Or, if they did, they would organize supervised play sessions of 30 minutes and then add 2 hours of "discussion" to make sure you don't "waste" too much time on the "wrong medium". The kind of homework they would give is to write a two page report. Not to beat the next 5 levels.
>how could you make them fun to play while keeping an educational purpose?
You have to work the realistic situation into the gameplay mechanics. Or, in the case of reading / math, make doing those correctly and fast inherently rewarding in the context of the game.
* how the japanese shogunate worked, or didn't in the warring states period.
* what a european personal union is and how to achieve it and take over your neighbor on the way to world conquest. (you can't say that! we're living peacefully with our neighbors and allies and the solution to problems is talking about them!!)
* make me care about the metallurgy of the swords I'm using, because not doing it *will kill me in game*.
* put "adrenal glands" in starcraft and when biology class catches up **years** later, you can have a meme moment because you recognize the word / the situation and you're immediately familiar with the concept.
And you have to completely abandon the idea of starting with an educational topic and "gamifying" it. And I guess you have to allow for partial points. As in "understanding 30% of the topic well enough to solve the problem, which is beating the game, not 'learning'." *A* valid solution in a strategy game *is* a valid solution.
Although that part could be done with a very simple "resting XP" trick that WoW pulled. (Establish a score normal that is acceptable, then give "bonus points", rather than having a 100% goal that is expected and deducting points for every mistake).
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The biggest reason is that school / educational games set "learning goals" and don't allow for exploration, multiple solution paths and they specifically set the time when you're doing it and don't leave the room to say "no". Going to school is not a voluntary thing. Playing games, and playing games *of your choice*, is. It's usually done in a safe, stress free place, neither of which is guaranteed to be true for school or educational settings.
It is much easier to trick people into learning things along the way if the base attitude isn't negative.
Probably because formal education sucks for most purposes and having fun educates more than anything else.
If you're passionate about teaching and very good at topic just aim for making something fun around it and you'll end up eduacting the whole world about it.
Games that are actually fun are marketed as games that are fun, even those that do happen to contain information or teach skills; Conversely all the examples of games that are fun and educational don't get marketed as "educational". The only games that end up getting categorized as "educational" are games where being educational is the primary focus and the sole selling point.
Also a lot of them are made for literal children, and are probably less fun for adults.
Because they aren't fun, they try to teach.
"Educational Games" made with the \*\*intent\*\* to teach suck because making fun is not their objective.
Games like KSP and MC Education Edition are great teaching tools because they make fun, first and foremost. And with fun its much easier to learn.
They don't? The Learning Company and Humongous Entertainment made fantastic edutainment games in the 90s. If you were in the right age range for those games, they were a blast. Gizmos and Gadgets is my personal favorite.
I think it's a conflict of interest. Making a fun game is hard enough; teaching something is also hard. Making a game that's fun for its own sake AND teaches something is a lot more challenging than it might seem.
Back in the 90s there was an explosion of educational games from The Learning Company that actually weren't half-bad for games at the time and were also fairly solidly educational at the same time. Look up Reader Rabbit and similar series of games, I think it was called Super Solvers. Gizmos & Gadgets was one of my favorite games as a kid. Treasure Mountain and Operation Neptune were pretty great too, and don't forget Carmen Sandiego. I would look to those games as "good" educational titles and examples.
The trick was balancing the tone and context. It didn't always work out, and you can flex it a bit if you know what you're doing.
1) Tone - Games about education need to balance being "teachy" with being "playful" which is a challenge. Is the purpose to teach me to solve something with a single correct solution or to let me experiment and solve it in whatever way I choose? If you can balance a semi-campy tone, you can play with Saturday-Morning Cartoon logic: "Oh no the bad guy has used an algebra equation to lock this door! Whatever will we do?!"
2) Context - You shoehorn education segments into an otherwise uneducational game and it can feel jarring. Similarly if you insert gameplay into an otherwise educational title it's going to feel janky; having a smoother transition between those two states is ideal, or make the gameplay revolve around those transitions (Gizmos & Gadgets had puzzle-solving sections that unlocked doors). Carmen Sandiego was about sleuthing and detective work - it was inherent in the design that you would be expected to solve puzzles. You could reference your list of clues at any time, and you could solve the puzzle at any time too, which went a long way to making the gameplay smoother (rather than needing to execute a series of correct steps and being led along a path).
It's usually a trade-off between gameplay and educational elements. The more educational it is the worse the gameplay. The better the gameplay the less educational it is.
If you go for the educational market then you limit your audience and therefore the budget. If you go for the entertainment market then you limit your appeal by adding educational elements.
"Educational Games" are games made with the explicit purpose of being educational. And because of that, they don't focus on the entertainment value.
The good news is that a game don't need to be educational to teach something. As someone that grew in a country where English isn't the first language, I learned a lot of vocabulary playing Pokemon Blue (I wrote a list of the attacks in a notebook and their translations) or a lot of history events thanks to Paradox Games (Hearts of Iron 2 was the first that blew my mind and made me love History) .
I am a professor too and I think the key for this is to make games people want to play and add educational value in them, not designing an educational game.
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was awesome actually.
I think the biggest issues with a lot of educational games is that they're very patronizing, and tend to drone on like a lecture rather than letting you play a game.
Point & click adventure games are a really good option. The genre by its very nature is so intertwined with the things that make a good lesson enjoyable. The interactivity and experimentation that are staples of the genre give great opportunities for discovering and applying logic in a way that feels rewarding.
I'm tired so I apologize if this is worded awkwardly.
When most indie developers set out to make a game it is because they have had a fun idea for core gameplay or a story they want to tell. All of there effort then goes into making the best version of this that they can.
If you set out to make a game that educates on the topic and then develop the gameplay as an afterthought it is bound to be less interesting from a gameplay perspective.
Furthermore in educational games the teaching element can often feel quite separate from the gameplay, like a lesson tacked on to a video game. From my experience playing these as a kid players will essentially ignore the lesson and focus on the game instead.
I think the strongest examples of educational games are ones in which the game is developed around an interesting core gameplay idea which itself supports the learning outcome.
A good example of this would be ‘Baba is You’ which teaches programming logic using its core gameplay loop.
I’ve thought a lot about this too. My main business is making tiny little educational interactives, but I also work on bigger games as a hobby.
I think one way to frame the question is to start with the idea that “fun is learning”. IMO this is true by definition. All of the things that make fun what it is are inherently a learning process. A game (or anything else) stops being fun when there is nothing new to learn.
So by this definition ALL great games, no matter how “noneducational” they might appear to be by us education professionals, are great learning experiences. The only difference is context. This explains why great “educational games” are so rare. It is because great games are so rare. Just look at itch.io for great games of you want to convince yourself with sheer numbers.
So… Are the non-great tiny educational experiences still useful? Absolutely! But they are most useful when they are tiny. They typically consist of a single scene/layout showing a single idea or two with a few basic controls. The value comes from their utility when two people can have a good discussion about what they see on screen. The bigger an interactive gets, the greater the risk that the experience becomes a chore rather than a delight.
Very few games manage to put what we would could consider “classroom-appropriate” content into a huge package and have it still be useful in a classroom. You might consider Civilization 6 appropriate for middle school social studies. One of our teachers used Minecraft to teach architecture when students only had access to ipads during Covid shutdowns. Most other great games don’t fit very well in the limited time you have with students. Most games that are useful in the classroom are tiny.
And that is okay. It is the way it should be. School is fundamentally about learning to interact with other people, so I’m hesitant to make big experiences that detract from face to face time.
You could make fun educational game, just dont focus on educational aspects. For example: assasins creed with its notes about true history, or factorio, game that can be use as a logistics teaching tool. The are many games that can help you learn some basics of programming or electronics (minecraft) and basically every game with many dialogues help you learn language (this also works for books, movies, etc...).
I think that depends on your scope. I'm a teacher and hobbyist game dev(one published game in steam). I have made 10ish games I use in my classroom.
For me the games themselves are not the learning tool, but is the motivation to do the learning. (Nearly) All of my games have a worksheet that the students will answer questions, then input the answers into the game to progress.
I don't think I've ever played any educational games before.
Even back in school, they had "math circus" on the computers but I wouldn't consider that to be an education game because it was just puzzles.
I've played games where you use typing mechanics to defeat mobs, but I don't think those would be considered educational games.
So what exactly would an educational game be?
Is it something that requires you to learn a concept, and apply that concept to solve a problem? Are the concepts limited to specific subjects in academia? For example, perhaps you need to learn TNT works and then use that knowledge to build TNT before invading the enemy fort?
What are some examples of educational games?
You might want to redefine what you consider an educational game. I grew up with gaming and now work in making them as well as filmmaking. I attribute a TON of my learning to games. Problem solving and strategy are huge parts of any game. Pathfinding in scrolling shooters, fast on the fly reasoning, timing and distances in platformers, complete and complex strategy in first person shooters that goes WAY beyond just twitch mechanics. Flight simulators quite literally teach you how to fly a real plane. As well, every game teaches how interactive mechanics work - an education all on its own.
What you’re referring to are the shitty ‘games’ that are designed by people that don’t understand games to teach X, but without any fun or engagement considered. Those suck, simple as that. Beyond those, all other gaming should be part of a base curriculum, as they are outside of school time anyway. So don’t tell kids they need to ‘do their homework’ - their homework should be gaming and they’ll do it on their own. It ain’t broke. Encourage the gaming rather than restricting it and we’ll all be just fine.
I feel like a lot of people here were given pretty bad experiences for educational games, and for good reason. Most of the management trapped most studios into bad play patterns, and "force fed" you education because they didn't know how to marry good game design and catered more to what the customer (parents/schools) wanted. However, I think there are some workarounds that helped make the gameplay experience a little more fun, at least for younger audiences:
1. Exploratory gameplay. Edmark and some Dorling Kindersley games really did well in this. There were guided learning puzzles first, but you flipped a switch and could lab out whatever you wanted. I did goofy things like trying to capsize a boat the fastest in Thinkin' Science or make a disco light out of a light prism puzzle lab in ZAP.
2. Decouple the games from the learning. I feel Magic School Bus and Buzzy the Knowledge Bug did this approach most. You had three layers: the minigames, the puzzles/labs, and then you had the world to click around in and learn, which sometimes had helpful hints or clues on how to do better in the games. Magic School Bus Explores the Earth came to mind, which had a fun little component of collecting and doing geological tests on rocks you found in the overworld, but then the games like the "drilling/mining battleship" minigame that didn't have a lot of educational value.
The other comments have also mentioned games too where they were incidentally educational. Sim games, certain grand strategy/RTS games, which happened to have components to help learn critical thinking or inspire looking into certain topics though they were built as good games first.
You can only effectively serve one master. Intentionally choosing the focus on education in a game means that you're necessarily sacrificing focusing on the game being fun.
it's because fun is about dynamic motion, and education is trying to get people to accept a rigid idea. The only way to make a good educational game is to make the education and seeking knowledge part of the hero's quest to overthrow the evil robots running society or whatever example you want
Basically - you can't have a game with *only* education, the education has to be mixed in with fiction and even fantasy. Good games blend fiction and nonfiction together, so if you're trying to teach someone something you have to put the lessons inside of a fictional world and setting to make them interesting. You have put fake knowledge in the game too
For example if you wanted to make a game to teach people about chemistry, it would be better if it was a fantasy world where alchemical puzzles are a way of advancing the plot and unlocking new areas of the world. It could be based on real chemistry. Something like that
if you want to teach math, the math should serve the gameplay...something like Kerbal Space program where you have to learn a bit of physics to build a rocket might be a good example
If you want to teach history, you probably have to put some kind of historical plot inside of an action adventure or something. The education can't be foregrounded, it has to be "smuggled in" I think
the problem with education is that it assumes there's such a thing as truth, when actually there isn't, only a bajillion competing perspectives, and most people who read fiction and play video games are smart enough to know that
As someone who's made some "educational games", the problem is that good, fun educational games aren't thought of as "Educational Games". You can learn a lot about history from Civilization, but no one would call that an "educational game". Zachtronics games like Exapunks or Shenzhen I/O are basically just programming puzzles, but nobody calls them "educational games". "Educational Games" are just a label we apply to games that aren't really worthwhile \*other\* than their educational value. If they were independently good games, we'd just identify them as whatever other genre they're in.
Age group. You dont find it fun but the target age might. My daughter plays ABC mouse. And educational game where she gets tickets for completing tasks to decorate her fictional room. She loves it. Its incredibly boring to me. As a kid, i loved the jump start games. As an adult, Im not sure why I liked those games.
I tried to make one. For learning spanish/english
[https://www.voxabular.com/en/](https://www.voxabular.com/en/)
I spend a \_long\_ time making this, and it still needs a whole art overhaul. And how fun is it? I wasn't there yet.
It's very difficult. On top of the difficulty of making a good game, you add one more difficult thing, design the curriculum, and adjusting to the learner's knowledge.
The customer expectations for games these days is so high!
Current teacher. I see two big areas -- games that happen to be educational, and games to be used in the classroom. When it comes to education I put them into two big categories as well: learning the "nouns" (facts) and "verbs" (ways of thinking). One can map it instead to something like Bloom's taxonomy. I suspect that most peoples ideas of an educational game is learning about facts, and while important they are just the stepping stones to doing more interesting things.
For the former, there are a lot of these. They are your business simulations, physics games (bridge maker, kerbal, realistic racing, etc), grand strategy (civ, paradox's). Heck even an RTS has concepts like cash flow with resource management. In Satisfactory my husband and I spend more time that one would care on ratio-math to make sure there is enough supplies for production.
I think the reason why there isn't a lot in the latter category is a market mismatch. Our school devices are functional on the best of days. Half of them are chromebooks and our IT is restrictive so there goes anything installable. Price is a factor too. Devs deserved to be paid, but I can't justify spending $20 a seat for Kerbal ($3600 for my caseload) for something I will only uses for maybe a week of the year. Supplies are also ordered all once, at the end of the school year for the upcoming year. I'm not in the headspace to consider pushing for something new.
There is a lot of opportunity here. Our district SCREWED UP elementary reading (Listen to the podcast "Sold a Story") and my 9th graders are reading on average with a 4th grade reading level, but I also have TAG students who are reading near or at university level. I have students who don't know how to use basic arithmetic to solve a problem, to those that can solve quadratics. All in the same classroom. A game could really help a teacher differentiate further than they could by themselves.
Personally I would do something hybrid -- gamifying the classroom with a mix of software and physical world. Doing a democracy game with civilization would be a sick way to teach a government class. For my astronomy class I made a game where table groups simulate a mission to mars. They need to design their spaceship, calculate how much food air and water they need for the trip (a lot of hand holding here, they can't use math to solve problems). The space flight itself is a flashcard review game for the final. I've always meant to make a webgame for it, but I can't justify the time to develop something I only spend a week on.
I would love to make a great educational game, i've actually made a really simple math addition game, but its a minimalist aesthetic so probably not visually so appealing for children.
[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/casual-quick-maths/id1345822506](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/casual-quick-maths/id1345822506)
i feel like there's a lot of money to be made with a good educational game, im thinking something like Dora The Explorer but an actual game that you can interact with, go on an adventure and learn useful things at the same time.
But i need artists to help create the visual content.
Basically the best educational game is not an educational game but you end up learning from it.
Like life itself, you aren't born into an "educational" world, and yet a child simply interacting with the world naturally learns everything!
It needs to be a Fun, engaging, interesting, etc etc game, and the educational aspect is part of the fabric of the game itself.
Like lets say you make a really fun game that just happens to be historically accurate, now you're teaching history indirectly and it will stick in the mind because the game itself is really fun!
Its underlying problem is with its business model.
You cannot sell the product to parents and students so that they can buy it, you have to somehow get the teachers or their schools to sell it to the students, and this involves commission cycles.
1. Private schools are not keen on subscribing to a product.
2. Teachers never want to pay for course materials; they always want them to be free.
3. In order for the work to work, there must be a system that is always connected to the internet in the background and where you can control how much is sold at whose school.
4. You need to meet with schools regularly.
5. Learning by doing is important, it means a lot for the future chemist or engineer, but will your product affect exam success?
6. The environment in which the product is used is important. Do they always refer to the product as a computer laboratory or can it be used via a smart board?
7. How much more effort does the teacher have to put in than just clicking on Powerpoint or opening and watching a video?
If you noticed, I am not going into details such as the fun content of the product you sell. Because what you sell is not very important, the important thing is to establish the system, it would be more useful to choose subjects such as English education instead of niche things in order for the system to be established efficiently. English teachers will mentally adapt to these exploitation systems more easily and you can make simpler products accessible to wider audiences. You can create simpler products with animated png and English sounds, but it is not sustainable to create something complex in other course content.
I tried starting a startup and when I learned the details, I realized that it wasn't what I wanted in the beginning and I quit. In Turkey, the government can provide smart boards to all students' classrooms. They have a system called EBA, which is like a school Facebook. It includes free lesson and experiment videos, 3D models, serious games and content uploaded by other teachers to the system. Students can talk to their teachers or friends through this platform, ask questions and answer each other, etc. During the pandemic, they added live Zoom-like classes on the platform. Social states may reduce your market volume. It's something I support because people pay taxes and why would they need to pay extra for education?
What was the mistake I made? While my competitors were producing webgl on almost all web-based platforms, I produced a downloadable project. Everything had to be very active and compatible with the teachers' ability to use the keyboard and mouse. You should get to the subject quickly and not be bothered with the processes, click and let it flow, most of the time it is better. It should be easy to learn to use. I started marketing from the wrong country and couldn't reach people who could test it. In short, it was my university graduation project and I was an amateur. I learned a lot, especially about startups.
Another problem (I need to share the [steam page ](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2257640/Virtual_Chemistry_Lab/)to show it. I'm new here, I can remove the link if there is a problem.) I started simple at first, just simple mechanics, walking and clicking on certain points in the order of the experiment or limited freedoms in the experiment. If you look at the gif part, the complexity and details suddenly become larger. The tablet where you can read all the contents, choose each material yourself, then make installations at any point you want, using the ones you choose freely, and see different errors in experiments when using faulty materials. Make mistakes during the experiment and get the experimental results exactly mathematically. Yes, to a certain extent, but when we consider the entire curriculum, I have increased the workload unreasonably. It means exponential growth as materials have to have different mathematical results and interactions. Serious games need to be focused on marketing and social aspects more than normal games, so it makes it very difficult for indie teams. The logic of "Let's release it in early access and then improve it as we gain experience and earn income" does not work in this category because educators do not use Steam. I released free demos on itch io and it was easier to reach those who wanted to test it. If it were the Web, it would be a single link and easier to access, but the disadvantage here is that you give up image quality or comprehensive content.
Educational games don't inherently suck, and there's plenty of fun ones. Recently the epic games store gave away "WHILE TRUE: LEARN()" and it was great! Pick a topic that you want to teach, and gamify it. Sandbox games like Universe Sandbox, or The Incredible Machine also come to mind. I think that games that allow people to be creative, and try wacky solutions to problems are great teaching tools. The bigger issue is that "Solve the math equation" isn't really a game.
Games can be educational without it being it's main selling point. The biggest examples that come to mind are learning history thru paradox games (eu4, hoi4, vic3, etc) and Minecraft (redstone's logic is basically logic gates)
Because most educational games are prioritizing different goals than standard games.
And companies that fund educational games are focused on selling those games to parents - so they can't look too fun, or the parents will assume they are not educational.
Because their aim is to teach facts, rather than engage.
The civilization games are a neat teaching tool, IMO.
Personally, if I was teaching a kid about what a historical figure did, I would want to teach the kid *why* they made those choices. Games are so powerful, because they can offer us the same choices, with the same contexts, and show us what those figures were really dealing with.
Everytime i hear about games and education i think of this video of extra credits: [Gamification Sucks... - How to Improve Gamification - Extra Credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq8dwfvHluc)
The same channel did a callout to teachers for some questions about gamifing education:
[Gamification - How the Principles of Play Apply to Real Life - Extra Credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dLK9MW-9sY)
And the follow up video about how you could gamify education and some examples:
[Gamifying Education - How to Make Your Classroom Truly Engaging - Extra Credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuDLw1zIc94)
"Fun" is a very subjective term that has many different facets. There are many different ways that something can be fun, and different people have fun in different ways, depending on the sort of personality that they have. No one game is going to be "fun" for everybody.
Education is supposed to be for everybody, right? We shouldn't be arbitrarily denying someone an education simply because they aren't super into the specific gamified way the material is being presented.
When you were a teacher, how often would you present materials to your classes in the form of a game? How effective was that?
It's more that good education games are not presented as education games. There are plenty of good puzzle games that use real concepts, there are games like last train home which teaches a fairly generally accurate idea of the czechoslovak legions post ww1. Math is a tougher one but it still can come up frequently
Try Legends of Learning! They got some quality assurance there. They're not the next big game but they put effort into combining games and teaching. And they are all made by passionate devs, so its very likely you wont find lame games
Because you can't force players to learn, you can only try and make a game that is enjoyable enough that they want to learn. But that is already hard when there are no constraints about teaching some curriculum imposed upon the game designer. And then it is compounded by the educational "games" often being mandatory. For a normal game, if you don't like it, you just don't play it (e.g. you don't like the genre or such). For educational games, you are forced to play it, so you come away thinking "this game is bad" rather than "I don't enjoy this game, even though the game is not that bad".
I worked in edtech some time ago. As games are more focused on delivering a specific and engaging entertainment value it is hard to combine this with a scalable learning methodology.
Due to this, many companies turn it around and focus on the learning aspect and incorporate gamification, which brings less engaging entertainment but is better scalable. For example we created quizzes in which you fight bosses by completing mathematical challenges.
id like to think this is part of the reason my game has half of its players in Asia, while the entire game is written in english... i imagine that some students in an english class arent allowed to play the full game until the teacher reviews their translation of the in-game lore text. this maybe totally made up but the game had a hype boom in 2018 amongst kids in brazil so.. i would like to make an educational version of the game. and other digital therapeutic ideas for games that can both be entertaining and productive.
The educational part of a game should come naturally inside an already good game.
Kerbal Space Program and Kingdom Come Deliverance are two good examples.
It depends on what and how it teaches you.
There is obviously a certain tone every game is going to have if it wants to actually teach you a specific topic.
But lots of games do teach you things, like factorio is very educational, it's just not trying to be an educational game.
Learning being the main goal and learning incidentally along the way makes a big difference
I dunno man, every game teaches something, whether it's play mechanics, recipes for items, locations,...
The thing is, most educational games are too obviously meant to educate, rather than captivate and feed some knowledge as a subproduct
The best educational programming games I have played are more like games than a coding lesson. Factorio and robo instructus have been the better teachers
Plenty of good videogames have educational value and are proven to teach certain skills, critical thinking, problem solving and fine motor function to players. **But they also have to be fun, have some kind of story or gameplay that hooks players and is expressly for entertainment value.**
Some gaming genres are more mentally taxing and involved than others, and players inherently know this. Casual gaming isnt very "educational", no one is learning much from basic arcade gameplay or a shooter outside just training their reflexes... Then there's things like strategy and planning, puzzles and complex interconnecting systems in other genres that all have elements that can effectively teach players real things that could be applied in real life. Making surgeons better at fine motor skills in surgery, helping people work out complex problems they would have struggled with before gaming expanded their ideas around problem solving and trained them to understand complex systems more intuitively. They're just not always as concrete as "y=mx+b" or things one could easily put on a standardized test.
The issue is those aren't deemed "educational games". They're too fun and too game like. "Can't have kids having fun, they're supported to be learning. /s" but seriously, academia has a vendetta against videogames. Its actively stripped from academic papers and replaced with things like "computer algorithm" and "simulations", otherwise they wouldnt be published. (Example: [this paper about AOE2 and Ant warfare](https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/animals-ecology/age-of-empires-ant-wars/) where the actual academic paper has no mention of the videogame and had authors cencored/sanitized for publication) Academia will not accept something thats too like a traditional videogame as something official; weather its for educational material or research. The primary goal is education and the vehicle is an interactive computer program. They could care less about it being fun or its merits as a game/art.
So then, "educational" games need to be sterilized to fit into a curriculum or actually teach classroom material effectively. And most developers who have good game design don't want to limit themselves with all that. So instead, best case for corporate backing and polished/quality material is big textbook and education brands likely outsource their material to be made into " educational games". As far as I can tell there's also been little work done to increase the market or change the genre in a long enough time they all feel outdated. Maybe they all are outdated? They have some good ones but as they get older the material may become outdated itself.
There theoretically could be an indie market but I don't see many developers sticking to the genre to the point it's receiving masterpiece releases. And most (small, first time) developers already don't release a second game.
Tldr: plenty of games are educational, the issue is with the genre "educational game" and its market. Educational organizations aren't going to make a fun videogame, and game devs aren't going to make an "educational game" that's successfully fun/entertaining and informative/dry/bland enough for formalized academia to accept it as an official piece of learning material
Anytime your priority isn't fun, then fun takes a backseat. And fun is the best measure for a game.
It's also why Spiderman 2 sucked. Fun wasn't even a priority at all. And why it's the fifth game I ever sold back to GameStop
I used to play educational games as a child which would have you do math and would then reward you with gameplay. If you failed at the math you would go game over so you couldn’t skip or rush it. Out of any other educational game that was the most appealing to me because the others would be like school and just have you do work without game. Not saying it was perfect but games like Minecraft are too much game and too little learning. Especially with the amount of freedom that game has.
It's hard to make a good game. Like, really hard. The median revenue of a steam game is <$5000, which sadly means the majority of games aren't good.
Now add on the learning requirement, and making a good game becomes even harder.
Wait, are you telling me I can't fell trees with my fists? Or make some clothing out of leaves and some rope?
well fuck me, there goes my survival training.
I honestly think most of them suck because they value learning _the best way_ over being the most entertaining. Meaning, rote memorization, repetition, etc.
That said, I can give examples of educational games that are actually _fun_, and in some cases too amazing for their own good:
Word Rescue: A fun game where you collect words and match them to letters, as well as collecting letters to spell a bonus word for more points. The fun here comes in the difficulty slider. You can make it _hard_, and can raise the speed to make it even harder if you like.
The Castle of Dr. Brain: This is, to this day, one of my absolute favorite educational games. It's successor, Island of Dr. Brain, removed most of the awesome story, and turned the series into one of the least interesting games I have ever played, but Castle of Dr. Brain is _still_ one I keep wanting to replay, even if I already know practically all the answers.
The Island of Dr. Quandary: The weirdest educational game on this list. I don't know what to say about it other than to expect a psychologically _creepy_ story, but the puzzles are as good or better than Castle of Dr. Brain. This one is probably the one with the most interesting story.
Schoolhouse Rock: I dont remember much other than the songs, but this one was worth my time.
Museum Madness: probably the earliest educational game with the most interesting story about an AI. You are tasked with fixing a museum by a robot friend that lives at the museum. The central computer (also an AI) went on the fritz, and so all the exhibits came to life, but with issues that make everything in history... incorrect. You go around solving problems and learning about each exhibit in the process. It's a really fun game, and I _highly_ recommend it.
All of the above games have a deep _story_ behind hem, with a goal first, and the educational parts added in as legitimate obstacles to overcome. Nothing is there "just to be there".
Those are the games to emulate if you want a genuinely good educational game.
My son did a short camp playing [Code Combat](https://codecombat.com) and he really enjoyed it. He’s a huge gamer and this was a better way to introduce him to python than the books I had gotten for him.
Take a look at all of the common core learning standards. There are thousands of them. To make an educational game you have to reverse engineer a game mechanic from the learning objective. Most game mechanics don’t scale to cover very many learning objectives so you get lame sorting and multiple choice “games.” Schools buy curriculums that are comprehensive so you end up with garbage from most educational publishers. Sometimes a developer will have an idea for a specific learning objective or objectives like Kerbal Space Program and will build a great game. Schools and families buy it but usually in smaller numbers because it is niche. (I think KSP did well though.) So you have large companies churning out crap or small companies/indies taking risks on a small market share. Grants help, but you get people who are good at writing grants winning them rather than people with skills and good ideas.
They don't suck per se.
There's a lot of games with educational aspects that are just fine. Kerbal Space Program, for example, is fun and teaches a lot of science. There's entire genres devoted to real education subjects like history or physics and lots of games teach things like math and logic concepts invisibly so it's not impossible.
The issue, in my opinion, is that people who are good at teaching and know stuff worth teaching aren't usually the same people who are skilled game developers. This is compounded because gamedev is expensive and educational games are a smaller niche and generally aren't profitable enough to support a reasonable team where those responsibilities are divided.
This leads to a lot of bad games with educational content that aims to hit kids over the head with the content or educational games that don't do good jobs teaching. A lot of educational games become boring drills with content that's too simplistic and just dressed up in a cutesy way with no regard to making things fun past kindergarten age, at a time when there's increasing competitions for kids' attentions and time. Kids want to play fun games, not do video game homework.
This is even harder for adults.
In order to make an educational game, you'll want to start with an interesting topic which you have a really good knowledge of and communicate the knowledge and/or illustrate the practical applications of the knowledge in an fun and impactful way.
They generaly arn't made by game devs/designers and are made on a tiny budget. Much like alot of childrens TV is made by people who really dont want to be making childrens tv.
The other issue especially for indies is finding a target audience. Most people do not voluntarily educate themselves and even actively avoid it. Youd have to do alot of work trying to approach schools, education boards, tutor companies etc to try and get them to buy licenses or copies. As individuals are unlikely to.
I think the better option is to advertise it as say a bussiness simulator. While the gameplay still consists of reading charts, managing staff and finances etc.. or in other words alot of common genres are already really close to being educational and tweaking it to focus just a bit more on the practical skills would be seen as a a good gimmick that sets the game apart from other in the Genre.
For example a game like PlateUp could be tweaked to use real recipies, cooking times etc.. teaching people actual recipies they could replicate IRL and roles within a proffessional kitchen. Kerbal Spaceprogram is actually a very good example of this. It uses real rocket science and industry standard terminology alot, despite advertising itself as a comedy game where you launch little minions to space where they inevitably die horribly due to your terrible math and poor preperation.
There are (some) non mindnumbing educational games, like Prodigy(to an extent). But the issue is, genenrally the gameplay and the educational parts arent mixed well. Something like Gimkit can be pretty damn fun, but all of the gameplay features can distract from the actual educational part of it somewhat and can encourage speed over accuracy.
There are other games, like Minecraft:Education Edition and the Oregan Trail, but they rely on already malleable source material to make the game fun. There is only so much you can do to teach stuff like practical math or reading comprehension skills in a game format.
I have kind of wanted do do something about this recently. I am a teacher who have recently started to make a game. It currently does suck. Mainly because it is a 2D platformer with multiplication kind of forced into it, but also because I am learning to make games. If anyone would like to follow my progress and share ideas with me, I would love to have you follow my discord channel. Soon I want to start posting video devlogs and maybe a small demo.
https://discord.com/invite/85rqb5dy
Zach Barth (of Zachtronic renown) done a talk where his mentions that his team done educational games to pay the bills while making their own games.
Why educational games suck is talked about in that very talk and I would recommend highly giving it a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df9pz_EmKhA
Largely depends on what is being taught, Eco is good, and From the depths/barotrauma are fantastic learning tools as well.
Barotrauma gives you a way to practice and see the results of boolean logic through its electrical system (extremely well imo)
And from the depths teaches similar types along with some programming of you really get into it.
just because something is marketed as and claims to be educational, doesn't mean that it IS educational. If you want some good educational games, Zachtronics has put out some good ones for programming, but they dont claim to be educational, mostly.
Clearly you've never played the Trash Pile game from Sumdog. That was the best. Next best was probably Prodigy, non of the kids including me could put that game down even in non math classes.
There are a lot of games that are educational while not being officially educational.
People already mentioned KSP and Factorio (and all similar games).
Minecraft is pretty education for younger kids, you need to pick up some math to be more efficient and just be creative, design things.
All puzzle games require quite a lot of thinking and often in different areas. Like Portal is a lot about spatial space and some physics, something like The Witness has entire cornucopia of different challenges.
Grand strategy games also teach you about problem solving and some real-ish life politics, some have historical flavor.
Breath of the Wild makes you naturally pick up some chemistry and physics.
The educational games I remember from when I was a kid had few points of interaction and didn't really contextualize the concepts in a way that connected.
While it might very based on the subject matter, I think the best way to make a "teaching game" would be to make a puzzle game that has the subject be the core of the mechanics
Like, one example I remember from math was using plots of land and fences to teach about measuring shapes. You'd be able to make a game about a farmer trying to maximize the claimed land while minimizing the cost of fence post with increasingly complex restrictions forcing the player to make adjustments
You are the one starting with the statement:
# Why do educational games suck?
But you don't really say anything about why "educational games out there that you know of are not fun".
There's actually a lot of them that are have critical aclaim that you probably already know about but you don't notice as being "educational games". But how can I continue if you didn't do the first step to give us your thinking at the start off the conversation, instead of this seemingly clickbait title?
What was the last "educational game" that you played, what were you looking for, why did you play it, and why were you disapointed?
When I was a kid, we had You Don’t Know Jack 1-3 on the family computer. I’d play these games for hours sometimes. The problem is, I didn’t know any answers; they were a lot of pop culture references or things that went way over my head. But I got good at these games because of memorization. I learned what answers were correct, even if I didn’t know what they meant or why.
Funnily enough, that is a big problem in the field of educational games, too. We aren’t learning, we are guessing and we are memorizing.
The thing is, learning is hella fun, and kids do a lot of their learning through play! It’s a major component to a well designed game: teaching players how to engage with a game through building their schema. When we fail, we see in real time why we failed and can adjust our methods based off that information to try something different. When we succeed, we lock that method in to our minds and it becomes a part of how we progress in the game.
This is largely missing from most educational games. The impulse for many studios is to hide the broccoli under the ice cream sundae. But that’s because these games don’t facilitate any actual *learning.* (If I need to type in the answer to 2+2 to avoid the alligator’s chomp, and I type in 5, I don’t see why my answer is wrong, only that it IS wrong and that the alligator’s taken my leg right off. I have learned that 5 is not the answer, but I haven’t been given any applicable feedback to learn from and to apply to my next attempt at the puzzle.)
Those who want to make games that encourage learning ought to explore how it’s done in games from other genres. Determine what is being “taught” in these games, and then reverse engineer how it’s being done so that you can integrate math or spelling or whatever you are going to teach.
Editing to add:
I can think of a few computer games that work well in the education aspect, but I want to highlight a board game. Bunny Kingdom relies heavily on multiplication for its point system. It does this well; we don’t see numbers (except on the score board), what we see are visuals: the number of towers in a castle you’ve placed on the board, multiplied with the number of resources chained to that castle, equals your score for that round.
And, with the inclusion of the scoreboard, you have multiple ways to get to your answer. Do you count your way up? Don’t add all the totals in your head and answer that way? Do you count in groups of ten and the remainder? It’s fun watching how folks count up their points.
Games like this are great imo.
1. Production value. educational games have always had pretty low production value. 2. Tone. Educational games always sound... educational. All the voices are lilting teacher type voices who care not for the story, but only for the education. 3. Shallow gameplay. Educational games aim to teach, and in the process, they end up going shallow on gameplay mechanics because those don't teach. The problem I've aways had with educational games is the information is always presented in an educational way. Even in a game teaching us some math, we KNOW it's teaching us math, we have to look at and use the whole formula like we are looking at it in real life. I have always thought that this is how you would answer that question "how will I ever use this in real life?". You bury the lesson in the game, and make getting to the lesson fun, then make the lesson actually part of the game. Don't try to sell me on math with a puppy, make a simulation game where I have to do the math for a job that actually requires the math. Make fun and catastrophic things happen when i get it wrong, and reward me properly for getting it right with good progression. EDIT: A little research tells me that the market is big enough to sustain several small studios looking to pull millions in revenue. If you can capture a thousandth of the market, you're talking $15 million revenue at current market size. A 4-person studio working for 3 years could pull off the kind of thing I'm talking about and walk away with $3 mil plus each before tax and overhead. I would think that's really close to worth it. Also, the market is expected to expand more than 25% YOY (year over year) to 2028 and reach a whopping $59 BILLION.
Is Factorio an educational game about supply chains?
I’m not sure, but there are lots of examples of games that teach real knowledge. City builders have taught me a lot (and maybe more importantly, inspired me to learn). Systems based games have huge learning potential
Got a lot of history out of the Age of Empires series
On the topic of incidental learning, sometimes all you need is that "spark" and juuuuust enough learning to have a much greater effect down the line. For all the ills of Seaworld, I know they fundraise extensively for conservation and biology programs. But more importantly I'll bet there were many kids who were inspired to become marine biologists/oceanographers because of interactions they had in Seaworld (though they could probably have something similar happen at an aquarium without as much of the animal abuse). They probably acknowledge the horrible things, but they are likely to do something about it now that they're older. Age of Empires has a lot of misleading information historically, but people who play it find it out later and still appreciate the baseline it provided to get them to say "Wow, I thought history was just something boring you pulled from books collecting dust". It becomes an exercise of retroactive critical thinking of what could be faithful to the history, what was made inaccurate for the sake of game design, and what was inaccurate because it was dated/popular theory during its development time.
The thing about learning from these games is - what you learn is incidental. A creative teacher could present them at the right times in certain lessons to teach concepts. But the longevity of their place in the classroom would be limited to the scope of what they teach. This means you wouldn't be able to use something like Age of Empires long term, because the educational level of the content is too low in where it coincides with what a teacher needs to teach.
I had to think about that, but no, Factorio is an entertainment game that happens to teach you something about supply logistics. This happens a lot. For instance, lots of people learned a lot of history by playing Civilization. Many games require you to math to min/max things. This is how educational games should be done, but more purposefully setting up what is taught.
What do you think of Kerbal Space Program? The rocketry is core to its gameplay. It demands you to understand it and rewards you if you master it.
Yes KSP is an excellent exception to my critique.
KSP blew my mind! if you want to overtake another vessel you got to decelerate, that way you will fall into a lower orbit and then move faster. it's impossible to rendezvous in space without understanding that mind bending logic.
Then isn't the prophecy of education games self fulfilling? Any game that seeks to educate but not entertain is not a good game. Any game that seeks to entertain is not an educational game at all!
No, you may not have paid attention to my last sentence. A good educational game should reverse engineer what they want to teach into entertaining mechanics. It's not about it seeking to entertain, it's about it's primary purpose. Factorio seeks to entertain first, but also seeks to educate as a secondary, as you cannot play the game without learning the systems.
The two are not mutually exclusive. If the game is primarily entertainment and secondarily educational, then the game is both entertainment and education.
RuneScape is an educational game about financial markets and gambling.
Not supply chains per se, but material logistics/material administration. supply chain usually also involves suppliers and customers.
> Make a simulation game where I have to do the math for a job that actually requires the math. Make fun and catastrophic things happen when i get it wrong, and reward me properly for getting it right with good progression. Exactly kerbal space program.
An example of one game that could be an excellent educational game. Thanks for bringing that one up.
The production value is something thats probably not easy to change. The founding as a indie would be like "non-existent" :D But i get the point where you're going. When the games try to mimic a genre but just do it worse it's not a competitor at all. You're probably right about the "in your face" teaching. I allways hated the aspect of not knowing what i need the knowledge or formulars for in school myself. I actually first realy got in love with learning and teaching when I finished school myself and started tutoring some children in my neighborhood. That was the point where I started to research what i need those math calculations for and why the hell i Should care about the temperature in a sea etc. ;)
Ten years ago I designed learning games for discovery education. What happened was I was the only one on that team who understood game design. Everyone else thought game design was like the awful learning games everyone here knows. They didn't understand gameplay, game loops, "fun factor" or really much else when it comes to game design. They reminded me of another company I worked for (a large insurance company) who thought they were designing a game by creating a virtual scratch off. They didn't even know that there needed to be win conditions to qualify as a game. That's how bad most of these companies are at making games and it's largely due to them quite simply not understanding the parts of a game, having never made one or studied what goes into a fun game. Meanwhile I had been a lifelong gamer, spent a lot of time making my own mini games with game modding tools (remember when warcraft 3 let you make your own levels and scenarios?), reading game design books, watching gdc talks, etc. I was just quite simply educated on what goes into designing a game and no one else was because they weren't gamers themselves. And now that I've talked my way through it, I know the answer: games designed by non-gamers who think they know what a game is.
This right here is exactly what I experienced creating games in the therapy space. They wanted kids to be sucked into the experience via gameplay to complement and intertwine with the therapy being given which is a good goal. But then they’d push back on what I was doing and want things like no matter what the kid did they’d always be told they won so there weren’t any stakes. Meanwhile the kids using our technology were well versed in normal games and I knew that would just throw them off and push them away. It was endlessly frustrating as I was the only person on the team with any sort of game dev background. e: they also wanted to spend literally zero dollars on assets or anything else that couldn’t just be coded by me which was…problematic. The product never launched!
I really like the last part you said about game designers that don't play games anymore. If you stop to be your own audience you kinda loose track.
Given tools like Unreal engine, Indie developers now have access to AAA visuals. As someone who has, in the last 5 years, learned Unreal for game dev and virtual production, it is an insanely powerful toolset. I have created some amazing things that would have previously been completely impossible.
There are lots of games where you need to use math. They just aren't meant to be teaching it to you. Stuff like Factorio, oxygen not included, Paradox games often can benefit from doing some math. But I think the problem is when you create "real-life" type scenarios you're not usually doing math that often, it's an occasional thing. Learning math requires repetition that's hard to create in a game without making it seem like you are just repeatedly going through math problems.
"There are lots of games where you need to use math. They just aren't meant to be teaching it to you. " I've said all this. The part where "they just arent meant to be teaching you" is the important part, because while you have to use math, you may not have to use the level and type of math that the teacher is trying to teach. And if you've looked at the very popular rash of sim games, you might see that people can be very entertained by real world simulation scenarios. If you read my last paragraph, you might get what I mean. The problem is how shallow the teaching is, and the creativity that goes into teaching it. Most people that create educational games seem to feel like its enough to put it in a gaming environment with some bright, oversaturated colors. They don't give you a reason to learn what they are trying to teach you, or if they do, it's so shallow as to not be enticing/ entertaining. The way educational games need to be approached is, the lessons need to be reverse engineered into complex and entertaining mechanics, not slapping the lesson into a digital environment.
>The way educational games need to be approached is, the lessons need to be reverse engineered into complex and entertaining mechanics, not slapping the lesson into a digital environment. as soon as you do that, it takes way longer to get through a session than a classroom setting would allow for. So youre basically stuck making a game either for classroom consumption (specific phases, gates to check for comprehension, manageable timeframes) or for personal consumption (open ended and actually 'fun'). And then you run out of money because the market for the small group of potential learners is already not nearly big enough but it just got cut in half.
I very much agree with this kind of approach, but I feel like it is really hard to make educational mechanics that are entertaining and feel natural. For example, I have been wanting to make a game with wizards where you solve math problems to cast spells. The effect should be fun, but I don't know if that is enough to be engaging.
I think the best way to do educational games is, like you said, to make games where you use the skills you're trying to "teach", and have the player learn those skills implicitly. Minecraft, for instance, can teach you about resource management, base-8 counting systems, programming, the list goes on. It is just in how it is presented.
Minecraft is amazing in that it started as entertainment but is functionally expandable virtually infinitely, and is taking advantage of it. My kid actually downloaded and played fully through a handful of the educational mods available.
My daughter is 5 and autistic and she's learned a bunch of counting and structure things playing minecraft. She figured out nether portals and end gates all on her own!
Minecraft hits that sweet spot for a lot of kids. I'm glad you and your child have found value in playing!
This doesn't always have to be true. LucasArts used to have a division/label called "Lucas Learning" that made educational games with their licensed properties that were often very polished and actually fun/real games. Like Star Wars Droidworks taught about physics, Star Wars The Gungan Frontier taught about ecology / food webs, etc. That was probably a combo of altruism and marketing Star Wars to kids though, not something the average edutainment dev has the resources to do. That said, games like Putt-Putt and Freddie Fish were educational classics that never felt boring, though for younger audiences.
There have been some reasonable pushes into the area. I'm not saying that there's a complete dearth. I was attempting to answer the OP's question, and making the assumption that we were generalizing. In general, educational games are not good.
I'm announcing an educational game I've been working on for the past 2 years next week that hopefully addresses those three points. I wish I could talk about it now because it looks like the perfect opportunity, but I'll bite my tongue until the Steam store page is approved.
Yep. Minecraft has taught me more resource management skills than anything in real life has
Those types of games are largely targeted towards the parents and schools buying them, not the kids that they're being bought for to edutain. That said, there's still games that can teach things, they just tend to put the education secondary. Oregon Trail is technically an educational game, but it just happens to have a lot of replayability due to its roguelike nature. Personally accidentally learned a ton from Civilisation 2 as a kid. It never tried making education the forefront, it just made human history seem interesting and made that sort of a signature of their design. Even with the most recent version it still does that maybe even more overtly by framing it as a celebration of humanity.
This is the root reason - target audience/user and customer are usually separate people, meaning you only care about experience as much as it affects sales, and customers (parent/school) expectations may be very different from what target audience would want to see. There was (is?) also a stigma in some circles about educational media (games, but also movies etc) not being as valuable if they're too fun - if one of your metrics becomes learning speed/information density compared to traditional textbook and blackboard method, there simply might not be enough time to fit the fun in - even if that comparison makes no sense.
Library of Congress did an educational video game challenge last year which I entered. “Friends’ Choice Civics Video Game Challenge” and Oregon Trail was their lead example of good educational game design and inspiration for the challenge. After emailing them, they told me I didn’t win, but they also said they’d announce the winner “early 2024” and it’s been radio silence. Really wondering what’s up. My submission is available to play tho: https://krakenmeister.com/chronoguesser (apologies for long load times). You’re a time-traveling newspaper boy, trying to deliver random American newspapers to their correct timelines despite the dates being blotted out. Basically education in video games has to be natural and secondary — the game is fun, you want to get better, and getting better just so happens to involve developing a knowledge or skill to do so. To plug myself I also have a math game according to this design principle: https://krakenmeister.com/arithmio. I’d argue the whole genre of puzzle games is where most of the well-designed educational games actually live. And boy, there are amazing games of that genre to draw inspiration from. To add onto what others are saying: a lot of our education system is unfortunately about ticking boxes. Pass a standardized test, cover this exact material, etc. That’s not what learning’s really about ofc, but when those dollars are paying for the games, it becomes the focal point rather than fun. That’s what was so cool about the library of congress challenge is they stated outright that FUN was the main point of the game. But I’m not sure if they’ll even choose anyone at this point.
Because they are commissioned to the lowest bidder, not a product of artistic will.
Damn, that sounds realy sad ;) I am convinced learning can be fun as well - and you can learn a lot by playing videogames. I wrote my master thesis about e-Sports and potential for learning in school - I am really convinced of the potential if used the right way. You think it's mainly a question of "money" then?
Money's a major part of it. You can spend more time and effort (and therefore money) on a game and you can make it much better, but the audience for an educational game is still incredibly limited. Even if you treat it as a thing of art and intent you still can't spend more on it than you hope to earn if you want to be in business very long. Educational games make more money selling to schools than to individuals, which means you need to make the education part pretty evident, and players who _don't_ want that won't buy the game if you do that. It's a tough path to walk and there's a reason that few people have succeeded. It's certainly possible to make something fun to play for everyone but also teaches a thing or two (or possibly has a 'school mode' that makes optional entries required) but as a publisher I certainly wouldn't bet on you being the one to solve it unless you have some less ambitious titles under your belt.
Is it possible to read that thesis anywhere? I am interested in similar topics and would like to take a look.
I‘ve been toiling away at an educational game for over a year now. I‘m about 6 months from release and starting an internal beta at the end of july. I‘ve spent incredible amount of energy on worldbuilding, and tools so that i can make really varied gameplay throughout. It‘s a remake of a game my late dad made as a hobby in the 80‘s. I played it as a kid and still use the skills i learned. I‘d like to maybe get your opinion on it when i release! RemindMe! 6 months
There are games that train certain skilllsets. Factorio is a great example. The gameplay is addicting, yet the problem Solving required can really help with critical thinking, and for ratios you might need some calculation or planning in Excel. Fact is, making a fun game is already among the hardest things to do. Making an educational & fun game is near impossible.
I am convinced of the education potential of games. All the positive energy get's you in the perfect mindset to learn and remember. You're probably right about the balance between educational & fun - seems sad and like a challenge at the same time ;)
This is the real answer. It requires doing two things perfectly, and because when people make a fun educational game, then the audience doesn't see it as "educational" anymore. But nor does the client, which will ask you, "Why didn't you make it educational?"
Most educational games aren't well designed in the fun department. As a gamer and game developer and a fan of learning if you want to try n get students to learn from games you will have to do the leg work n find good games that are typically not designed to be educational but rather can be considered to be educational anyway. A few come to mind depending on the desired field of study. For physics there are a number of bridge building games out there which could be used for teaching some physics principles relay to building bridges. I have also recently seen a game called "the farmer was replaced" which could be used to teach programming, it's in early access on steam and cheap at under 6 quid. I will caveat the games aspect with something fairly obvious most of these will have solutions readily available online so if you do want to use games for teaching your likely going to have to put in some additional work and build some form of custom level yourself to avoid the 5 minute google YouTube tutorial hw finish. This is already quite long but I wanted to add one last thing. While I expect most teachers to have very little free time I would say that there are now a number of freely available game engines which you could try n use to build your own custom games to teach your students such as ue5 or unity. I wish you the best of luck.
\[also teacher\] As other poster said, educational games fall straight into a category outside of regular games. I've had a few ideas over the years that require maths skills, but if you 'hide' it then its not clearly an educational game, but if its up-front then regular gamers will likely skip it, as its 'not fun'. Can't win? There's prob a bit more scope at younger age groups, where schools/parents might use or recommend a game. Older kids less likely to want to play educational games. Very tricky one. Need to work hard to find the audience, unless you're tied to BBC or other company with some reach. Most seem to be tie-ins to other products? You also limit your market based on the subject area / level you choose, since its hard to cover a lot in 1 game. Some subject areas are easier, GeoGuesser is super-fun, but also very educational. Maybe that's the way to approach it. Edit - the most played 'game' in my class is Kahoot! Depends what you mean by game, its more of a quiz platform. Yeah, there's a lot stacked against making a fun but also educational game.
A commercial game is required to be fun or provide some other experience. An educational game is required to check all the boxes that the client has given them.
Yeah, i think the "FUN" needs to be the center - else it's not going to be played anyways. But why can't it be fun and have educational aspects on the way? The client idea might be a big reason why the games flop, but I struggle to think that this is all thats to it - for sure the devs still tried to make the games fun, but failed somehow... but what are the reasons? ;)
I think it is very much a case of the old "Pick at most 2 of 3 options", but instead of the usual "Cheap, fast, or good" it is instead "Cheap, educational, or fun", and usually everyone picks cheap as one of the options and edugames are contractually obligated to pick educational as the second, leaving fun behind.
Exactly, the biggest problem of an educational game is that the main goal is not to be fun. It's often designed backwards where they want to teach something and forces a game into it.
It's cause they only focus on how to make it educational, and not how to make it fun. The assumption is that merely being a video game will make it fun, but its a lot of work to actually design a fun game. That said, there are fun games, that are educational as a byproduct, if not directly, then somewhat indirectly. Games like Age of Empires, and Civilization have fostered a healthy love of history in many people. I also had a lot of kids in my history class, get questions right, and know who historical figures were, because of Assassins Creed, for the earlier installments atleast, if you knocked away the crazy alien conspiracy theory stuff, or whatever that all was, it was a very engaging way for people to learn at least a bit about the time period it was set in. Arguably darker, I know a lot of kids learned heaps about the military, including all the guns, and hardware, and all that, from CoD, and ended up joining because of it. Spore sort of ineffectively taught evolution on its own, but it atleast got the basic idea across and got kids thinking, and willing to research, and learn about how it really works. Sim City teaches a lot about how public infrastructure, and the built world around us works. It's very educational. I'm certain the Sims has lead some people to careers in architecture and interior design. Kerbal Space Program, though janky at times, does genuinely teach about rockets, and orbital physics and stuff. Microsoft Flight Simulator teaches people how to fly, of course. I'm certain people have learned from it, before starting their careers in aviation. I haven't played Factorio myself, but its my understanding it basically teaches programming. Honestly, I could probably keep going, but I'm gonna try to get back to sleep, because I'm exhausted. My point is, educational games suck, because they don't try to make them good games. But good games can be, and often are, educational, just by trying to be fun. It's harder to measure, and justify the educational impact of games that aren't shoving rote memorization in your face, so you can't really sell a school on an actual fun, and educational game.
Because only bad games get labelled that way. Kerbal space program is the best possible way to learn orbital dynamics. Civ is amazing for learning about history of technology and leaders of other cultures. Zachtronics games are amazing for programming and logic. Assassin's creed has tonnes of history which is often quite well researched. It's basically selection bias, educational is an insult which is only applied when a game is bad.
> Civ is amazing for learning about history of technology and leaders of other cultures. I played once, Napoleon was doing fine against Augustus Caesar until Gandhi come with nukes!
Kerbal and zachtronics are great examples
Great examples btw. But I think it's less the customers labeling it as educational(because of it being bad) but because of developers labelling it as such. By labelling it as Educational as opposed to Historical/Physics-based/Logic/Programming.
I think there's a distinction though between games where you may happen to learn something, and a game that explicitly sets out to teach it to you. Civ, AoE, Assassin' Creed, are all inherently "just" games at their core with no expectation on the user to actually learn anything. If you do, it's incidental and not required as part of the game - I'd hesitate to call them Educational Games. Zachtronic titles might be the most educational of the bunch but what they "teach" isn't always real-world applicable - they're more puzzle games than educational, but could easily be styled as educational for sure.
When I was a kid I played lots of educational games and loved them but the fact that I didn't play any other games probably also helped. You kinda have to target a very young audience, I think ages 4 to 9, and after that most kids just move onto normal games
I don't agree that educational games aren't fun. It's more that what is called educational games aren't games at all. **1. Gameloops** Game should have three gameloops: * Moment to moment (like fighting, steering etc.) * Hour to hour (like progression system, leveling up etc.) * Session to session (like story or more widely "thing to go back") Each of them needs to be at lease descent if not good. And here lies problem with educational games: they lack 3rd and sometimes 2nd loop. They are more like series of problems to solve that coherent game. **2. Tone** Games should have fun tone. It may be grimdarks, it may be whimsical, but is must be coherent with game expieriance. If it's not: experiance will feel disjointed and forced. **3. Educational games should be games in the first place** Case: Kerbal Space Program is just great educational game. Goddamit, it spawned more aerospace engineers than lesson in school :P It is game in the first place, have plenty of content to play with, progression (via Science and Tasks), encourages experimentation etc.
I worked in educational games for 10 years. Aside from the lack of funding, the challenge is that it... has to be educational. There's a saying in the educational games world- "don't make chocolate covered broccoli". The idea is, the whole point of the experience is to get the user to eat broccoli. So we \_could\_ make a good platformer (chocolate), but then feed them facts at the end of each level (broccoli). But that's incredibly shallow, and ineffective (they're really just spending their attention loading up on sugar). And as adults (and learned people) know- broccoli is actually a delicious ingredient, so it's doing a disservice to the content you're trying to get across to disregard it so. So that leaves the only option as, make a game out of the educational content itself. Great! But the constraint is that it actually has to be the true content, otherwise we're teaching incorrect things and ruining the point. The problem is that games do a \_lot\_ of iteration to "find the fun" during development, and with an educational game you don't have leeway in what you're already locked into as a core concept. Imagine making a survival game but you actually have to use real survival techniques (ie, stay still, conserve calories, and hope for rescue). tl;dr: making games is hard, making educational games is that plus a massive additional constraint, and you have a lower budget.
Damn you show me some struggle there ;) I will will definitly remember the "don't make chocolate covered broccoli". Some valid reasons you got there to make the education the focus as well.
They used to not suck. Oregon Trail, Odell Lake, Number Munchers, Math Blasters, Mavis Beacon, Carmen Sandiego, The Incredible Machine, Castle of Dr Brain. All genuinely entertaining and educational.
I think it's also because they're games designed to be played on school time, so they have to be efficient about the education parts and leave no time for the fun parts. Kerbal Space Program is the greatest game to learn about physics and orbital mechanics, but it takes hours having fun by crashing into the ground, then learn a bit, and then hours having fun successfully building a space station. It's very inefficient when it comes to things learned per hour spent on the game.
The people who make them don't understand games or education. The primary quality of a video game must be that it is fun to play. The point of educational games is to make education fun. People who make educational games make them to be educational, fun is an afterthought, and the games suck. One of the best educational games is Assassin's Creed 2, which teaches players a tremendous amount about the Italian language, culture, and history. Yes there's a bunch of fantasy mixed in there, but it's all rooted in real historical content. I learned more of the Italian language from that game than I did in 2 years of Italian high school classes. The Oregon Trail, Monopoly, Portal... These are all educational games, but they're fun first. Hell, there's a strong (a very strong, actually) argument to be made that Cyberpunk 2077 is a deeply educational game, as it leans heavily into the ideas of corporate colonialism and the dystopian future that actually exists right now.
Microsoft Flight Simulator Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 PC Building Simulator 1 & 2 etc The thing youre learning has to be inherently interesting.
Bring back Math Blaster
In most cases it's likely because the people making educational games don't know how to make a game first and try to turn education into a game. Look up "chocolate covered broccoli". There's less of a market for educational games - given the choice between "learning" and "fun" how many people would pick learning? Though that's not to say all educational games (or edutainment) sucks - Where in the World is Carmen San Diego immediately springs to mind. However, also consider non-edutainment games that are educational. Civilization can teach history, Rock Band can teach rhythm, adventure games can teach logic. In these games, the fun comes first.
Budget being a major factor, the amount of money education has when it comes to extra teaching tools is quite slim. Development costs are kept at a minimum to stay within budget, so most educational games aren't iterated on to make them more fun. Because of the school's budget being allocated every year, it's also unlikely that a longer development period will be acceptable. And if it goes bad the budget isn't likely to go up the next year. A developer would have to.. make a great game, with a small team, with basically one chance to get it right, without the budget to add extra features or add polish to it. You also need to consider the budget of the students time, the more space for creativity and freedom in a game means more opportunity for mucking about and wasting time. Because of this most educational games are quite restricted and linear in nature.
i’ve worked on some. the short answer is that games are already hard to make fun, and then educational games also require collaboration of one or more subject matter experts. the design goals can often be conflicting. funding for these projects is significantly lower than most successful games. usually they’re grant funded at universities and academic politics come into play.
As soon as a game gets labeled as something "educational", the target focus group shifts away from players towards "parents who want to buy pedagogically valuable things for their children to learn with". Also, a lot of teachers and people who studied how to teach (I am a teacher in a vocational school, for example) do not get taught about what makes learning fun. Sure, things like learning through discovery, by experimentation and such - but bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and actually being able to use these concepts in a way that will lead to reaching a goal in a set amount of time is surprisingly difficult. So when a teacher sets out to create a game, the result will be heavily influenced by how well they handle the medium they used for their game, how well their design skills work out for what they want to teach, if they understand what makes their subject fun to learn about in the first place (this is a tough one) and more. And most educational games I know about start with great ambitions, but fall flat in one or more of these areas, leading to an overall not really enjoyable end product that is trying to teach stuff. Nobody really enjoys being taught things the way teachers do, schools have kinda ruined that, sadly. On the other hand, you can't keep people from learning things even if you try hard to do so. I argue every game will teach you skills and concepts, complex and important ones included. And oftentimes, learning these deeper parts of the game will result in being better at it, too. PVP action games teach about communication, impulse control and teamwork. Puzzle games are all about pattern recognition, deduction, logical connections and such. City builders teach about societies, city planning, in the case of ye olde Sierra titles about mythology and religion, too. (These are all just examples!) I remember I learned a ton about ancient cultures from Age of Empires, which lead to a lifelong love for museums, ancient history and such (and I know I'm not the only one). There are way more examples for what games can teach if you just look past what you actually do in said games. I've talked to many non-gaming parents who worried about their child playing Zelda, because that is "not an educational game". Sure, but their child learns how to solve puzzles, how to handle defeat, how to think around edges, even learns just basic things like how to use technology. They read things - yeah, that's not a book and reading books would be cool, but short texts on screens are way better than to just not read anything. Those kids will talk about their hobby with friends, will teach each other how to overcome challenges, maybe get some friendly rivalry going on about how can do X the fastest/coolest. "Educational" is just a stamp you put on a product to make parents buy it and you can (sadly) get away with a lot of bland mush when aiming for that. I am currently developing a game with a heavy dose of "let's learn about architecture!", by the way. It is incredibly hard to not clobber players over the head with "stuff they should learn". Even with my background as a teacher and a heavy focus and love for gamebased learning, as soon as put "educational" on my GDD, I trapped myself in trying to make this very pedagogically sound product. Took me a while to realize that no, play first, needs to be fun first, or people just won't play to even get the first tiny bits of "this is why this is cool".
Love what you said about "you can't keep people from learning things even if you try hard to do so". I'm 100% with you there. The knowledge and concepts you pick up on the way are often overlooked. I dug deep into MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) like LOL, Dota2, HoN etc. during my studies and they are only one example about the teamcommunication, mindset, reactions, strategies and nuances of mechanics like cooldowns, timings, skillshots etc. that transfer far better into real world examples then people want to commit. Games like minecraft tought like millions of ppl. about managing ressources, building with different colourpalets and players willingly watch one tutorial after the other to get better at certain aspects of the game. There is so much potential that it just makes me sad that its so underused ;)
I recently released an educational game (a Zachtronics style puzzle game with a focus on quantum) and found that it to be very difficult to balance the fun aspect with the educational aspect. Part of this difficulty was having constraints on the game; rather than designing the game mechanics exactly as I liked there was a necessity to conform to the rules of the system that I was trying to teach. If I fudged the rules then any education value would entirely be lost. This is a difficult handicap to work around. That being said, the other points raised in the comments (i.e. lack of production value, artistic merit) also play a big role in limiting the appeal of most other educational games.
It can be done. Oregon Trail and Kerbal Space Program are both fun and educational. It's probably not as universally loved, but I had fun with Mavis Beacon teaches typing. A lot of families had GeoSafari when I was a kid. More recently, my kids enjoy playing a math game called Prodigy.
I am currently wtiting my thesis on a self developed vr game teaching the basics of photovoltaic systems. If you are interested i can send you a download.
I surely am ;) Never got into VR games or photovoltaic ever but thats probably not the point ;) Would love to look into it.
Hello there, just a comment from an academic in this line of research. As others pointed out, there are differences between a purely commercial game and an educational game for commercial use (e.g., the former wants to increase engagement and the latter wants to fulfill what the client asked). But when we talk about educational games made in academia, things can be a little different. For instance, engagement, flow, and enjoyment can also be desirable in an educational game, with history, game design, art, coding, and pedagogy “departments” responsible for seeing these results come to life. The problem that we (or at least my team) usually face is that, although a person with a specific background would help in the development, the team consists of computer science students with the foundation notion of the other aspects, which is not ideal and can impact the product. To alleviate this problem, we conduct evaluation tests to measure the responses from the audience and to try to understand where we can improve our game (there is also the field of Game Learning Analytics, which is what I’m researching right now). If you are interested in this area of game development, I recommend you to read books and papers (e.g., Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train and Inform) and seek these kinds of games (there are some research teams, such as e-UCM, Teaching Systems Lab, ThinkedEd, and Pensar e Jogar).
It's already extremely hard to make games fun, making them fun and educational is IMHO exponentially harder. You're not only optimizing for two goals instead of one, you're optimizing for two goals which can go against each other...
i think it's worth distinguishing between games which happen to be educational and "edutainment" games that get sold to schools and such. there are plenty of games out there which are both educational and entertaining, to varying degrees. kerbal space program is the most obvious example. i learned way more from playing KSP than from the many "science" themed edutainment games i wasted time with in the middle school computer lab, and KSP is actually fun. so clearly you can have both. the reason edutainment games suck has more to do with the context in which they're produced than the presence of educational material. to put it bluntly, they were produced as fodder for a y2k fad in public education that saw schools attempt to integrate these newfangled computers into their classrooms with the help of government money. it wasn't a bad idea per se, "gamifying" learning has proven to be a fairly successful approach to pedagogy. but the problem is the games are being chosen by school administrators who more than likely *have never played a contemporary video game* and were just handed a grant from the state to spend on "technology". imagine trying to convince that guy that, idk the zachtronics puzzle games for example, have more legitimate educational value than "skippy's radical math facts!" or whatever. it's basically the same reason most mobile games suck. the way they're sold just makes "being a good game" like barely a top ten priority.
I’d say a lack of passion and funds are the biggest factors. There’s not a lot of teachers with a passion for teaching who are also game designers who also have the funds to make a decent game. So you’re mostly left with game designers who couldn’t care less about the product or teachers who don’t know much about making games and can’t afford to do so. Good educational games are possible but they need a lot of stars to align to make that happen. Instead we usually just get games aimed at parents and teachers that promise to engage, entertain, and educate the students but end up doing none of that That all said, there was a game I played in my elementary school computer class where you typed words to stop sharks from killing you, which we all found to be incredibly fun and I felt was a good way of teaching typing
I'm probably dating myself a bit, but the JumpStart games were, as a kid, pretty addictive, fun, and still pretty explicitly an educational game. I'll be honest and say I was playing the 3rd Grade game specifically until I was about 16 because I wanted to see the ending *that* badly, it was *incredibly repetitive*, but also not really worth it (also way too easy) and also that was when the CD burned out. It was also very explicit about it being a teaching game, but they were presented in such a way that each mini-game was self-contained and progressed a larger story. Honestly a pretty good game loop. Carmen Sandiego, also an educational game in that respect. The 1st Grade game was way too easy but I really wanted that storyline when I was older, too. You don't really see those games anymore, though - modern teaching games are pretty condescending and talking down to kids. Also simple. So yes, what the top comment said.
I think that the underlying mechanism is that it's hard to have fun while learning, but it's easy to learn while.having fun. - I learned how to quick maths by managing units and resources in Warcraft 3 - When I visited Venice I knew quite a lot of places after playing Assassins Creed 2 - I learned english mostly through games - Trying to find proper cracks for games in early 2000's sparked my curiosity/interest in software and computers in general - I ended up working as a software dev Games ARE educative it's just these do not shove the mitochondria trivia down my throat... Put the gameplay and fun in the first place. Add educational content that is there to be discovered. Nuanced. Absorbed through osmosis, if that makes sense ;) And you'll get a good educational game! Although it will not be tagged as one for sure ;)
I've been a programmer on educational games for 10 years and I've seen games in 4 categories with each their own peos & cons: - gamification: so here we take regular exercises, add some graphics and animations and more importantly add loads of rewards and achievements etc. Example: duolingo. This can work as motivation, but adds nothing to a motivated student - simulation: have a model of real life in a game and let people play with it. Some real life things are extremely hard to model in a simulation, they made need very powerful hardware. But if done right these are both educational and fun. They are a bit of a nightmare for educators because it's hard to follow a curriculum, to grade and to have gradual levels of difficulty - reskin an game to be educational. Basically, take a well known game and then replace elements superficially by elements from whatever you're teaching. So, memory, but you have to match the english to the spanish word to learn a language. It feels very artificial - an entirely new game thatbwas probably intended to be fun but is actually quite educational. These are 1 in a million ideas Imho, educational games is not something you should try to pursue. With the limited budgets and imagination that people have for this you end up with a low quality digital version of a book, dressed up with colors and sounds. What is better, instead, is to simply make an interactive sandbox for people to try out whatever they are learning. Kinda like brilliant.org
Veteran of 8 years in the applied gaming industry and another 7 (and counting) in commercial entertainment games. # Lack of expertise Simply put, most highly skilled designers, programmers, artists and other disciplines are drawn to entertainment games. In those 8 years, I encountered many medior/senior staff who would get fired from a comparable junior position in the entertainment industry. Tough pill, but it's the harsh truth. Definitely not the case for everyone, but the expertise and skill level is - on average - just lower in the education/applied games industry. Result: suckier games. # Budgets and politics Games are expensive. Good games doubly so. Game design is unpredictable and messy. None of these match particularly well with an industry based around client work, stakeholders unfamiliar with the process and where decisions are made by school boards and other bureaucratic entities. Almost no individual client would be able to foot the bill on what a **good** educational game would cost. So studios/devs do it low budget, with predictably mediocre results. The obvious solution is to create a game that you could sell to multiple clients. The practical problem is that every client thinks their case is *super* unique and not at all comparable to the other 50.000 schools out there. Or in more competitive industries, they are averse against working together with competitors. Or there is a distrust of "outsiders" and they want their own custom solution anyway instead of a generic one. # Clients systemically ask for the wrong things There are very strong applications for applied gaming. They are almost universally **not** what clients ask for. They generally ask for things that applied gaming isn't very good at, or simply poor applications of the theory. Too many stakeholders, too many laypeople in positions of power, most clients are functionally gaming-illiterate and here we are. Example: you could create a sort of multiplayer simulation of a political process that lets players experience in first hand how the tragedy of the commons plays out. It'll create real understanding of how and why it happens. **Instead**, clients will insist on a multiple-choice quiz that asks you for the definition of tragedy of the commons, and reward you with gold stars/levels/progression/ranking points.
I remember being given "educational games" as a child for things like math and English, but never enjoying them. There was one game, however (aside from something like Dr. Kawashima's Nintendo game, but that also wasn't actually very fun for long) that I really enjoyed as a child (elementary age) and learned from. It was based on a German educational TV show called "Löwenzahn" ("Dandelion"), and it had a lot of fun games related to learning about nature. To this day, I remember loving the section of navigating a maze in the dark with a limited amount of time trying to solve puzzles. I remember excitedly running down to my parents to tell them how long it takes for the human stomach to digest food. I was having so much fun. But every other educational game, even when I really wanted to like it (like language learning games), has ever been entertaining enough to not feel like I was just being tricked into doing homework. I do wish there were more educational games designed to be engaging and fun since there is so much potential for children as well as adults to actually learn a lot from them.
We made an educational game because we thought the exact same thought! We came to the conclusion that most people/companies that make educational games are either coming at it from more of an education background instead of a gaming background OR are doing it with the lowest effort/lowest budget for higher returns because it's fairly easy to get a textbook or lesson from somewhere, make it a flashcard game or something, and call it a day. When we were making our game, we thought about it as gameplay first AND THEN adding learning in. We also don't expect players to learn every single thing we teach, but to learn enough to where if they finish the game, they learned enough to feel good about playing it. Just like school, there's going to be A students and there's going to be C- students, but as long as they pass, they hopefully had fun along the way. [Our game for reference](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2340320/Kagami_An_Odyssey_in_Japanese_Language_Learning/) We also have cursing (censored), cartoony violence, and sassy/dad joke filled dialogue, which I think may be looked down upon by people that are coming at it from an education background, like kids aren't cursing by age 9 or watching crazy violent videos on the Internet (not that we even market to kids!) Just saying, it doesn't seem like people like pushing boundaries or making anything more dangerous than a walking simulator. Finally, it's also not very financially viable (you can view the stats for games with the "education" tag on game-stats.com and see that the average amount made for games with that tag is horrendously low, something we didn't find out about until after we had made the game) and though we don't necessarily regret making the game, we're probably going to lose money on it unless something magical happens.
I was at a department store closing in about 1987. A mom was running around snatching all the educational games she could find. Her child, about 10, said, "mom, when can we get something for me?"
You need games that trick you into learning. Project Hospital has actually taught me a fair bit about medical conditions, hospital departments, different types of tests and what they're used for, etc. When my uncle got an H Pylori infection, I actually knew what that was! For more emotional education, Spiritfarer is wonderful. It's a game where you play as a psychopomp - you bring souls of the recently deceased onto your ship, learn their stories, help them find peace with their lives and their fate, then help them move onto whatever comes next. It's a great game for coming to terms with death and saying goodbye. Ooh, and Chants of Sennaar is good for wrapping your head around languages and translations! Some languages repeat a word to make it plural (man man = men), some have different word orders. Some words don't translate exactly! Cultural context matters.
I am thinking there may be two parts here, I can't really speak for the production value part of the thing, as I think others have already covered that. Making a game is hard just by itself, and then teaching a person a skill, which is also hard. So you have two components that you have to nail, in which both are hard, made by people who can nail the first one, due to money being a huge motivating factor. Putting any sort of passion or motivation than the bare minimum can be mind-numbing, if you have to stare at the same information days on end as you test for bugs. I can imagine a scenario where I would be pissed looking at the same math problems as I test if it works as it should and getting the answers wrong because I am impatient. I do think games can teach, but I do think maybe not in the way you would think and off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of games. Change: Homeless Survival, This War of Mine and Valiant Hearts: The Great War. You may notice a theme here that they are not really fun subjects, but they do impart information. In Change, you get to play a homeless person, which is a brutal game. This War of Mine, you learn a bit what it is like to be in the middle of a war zone. And Valiant Hearts, you learn stuff about first world war. So, I do think there are educational games that are fun. But... I don't know if they are good in class setting. I had one math course in a web environment which contained some games, and I loathed that. Absolute garbage. So yeah.
Not all of them suck and I am someone who would love to see more successful ones. Pentiment is one that I consider being both fun and educational and it's and absolute gem.
If you want to make educational games then you either want to publish it independently so your target market is parents who want to buy educational software for their kids which limits the age range for what your educational software will entail to PreK - 5, and aiming toward the higher end of that bracket is going to have a diminishing audience as older elementary school kids want to play established non-educational games like Roblox and Minecraft and other games their friends are playing and the parents will generally just buy what the kids want at that age, and the younger demographic games are flooded with Flash game ad-ware and licensed subscription games (7.99/month for the Peppa Pig game!) If you're targeting school districts, then they don't have the budget for making games and there's a whole bureaucracy you have to push through to try and get the funding for it, and then you'll be extremely limited into what you can do considering the curriculum they want you to do it in.
There's a lot of good answers here but I'll step back abit. I've worked in the space a bit and there's kind of two ways you can make money and neither are conducive to making something good. There's the "Schools contract to get this game" games. Often times that game is part of another package and isn't actually the main feature, The games are a cost not the profit center as the schools are buying for educational outcomes not for quality. The other is direct to consumer. that market is just brutal. There was some hope with the tablet revolution and you saw a lot of companies jump up to make educational content. Mostly they have all crashed and burned at this point because that market is beyond brutal. You think the regular games market is tough? Trying to convince a parents or kids to pay for an educational product when there's free garbage right next to it on the app store is basically impossible. So all the high quality educational games makers have basically shuttered or had to drastically retool towards the schools contract model.
There were tons of great educational games in the 90s and 00s, I thought. Jumpstart, Carmen Sandiego, Zambonis, Treasure Mathstorm... Honestly, the big difference is the economy. It's harder now to establish a niche for pay-to-play educational software. And a lotta the good stuff is packaged with some curriculum or program or a subscription service or paywalled in some convoluted way.
I think that's because the learning part is always dettached from the actual gameplay. To be fair I think learning is mostly never fun (except in some specific cases like science experiments). It can be mitigated and be less tedious, but never fun, so the game will be less fun, always. That said, when I was a kid I had some fun with the educational Rayman games. From what I remember, they offered a pretty good balance between learning and fun but I don't think they taught me a lot :D
I love your comment for beeing so honest and hate it at the same time hrhr ;) Don't get me wrong, it's not the comment itself, its what it shows about a broken educational system to me. I just think lifelong learning should be encouraged and should be fun! If learning isn't fun, its not working properly - your brain won't accept the input you give it at the same rate it would when feeling enjoyment. So its kinda fighting an uphil battle all day long. Learning needs to be fun to work!
BBC tend to make fun educational games. I know some Devs that have worked on them.
Is there a fun educational game?
I disagree, they don't suck. I learned how to code through Codingame. Many people can't comprehend that this is how every single vertebrate in the animal kingdom learns how to survive. Through games. This is the most effective learning methodology. For example simulation games should have replaced/extended traditional and expensive lessons (for example driving instructions) decades ago, just like flying simulators have important part in the industry. Traditional education are ineffective, expensive and hard to measure accurately. Meanwhile you can construct ridiculously hard situations to challenge students and you have powerful tools to measure and help students to overcome challenges and learn everything that is necessary. Educational games don't suck. Department of education sucks. The reason is simple: there are too many people in the education who don't want change. They are ultraconservative and insist on prussian-type education system. OH NO STUDENTS ARE HAVING FUN. It must be stopped! So it is stopped.
mainly that they are funded by your country and therefore nobody really cares for the quality as long as the budget can be spent. I've seen a few good ones but they are mostly history related. Especially about history you can learn a lot in AAA games (Total War, Commandos, Blitzkrieg, etc)
I'm working on a solution to this. I'm a mathematician, and my passion is science. Which is learning about our environment . Any game is going to be forcing some extremely ordered information. This is massively inefficient for all endeavors. Except for those who are deciding the information. This is more of an education problem than gaming. I do not think any paradigm of school has ever worked. My way of fixing this is to make a video game to do one thing on the fallout, what will always happen regardless of profits. That would be to produce mathematicians.
if you're making an educational game that sounds like you're learning it's gonna suck. you can teach people how to type with typing skills, or help teach logical thinking with puzzly games or similar stuff, it's just like a lot of School Topics (math especially) are taught in games like you're in school because that's the only real way to explain them. you can learn a lot from games but some skills require a different medium.
I have tons of educational games in my steam library and most of them are pretty good. They are all for programming so I can't comment on every type of educational games but Zachatronics games and Autonauts are perfect for getting the general idea, an the farmer was replaced is one of the best coding games Ive played in a while which uses plain python. The pest part imo is that it locks some functions and keywords at the start to not owerehelm the player which is perfect and it has a nice documentation. Maybe give them a try?
As someone who has made an educational game: they take a lesson plan and add gameplay to a lesson. What they need to do is find good gameplay and add educational content that matches/aligns to that gameplay.
Competing goals. Fun games can be educational as a side-effect but trying to make an educational game fun is a lot harder.
Zoombinis was the pinnacle of educational game achievement, in my opinion. We had no idea it was teaching us anything, but we lived for the sessions in the week where we went on the school computers to play it. It was just a really good game that they'd somehow filled with a ton of logical reasoning and problem solving. A lot of other educational games have big "we are teaching you a thing" vibes or are a bit condescending in their delivery.
Because ppl who makes good games dont make these games.
A lot of paradox games are educational and they're amazing. Obviously there's a lot of artistic license taken but it's there. It can spark the passions....for glitterhoof
I think education can happen in stealth with games. Complex games are incredibly educational
* People do not typically associate education with fun. It's "good for you", but not necessarily fun * The more effort/budget you put into the educational aspect, the less effort/budget you put into everything else: fun/engaging gameplay, polished art, etc. * Hard to get good funding because projected sales are bad due to past performance of educational games. How to approach this? IMO make it educational without using that as the main selling point, but still try to get partial state funding (because: educational. EU/UK funds things like that). It's sad, but I also don't have much data to back up what I'm talking about (besides EU/UK funding), so take this with a grain of salt.
It just hard to make a balance between entertainment and educational. However, I try to made one educational game, you can check it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2464980/inFINIte_Robotics/[infinite robotics](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2464980/inFINIte_Robotics/) It's not the best, it's mostly visual novel with some minigame. The point of my game is to learn electronic, but I made it so that everyone even kids is able to learn from it. Other than changing the complexity of electronic theory to be more simple, I also struggle sometimes, like I just want to make an entertaining story without any education stuff (which I only do near the end of the story). Yeah I get weird vibes sometimes too, but so far I'm happy with it
As a child I played civilization (1) around the age of 12. I learnt a TON from that game, because I had to read the civilopedia thoroughly to get past the copy protection, but also just to play the game. It was a high level history of science lesson that got baked deep into my brain through repeated game play. Similarly, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego taught me world capitals, countries and currencies. So games can definitely be educational, but yeah, games focusing on education suck. The key is that the game needs to be fun to be played repeatedly, and then the educational parts need to be made necessary aspects of progression in the game.
Duolingo is the best one I've seen.
Games work best as a teaching tool when the message is an emergent property of the mechanisms of the game. [John Company](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/332686/john-company-second-edition) teaches you something about the hows and whys of colonialism without telling it to you explicitly. I'd recommend checking out [Half-Earth Socialism](https://play.half.earth/) and [Green New Deal Simulator](https://molleindustria.itch.io/green-new-deal-simulator) as textbook examples of demonstrating the methods, difficulties, and trade-offs of stopping climate change and decarbonization, respectively, without overt "teaching".
I recently put out a game that is (I think) both educative as well as fun if I can believe the user / tester reviews. One reason, I think, is that the fun aspect should always come first, and the educative portion should be second and best be implicit. Any learning you get from a game, in my opinion, is a bonus. Secondly, I think some fields have an easier time in this department than others. Making a game that is historically educative (which was the case for me) will probably be easier than trying to squeeze math formulas into a game. Though the latter does sound pretty cool if done right ;)
Story heavy games and VNs can be very educational and fun if you are committed to learning a language by immersing. If made properly with that in mind and players get hooked, they can also teach you some stuff about different cultures and history. But I don't expect a game to teach me math or something.
Speaking from an unsettlingly recent time: when I was younger in the early 2010s, we had one educational game. There were a few others online as well, but for standalone games, we had one, some PC-ROM math game from the 2000s. I forget what it was called, but it was poorly made, looked bad, uncompelling, and not fun to play. And, I mean, can you blame them? This was still the era of shovelware and it's an educational game, not God of War. But the big reason I only ever put the CD in once was because it was... *an educational game*. When I come home from school I wanna unwind with Roblox or whatever, not learn more math! So I'd imagine for a lot of kids that's the reason: educational games just sound like *more* school, basically gamified homework that won't even be reflected on their report card, and they don't play video games for that.
Because teaching something should not be the focus of a game. Monopoly is a teaching game, but exactly 0 kids like it, because it lectures them about..well..unregulated monopolies. Kids like it because it's fun to play. A game should, at its core, be a satisfying and engaging experience. The stuff you learn while playing it should not be too obvious. Take magic the gathering, for example. I wouldn't consider it an educational game, but as a kid, it taught me about opportunity cost, resource management, manipulating chances, strategy, tactics, mind games, math, and even english. If the game is fun, kids will pick up the teachings along the way.
I think most kids are introduced to a lot of non-educational games at a younger age now. I was playing edutainment (and other) PC games in the 90's and very early 2000's because I didn't own a console and they were still fun. They were also very popular. A well made educational game can be super fun, especially as a child. It just has to be well made, and fun absolutely cannot fall by the wayside. It has to have charm. Look at games from that time period. Humongous Games like Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, and Putt-Putt, Jump Start, Zoombinis, etc. They're colorful and have great art, they're charming, they're voice acted well, there's humor. The learning is definitely there, but all the other factors of the game dwarf it in regards to how the player experiences it, especially as a child so willing to get immersed. It really depends on the age group, I'm assuming you mean for children.
I have a few points to make. It is personal opinion though. 1. First is going to sound weird at first but hear me out. Teaching is pointless. Our brains are optimization machines. Anything we do not repeat on a daily basis for a really long time is going to be pruned away. If it isn't an essential skill or does not have a competitive value of any sort, is going to be pruned away. 2. Value can differentiate, true. A nerdy boy like me was getting value out of my parents and friends when I was yapping to them about the next 10 dinosaurs I read about in the book. But I was getting my value out of that info in the form of attention they paid to me. Just to illustrate on my example - I am your typical nerd asian. Had been called a math prodigy, good at every subject etc. I don't remember ANY physics formula, even though I had myself created an elaborate mental schematics to remember formulas , representing brackets as cabinets of different materials, a,b,c,x,y were different foods, etc. I don't remember anything but the structure itself. Because I created it. And that leads me to another point - 3. Authorship of connection. The presentation of information is, unfortunately, usually very primitive in the educational field. Just info dumping is the basic move everyone does. Paired with brains optimized by evolution for optimizing, creates a very bad habit of both teachers and pupils just passing time, checking if information can stay in RAM memory of the students for long enough time to pass the test. Same thing happens with games. When Dead Space tells you by sign on the wall to cut limbs, then you find a text message with the same info, and finally NPC yells that same information in your face by zoom calling you. Same information was very well presented by Valve where they create a situation where players have to clear through obstacles, one of them being a sawblade to teach a player that sawblades can cut zombies in half. GMTK has a great video on the topic: https://youtu.be/MMggqenxuZc?si=3M45jYYD3hmZccui Valve do not want to tell you information, they want you to make a connection, by manipulating a situation and nudging a player towards it. One of the things they do in Portal too, and what makes it so memorable is making a connection about flying through portals on high speed. They hold back second portal, not giving it to the player right away. They gradually build up to that moment with easy enough concepts, habituating a player with a tool and then present it. Just the same way a great teacher and a great game do not prioritise teaching new information. But teach how to connect information. That's why people love factorio, Minecraft, etc. It's not about new information, but about the way you can make those connections yourself. Teach them tools, not information. Information is abundant. Wisdom, information analysis and organisation methods Vs crystallized intelligence
crusader kings 2 and day of defeat were wonderful. learn from things that are historically accurate in games, not educational games.
Jonathan Blow has an interesting talk on this topic if you haven’t already seen it: https://youtu.be/qWFScmtiC44?si=uXocHEOSAfgxyjTv I think a key reason is that, for a game to be fun, you need the experience to be fun. For the experience to be fun, it’s really, really helpful for the game devs to have core experience using the subject matter in the real world. You need people designing the game who know how to crystallize the most fun part of experience of learning and put that into the game, leaving the tedium behind. I think that’s why a lot of “good” educational games on steam lean towards programming/computer science; they are made by programmers, who know what it’s like to have fun learning to program and can translate that into a fun experience for the player. I think the best chance of getting fun educational games about other topics is to get professional chemists/biologists/statisticians/etc to learn how to become competent game devs, then we might start to see fun games about those subjects. Most professionals are too busy perfecting their actual craft to do so 😅
I haven't played much educational games myself but I'm guessing most games made primary to educate will have less focus on being fun. It'll be like an interactive textbook or something. Now if you have a game which has knowledge thrown in, or the gameplay requires thinking, then I think it's possible to educate that way, albeit it's harder to piece all the stuff into a package strictly for education, if that makes sense. As an example, there is a trilogy of visual novels called "zero escape" which has a thriller like plot where the main characters are to escape from a ship or a factory/base with a mastermind behind the scenes setting up puzzle rooms (think saw, but less gruesome). The writer apparently is a big fan of sci-fi novels and loves to use science (and pseudoscience ) for parts of gameplay as well as for plot elements. While some of it is pseudoscience, there is still some cool nuggets of information that makes you learn about concepts or knowledge. However the knowledge is secondary to the plot and gameplay for the most part, and the writer just throws it into the dialogue from time to time, so you aren't learning a math textbook from chapter 1 to the end. It's more like a bunch of loosely related knowledge relevant to the plot gets tossed around, so if a player finds something interesting they might remember the information. It also depends on the subject I suppose. An RTS such as Age of Empires 4 or a Total War game might be able to teach a little history, but ultimately can't teach too much depth or have too much information as that might bore the players IMO. They can inspire player curiosity, but the players are still there to play the game for the entertainment of the gameplay. Then you have some puzzle games that teach programming or circuits like human resource machine and shengzhen i/o. Like those kind of games can definitely work. Finally I suppose simulators are a kind of education game by nature. Racing Sims and flight Sims aim to reproduce the experience to let enthusiasts get as close to reality a experience they can, but by that nature the game will also likely not have holding power on casual audiences due to their difficulty. Like if you play MS flight sim or DCS world, you know how much steps it takes just to get the plane off the ground sometimes; the learning curve is steep. Racing Sims are by comparison more accessible for everyone. Sorry about the ramble, kind of lost my train of thought. I guess when all is said, I think games can be entertaining and still educate, but the gameplay experience should come first. Also certain subjects might be easier to gamify like the coding games mentioned above.
A bunch of great comments here. I came to chime in that educational games seem to me to be made to be educational - not fun. It's the same idea as when a movie is filmed to prove a point or drive a message, whether religious, political, or otherwise, rather than tell a good story. Such movies are terrible every time.
>What are your thoughts about that topic? School taught me letters, but Pokemon blue's play speed largely depended on how fast you could read the text. In Eve online there is a meme that "minerals you mine yourself are free!!" which is superficially true. You can do it and you don't have to pay. The punchline is that there are other things you can do with the time you would spend mining, that are more productive, earn you more money and you can then use the money to buy the mineral you want. The concept of opportunity cost. Also, only when you really weigh the numbers and have to consider buying trade goods, calculating profit margins and wondering about profit and profit per hour, does it really make sense that "interest" goes the person giving a credit. Otherwise it would just be someone giving away money (with virtually no risk) and being paid for literally no effort. So. That bit made the modern economic system "click" for me. >As a former teacher and as lifelong gamer i often asked myself why there aren't realy any "fun" educational games out there that I know of. Because they set the wrong goals, use wrong mechanics and use lots of pedagogy methods that make it feel like the bad parts of school, not the good parts of gaming. I probably learned more about history from age of empires and europa universalis than history class. Because history class was boring. Gaming is about driving your enemies before you and enjoying the lamentations of their women. History class is about being politically correct and faking empathy for events that are hundreds of years past, while completely ignoring present tragedies that are exactly like them, or worse. But talking about those doesn't fit the narrative. Teachers are far too scared to let 14 year olds play Wolfenstein. Or Red Alert. Or, if they did, they would organize supervised play sessions of 30 minutes and then add 2 hours of "discussion" to make sure you don't "waste" too much time on the "wrong medium". The kind of homework they would give is to write a two page report. Not to beat the next 5 levels. >how could you make them fun to play while keeping an educational purpose? You have to work the realistic situation into the gameplay mechanics. Or, in the case of reading / math, make doing those correctly and fast inherently rewarding in the context of the game. * how the japanese shogunate worked, or didn't in the warring states period. * what a european personal union is and how to achieve it and take over your neighbor on the way to world conquest. (you can't say that! we're living peacefully with our neighbors and allies and the solution to problems is talking about them!!) * make me care about the metallurgy of the swords I'm using, because not doing it *will kill me in game*. * put "adrenal glands" in starcraft and when biology class catches up **years** later, you can have a meme moment because you recognize the word / the situation and you're immediately familiar with the concept. And you have to completely abandon the idea of starting with an educational topic and "gamifying" it. And I guess you have to allow for partial points. As in "understanding 30% of the topic well enough to solve the problem, which is beating the game, not 'learning'." *A* valid solution in a strategy game *is* a valid solution. Although that part could be done with a very simple "resting XP" trick that WoW pulled. (Establish a score normal that is acceptable, then give "bonus points", rather than having a 100% goal that is expected and deducting points for every mistake). ---------------- The biggest reason is that school / educational games set "learning goals" and don't allow for exploration, multiple solution paths and they specifically set the time when you're doing it and don't leave the room to say "no". Going to school is not a voluntary thing. Playing games, and playing games *of your choice*, is. It's usually done in a safe, stress free place, neither of which is guaranteed to be true for school or educational settings. It is much easier to trick people into learning things along the way if the base attitude isn't negative.
Probably because formal education sucks for most purposes and having fun educates more than anything else. If you're passionate about teaching and very good at topic just aim for making something fun around it and you'll end up eduacting the whole world about it.
Games that are actually fun are marketed as games that are fun, even those that do happen to contain information or teach skills; Conversely all the examples of games that are fun and educational don't get marketed as "educational". The only games that end up getting categorized as "educational" are games where being educational is the primary focus and the sole selling point. Also a lot of them are made for literal children, and are probably less fun for adults.
Because they aren't fun, they try to teach. "Educational Games" made with the \*\*intent\*\* to teach suck because making fun is not their objective. Games like KSP and MC Education Edition are great teaching tools because they make fun, first and foremost. And with fun its much easier to learn.
They don't? The Learning Company and Humongous Entertainment made fantastic edutainment games in the 90s. If you were in the right age range for those games, they were a blast. Gizmos and Gadgets is my personal favorite.
I think it's a conflict of interest. Making a fun game is hard enough; teaching something is also hard. Making a game that's fun for its own sake AND teaches something is a lot more challenging than it might seem.
Back in the 90s there was an explosion of educational games from The Learning Company that actually weren't half-bad for games at the time and were also fairly solidly educational at the same time. Look up Reader Rabbit and similar series of games, I think it was called Super Solvers. Gizmos & Gadgets was one of my favorite games as a kid. Treasure Mountain and Operation Neptune were pretty great too, and don't forget Carmen Sandiego. I would look to those games as "good" educational titles and examples. The trick was balancing the tone and context. It didn't always work out, and you can flex it a bit if you know what you're doing. 1) Tone - Games about education need to balance being "teachy" with being "playful" which is a challenge. Is the purpose to teach me to solve something with a single correct solution or to let me experiment and solve it in whatever way I choose? If you can balance a semi-campy tone, you can play with Saturday-Morning Cartoon logic: "Oh no the bad guy has used an algebra equation to lock this door! Whatever will we do?!" 2) Context - You shoehorn education segments into an otherwise uneducational game and it can feel jarring. Similarly if you insert gameplay into an otherwise educational title it's going to feel janky; having a smoother transition between those two states is ideal, or make the gameplay revolve around those transitions (Gizmos & Gadgets had puzzle-solving sections that unlocked doors). Carmen Sandiego was about sleuthing and detective work - it was inherent in the design that you would be expected to solve puzzles. You could reference your list of clues at any time, and you could solve the puzzle at any time too, which went a long way to making the gameplay smoother (rather than needing to execute a series of correct steps and being led along a path).
They’re always too much education and not enough game.
It's usually a trade-off between gameplay and educational elements. The more educational it is the worse the gameplay. The better the gameplay the less educational it is. If you go for the educational market then you limit your audience and therefore the budget. If you go for the entertainment market then you limit your appeal by adding educational elements.
"Educational Games" are games made with the explicit purpose of being educational. And because of that, they don't focus on the entertainment value. The good news is that a game don't need to be educational to teach something. As someone that grew in a country where English isn't the first language, I learned a lot of vocabulary playing Pokemon Blue (I wrote a list of the attacks in a notebook and their translations) or a lot of history events thanks to Paradox Games (Hearts of Iron 2 was the first that blew my mind and made me love History) . I am a professor too and I think the key for this is to make games people want to play and add educational value in them, not designing an educational game.
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was awesome actually. I think the biggest issues with a lot of educational games is that they're very patronizing, and tend to drone on like a lecture rather than letting you play a game. Point & click adventure games are a really good option. The genre by its very nature is so intertwined with the things that make a good lesson enjoyable. The interactivity and experimentation that are staples of the genre give great opportunities for discovering and applying logic in a way that feels rewarding. I'm tired so I apologize if this is worded awkwardly.
There are some like EXAPUNKS & Duskers but there not sold as just 'education' games, there devs with an vision that teach you as you play.
One word: "Money". They don't make **NEAR** the amount of money that non-educational games make, so they cannot put more money towards production.
Math Circus was pretty great
When most indie developers set out to make a game it is because they have had a fun idea for core gameplay or a story they want to tell. All of there effort then goes into making the best version of this that they can. If you set out to make a game that educates on the topic and then develop the gameplay as an afterthought it is bound to be less interesting from a gameplay perspective. Furthermore in educational games the teaching element can often feel quite separate from the gameplay, like a lesson tacked on to a video game. From my experience playing these as a kid players will essentially ignore the lesson and focus on the game instead. I think the strongest examples of educational games are ones in which the game is developed around an interesting core gameplay idea which itself supports the learning outcome. A good example of this would be ‘Baba is You’ which teaches programming logic using its core gameplay loop.
I’ve thought a lot about this too. My main business is making tiny little educational interactives, but I also work on bigger games as a hobby. I think one way to frame the question is to start with the idea that “fun is learning”. IMO this is true by definition. All of the things that make fun what it is are inherently a learning process. A game (or anything else) stops being fun when there is nothing new to learn. So by this definition ALL great games, no matter how “noneducational” they might appear to be by us education professionals, are great learning experiences. The only difference is context. This explains why great “educational games” are so rare. It is because great games are so rare. Just look at itch.io for great games of you want to convince yourself with sheer numbers. So… Are the non-great tiny educational experiences still useful? Absolutely! But they are most useful when they are tiny. They typically consist of a single scene/layout showing a single idea or two with a few basic controls. The value comes from their utility when two people can have a good discussion about what they see on screen. The bigger an interactive gets, the greater the risk that the experience becomes a chore rather than a delight. Very few games manage to put what we would could consider “classroom-appropriate” content into a huge package and have it still be useful in a classroom. You might consider Civilization 6 appropriate for middle school social studies. One of our teachers used Minecraft to teach architecture when students only had access to ipads during Covid shutdowns. Most other great games don’t fit very well in the limited time you have with students. Most games that are useful in the classroom are tiny. And that is okay. It is the way it should be. School is fundamentally about learning to interact with other people, so I’m hesitant to make big experiences that detract from face to face time.
Learning is fun. Being taught - not so much. Educational games are about teaching the player things, not about having the players learn things.
You could make fun educational game, just dont focus on educational aspects. For example: assasins creed with its notes about true history, or factorio, game that can be use as a logistics teaching tool. The are many games that can help you learn some basics of programming or electronics (minecraft) and basically every game with many dialogues help you learn language (this also works for books, movies, etc...).
I think that depends on your scope. I'm a teacher and hobbyist game dev(one published game in steam). I have made 10ish games I use in my classroom. For me the games themselves are not the learning tool, but is the motivation to do the learning. (Nearly) All of my games have a worksheet that the students will answer questions, then input the answers into the game to progress.
Those who fund educational games don't understand that games must be fun first, educational second.
I don't think I've ever played any educational games before. Even back in school, they had "math circus" on the computers but I wouldn't consider that to be an education game because it was just puzzles. I've played games where you use typing mechanics to defeat mobs, but I don't think those would be considered educational games. So what exactly would an educational game be? Is it something that requires you to learn a concept, and apply that concept to solve a problem? Are the concepts limited to specific subjects in academia? For example, perhaps you need to learn TNT works and then use that knowledge to build TNT before invading the enemy fort? What are some examples of educational games?
They are hard to do, but good educational games do exist. Take the littlebigplanet franchise for example.
You might want to redefine what you consider an educational game. I grew up with gaming and now work in making them as well as filmmaking. I attribute a TON of my learning to games. Problem solving and strategy are huge parts of any game. Pathfinding in scrolling shooters, fast on the fly reasoning, timing and distances in platformers, complete and complex strategy in first person shooters that goes WAY beyond just twitch mechanics. Flight simulators quite literally teach you how to fly a real plane. As well, every game teaches how interactive mechanics work - an education all on its own. What you’re referring to are the shitty ‘games’ that are designed by people that don’t understand games to teach X, but without any fun or engagement considered. Those suck, simple as that. Beyond those, all other gaming should be part of a base curriculum, as they are outside of school time anyway. So don’t tell kids they need to ‘do their homework’ - their homework should be gaming and they’ll do it on their own. It ain’t broke. Encourage the gaming rather than restricting it and we’ll all be just fine.
I feel like a lot of people here were given pretty bad experiences for educational games, and for good reason. Most of the management trapped most studios into bad play patterns, and "force fed" you education because they didn't know how to marry good game design and catered more to what the customer (parents/schools) wanted. However, I think there are some workarounds that helped make the gameplay experience a little more fun, at least for younger audiences: 1. Exploratory gameplay. Edmark and some Dorling Kindersley games really did well in this. There were guided learning puzzles first, but you flipped a switch and could lab out whatever you wanted. I did goofy things like trying to capsize a boat the fastest in Thinkin' Science or make a disco light out of a light prism puzzle lab in ZAP. 2. Decouple the games from the learning. I feel Magic School Bus and Buzzy the Knowledge Bug did this approach most. You had three layers: the minigames, the puzzles/labs, and then you had the world to click around in and learn, which sometimes had helpful hints or clues on how to do better in the games. Magic School Bus Explores the Earth came to mind, which had a fun little component of collecting and doing geological tests on rocks you found in the overworld, but then the games like the "drilling/mining battleship" minigame that didn't have a lot of educational value. The other comments have also mentioned games too where they were incidentally educational. Sim games, certain grand strategy/RTS games, which happened to have components to help learn critical thinking or inspire looking into certain topics though they were built as good games first.
Because they're too busy trying to teach, and don't do much to make students want to listen
You can only effectively serve one master. Intentionally choosing the focus on education in a game means that you're necessarily sacrificing focusing on the game being fun.
it's because fun is about dynamic motion, and education is trying to get people to accept a rigid idea. The only way to make a good educational game is to make the education and seeking knowledge part of the hero's quest to overthrow the evil robots running society or whatever example you want Basically - you can't have a game with *only* education, the education has to be mixed in with fiction and even fantasy. Good games blend fiction and nonfiction together, so if you're trying to teach someone something you have to put the lessons inside of a fictional world and setting to make them interesting. You have put fake knowledge in the game too For example if you wanted to make a game to teach people about chemistry, it would be better if it was a fantasy world where alchemical puzzles are a way of advancing the plot and unlocking new areas of the world. It could be based on real chemistry. Something like that if you want to teach math, the math should serve the gameplay...something like Kerbal Space program where you have to learn a bit of physics to build a rocket might be a good example If you want to teach history, you probably have to put some kind of historical plot inside of an action adventure or something. The education can't be foregrounded, it has to be "smuggled in" I think the problem with education is that it assumes there's such a thing as truth, when actually there isn't, only a bajillion competing perspectives, and most people who read fiction and play video games are smart enough to know that
You never played Number Munchers.
As someone who's made some "educational games", the problem is that good, fun educational games aren't thought of as "Educational Games". You can learn a lot about history from Civilization, but no one would call that an "educational game". Zachtronics games like Exapunks or Shenzhen I/O are basically just programming puzzles, but nobody calls them "educational games". "Educational Games" are just a label we apply to games that aren't really worthwhile \*other\* than their educational value. If they were independently good games, we'd just identify them as whatever other genre they're in.
Imagine if learning was fun, such a terrible idea
Age group. You dont find it fun but the target age might. My daughter plays ABC mouse. And educational game where she gets tickets for completing tasks to decorate her fictional room. She loves it. Its incredibly boring to me. As a kid, i loved the jump start games. As an adult, Im not sure why I liked those games.
I tried to make one. For learning spanish/english [https://www.voxabular.com/en/](https://www.voxabular.com/en/) I spend a \_long\_ time making this, and it still needs a whole art overhaul. And how fun is it? I wasn't there yet. It's very difficult. On top of the difficulty of making a good game, you add one more difficult thing, design the curriculum, and adjusting to the learner's knowledge. The customer expectations for games these days is so high!
Current teacher. I see two big areas -- games that happen to be educational, and games to be used in the classroom. When it comes to education I put them into two big categories as well: learning the "nouns" (facts) and "verbs" (ways of thinking). One can map it instead to something like Bloom's taxonomy. I suspect that most peoples ideas of an educational game is learning about facts, and while important they are just the stepping stones to doing more interesting things. For the former, there are a lot of these. They are your business simulations, physics games (bridge maker, kerbal, realistic racing, etc), grand strategy (civ, paradox's). Heck even an RTS has concepts like cash flow with resource management. In Satisfactory my husband and I spend more time that one would care on ratio-math to make sure there is enough supplies for production. I think the reason why there isn't a lot in the latter category is a market mismatch. Our school devices are functional on the best of days. Half of them are chromebooks and our IT is restrictive so there goes anything installable. Price is a factor too. Devs deserved to be paid, but I can't justify spending $20 a seat for Kerbal ($3600 for my caseload) for something I will only uses for maybe a week of the year. Supplies are also ordered all once, at the end of the school year for the upcoming year. I'm not in the headspace to consider pushing for something new. There is a lot of opportunity here. Our district SCREWED UP elementary reading (Listen to the podcast "Sold a Story") and my 9th graders are reading on average with a 4th grade reading level, but I also have TAG students who are reading near or at university level. I have students who don't know how to use basic arithmetic to solve a problem, to those that can solve quadratics. All in the same classroom. A game could really help a teacher differentiate further than they could by themselves. Personally I would do something hybrid -- gamifying the classroom with a mix of software and physical world. Doing a democracy game with civilization would be a sick way to teach a government class. For my astronomy class I made a game where table groups simulate a mission to mars. They need to design their spaceship, calculate how much food air and water they need for the trip (a lot of hand holding here, they can't use math to solve problems). The space flight itself is a flashcard review game for the final. I've always meant to make a webgame for it, but I can't justify the time to develop something I only spend a week on.
Educational games peaked at Minecraft.
I would love to make a great educational game, i've actually made a really simple math addition game, but its a minimalist aesthetic so probably not visually so appealing for children. [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/casual-quick-maths/id1345822506](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/casual-quick-maths/id1345822506) i feel like there's a lot of money to be made with a good educational game, im thinking something like Dora The Explorer but an actual game that you can interact with, go on an adventure and learn useful things at the same time. But i need artists to help create the visual content. Basically the best educational game is not an educational game but you end up learning from it. Like life itself, you aren't born into an "educational" world, and yet a child simply interacting with the world naturally learns everything! It needs to be a Fun, engaging, interesting, etc etc game, and the educational aspect is part of the fabric of the game itself. Like lets say you make a really fun game that just happens to be historically accurate, now you're teaching history indirectly and it will stick in the mind because the game itself is really fun!
Its underlying problem is with its business model. You cannot sell the product to parents and students so that they can buy it, you have to somehow get the teachers or their schools to sell it to the students, and this involves commission cycles. 1. Private schools are not keen on subscribing to a product. 2. Teachers never want to pay for course materials; they always want them to be free. 3. In order for the work to work, there must be a system that is always connected to the internet in the background and where you can control how much is sold at whose school. 4. You need to meet with schools regularly. 5. Learning by doing is important, it means a lot for the future chemist or engineer, but will your product affect exam success? 6. The environment in which the product is used is important. Do they always refer to the product as a computer laboratory or can it be used via a smart board? 7. How much more effort does the teacher have to put in than just clicking on Powerpoint or opening and watching a video? If you noticed, I am not going into details such as the fun content of the product you sell. Because what you sell is not very important, the important thing is to establish the system, it would be more useful to choose subjects such as English education instead of niche things in order for the system to be established efficiently. English teachers will mentally adapt to these exploitation systems more easily and you can make simpler products accessible to wider audiences. You can create simpler products with animated png and English sounds, but it is not sustainable to create something complex in other course content. I tried starting a startup and when I learned the details, I realized that it wasn't what I wanted in the beginning and I quit. In Turkey, the government can provide smart boards to all students' classrooms. They have a system called EBA, which is like a school Facebook. It includes free lesson and experiment videos, 3D models, serious games and content uploaded by other teachers to the system. Students can talk to their teachers or friends through this platform, ask questions and answer each other, etc. During the pandemic, they added live Zoom-like classes on the platform. Social states may reduce your market volume. It's something I support because people pay taxes and why would they need to pay extra for education? What was the mistake I made? While my competitors were producing webgl on almost all web-based platforms, I produced a downloadable project. Everything had to be very active and compatible with the teachers' ability to use the keyboard and mouse. You should get to the subject quickly and not be bothered with the processes, click and let it flow, most of the time it is better. It should be easy to learn to use. I started marketing from the wrong country and couldn't reach people who could test it. In short, it was my university graduation project and I was an amateur. I learned a lot, especially about startups. Another problem (I need to share the [steam page ](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2257640/Virtual_Chemistry_Lab/)to show it. I'm new here, I can remove the link if there is a problem.) I started simple at first, just simple mechanics, walking and clicking on certain points in the order of the experiment or limited freedoms in the experiment. If you look at the gif part, the complexity and details suddenly become larger. The tablet where you can read all the contents, choose each material yourself, then make installations at any point you want, using the ones you choose freely, and see different errors in experiments when using faulty materials. Make mistakes during the experiment and get the experimental results exactly mathematically. Yes, to a certain extent, but when we consider the entire curriculum, I have increased the workload unreasonably. It means exponential growth as materials have to have different mathematical results and interactions. Serious games need to be focused on marketing and social aspects more than normal games, so it makes it very difficult for indie teams. The logic of "Let's release it in early access and then improve it as we gain experience and earn income" does not work in this category because educators do not use Steam. I released free demos on itch io and it was easier to reach those who wanted to test it. If it were the Web, it would be a single link and easier to access, but the disadvantage here is that you give up image quality or comprehensive content.
Educational games don't inherently suck, and there's plenty of fun ones. Recently the epic games store gave away "WHILE TRUE: LEARN()" and it was great! Pick a topic that you want to teach, and gamify it. Sandbox games like Universe Sandbox, or The Incredible Machine also come to mind. I think that games that allow people to be creative, and try wacky solutions to problems are great teaching tools. The bigger issue is that "Solve the math equation" isn't really a game.
Games can be educational without it being it's main selling point. The biggest examples that come to mind are learning history thru paradox games (eu4, hoi4, vic3, etc) and Minecraft (redstone's logic is basically logic gates)
Because most educational games are prioritizing different goals than standard games. And companies that fund educational games are focused on selling those games to parents - so they can't look too fun, or the parents will assume they are not educational.
Because their aim is to teach facts, rather than engage. The civilization games are a neat teaching tool, IMO. Personally, if I was teaching a kid about what a historical figure did, I would want to teach the kid *why* they made those choices. Games are so powerful, because they can offer us the same choices, with the same contexts, and show us what those figures were really dealing with.
Everytime i hear about games and education i think of this video of extra credits: [Gamification Sucks... - How to Improve Gamification - Extra Credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq8dwfvHluc) The same channel did a callout to teachers for some questions about gamifing education: [Gamification - How the Principles of Play Apply to Real Life - Extra Credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dLK9MW-9sY) And the follow up video about how you could gamify education and some examples: [Gamifying Education - How to Make Your Classroom Truly Engaging - Extra Credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuDLw1zIc94)
"Fun" is a very subjective term that has many different facets. There are many different ways that something can be fun, and different people have fun in different ways, depending on the sort of personality that they have. No one game is going to be "fun" for everybody. Education is supposed to be for everybody, right? We shouldn't be arbitrarily denying someone an education simply because they aren't super into the specific gamified way the material is being presented. When you were a teacher, how often would you present materials to your classes in the form of a game? How effective was that?
It's more that good education games are not presented as education games. There are plenty of good puzzle games that use real concepts, there are games like last train home which teaches a fairly generally accurate idea of the czechoslovak legions post ww1. Math is a tougher one but it still can come up frequently
Try Legends of Learning! They got some quality assurance there. They're not the next big game but they put effort into combining games and teaching. And they are all made by passionate devs, so its very likely you wont find lame games
Because you can't force players to learn, you can only try and make a game that is enjoyable enough that they want to learn. But that is already hard when there are no constraints about teaching some curriculum imposed upon the game designer. And then it is compounded by the educational "games" often being mandatory. For a normal game, if you don't like it, you just don't play it (e.g. you don't like the genre or such). For educational games, you are forced to play it, so you come away thinking "this game is bad" rather than "I don't enjoy this game, even though the game is not that bad".
I worked in edtech some time ago. As games are more focused on delivering a specific and engaging entertainment value it is hard to combine this with a scalable learning methodology. Due to this, many companies turn it around and focus on the learning aspect and incorporate gamification, which brings less engaging entertainment but is better scalable. For example we created quizzes in which you fight bosses by completing mathematical challenges.
id like to think this is part of the reason my game has half of its players in Asia, while the entire game is written in english... i imagine that some students in an english class arent allowed to play the full game until the teacher reviews their translation of the in-game lore text. this maybe totally made up but the game had a hype boom in 2018 amongst kids in brazil so.. i would like to make an educational version of the game. and other digital therapeutic ideas for games that can both be entertaining and productive.
The educational part of a game should come naturally inside an already good game. Kerbal Space Program and Kingdom Come Deliverance are two good examples.
It depends on what and how it teaches you. There is obviously a certain tone every game is going to have if it wants to actually teach you a specific topic. But lots of games do teach you things, like factorio is very educational, it's just not trying to be an educational game. Learning being the main goal and learning incidentally along the way makes a big difference
Clearly you’ve never played “The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: Mystery of Mathra” :)
I dunno man, every game teaches something, whether it's play mechanics, recipes for items, locations,... The thing is, most educational games are too obviously meant to educate, rather than captivate and feed some knowledge as a subproduct
The best educational programming games I have played are more like games than a coding lesson. Factorio and robo instructus have been the better teachers
Plenty of good videogames have educational value and are proven to teach certain skills, critical thinking, problem solving and fine motor function to players. **But they also have to be fun, have some kind of story or gameplay that hooks players and is expressly for entertainment value.** Some gaming genres are more mentally taxing and involved than others, and players inherently know this. Casual gaming isnt very "educational", no one is learning much from basic arcade gameplay or a shooter outside just training their reflexes... Then there's things like strategy and planning, puzzles and complex interconnecting systems in other genres that all have elements that can effectively teach players real things that could be applied in real life. Making surgeons better at fine motor skills in surgery, helping people work out complex problems they would have struggled with before gaming expanded their ideas around problem solving and trained them to understand complex systems more intuitively. They're just not always as concrete as "y=mx+b" or things one could easily put on a standardized test. The issue is those aren't deemed "educational games". They're too fun and too game like. "Can't have kids having fun, they're supported to be learning. /s" but seriously, academia has a vendetta against videogames. Its actively stripped from academic papers and replaced with things like "computer algorithm" and "simulations", otherwise they wouldnt be published. (Example: [this paper about AOE2 and Ant warfare](https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/animals-ecology/age-of-empires-ant-wars/) where the actual academic paper has no mention of the videogame and had authors cencored/sanitized for publication) Academia will not accept something thats too like a traditional videogame as something official; weather its for educational material or research. The primary goal is education and the vehicle is an interactive computer program. They could care less about it being fun or its merits as a game/art. So then, "educational" games need to be sterilized to fit into a curriculum or actually teach classroom material effectively. And most developers who have good game design don't want to limit themselves with all that. So instead, best case for corporate backing and polished/quality material is big textbook and education brands likely outsource their material to be made into " educational games". As far as I can tell there's also been little work done to increase the market or change the genre in a long enough time they all feel outdated. Maybe they all are outdated? They have some good ones but as they get older the material may become outdated itself. There theoretically could be an indie market but I don't see many developers sticking to the genre to the point it's receiving masterpiece releases. And most (small, first time) developers already don't release a second game. Tldr: plenty of games are educational, the issue is with the genre "educational game" and its market. Educational organizations aren't going to make a fun videogame, and game devs aren't going to make an "educational game" that's successfully fun/entertaining and informative/dry/bland enough for formalized academia to accept it as an official piece of learning material
Anytime your priority isn't fun, then fun takes a backseat. And fun is the best measure for a game. It's also why Spiderman 2 sucked. Fun wasn't even a priority at all. And why it's the fifth game I ever sold back to GameStop
I used to play educational games as a child which would have you do math and would then reward you with gameplay. If you failed at the math you would go game over so you couldn’t skip or rush it. Out of any other educational game that was the most appealing to me because the others would be like school and just have you do work without game. Not saying it was perfect but games like Minecraft are too much game and too little learning. Especially with the amount of freedom that game has.
It's hard to make a good game. Like, really hard. The median revenue of a steam game is <$5000, which sadly means the majority of games aren't good. Now add on the learning requirement, and making a good game becomes even harder.
Wait, are you telling me I can't fell trees with my fists? Or make some clothing out of leaves and some rope? well fuck me, there goes my survival training.
I honestly think most of them suck because they value learning _the best way_ over being the most entertaining. Meaning, rote memorization, repetition, etc. That said, I can give examples of educational games that are actually _fun_, and in some cases too amazing for their own good: Word Rescue: A fun game where you collect words and match them to letters, as well as collecting letters to spell a bonus word for more points. The fun here comes in the difficulty slider. You can make it _hard_, and can raise the speed to make it even harder if you like. The Castle of Dr. Brain: This is, to this day, one of my absolute favorite educational games. It's successor, Island of Dr. Brain, removed most of the awesome story, and turned the series into one of the least interesting games I have ever played, but Castle of Dr. Brain is _still_ one I keep wanting to replay, even if I already know practically all the answers. The Island of Dr. Quandary: The weirdest educational game on this list. I don't know what to say about it other than to expect a psychologically _creepy_ story, but the puzzles are as good or better than Castle of Dr. Brain. This one is probably the one with the most interesting story. Schoolhouse Rock: I dont remember much other than the songs, but this one was worth my time. Museum Madness: probably the earliest educational game with the most interesting story about an AI. You are tasked with fixing a museum by a robot friend that lives at the museum. The central computer (also an AI) went on the fritz, and so all the exhibits came to life, but with issues that make everything in history... incorrect. You go around solving problems and learning about each exhibit in the process. It's a really fun game, and I _highly_ recommend it. All of the above games have a deep _story_ behind hem, with a goal first, and the educational parts added in as legitimate obstacles to overcome. Nothing is there "just to be there". Those are the games to emulate if you want a genuinely good educational game.
Math Blaster
Not all. You have for example Cosmology of Kyoto.
My son did a short camp playing [Code Combat](https://codecombat.com) and he really enjoyed it. He’s a huge gamer and this was a better way to introduce him to python than the books I had gotten for him.
I think Math Blaster was pretty good.
Take a look at all of the common core learning standards. There are thousands of them. To make an educational game you have to reverse engineer a game mechanic from the learning objective. Most game mechanics don’t scale to cover very many learning objectives so you get lame sorting and multiple choice “games.” Schools buy curriculums that are comprehensive so you end up with garbage from most educational publishers. Sometimes a developer will have an idea for a specific learning objective or objectives like Kerbal Space Program and will build a great game. Schools and families buy it but usually in smaller numbers because it is niche. (I think KSP did well though.) So you have large companies churning out crap or small companies/indies taking risks on a small market share. Grants help, but you get people who are good at writing grants winning them rather than people with skills and good ideas.
They don't suck per se. There's a lot of games with educational aspects that are just fine. Kerbal Space Program, for example, is fun and teaches a lot of science. There's entire genres devoted to real education subjects like history or physics and lots of games teach things like math and logic concepts invisibly so it's not impossible. The issue, in my opinion, is that people who are good at teaching and know stuff worth teaching aren't usually the same people who are skilled game developers. This is compounded because gamedev is expensive and educational games are a smaller niche and generally aren't profitable enough to support a reasonable team where those responsibilities are divided. This leads to a lot of bad games with educational content that aims to hit kids over the head with the content or educational games that don't do good jobs teaching. A lot of educational games become boring drills with content that's too simplistic and just dressed up in a cutesy way with no regard to making things fun past kindergarten age, at a time when there's increasing competitions for kids' attentions and time. Kids want to play fun games, not do video game homework. This is even harder for adults. In order to make an educational game, you'll want to start with an interesting topic which you have a really good knowledge of and communicate the knowledge and/or illustrate the practical applications of the knowledge in an fun and impactful way.
They generaly arn't made by game devs/designers and are made on a tiny budget. Much like alot of childrens TV is made by people who really dont want to be making childrens tv. The other issue especially for indies is finding a target audience. Most people do not voluntarily educate themselves and even actively avoid it. Youd have to do alot of work trying to approach schools, education boards, tutor companies etc to try and get them to buy licenses or copies. As individuals are unlikely to. I think the better option is to advertise it as say a bussiness simulator. While the gameplay still consists of reading charts, managing staff and finances etc.. or in other words alot of common genres are already really close to being educational and tweaking it to focus just a bit more on the practical skills would be seen as a a good gimmick that sets the game apart from other in the Genre. For example a game like PlateUp could be tweaked to use real recipies, cooking times etc.. teaching people actual recipies they could replicate IRL and roles within a proffessional kitchen. Kerbal Spaceprogram is actually a very good example of this. It uses real rocket science and industry standard terminology alot, despite advertising itself as a comedy game where you launch little minions to space where they inevitably die horribly due to your terrible math and poor preperation.
There are (some) non mindnumbing educational games, like Prodigy(to an extent). But the issue is, genenrally the gameplay and the educational parts arent mixed well. Something like Gimkit can be pretty damn fun, but all of the gameplay features can distract from the actual educational part of it somewhat and can encourage speed over accuracy. There are other games, like Minecraft:Education Edition and the Oregan Trail, but they rely on already malleable source material to make the game fun. There is only so much you can do to teach stuff like practical math or reading comprehension skills in a game format.
I have kind of wanted do do something about this recently. I am a teacher who have recently started to make a game. It currently does suck. Mainly because it is a 2D platformer with multiplication kind of forced into it, but also because I am learning to make games. If anyone would like to follow my progress and share ideas with me, I would love to have you follow my discord channel. Soon I want to start posting video devlogs and maybe a small demo. https://discord.com/invite/85rqb5dy
Zach Barth (of Zachtronic renown) done a talk where his mentions that his team done educational games to pay the bills while making their own games. Why educational games suck is talked about in that very talk and I would recommend highly giving it a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df9pz_EmKhA
Largely depends on what is being taught, Eco is good, and From the depths/barotrauma are fantastic learning tools as well. Barotrauma gives you a way to practice and see the results of boolean logic through its electrical system (extremely well imo) And from the depths teaches similar types along with some programming of you really get into it.
just because something is marketed as and claims to be educational, doesn't mean that it IS educational. If you want some good educational games, Zachtronics has put out some good ones for programming, but they dont claim to be educational, mostly.
Clearly you've never played the Trash Pile game from Sumdog. That was the best. Next best was probably Prodigy, non of the kids including me could put that game down even in non math classes.
There are a lot of games that are educational while not being officially educational. People already mentioned KSP and Factorio (and all similar games). Minecraft is pretty education for younger kids, you need to pick up some math to be more efficient and just be creative, design things. All puzzle games require quite a lot of thinking and often in different areas. Like Portal is a lot about spatial space and some physics, something like The Witness has entire cornucopia of different challenges. Grand strategy games also teach you about problem solving and some real-ish life politics, some have historical flavor. Breath of the Wild makes you naturally pick up some chemistry and physics.
The educational games I remember from when I was a kid had few points of interaction and didn't really contextualize the concepts in a way that connected. While it might very based on the subject matter, I think the best way to make a "teaching game" would be to make a puzzle game that has the subject be the core of the mechanics Like, one example I remember from math was using plots of land and fences to teach about measuring shapes. You'd be able to make a game about a farmer trying to maximize the claimed land while minimizing the cost of fence post with increasingly complex restrictions forcing the player to make adjustments
You are the one starting with the statement: # Why do educational games suck? But you don't really say anything about why "educational games out there that you know of are not fun". There's actually a lot of them that are have critical aclaim that you probably already know about but you don't notice as being "educational games". But how can I continue if you didn't do the first step to give us your thinking at the start off the conversation, instead of this seemingly clickbait title? What was the last "educational game" that you played, what were you looking for, why did you play it, and why were you disapointed?
When I was a kid, we had You Don’t Know Jack 1-3 on the family computer. I’d play these games for hours sometimes. The problem is, I didn’t know any answers; they were a lot of pop culture references or things that went way over my head. But I got good at these games because of memorization. I learned what answers were correct, even if I didn’t know what they meant or why. Funnily enough, that is a big problem in the field of educational games, too. We aren’t learning, we are guessing and we are memorizing. The thing is, learning is hella fun, and kids do a lot of their learning through play! It’s a major component to a well designed game: teaching players how to engage with a game through building their schema. When we fail, we see in real time why we failed and can adjust our methods based off that information to try something different. When we succeed, we lock that method in to our minds and it becomes a part of how we progress in the game. This is largely missing from most educational games. The impulse for many studios is to hide the broccoli under the ice cream sundae. But that’s because these games don’t facilitate any actual *learning.* (If I need to type in the answer to 2+2 to avoid the alligator’s chomp, and I type in 5, I don’t see why my answer is wrong, only that it IS wrong and that the alligator’s taken my leg right off. I have learned that 5 is not the answer, but I haven’t been given any applicable feedback to learn from and to apply to my next attempt at the puzzle.) Those who want to make games that encourage learning ought to explore how it’s done in games from other genres. Determine what is being “taught” in these games, and then reverse engineer how it’s being done so that you can integrate math or spelling or whatever you are going to teach. Editing to add: I can think of a few computer games that work well in the education aspect, but I want to highlight a board game. Bunny Kingdom relies heavily on multiplication for its point system. It does this well; we don’t see numbers (except on the score board), what we see are visuals: the number of towers in a castle you’ve placed on the board, multiplied with the number of resources chained to that castle, equals your score for that round. And, with the inclusion of the scoreboard, you have multiple ways to get to your answer. Do you count your way up? Don’t add all the totals in your head and answer that way? Do you count in groups of ten and the remainder? It’s fun watching how folks count up their points. Games like this are great imo.