19 - What Can We Learn From Computer Games?

by Lennart Nacke

As a nat­ural follow-up to yesterday’s slide deck, we have Mary and Douglas Kiang’s pre­sen­ta­tion on dig­i­tal games for the body, mind and soul today. Their talk out­lines 21st Century skills expected from this gen­er­a­tion, such as cre­ativ­ity, inno­va­tion, problem-solving, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and col­lab­o­ra­tion. If that does not sound like the core activ­i­ties you do in your favorite game yet — the slides are going to per­suade you.

First, we get a glimpse into the cur­rent stu­dent demo­graphic. One thing, our gen­er­a­tion needs to be really good at, is mak­ing strate­gic deci­sions and fil­ter­ing infor­ma­tion to our basic needs. As infor­ma­tion around us grows and becomes widely avail­able, a core skill in my opin­ion will be to be able to chose what infor­ma­tion to take into account for mak­ing a strate­gic deci­sion and what to leave out. Since we are a gen­er­a­tion of active builders and learn­ers, we are harder to teach, because for acquir­ing a skill we need to have just the right bal­ance between a too easy or a too hard task. Often teach­ers are not equipped to gen­er­ate this level of sophis­ti­ca­tion for their stu­dents, which is where dig­i­tal games come into play (pun intended).

The slides dis­cuss some of the fac­tors that make great games, such as con­struc­tive (e.g., LEGO Digital Designer, Junkbot, Bridge CS, MIT Scratch, Alice, Squeak, or Microsoft Kodu), cre­ative (e.g., Professor Layton, Enigmo, Crayon Physics, etc.), com­plex (e.g., Caduceus and Spore [see video below]), and col­lab­o­ra­tive (e.g., Rock Band, New Super Mario Bros. Wii) fac­tors that are all some­what aligned to cre­ate the big mys­te­ri­ous phe­nom­e­non called fun. The slides end a bit abruptly in the mid­dle of exam­ples. A take­away sum­mary would have been nice. Nevertheless, please have a look at the slides and their wiki site with resources.


Will Wright’s talk on TED (Video)


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