Aaron’s Current Capstone Presentation – Google Doc or on SlideShare
So I had to finally present to my colleagues last night (as referenced by Dave RoedlRoyer’s post at the Interaction Culture Blog) and got some great feedback on several fronts. One interesting thing Sam Shoulders brought up was to compare educational TV to educational games. It may be interesting to take a look at the differences between production of let’s say any ol’ cartoon, like transformers, and say Dora the Explora (or are you supposed to spell explorere properly?). That may produce some interesting items.
Essentially what Dave was saying in his post is that all games are serious, and teach people something. The difference between a “serious game” and just a game is that it was designed with the intent to teach, and that was explicitly made part of the game. Keywords: intent, explicit. All games teach, although it may not be what people think.
Some people think violent video games teach people to be violent, making it into a causal relationship. Kid A plays GTA, GTA in turn causes that kid to be violent. Perhaps we can put it in terms of influence, or that it sends the message that certain things are OK. I don’t really know, but it’s pretty clear from the millions of people who have played very violent games like say Contra, Duke Nukem, or pretty much any of the early space games (space invaders, galaga et al) who haven’t become violent (yet?!) that there is more to this question.
What’s the take home message here? Everything we make as designers embed values, judgments, prejudice… in short we embed a piece of ourselves and our culture in everything we make.
What does this mean for us? My reaction to this is, Hey Aaron, be the best man you can be! So that when you make your next game that explicitly teaches, it will make the world a better place.