{"id":3122,"date":"2020-07-18T23:59:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-18T23:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=3122"},"modified":"2020-07-18T23:59:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-18T23:59:00","slug":"games-as-educational-tools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2020\/07\/games-as-educational-tools\/","title":{"rendered":"Games as educational tools"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Blow had a talk this week on the subject<\/a>, which was very interesting. And Hacker News had a thread recently<\/a> as well, spawned from this blog post<\/a>. Excellent points being made.<\/p>\n

This is very important to me. I started my career working on educational games. Now it\u2019s 2020, kids are at home and school will probably never, ever be the same.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the perfect time.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to go through all the obvious \u2013games are all educational, it\u2019s hard to make interesting education games- but I\u2019d like to point out to one thing that games teach better than anything else: management<\/strong>, aka navigating systems.<\/p>\n

Management is about so many things. Secondary goals, short-term, long-term actions, timing. All those things that we do to maintain, sustain and run systems. Management is something a bit impalpable that\u2019s being taught in every single game you play (these days games want you to manage the same things for hundreds of hours, which is problematic because it\u2019s so unnecessary). The first thing management teaches you is to observe what is going on. Isn\u2019t it something you need, whatever you do in life? Yes. Games are the best management playgrounds ever. <\/p>\n

Get burn, do badly it\u2019s okay, do wonderful and it doesn\u2019t really matter, it\u2019s a game. But those moments taught you. Those moments will stay with you and later on you\u2019ll intuitively know that if you don\u2019t pay attention to a certain little thing, this might end up into a big problem. You\u2019ve learned so much through navigating those systems and that will be useful in life. You just don\u2019t know how, but it will (I know I\u2019ve become better than average at navigating crowded space thanks to playing shoot \u2019em ups and Counter-Strike for years).<\/p>\n

The big question would be: what kind of games do we want to create so that people can use more directly their newly acquired knowledge and management skills?<\/strong> I have one.<\/p>\n

Take The Sims building houses part. Add actual numbers about insulation, material used, costs etc. This way, people can actually play to make a home \u2013that can be build in the real world- as they want, costing as less as possible or having the best temperature inside without running AC. Or just trying things out.<\/p>\n

I would love to see people obsess over insulation R-value, optimizing and understanding house shape and material, understanding that hemp is fabulous or how small homes are far more efficient and just fine. And then people could visit their creation in VR. Now that\u2019s a really useful, down to earth, global thing!<\/p>\n

It makes me think that games, tools and toys are all intertwined and useful to learn and teach yourself a million things. We game developers and designers need to cater to this need though.<\/p>\n

This is the direction I hope and wish a branch of computer games culture will follow. We need it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Blow had a talk this week on the subject, which was very interesting. And Hacker News had a thread recently as well, spawned from this blog post. Excellent points being made. This is very important to me. I started my career working on educational games. Now it\u2019s 2020, kids are at home and school […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3123,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3122\/revisions\/3123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}