Newbie

So as you likely already know, the Learning Games to Go project (of which this blog is but a small part) will ultimately yield a learning game to be played by middle-school pre-Algebra students. Recently, I was lucky enough to play a demo of another game that teaches math to kids. It’s called Dimenxian and the game’s motto is “Learn math or die trying!” Now given my utter lack of game-playing expertise, I must admit that I found this motto/threat to be more than a little disturbing. If I didn’t learn the math (as I suspected I wouldn’t), would I, in fact, “die trying”? As it turned out, though, I survived the experience and liked the game a lot.

The first thing you notice about this game is that the graphics are way cooler than you’d expect from a typical learning game. You move through a well-designed 3-D space, you experience beautiful colors and textures, and you feel like you’re playing the game for fun (and not to learn algebra). Here’s a bit of what the game looks like -

The first game, the one in the demo, involves working with x and y coordinates on a graph (and in the 3-D space of the game) to locate and download urgent data from the weather stations (or something like that…). Amazingly, I was able to navigate myself around and actually do it. I had my struggles, but I didn’t feel like a moron when I played this game.

One really helpful thing about Dimenxian (especially for a Newbie like me), is that you get lots and lots of feedback. There is a voice that guides you and there are on-screen warnings when you’re straying too far from your goal. In short, you’re allowed to mess up, but the game also holds your hand a bit so you’ll have a good chance to succeed.

I think that the folks who make this game are really onto something, and I look forward to playing the rest of it. You have fun while you learn – what a concept!!

So last time, I focused on the social aspects of games. And I was pretty much ready to say then, that for me anyway, games could be defined as social activities. Then I did a little more thinking and decided that that just wasn’t the case.

In addition to playing a lot of games with my family when I was a kid, I spent a ton of time playing games on my own. Sometimes they were store-bought games and sometimes they were games of my own creation. Hockey was huge in the 1970s in Boston where I grew up, so I invented my own hockey game. I’d bat a marble back and forth with nickels inside a shirt box. The objective? To get the marble into one of the paper cups on either side of the box and score a “goal.” I played that game for hours and hours!

Now if you’re playing a game by yourself, there has to be some mechanism for variability. And in many of the store-bought games that meant you needed these….

One of my favorite games involving dice was this one -

It was Sports Illustrated’s “Decathlon” game. It was an easy-to-play simulation and I absolutely loved it. You rolled the dice and then compared your roll against a set of cards that showed probable outcomes for each athlete in the various track and field events. The Olympics were quite a big deal back then and it was great fun to pretend I was one of the athletes that I’d seen on television.

When my parents split up, my Mom, brother and I went to live with my uncle for a month or so. We couldn’t bring very much stuff with us, but one of the things that I did bring was that Decathlon game. It engaged me big-time when I needed to be engaged. Simple design, simple game play. And I could do it by myself all afternoon long….

So I won’t define games as social activities. They can also be great solitary activities that challenge us (as per “The Sims 2”) and fill us up when we need it (“Decathlon”).

Finally, I do feel confident about defining good games as “sticky” (technical term, that…). They connect us with each other… or they connect us with our imaginations.

And I guess that the best ones do both.