The following is a summation and reflections from the Bad Game Arcade 2023
What makes games special? Throughout the week of the 2023 Bad Game Arcade panelists, interviewees, and audience members posed this question. Despite a weeklong event focusing on the good and bad of educational games, we kept coming back to a very basic question. In the world of education, are games the answer? What do they really offer?
It’s a reasonable query. There are many ways to teach a concept, so why might games be worth consideration. Almost everyone agreed, learners are playing games anyway, why not make tools that match their enthusiasm. However, between the 4 roundtable discussions, workshops, and interviews other answers emerged.
Day 1: Educational Games and Indigenous Perspectives
On the first day, another answer focused on preservation and representation. In the panel, Indigenous Perspectives on Educational Games, Kahentawaks Tiewishaw from Revital Software discussed how their work on language preservation and instruction through games. Globally, indigenous languages are only a few generations from potentially fading away. In Canada, calls have been made to "revitalize them" and games offer one way to immerse, instruct, and show these languages to their players and larger communities.
As the conversation continued and Vanessa Racine and Will Thompson shared similar concerns, they also pointed to the goals of representation within games from a larger scale. They noted how when they were kids they rarely saw themselves or their nations positively represented in games (a problem felt by many), and carving out a space for indigeneity in games requires a balance between working with the industry and building their own design spaces.
I was left with so many thoughts about how educational games seem to avoid these questions. Oftentimes I get brought into conversations about effectively teaching a concept, but not if games can function to preserve aspects of culture and language, nor think about which characters educational games even choose to present. This conversation was just a start, and led to a week of further discussion.
Day 2: Implementation and Facilitation
On Tuesday, the conversation moved from representation to implementation. We know that educational games are being made, but how do we actually make good use out of them? The panel that night, Super-effective Facilitation, focused on that theme with Matt Pinchuk, Diogo Pereira Henriques, and Effie Argyropoulos discussed so many ways to make game’s effective. We can’t just throw a game out into the world or at some classrooms and expect it to do anything. It needs to be targeted, and preferably, facilitated.
I really appreciated that these panelists discussed games generally, instead of focusing in on particular titles. Matthew’s work that uses commercial boardgames in schools provided a fascinating counterpoint to think about how any game can be used to teach material. To the question hanging over the week, this discussion suggested that education needs a greater reliance on teaching soft skills - like compassion, critical thinking, and communication. Guess what, games are incredibly good at doing this. This was put into action during the livestream of media literacy game analysis.
In their solo interviews, Effie and Diogo discussed the impact of games. Effie discussed how even simple quiz games can help bolster resilience, and Diogo’s discussion of building an entire university campus in minecraft leaves me with more questions and inspiration than I care to admit. The pandemic asked us to re-evaluate how we learn: classrooms were hybrid, knowledge became further entrenched on social media, and thinking through ways that games can work in those spaces are critical steps.
Day 3: Gamification / Games / Game-Based Learning?
This balance of games, quizzes, and public learning came to full discussion on Wednesday. The fullest roundtable of the event, game makers, scholars, and non-profit designers discussed The Fine Line between gamification and games. This debate is longstanding, old, and (honestly) overdone, but I wanted to encourage talking about how these boundaries frame what is good and bad in game design. I appreciated that the conversation was not dismissive at drawing lines around what constitutes a game and instead focused on how both intersect with the larger goals of the industry and classroom.
I highly recommend watching the panel, as it is filled with so many quotes and great arguments. Christopher Chancey, founder of Manavoid which showcased Rainbow Billy in the arcade, really emphasized the power of games to meet kids at there level in engaging ways to talk about everyday skills. Chris Colley summarized this and the previous day's comments when they said,
“You ask employers what they want today and it isn’t who got the highest marks in math, it's how do they work with other people, how do they collaborate. You can’t see that on a worksheet, you need to see them in interaction to see these beautiful skills come out.”
As the panel continued; we discussed how games can improve the plainness of a worksheet. But games go deeper. They can be tools that equip new students, moments that unlock potential, or alternative ways to engage with a concept. In short, it isn’t about games and gamification, it comes down to teaching students to think - something I wrote about around fact checking education and the games being used.
Day 4: Designing where?
By now the passion of the attendees and panelists was palpable. No one there was doubting their potential for learning or presenting hard concepts. In the end, it came down to the challenges of making them functional, usable, and addressing exact needs.
In her interview leading up to the final panel, Jes Klass highlighted the work of a games studio at Depaul University which paired with teachers to make games specific for their needs. This work demonstrated just how focused games can be. There are general games that many teachers can use, but we can also fine tune and adjust them to the specifications of a particular batch of students. However, this is made possible through the studio's direct support from the university.
Educational games live and die by the support that they get there are problems with the industry that vary from academic spaces. The two, while both focused on making great tools, are bound by different constraints which challenge the efficacy of educational games. As the 4 panelists discussed in Where it’s Made, one of the key factors around the question "why games" is the entire challenge of making, maintaining, and implementing them.
The conversation ranged from discussing the lifespan of grants compared to the long shelf-life of educational titles. Dr. Adam Dubé discussed the value of Academia not to just make games, but in studying and justifying their efficacy. This point was well received as longtime designers Alan Dang and Bobby Lockhart discussed a key challenge with the industry. Together they painted an image of the industry, one that churns out countless heartless - and relatively useless - "educational games". This mass amount of "bad" titles mixes with the few fun, well-designed, and engaging games, making a sludge that is extremely difficult to sift through.
Yet there is hope. One issue is subject matter. Math games are excessive - creating a hard to decipher mix. But some subjects have barely been approached by the educational games space. As Bobby discussed, educational games can be pervasive, powerful, and engaging tools that can fully actualize a variety of learning material. However, it is critical we recognize the challenges that exist and design tools which are worth ours and educators time.
Day 5: Final Thoughts
Across the week panelists and interviewees laughed when I told that many people think educational games are profitable. This is a world is one of passion, not riches. The shining early prevalance of some educational games, like Oregon Trail existed in an almost empty pot, but today there is lots of bad games out there which can hide the good. This has made it critically important that we find the gems, the games which stand out and effectively function as educational games. The problem is how do we sift through it all. This final question offers a starting a point for the next Bad Game Arcade.
In the end, the Bad Game Arcade emphasized that the question was not what makes educational games special, but how games can be made special for the purposes of education. Everyone highlighted the potential and promise that games provide. While there are questions to answer, an industry to adjust, and a deep need for originality, The Bad Game Arcade showed how passionate some game makers are, and that the future of educational games is just beginning.
This event was meant to be a spark. Educational games have - arguably - more potential than they did at their inception but we need to keep this conversation, design, and research going.
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