How Computer Games Can Be Educational
So it’s the first week of the school holidays, and the main order of the day is finding ways to keep the kids entertained whilst keeping them as far as possible away from their games consoles.
So it seemed like a pretty good compromise to visit the Videogame Nation exhibition at Urbis. It’s a pretty comprehensive collection of the history of British videogames, including personal favourites like Elite, Operation Wolf, Sensible Soccer and GTA. The kids’ perspective was interesting: they were just as happy to play the jerky, blocky Jet Set Willy as they were to play photo-realistic stuff like LittleBigPlanet. And despite their tender years, they also were particularly drawn to stuff that was nostalgic to them, like Donkey Kong Country, which seemed to me like it came out five minutes ago.
- Sensible Soccer
Here’s something I found particularly informative. We had a game of Sensible Soccer, which I spent far too much time on in the nineteen-nineties, and guess what? It was still great! The graphics were primitive in the extreme, but it was fast and easy to get the hang of and consequently brilliant fun. And it played nothing like football, but it didn’t matter because you got that it looked like football, so you knew the object of the game, and then you got that it was fun, and so who needs the “realism” of FIFA10?
I’m reminded of a documentary I saw once about seventies TV sci-fi, in which the “special” effects were discussed. The point was made that the fact that the spaceships were painted egg-boxes on bits of wire wasn’t a concern, because the viewer was quite happy to accept that the egg-boxes were a representation of a spaceship. Of course they were! You couldn’t film an actual spaceship, so what were the special effects guys supposed to do? The egg-boxes were used to inform us that the spaceship was on the move - and on with the story.
And so it is with Sensible Soccer. And it was a timely reminder, as we continue to work on the Army Of Zero rule expansions, that realism comes a distant second to playability and fun. Being able to pick up the game and just play it and have fun with it is paramount, and simulating “realistic” combat doesn’t matter. At all.
July 31st, 2009 at 8:00 am
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