| | July 20198eymour Papert--the brilliant polymath who co-founded the MIT Media Lab--predicted twenty-five years ago that the future of learning would lie in the development of learning games. It has taken a while for the world to catch up to his visionary insight, but over the last five years the idea of "serious games" has become one of the hottest areas in education and training. The improvement in internet bandwidth and the development of so-called "game engines" like Unity and Unreal that allow for the creation of interactive 3D worlds like those in "AAA" video games at relatively low (and rapidly decreasing) cost have made it possible for almost any organization to create complex, game-like experiences that can rival what is available in the commercial game market.The appeal of learning games is that they offer a possible answer to what has long seemed like an impossible dream: creating educational content that learners actually want to interact with. Learning designers, as Papert noted, have long been"green with envy when they see the energy [people] pour into computer games."The marriage of games and learning may at first seem incongruous, but, in fact, learning design and game design are more alike than one might think. In a manner of speaking, game design is learning design. A game doesn't work unless its audience can learn to play it. Moreover, it is actually the learning that makes the game fun. Most games become boring once they are mastered. Games are already effective learning experiences--they just don't, for the most part, teach skills that are applicable to the real world. That's where learning designers come in--if we can combine the best of what learning designers do with what the best of what game designers do, we may be able to revolutionize learning.But what if we can't? Papert highlighted the risk with a reference to an old anecdote, according to which a famous beauty not noted for her intellect once suggested to George Bernard Shaw, a brilliant playwright not noted for his handsomeness, that they could have an amazing child together, "with my looks and your brains." "But Madame," Shaw is supposed to have responded, "what if the child had my looks and your brains?" In our case, the worry is that educational games may turn out combine all the fun of traditional education with the intellectual content of most games.Unfortunately, that has often been exactly what happens when learning designers try to create games. Many of the games they produce involve a game-like quest--getting to Mars, say, or killing zombies--but make the learner answer multiple-choice trivia questions to get ahead in the game. Learners are not fooled--they can tell they are getting a quiz disguised as a game. Efforts along these lines tend to confirm one's worst fears about what could happen to games in the hands of educators. IN MY OPINIONSLEARNING GAMES: WHY INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN NEEDS TO BE MORE LIKE GAME DESIGNBy Gregg Collins, Ph.D. Chief Learning Scientist, NIIT Ltd.
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