Opinion: Can Games Be Educational? Feature

There's no avoiding the fact that videogames don't exactly have an education friendly image. Ask Boris Johnson, the now London Mayor, for his opinion on the matter and you'll get the following reply:

"It's the snarl that gives the game away. It's the sobbing and the shrieking and the horrible pleading - that's how you know your children are undergoing a sudden narcotic withdrawal. As the strobing colours die away and the screen goes black, you listen to the wail of protest from the offspring and you know that you have just turned off their drug, and you know that, to a greater or lesser extent, they are addicts.

"Some children have it bad. Some are miraculously unaffected. But millions of seven to 15-year-olds are hooked, especially boys, and it is time someone had the guts to stand up, cross the room and just say no to Nintendo. It is time to garrotte the Game Boy and paralyse the PlayStation, and it is about time, as a society, that we admitted the catastrophic effect these blasted gizmos are having on the literacy and the prospects of young males."

At least, those were his words in a Telegraph column back in 2006 before he had to take it all back when the London Games Festival came to town in 2008:

"I'm delighted that the London Games Festival is back in our city for its third year. It demonstrates the creativity and range of the gaming industry, which, as an important part of London's creative sector, makes a vital contribution to the economy as a whole," Boris recited in a press release for the event.

That'll be an order of humble pie to Mr. Johnson's table then. But whatever the philandering bumbler thinks or writes in his excessively colourful Etonian dialect, there are examples of games that are educational or, at the very least, stimulating to the extent of a crossword or bout of Sudoku. With this in mind, we set out to nail them down before the people with lanterns and pitchforks came to torch the TVG offices.

It's Not Quantum Physics, Or Is It?

Many game critics would argue that Half-Life 2 is the supreme ruler of FPS games over the last decade, and it's a fairly strong argument to be fair, but beyond the inspired characters and plot twists, riveting gunplay, and stunning graphics is the one element in its gameplay that no other FPS in existence has ever come close to - its puzzles. Half-Life 2 utilised a number of physics based puzzles that, for reasons unknown, have not been attempted to any great extent by other FPS games since Half-Life 2's release in 2004.

The puzzles that Valve coordinated for Half-Life 2 not only made good use of physics but also demanded a significant amount of intelligence on the part of the gamer, encouraging them to use their powers of lateral thought to resolve numerous apparent stalemates. In many ways it's a shame that the game was violent enough to be rated 15 as this type of problem solving would've been particularly enlightening for a slightly younger crowd. Nevertheless, here are a few good examples:

• Towards the end of the game's 'Route Kanal' chapter, gamers find themselves apparently stuck in a storm drain with the obvious exit being a pipe about halfway up the wall that's inaccessible from any vantage points. It's not until the gamer figures out that they have to open a valve and let more water into the storm drain that they can then swim through the pipe once the water level has risen high enough.
  
  
• At the beginning of 'Water Hazard', gamers come to an apparent dead-end on their newly acquired airboat. The solution is weighing down a ramp by filling an underwater cage (that's attached to the ramp) with air filled plastic barrels, thereby making it rock over to the other side of its pivot like a seesaw. The airboat can then be used to jump over the ramp and into the game's next section.
  
  
• During 'Highway 17', players come to a crane about halfway through the level that has an electromagnet dangling from its jib. The gamer has to leave their dune buggy on the beach to get to the crane and will soon realise that they can use the electromagnet to hoist the buggy into the next level section. There is, however, the issue of a drawbridge that's been pulled up and is stopping you from reaching the now moved buggy. From the crane, players can swing the electromagnet and use its momentum to knock down the bridge.

These examples are poetry in motion where physics based puzzles in games are concerned (if such a thing exists). In contrast, other FPS games have rarely displayed the intelligence of Half-Life 2, with problem solving usually being narrowed down to clichéd challenges like finding keycards for locked doors. However, while Half-Life 2 might be a significant challenge of a gamer's lateral thinking, you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's educational per se. This is where Sid Meier comes in.

Be Civilised

Sid Meier's series of Civlization games has taught a generation of gamers about history, from the dawn of the Stone Age right up until Modern times and even into the future with mankind's colonisation of Alpha Centauri. We're not trying to argue that Cvilization portrays an accurate rendition of history in terms of people, places, and events. Anybody who's played the game knows that you carve your own telling of history where those factors are concerned. Instead, it teaches gamers about how scientific, technological, political, and socio-economic breakthroughs in history have influenced the growth of civilisation.

Whether you're researching bronze working, banking, feudalism, or ballistics in a Civilization game, Sid Meier has always been able to show gamers how their research effects subsequent breakthroughs in his titles' anally detailed and often confusingly deep research trees. For example, in order to obtain 'the bomb' and then actually be able to detonate it over enemy soil, you'll first have to make breakthroughs in physics (i.e. nuclear fission) and avionics (i.e. long distance bombers) before you can re-enact the flights of Enola Gay and Bockscar. All of these breakthroughs are then categorised in the game's extensive Civopedia, giving players some scope and background detail for the historically accurate research their particular civilisation is undertaking.

We're not suggesting that schools should throw out the history books and teach the subject through extended sessions of Civilization IV instead. All we're saying is that if a child wants to play the game in their spare time then, who knows? They might actually learn something. Whatever the case, it's got to be considerably more educational than spending a Saturday night watching The X Factor.

Multitasking

One gaming genre that found its home on PC consoles during the mid to late nineties and early noughties - but has sadly tailed off in its popularity ever since - is the management game. Surviving today with titles such as Sports Interactive's yearly Football Manager games and EA's The Sims titles, the management game was once filled with every kind of managerial position you could dream of. Whether you wanted to run your own city (Sim City), become the political dictator of a Caribbean island (Tropico), build a hospital from the ground up (Theme Hospital), or monopolise a transport network (Railroad Tycoon) then management games had you covered.

Granted, these sorts of game are hardly educational in the traditional sense - you won't be learning any Maths & English here - but what they do teach gamers are organisational, managerial, and multitasking skills. Again, we wouldn't advise a high powered CEO or company President to improve their motivational skills by spending their weekends playing Evil Genius. Nevertheless, there are skills to be learned from these games nonetheless and that's surely a form of education, although admittedly the form of learning may be mild given the stronger emphasis on entertainment.

Much like Evil Genius, the genre classic Dungeon Keeper challenged gamers to multitask in order to succeed. In the game, players attempt to build a lair and fill it with ever more elaborate traps, while simultaneously warding off attacks from 'hero' characters that try to plunder the evil dungeon keeper's (that's you by the way) treasures and kill their carefully designated monsters. In order to do this, players need to multitask as they keep an eye on all of the possible entrances to the lair while simultaneously balancing the time they spend expanding the dungeon.

Management and organisation, on the other hand, are skills that have never been more essential in a game than they are in Football Manager. Whether you're listing all of your youth team players as available for loan in order to progress their stats quicker; making sure to provide enough rotation in your squad to keep players healthy while not tinkering too much with the formation and starting line-up; or disciplining a petulant player by fining them a month's wages for getting sent off; the need for managerial smarts and shrewd organisation are never far away.

A Bygone Era

What all of the games listed above have in common is their allegiance to the PC platform. Sure, Half-Life 2 and Civilization have been ported to the consoles in one way or another but any true fans of the games will tell you that they're at home on the PC. And then there's management games, which have tended to translate onto the consoles poorly due to the lack of a good interface (much like RTS games), not to mention the fact that the market tends to be smaller for those types of game on the consoles.

With a PC market that's experienced dwindling sales figures in recent years and a lack of innovation on the platform, it's sad that games like the ones listed above are increasingly hard to come by. Our advice: get rummaging in those bargain bins for some PC classics before they pass out of sight and, to help you on your way, here's a list of TVG's most highly recommended bargain bin games with added mental stimulus:

• Total Wars Rome through Empire*.
• Tropico, although avoid Pirate Cove.
• Half-Life 2 (You're best off going for the Orange Box, with Portal throwing in some added brain bending puzzles for good measure).
• Braid (XBLA and Steam).
• Evil Genius.
• Civilization III or IV.
• Check out developer Introversion - Darwinia, Defcon, or Uplink - they're all good.
• Shadow of the Colossus, and ICO for that matter.
• Any God of War game/Ubisoft's previous-gen Prince of Persia trilogy.
• The Penumbra Collection.

* Specifically, Empire: Total War won't be in a bargain bin for a while yet.