A blog turning into a game

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We’re looking to make a list of the top educational games ever made, the top 9, in fact.  Do you have any suggestions? How about classics like Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego? Or perhaps newer, more socially conscious games like FreeRice?

Send us your top picks.  We’ll tally up the results and let you know the winners in a future post.

Yesterday, EA released its long awaited massively single-player online game, Spore.  The game has received widespread acclaim over the past several months because of its technological richness and creative storyline and game design.  Spore allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its earliest beginnings, through its entire development.  The game is in the tradition of classics like Civilization and SimCity.

Players can populate their world in Spore using creatures that they, or others, make.   Even though the game is single player, objects or creatures built by users get uploaded to a master database for others to download and rate.  The game uses a sophisticated form of design called procedural animation.

The game has transplanted real-world debates into the realm of educational game design.  For instance, critics note how the game raises questions on creationism vs. evolution.  Game creators have even referred to their perspective as “creativolution.”  When it comes to educational games, does the content have to project a specific pedagogical theme? Or it can be open-ended? Spore allows for unbound creativity in universe design, but how much should that design reflect real-world constraints imposed by science? One might expect a similar debate when thinking about how real environmental concerns like global warming should be reflected in the game environmnet, if at all.

Here is a TV ad for the game and a link to the official website:

Gamasutra and the SF Chronicle today discuss the findings of a non-profit called HopeLab, founded in 2001, concluding that video games can help encourage young people with cancer to take their medications more consistently.  Dr. Steve Cole, who helped direct the study, wrote,

“We now know that games can induce positive changes in the way individuals manage their health.  The game not only motivates positive health behavior; it also gives players a greater sense of power and control over their disease — in fact, that seems to be its key ingredient.”

The game, called Re-Mission, and introduced in May 2006, is an open community for teenagers and young adults afflicted with cancer.  The study followed 375 teens and young adults with cancer at 34 medical centers in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The results were very promising: young people who played the game maintained higher blood levels of chemotherapy and showed higher rates of antibiotic utilization than those who did not.

Re-Mission is powerful because of its focus on a specific cause and the ability to combine interactivity with gameplay.  Here is a trailer of the game:

Most of the team at Ramo grew up playing classic computer games like Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, and Reader Rabbit. These games were fun for us (as kids), but were educational in ways that made parents and teachers comfortable. Importantly, many of these games had educational value in the form of real-world learning, not just simple mechanical drills that would have felt too much like school. After all, where else would we learn about dysentery except in Oregon Trail? The developers of these games did a fine job building engaging products that emphasized some kind of learning to make the games meaningful beyond the simple entertainment value.

The big question is, what happened to these terrific game franchises?

The Learning Company, which was a pioneer in the edutainment space and developed titles like the ones above, got acquired by a handful of different companies, including Mattel; it is presently owned by Riverdeep. Looks like many of the original titles are still available, either in a boxed or downloadable format. The Learning Company website references nostalgic memories of Oregon Trail: “Develop solutions to help your friends and family survive the dangers of the long journey, including raging rivers, buffalo stampedes, sickness, and starvation.” Just the skills kids need to be prepared for the 21st century. Unfortunately, some of these games haven’t been updated in a few years.

What are some of your favorite memories of the classics?

I read an article recently on the growing use of computer and video game entertainment as a form of therapy. This school of thought argues that there are a handful of non-entertainment benefits to consuming certain types of games:

Exercise: not your fingers from pressing up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start (think Konami code back in the days of Contra), but real exercise through devices like the Wii, which encourage rapid cardio through cleverly designed fitness games. The product is especially popular with therapists and children.

Health: Quit smoking-expert Alan Carr is launching a series of games on the Nintendo DS this fall called “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.” 10M smokers have already used his products to quit smoking.

Education: Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently announced her involvement in Our Courts, a project to teach kids about civics. There also been a growing brain fitness movement, with games like Brain Age. Brain Age and its sister titles have sold over 10M copies worldwide, indicating a huge demand for education-focused gaming.

Philanthropy: FreeRice enables individuals to contribute to ending world hunger by playing simple word games on its site, which is in partnership with the UN World Food Program.

The Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco a few weeks ago provided solid exposure to what’s happening in the games space. Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures, Andrew Chen, and Gamasutra all have great recaps on the conference.

One of the panels covered Monetization and Business Models for Social Games; Virtual Worlds News summarizes it well. Generally, gaming businesses make money in two ways, payments (such as microtransactions or subscriptions) and advertising. The Casual MMO panel at the conference acknowledged that kids 6-14 control $60B in disposable income. Tapping into that spending, however, is difficult.

There are unique challenges (and perhaps opportunities) associated with payments and advertising-based online gaming models for kids. First off, kids generally do not have credit cards. In addition, even though a growing portion of teens/kids have cell phones, at least in the U.S., handset-enabled payment mechanisms are limited. That means that parents have to be involved in the purchasing decision if kids want to subscribe to an online service. The benefits of a payment model, however, are that parents feel more invested in the product their kids are buying and may even encourage them to consume it more.

Advertising is the other revenue source. With kids products, the challenge is finding a large enough of base of brand advertisers, which is especially challenging given the youth (no pun intended!) of the in-game advertising industry. You also have the challenge of reassuring parents that the advertising will be relevant and safe for their kids, in addition to complying with any policy regulations that may exist. I was recently talking to an executive from Massive, the in-game video advertising company acquired by Microsoft, and was told that both from monetization and user experience perspectives, advertising to kids in a gaming environment was very risky and was not something they were investing in.

With payments, it seems that parents are more comfortable spending money for their children when some kind of physical asset is also delivered. Webkinz is a great example of such a product. In focus groups we have conducted, parents admitted that they bought the stuffed animal only so that their child could play in the online world — in many cases — the child would throw away the physical pet, and spend more time with its online counterpart!