Game-Based Learning

I like computer games. I believe you can learn about the real world by playing them. Unfortunately in my experiance (not that I have a great deal) the games that are the most enjoyable tend to teach the least, and those that teach a good deal of material are not at all enjoyable to play. Unfortunately my experiance tonight reinforced that conclusion.

I played Third World Farmer and FloodSim. I've actually played Third World Farmer before, when our class syllabus was first sent to us, and I've noticed that several changes have been made. When I first played it, the game was impossible to "win". No matter how carefully and wisely you made decisions, bad luck and circumstances beyond the player's (or a poor farmer's) control eventually always led to failure. Of course this is not  the usual scenario in a game for obvious reasons, but I thought it was a very effective way to demonstrate how people in precarious life situations are so vulnerable to outside forces. The game was a bit simplistic, but this made it easy to play and allowed the teaching point to be reached quickly. It was also a little heavy-handed with political "preaching" ("You've had to spend all your money on foreign medicine, praise patent laws."), but this created a teachable moment about how US policies can affect other nations, and about how everyone has a bias or political agenda, even if it is subconscious. The later changes (showing each person's health, allowing the player to make family planning and education decisions), has added new layers of information to the game, but it has also given the player much more control made it much easier and this has taken away from the initial lesson about precariousness.

FloodSim on the other hand was a deluge of complex information in the guise of a game. Characters lectured the player, who then made decisions that felt meaningless because of the games schizophrenic feedback (newspaper headlines that alternatively read "You've done well" and followed by  "You've done poorly" just moments later.)

Although I think both of these games could be used for education purposes, I don't think I would want to use either as they were probably intended. I think playing Third World Farmer would be a good homework assignment after challenges to developing nations had already been studied a bit in class. The next day there could be a class discussion about the game and how it made students think more deeply about their previous learning. There could even be a writing or some other assignment reflecting on the students' experiences with the game and how it relates to other class material. FloodSim could be utilized as a teaching tool with the game projected and the whole class discussing the information as everyone together "tries out this simulation of how policy decisions affect outcomes" or "of what types of policies governments can use to deal with flooding". FloodSim presents a lot of information in a visual way, but I think calling it a "game" and telling students to "play" it would cause those students to never trust their teacher again! as a game it is a dismal failure, (and perhaps the name "Sim" implies that it was never to be thought of as a game in the usual sense), but I think it could be effectively used in the classroom as an alternative to a reading assignment or direct instruction from the teacher.