Professor Warcraft
Matt Sakey,
IGDA,
Oct 06, 2003
Games are better educators than you think, argues the author, and the evidence for this is the deep knowledge gamers have of fictional worlds. "The fact that they generally teach us about fictional worlds or nonacademic issues is secondary to the fact that history, literature, geography, art, and pretty much anything else can be taught effectively in a game environment." The author contrasts current trends in e-learning - "affordable, disposable learning modules so easy and cheap to create that it's better to produce new courses than update old ones" - and suggests that games could adapt to this world. In the gaming community, the equivalent of a learning object is a 'mod' - a player-authored replacement for an original part of the game. Mods can include not only replacement game pieces (such as a 'warrior' tile) but also actual chuncks of game logic - the Civilization games are good examples of this. Where things get interesting - and where I am headed with learning objects (even if nobody else is) - is when the mods for a learning gaming environment are supplied and applied automatically via dynamic syndicated feeds of learning objects and other resources. It would be like the mobility of a chess piece increasing and decreasing based on shifting prices on the stock market.
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