Brian Eggleston

            In “Video Games in Education”, Squire presents the thesis that the educational potential of videogames are largely ignored by the educational community. He argues that more research is needed to elucidate the possibilities that video games might present, as well as giving some insight into the design techniques that would be necessary to create educational video games. In the process of arguing this thesis, Squire attempts to debunk several “myths” about video games, and show that they are not the destructive entities that opponents of the video game generation have made them out to be, but instead useful tools for social learning.

            I think however, that there is a major problem with this thesis, which is the infeasibility of creating effective edutainment. One of the first issues facing the idea of edutainment is the constraint that any learning that will take place in the course of the game will have to be as concentrated as the learning that takes place in the classroom, or else it will not be worthwhile to replace the latter with the former. However, this is no easy task. You cannot just sit a child down in front of CIVIII, and hope that in the course of 8 hours of playing the child will learn something about economics. The game has to ensure that every hour spent playing it will be more productive than an hour spent in the classroom. But what kind of game would it take to be this productive? Unfortunately, probably not the kind of game that would be able to keep a student’s interest for a prolonged period of time. One of the most attractive things about video games, and one of the things that makes them so much fun to play is that they don’t require a significant amount of thinking. They let you coast into autopilot and forget about the real world for a while. If video games were suddenly made to be grounded in the real world and in education, one of the primary factors that leads to the enjoyment of video games.

            In addition to this, there is a major problem with trying to get students to play a game that is educational. It would be almost impossible to create a game in which the educational value is so hidden that the student is incapable of figuring out that the game is actually supposed to be teaching something in addition to just being enjoyable. But, the age at which students might stand most to benefit from these edutainment games is also the age at which they are most rebellious. No student is going to want to play a game that he/she knows is supposed to be a learning tool. No matter how fun the game might actually be, the student is going to be resentful of the fact that he/she is basically being “tricked” into learning, and would either refuse to play the game, or would refuse to commit his/herself to the game fully, thereby negating its educational value. This makes the project of creating a video game that is simultaneously fun and significantly educational a rather infeasible one.

References

Squire, K. (2003). Video games in education. International Journal of Intelligent Simulations and Gaming, 2(1).