Educational video games aren’t a new phenom, by a long shot, but I think they’re finally starting to come into their own as actual good games.  Here’s the skinny, with a lot of MHO to temper the facts.

Here’s a great blog post detailing a list of the Top 10 most influential educational video games of the 1980s.  I bet you didn’t even know all those words could be used together in the same sentence, but here is the proof.

I think the reason why educational video games were not popular was twofold - first, video games were evil, and therefore nothing good could come from playing them, so educational video games seemed like a total paradox to parents.  Second, kids weren’t interested in using video games to learn anything, at least not on purpose, so they avoided those games.

There’s been a pretty big shift in the general population regarding video games - the generation that grew up on video games is now coming into its own, and so video games are just a part of normal life.  On top of that, the Internet, mobile devices and consoles provide a wide variety of methods to experience video games that appeal to every age group.  That’s the key, I think - adults are much more interested in using the technology for continuing education than kids are, so now that its ok for adults to play video games, educational video games have a real place in the world.

Games For Health is a non-profit organization developed to explore the ‘good-for-you’ aspects of games, particularly as they apply in the health industry - so using games and game technology to help people recover from various conditions, etc.

At the forefront of this educational and beneficial gaming movement is Nintendo - many games available for the handheld DS are marketed as educational or beneficial to the users health in some way.

For example, Big Brain Academy and Brain Age are two titles that use lots of little, short games and puzzles to help you sharpen your mind, improve your coordination, and hone your memory.  Throughout Brain Age, your guide offers suggestions on how to keep your mind active, and how each task is improving your brain.  Many seniors have purchased DS’s pretty much just to play Brain Age, and have followed it with other similar games, as a way of keeping their minds active.

Personal Trainer: Math , My Word Coach and My French Coach are newer titles for the DS that are straight education - they exist solely to help you learn something.  All of a sudden video games are overstepping their boundaries - if they keep making titles like this, then libraries everywhere will be forced to collect video games whether they want to or not - if you purchase language learning CDs, Cassettes, DVDs, and CD-ROMs, why not DS cartridges?

Is My French Coach a game?  Sort of, sure.  But how about Personal Trainer: Cooking?  That’s an interactive cookbook available for the DS.  You choose from over 200 recipes, and it talks you through them.  You can use voice commands to move back and forth through the recipe, repeat a step, or elaborate on a step.  It also has a shopping list function so you can check to see what ingredients you already have, and which ones you need to buy.  That one’s not even a game at all.  It’s a cookbook in a new format.  Shouldn’t libraries be purchasing that?  If they purchase that, as a cookbook in a new format, would they be impelled to collect something like What’s Cooking? With Jamie Oliver - that one has recipes to follow in your real kitchen, but also modes where you can create your own recipes and try them out in a virtual test kitchen, as well as straight game modes where you practice making recipes for speed, etc.

Of course, interactive mystery novels are also appearing for the DS,  and though these aren’t ‘educational’ or “healthy” in traditional terms, they’re certainly non-traditional in terms of video games.  What they do is enforce the idea that the console is no longer just for games - there are many uses for it, to meet the needs of the wide variety of people who are using it.

Video games, it would seem, are only at the beginning of their evolution - like many major inventions of the past, they started as toys, novelties, and distractions, and now have found their way into many aspects of our lives, for the long term.  I just hope someone puts together a comprehensive and scholarly database of playable games sometime soon, with downloadable formats so i can play The Legend Of Zelda: Link To The Past on my Kindle while attending classes on the neuro-stimulus response of autonomic systems to interactive realtime electronic gameplay.  Or whatever.

A Non-tech Games perspective:

Our library used to have more in-person old-school analog gaming groups where people could meet and play a variety of games - chess, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Checkers, etc.  These programs have suffered from the economy as much as any program at any library, but I’d like to see more in-person interactive game programs coming back as soon as we are able, because it adds an element of community to the process of gaming, and helps to build community connections around common interests, interactions, and friendly competition.  Multi-player video games do that as well, but there are some interesting philosophical differences between side-by-side interaction (everyone facing the screen) and face to face interaction (facing your opponent/s across a game board.)

My super nerd dream for a library program would be the equivalent of a book group, but with games.  Wouldn’t that be fantastic?  You’d have to meet weekly to get enough experience with each month’s game choice, but that would be a lot of fun, especially if your library already has a weekly game time set aside for chess, etc.  With a little effort, you could easily pair a book with the game of the month - for example, you could play mah-jong one month, and read The Joy Luck Club.  The next month you could play Go and watch the movie Pi, or read the first volume of Hikaru No Go, or another book involving Go.  You could do Chess, or learn Canasta, or Whist (does anyone actually play that game?) or Backgammon, or Mancala, or any number of other games.  Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape Of the Lock at least partially involves people playing a French card game called Ombre.  It might be more difficult to play croquet and read Alice In Wonderland, but how cool would that be to set up a a croquet game at least once in the summer time, and play with people who are all interested in learning and talking about it?  For that matter, I’d like to learn how to play cricket, at least so I can understand just about any British novel written in the last century.

For more totally awesome, obscure, historically significant, possibly very difficult to locate games, there’s a great new book out called The Book Of Games: Strategy, Tactics, and History, by Jack Botermans  that has some really fantastic information in it.  But there are plenty of other books out there describing different card games, games to play on a checker board, etc.  With minimal expense, a program like this could get started, and if it proved popular and interesting, I think it could blossom into more interesting territory - ten or twelve decks of cards should be easy enough to come by, whereas ten or twelve sets of mah jong would be a bit of an expense unless you knew they were going to get used.  Why am I writing all of this here?  I should be making this into a proposal of some kind!