So it's official now: the Federation of American Scientists has come out in favor of using video games for education. Who am I to argue with that?
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars christened them "serious games" four years ago, mobilizing a loose-knit collection of game developers, educational foundations, grassroots organizations, human rights advocates, medical professionals, first responders, homeland security consultants, and assorted others around a common cause. Together--the experts provide the facts, the game developers the technological know-how--they've created a nascent industry. Their goal: To convince nonbelievers that games teach just as well as books, film, or any other medium."Games let us create representations of how things work in a medium that's built to do exactly that," says Ian Bogost, an assistant professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. "If you want to explain how a nuclear power plant works in a textbook, you have to demonstrate it with a logical written argument. But with games, the player can literally interact with the model of how a system works."
They felt it was imporant enough to hold a Games Summit. No word on their vote for game of the year.
It's funny, I just recently read Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good For You" and now I see evidence for his arguments everywhere. His basic theme is that pop culture, including Video Games, TV, and the Internet, are actually making us smarter (despite all the hype about declining standards and setting new lows, etc...)
And those are pop culture games he's talking about, not "serious" games. Really, though, if they had a nuclear power plant game when I was in school, I'd have played it and probably learned a lot. At least, I would have done so if it was possible to induce a meltdown, create a nuclear bomb, or use radioactive waste as a coolant to see if I could get it to shoot out the towers, raining down sweet radioactive destruction on the town. *ahem* Was I still writing? Crap.