The obvious value of many games and simulations lies in the enjoyment we get from playing them. Much of the fun in playing games comes from the rewards or satisfaction our brains get from learning and using in-game and game-related skills. For instance, driving games sell in their millions because we’re very good at subconsciously calculating how to get round corners. And because we become involved or ‘emotionally engaged’ in doing so.
Judging by sales the most fun comes from games that model physical skills and/ or what can be termed as ‘executive skills’. Executive skills include a range of cognitive skills involved in concentrating on tasks and maintaining self-discipline. They’re the ‘glue’ that helps us to build and integrate the ready made cognitive plans or models that allow us to think before we act. These plans or ‘blueprints’ let us bring thought into action by supporting effective planning, critical thinking and predictive decision making.
The Sea of Menace is part of a set of gamebooks for early readers
‘Physical’ videogames involving shooting, football, platforming and golf simulations have their place in developing some ‘executive skills’. However, it’s tabletop RPGs, boardgames, videogame RPGs and simulations that focus on finding fun and entertainment through asking players to use ‘executive skills’ and other higher cognitive functions.
Games deliver these valuable cognitive skills through modelling different problems and situations. This requires players to interpret and understand the problems and situations they are dealing with. For example, Monopoly models property development, Zoo Tycoon 2 models facilities management and Microsoft Flight Simulator models piloting.
Jacks is a classic playground game
Some of the skills within any game are specific to the role and model being played. Many others are transferable and ‘lessons learned’ can be integrated across a wide range of cognitive blueprints. This makes games a very effective way to train and educate, as learning by working with or playing through models is ideally suited to our brains, which learn through building and testing models.
The tuition that supports gamers is a critical factor in transferring and generating both the fun and learning within many games. Gamesmasters, fellow players, tutorials, forums, instructions and many other types of peer or self-directed learning allow players to acquire skills rapidly and create a demand for more intense or demanding challenges, which rely on ever more complex social and cognitive skills.
Little King’s Story uses RPG, Sim and RTS skills
It is already practical to look at the available research and draw up a list of the some of the benefits games and simulations have to offer:
self-motivation
literacy skills
visual literacy skills
basic numeracy
creative writing
problem solving
resource management
independent learning skills
critical thinking skills
collaboration and co-operation
intersubjectivity
systemic decision making
diagnostic and predictive decision making
Some of the likely outcomes from learning such skills and how to use them in a wide range of different contexts include:
improved resilience and mental health
adaptable interpersonal skills
considered and systemic decision making
highly flexible problem solving skills
improved academic performance in independent learning contexts, e.g. universities
Such a list, (which is not exhaustive), is valuable in terms of persuading parents, teachers and administrators that games have a lot to offer in homes, schools and colleges. However, it is equally important to stress that a match between fun or entertainment and the use of certain skills is highly dependent on avoiding ‘candy-coated’ learning.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
The games industry’s venture into ‘edutainment’ on CD-ROM in the 1990s clearly demonstrated that trying to bolt together standard gameplay alongside traditional school-based learning is unlikely to work. In-game skills and content have to follow from the gameplay or ‘fun’, rather than dictating the form of the gameplay.
For example, Dorling Kindersley and Microsoft released a Dinosaurs CD-ROM, which was little more than a reference book with a few game elements thrown in. The Tyrannosaurus Rex in Tomb Raider does more to make dinosaurs interesting in the space of a few minutes on screen, because players are confronted by the creature and have to consider how dinosaurs may have moved or attacked as they interact.
Traveller is an easy to learn tabletop RPG
Zoo Tycoon 2: Extinct Animals takes the idea of fun-based or focused skills and dinosaurs a step further by making fossils almost interesting. Players have to complete a ‘treasure hunt’ exercise to find various fossils; then synthesise the fossils in a lab to get viable DNA; before resurrecting creatures from various distant ages. They then have to work out how to look after the creatures and turn them into a safe visitor attraction.
Sadly, most schools try to start with subject content, e.g. volcanoes or fractions, and fit any game around the content. This is largely because schools remain locked into a Victorian model of learning that places subject content before skills, instead of alongside them. That makes it very difficult to establish active, independent or peer learning in the way many games can.
Dominion is a deck builder enjoyed by kids and adults
There is much talk of the value of ’soft skills’, ‘executive skills’ and ‘cognitive skills’ but the ‘back to basics’ crowd disqualify games, and many other forms of active learning, because they’re fun and, therefore, not to be taken seriously. From a psychological or scientific perspective, separating fun and skills or learning is a denial of empirical evidence of how our brains function. Science shows that our brains learn by building and testing models, and that they learn faster and in more depth when we’re actively enjoying meeting and solving challenging tasks.
Some schools are changing, as they recognise the cost of leaving active learning and skills development until college or university. However, for the foreseeable future it’s parents, librarians, games designers and gamers themselves who can choose to deliver or get more fun, and therefore more skills, by buying and playing games which offer rich contexts and advantageous cognitive skills. For parents, this is best done as early as possible by learning enough about play and games to support kid’s early learning.
