Where did learning games go ?

Hello, everyone,

I just stumbled upon an article atr Gamasutra.

It's about "blockbuster learning games" in the 90s. And the complete lack of them nowadays.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2…l_games_go.php

Two quotes from this article struck me :

Looking closer at The Learning Company and Broderbund’s collapse, that’s because it wasn’t due to isolated circumstances—it was a symptom of an entire changing market…which changed in part because their purchaser, Softkey. Softkey’s sales model ultimately interfered with the high-cost high-reward model Broderbund and The Learning Company had built their best games on.

The new pricing model, driven by both Softkey and every other developer in the business selling CD-ROMs at such low prices, destroyed the economic viability of the edutainment production cycle. Goldstein was obviously frustrated with the merger, but 17 years later, he says it’s water under the bridge. To him, the Broderbund model was built on the philosophy of “people—products—profit,” where talented people created good product that drove profit, but once the merger kicked in, that philosophy seemed to flow in reverse, and Broderbund, now part of The Learning Company, was sold to Mattel.

Portnow notes that in the wake of this dramatic change, Mattel could only think of one way to utilize The Learning Company’s multimillion dollar educational resources—developing licensed Barbie games destined for the dollar bin at Circuit City.

And one quote from the comment section which sounds to me 300 % right :

The most massive blockbusters were never edutainment games, and the big publishers became too hesitant to try to make money on most anything other than massive blockbuster attempts. More twitchy 'killing people with machine guns', and less 'games that make you think'.

Educational games died out the same time when Adventure games died out.
What have both in common ?
People had to THINK.

Edit : Another comment there links to an .PDF report on the same topic as well : http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/…dutainment.pdf
It is worth reading because it also explains the psychology between people and price points.


Alrik

One point is: at the moment, players who prefer to learn playing a product, massively weigh more than players who prefer to play a product.

The industry is based on learning. Usually, people get out of a product labelled a game when the learning process is over.

In other words, most of the production these days, are learning games.

The big difference is what people learn. Those educational games were focused on a certain kind of knowledge that is well recognized outside of the game circles.
One positive thing when you spend time learning things only: you never spend time to check if you have learnt properly.
In the case of educational products, the check might not be avoided.

The point of a game, any game, is for the player to have fun. Whether they have fun shooting things or have fun learning math doesn’t matter, but as soon as you lose focus, your game starts going downhill. I’m no expect on 90ths learning games, but from what I read I think the reason they went out of favor is that they focused on making the player have fun while learning, rather than learning while having fun.

Learning games can still be a commercial success, you just have to base it something that currently interests the generally population. A good example on this would be Kerbal Space Program, it very educational about spaceflight, while still being a huge commercial success.

My biggest games that I was learning from while having fun were History Line 1914-1918 (played it while we had WW1 back in school, used it to study for an exam, even) and Monkey Island (learned lots of English from that one).

Last example that I felt I actually learned something from a game was Expeditions: Conquistador. Are there others? Don't know, as I don't really play that much..

I learned the map of the entire Caribbean from Sid Meiers Pirates!

Complex modern games require a lot of skills from players, in the cognitive area as well (if you play the right games). Games have always served this purpose. Choose Your Adventure books started out as programs to hone people's decision making skills. And I must say I really enjoy the Fighting Fantasy books put on Steam by a company I can't remember right now. The amount of carefully weighed decisions is higher than in most CRPG's I've played.

Happened this:
1. consoles came. the purpose was to make people more dumb.
2. consoles failed (not fully though). facebook cowclickers came.
3. even facebook cowclickers failed (not fully). smartphones came.
4. so far phonegames are a success, people got dumber than they ever were.

I must admit that the most effective learning games I have ever ever played, by a mile, are phone games. Specifically, ear-training games that teach you to improve recognition of musical pitches, intervals and rhythms. Because these types of skills are best trained in regular short sessions, they respond extremely well to quick bursts a few times a day when you're waiting around. I went from being pretty weak in these skills to being pretty accurate within a few months.

What is a cowlicker ? Must taste awful.

That's cowCLicker, Alrik! I can't remember enough details to look it up but somebody made a joke game modeled after that farming Facebook game where you simply click on a cow - or something like that. Turns out people still liked the game. It points out that there's an addictive quality to these "games" that has nothing at all to do with having fun, which is why super stupid games can do well.

Regarding the educational games - I wonder who was buying them? Remember that home PCs were just becoming popular back then and one of the big selling points was that they would help your child learn. If you used that as a justification for buying a PC then you had better buy at least a few educational games!

Games can sneak education in. Crusader Kings and Eurpoa Universalis certainly give you a big dose of history. Games like X3 aren't going to teach you anything much about space but all those systems require you to "learn how to learn." If you just dive in and try to learn everything at once, you'll fry your brain. Any complex game requires that you figure out what you need to learn early on and what's better saved until later.

Thank you for that explanation about Cows !

I bought an "Carmen SanDiego" (?) game a few years ago on an flea market. I was intrugued, but haven't played it so far.

Originally Posted by joxer
Happened this:
1. consoles came. the purpose was to make people more dumb.
2. consoles failed (not fully though). facebook cowclickers came.
3. even facebook cowclickers failed (not fully). smartphones came.
4. so far phonegames are a success, people got dumber than they ever were.

5.The Witcher 3 came. Managed the non casual achievement of making people even dumber.