Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

Steven Poole schools the concept of the educational videogame

Can videogames be educational? The question is as old as videogames themselves, and it depends what you mean. One of my favourite toys as a young child was my Dataman, made by Texas Instruments: it was a futuristic-looking grey handheld console that essentially gamified mental arithmetic, flashing up sums on the blue LED display and asking the player to input the answer via the number keys. As a tiny nerd I became obsessed with getting perfect scores as fast as possible. After months of this I got very good at mental arithmetic, but then that was exactly what the Dataman was training. It was basically an interactive calculator.

The question gets more complex when we consider current discussions about the use of videogames as educational aids in schools. Sure, you can dump a lot of factual information into a game format, but questions remain as to how much the user actually retains as working knowledge afterwards. One way in which many people think that videogames can do something that print media can’t, however, is in their simulation of systems: by reacting to player inputs, the game can demonstrate how the parts of complex systems interact.

One very complex system whose operations mean a great deal to everyone on the planet, of course, is the climate. Global warming is the result of human inputs into a vastly complex interconnected web of systems, the best supercomputer models of which are still, of necessity, simplifications. In a time when President Trump has ordered his own environmental agency to delete all reference to the phenomenon, maybe wider grassroots education about the problem is in order. And maybe videogames, being particularly good at helping us understand systems, can help.

That, at least, is the possibility addressed by a fascinating recent paper by Tania Ouariachi Peralta, María Dolores Olvera Lobo and José Gutiérrez Pérez from the University of Granada in Spain. The researchers explore a suite of games on the theme of global warming and subject them to an interesting set of analyses, cross-validated with a global panel of experts in climate science, science communication and environmental education. They conclude optimistically that such games can improve climate education because, in them, “causes are made visible, actions are portrayed as local, uncertainty is avoided, contextualised information is provided in a positive and proactive tone, and a critical thinking approach is encouraged through decision-making.”

There is, however, a potential problem here, and one that may even be inherent in the videogame form itself. In videogames, regardless of genre, the individual player has an exaggerated, superhuman ability to change the course of events compared with the agency we actually have as individuals in our own lives — even compared to the agency that Donald Trump has, in the face of a recalcitrant Congress. The researchers make approving mention of a game entitled Act On

Your Consumption, “where the character Eva suggests that the player look around to check how many items are made of plastic in order to encourage the player to reflect upon how they could be replaced. She also encourages the player to write down his or her own plans for a sustainable diet and low-CO2 mobility.” This is a fine thing to do and would no doubt make the player feel better, as well as contributing in a tiny way to the improvement of her immediate environment. But is it going to stop global warming? No it isn’t. Local action by well-meaning people is not going to stop sea-level rises and increasingly frequent hurricanes: that is why we need politics, and decisions at the level of national governments, and international agreements such as the Paris accord.

Some of the other games examined by the researchers at least transcend the level of the single human by giving the player the role of a city manager or explicitly an ‘ecological superhero’, but by their very form they all imply that a single person can make a difference. The danger here, then, is that educational videogames which reduce a global, interconnected problem to the solipsistic universe of the single player are teaching exactly the wrong thing: they are encouraging a kind of complacent feeling of virtuous superiority. You can get good at sums on your own, but to address a challenge like global warming will take the greatest massively multiplayer action ever seen.

The danger is that educational videogames are teaching exactly the wrong thing