Gameguru Mania

[ggrobot]

ock, Paper, Shotgun has an interesting article about why Valve believes games can help education. Here\'s an excerpt:

The first time I ever played Portal was damn near magical. Each room I walked into held promise of some diabolical new assault on both my brain and the laws of physics, but I made them look like chil

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[Koogle]

yeh thats nice, whatev.. where is half life 3?

[Tom]

Oh geez HL3... man when desperation kicks in eh? LOL! I couldn't give a shit about HL3 myself. Same shit in a different skin.

[Sabot]

Wake up Valve. Like Jane's, DID had been making military simulations to train Grunts and pilots when the first Gulf war kicked off. That's education.Couple that with incredible machines from eons ago and you have physics along with ballistics. Gt academy teaches professional driving and on it goes. Portal was more about illusion rather than exceptional gameplay dealing with real world environments.
Want to go down that route; how about Quake in space and portals?

[Mark1Rikhter]

This is a fun debate. I think Valve had the right instinct interactivity and problem-solving do help people learn but Portal itself wasn't really designed as an educational tool. What actually works better is when you build a dedicated platform around learning goals from the start, not retrofit a game into a classroom. A friend of mine works in education portal development and they've seen way better results with purpose-built systems that track student progress and adapt content, compared to just throwing games at students and hoping something sticks.