Games in the Classroom - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 16

This marriage has always been a rocky one. Relationships need balance to
sustain them. We ll come back to that word, balance , again and again in the

following pages. One of the hardest jobs a game designer has is to balance the
many elements of a game. But I

'

' m getting ahead of myself.

Education Versus Entertainment
The problem was that EDU came before TAINMENT. Education was empha-
sized so much that little more than lip service was paid to entertainment. This
imbalance survives to this day. The dilemma is a tricky one. If the software fails
to entertain, it can be even more boring than the worst lecturer. If the software
concentrates too much on fun, it risks obscuring the learning objectives (see
Figure 2.3). I will address this issue on later levels, but the secret to the balance
here is pragmatic educators and game designers being willing to compromise, so
that both have an opportunity to reach their goals.

The next wave of video games used for education was to drop the EDU entirely
from Edutainment and bring the instructor back into the equation. These are
commercial video games that may contain educational elements by their very
nature but were not designed to be educational. One of my favorites, and one of
the best computer games of all time, was Sid Meier ' s Civilization (see Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4
A commercial game that teaches.

Figure 2.3
Introducing favorite characters doesn

' t help very