Video Games Are the Future of Education

I think video games are more inspirational then they are educational. Of course, their power can be channeled to make them more useful but success stories are rare, if there are any.

I know the head of the largest gaming magazine in Turkey, who quit his job years ago to consult Turkish game companies as well as the government to build such games. The government basically funded everything but the result is still below what they wished for.

Reforming education is hard. So is building video games. Now they had two problems. Reminds me regex. :)

The games that taught me real lessons were always those hardcore, for fun ones.

Back in the day (2005), we didn't have Turkish translations for DnD rulebooks. I pirated PDF scans and read all of them (very slowly) to be able to play as a DM for my friends. That is still the most challenging reading comprehension practice I've ever done for the English language.

I played the entire Monkey Island series with a dictionary open. Finished Starcraft BW multiple times just to be able grasp the story. Played Medieval Total War with many factions just to see what had been the differences among them during those times. Started researching the cold war after playing MGS3 since it was otherwise a really opaque thing to look at as a kid from Turkey. I owe my almost reflex-like analytical skills to those games where number crunching is the deciding factor for success, such as WoW with its auction house, Dota with its item combinations, Cities Skyline with balancing resources, and all those other tycoon games that I don't even remember.

Finally and most importantly, I'm a computer engineer today because Starcraft BW, Heroes 3 M&M and Warcraft 3 had world editors that can produce maps even for "multiplayer". Thank you Blizzard and 3DO, I owe you people big time <3.

In my case it was the egg needed for making a gingerbread cookie on Christmass. There was only one low level area that would drop them 100%. So I farmed it en-masse, no one else did.

I think the real value of KSP is orthogonal to textbooks. Like it says in that one xkcd strip, it gives you an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics by letting you interact directly (and with a goal) with orbital trajectories. I think you'd have a hard time getting the same visual intuition about how the ellipse stretches and rotates depending on whether you burn retrograde or radially out from a textbook.

The great value, here, I think, is that you can have a process completely alien to humans and get an intuition of it about as good as what we can get from playing around with a ball. In high school physics, ballistics (and therefore gravity) is taught using a ball being thrown in the air for a reason- most people have this sort of intuition for that process, and find it easier to get from there to the mathematical model.

Before games/simulators like KSP, the only way to get an intuition of orbital mechanics like that would be to simulate it in your head a bunch, arduously.

I think this is a potential great source of value: games/simulator can give you otherwise-very-hard-to-get intuitive knowledge of (models of) subjects. Not a replacement for the maths and the crunch, but would probably make it easier in a revolutionary way.

I wonder if this is already happening? There must be a generation of aerospace engineering students now who have sent rockets to the Mun.

Review for those who want to see it before playing the entire game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGtw5eOfZ48#t=2m39s

Maxis games are pretty good in that regard; Sim City was probably the most influential in a list of 'management' games, which teach you about economics, revenue vs expenses, and natural disasters; some of its successors / related games like Transport and Roller Coaster Tycoon make that even more apparent.

And The Sims simplified, but made me (and probably others) aware of quantified personal needs; you need x amount of sleep per night or you'll accrue 'sleep debt' and distress, you need social contact to fill that meter, etc.

Minecraft has an educational mode / version btw, there was one game our son was playing that basically made him go out into the sea and identify various types of sea life. I mean it's all Minecraftified (?) and abstracted, but they do pick up a lot of things from it.

I'd still like him to read more books though, given that his language skills are pretty bad.