Simon Carless points out this Education Guardian article on video games in education, featuring this quote from "games designer and theorist" Ian Bogost:
"Good educational games teach differently than contemporary classrooms," says Bogost. "Games could play a part in integrating real use of abstract knowledge; that's what I try to do when I design such games."
The best educational games are procedural representations of systems, he adds. They let people play around with elements of a system to see how they combine to generate effects and structures.
"Civilisation is a good example; it teaches about material and geographical contingency in the progression of history. Nintendo's Animal Crossing is another - my five-year-old learned almost everything he ever needs to know about long-term debt by figuring out how to pay off his home mortgage in the game."
I suppose the simulation would be higher fidelity if you incurred interest on your loans, but having to maximize profit generation would reduce the self-direction of the rest of the game. As real ("commercial") games will sacrifice teaching principles for entertainment value, there's certainly room for separately educational games.
What will Animal Crossing DS teach? Sure, there aren't NES games, but if the rest of the inventory management from Animal Crossing GC is there, making it massively multiplayer could turn it into a world-wide free market simulator. Surely some people might be happy to find that an economics sim is making its way to kids this fall from Nintendo.
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