Educational games have been part of the game genre since the early 70ies. (MobyGames™, 2006) Given that these game haven’t the same number of loyal fans as regular game have had, these games have only evolved slowly. The primary followers of this type of game have been teachers this meant have always had tremendous focus on the educational part.
The situation today is that only a few new educational games are created each year. Usually these games are aimed at the 5-7 year old, and the level of difficulty is often lower than the ones in school-related education. This leaves the older, pre-teen school kids (7-16 year old) with either old games, or with only traditional forms of education. The problem with these old games is that they don’t fit the today standards within computer games (Dickgrave, 2005). They don’t have the nice graphics, the cool sounds and the interesting game play. According to Alan Lenton, a highly regarded game designer, the reason for this lack of evolvement within the educational games used in schools is of a financial matter. He claims in an interview that:
It's difficult and expensive to write a good game. It's difficult and expensive to write good educational software. To try and do both at the same time is a major exercise in the management of complexity. Add to that the tendency of teachers to make copies of commercial software to pass round their cash-strapped schools and you have an understandable reluctance of companies to invest in anything that might be a real 'educational game'. (Lenton, 2005)
So the problem is, how do you create an educational game for school-related education, using simple inexpensive tools, which is still interesting for the student to play. In the same interview, Lenton says that:Most games that are purported to be educational are boring — boring games and boring 'education'.
(Lenton, 2005)
This means, that according to Lenton the educational games are boring because of both their contents and their subjects. So, for an educational game to be interesting, it has to include some kind of motivational elements combined with the educational ones.
How can we improve educational games? Are there any other game genres that have some kind of motivation we can use in educational games? The answer could be puzzle games these games are simple games yet very entertaining to play.
The puzzle game genre was first defined in 1985 with the game Tetris. The fact is that Tetris was far from the first puzzle game. Some of the first puzzle games were games like minesweeper, and card games like such as solitaire, which both was developed before 1985. Tetris however changedeverything it was immensely popular, as discussed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/computer_puzzle_game
Puzzle games were remarkable in the way that they were simple games that focused on the player having fun while doing fairly simple activities. These games ranged from mindless entertainment to difficult engaging puzzles.
I light of this we think it would be interesting to know if it’s possible to improve an educational game by adding what we call the motivational elements from puzzle games.
Our field of interest during this assignment will be educational computer games and computer puzzle games.