Tangental Learning
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Great video, definitely worth a watch, well done to Daniel Floyd for putting it together.
(I know I’m a little bit late of the gate on this one, but better late than never)
Three points:- Tangental Learning is great, its a step in the right direction, but I think the video misses the most important point when it comes to games and learning. To ensure effective retention and transference of knowledge you need to actually integrate the knowledge / skill that you’re teaching into the gameplay experience as opposed to simply being a sideline attraction. Thats not to say that it needs to be a “shoved down your throat” as a critical path objective, but you need to reward your player for applying their new found knowledge or skill. That’s what Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning is all about. It’s the actual doing that cements the understanding.
- This type of video format (ZP inspired or not) works a heck of a lot better than a daunting essay
- Entertainment mediums that consume a significant amount of a person’s time have a sort of cultural responsibility to the player. Culture is no longer passed on through bards or round campfires, but through movies, books, and yes even games. We need to think more about the lasting impression that an interactive experience has on someone, and how that helps define us as individuals and a collective culture.
2 Responses to “Tangental Learning”
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It misses the point by a tangent. I like the approach where the interactivity teaches you something meaningful, the problem is you have to design the game, top to bottom, based around that specific dynamic. You can’t make a game about vector-seeking and teach someone anything meaningful about WWII. You can make a game about shadowy finance and let the player learn how to give loans to dictators to start Volkswagen and then proceed to conquer Europe. Cause and effect. If you want to get aesthetic about it, you can make the big reveal at the end be that you’re Prescott Bush. This is all fact, and yet elves seem more compelling to most designers…
@ Patrick – a middle ground can be reached by taking a broader view of what a game dynamic ‘teaches’ – Halo obviously teach players how to play Halo, but they also encourage players to develop skills required for working in a team, targeting and tracking moving objects from a moving frame of reference.
What I think Tim is getting at is that by looking at the skills that are more peripherally learned by a game task, we can strike a balance between unrelated name-dropping and having to tailor a game around its historical context.