No More Teachers, No More Books?

Ready for today's economics lesson? Okay, everyone take your seats, leave your pencils and notebooks in your bags, flip up your desk LCDs, pull out your control pads, and...first one to secure our borders without upsetting pro-immigration activists or wrecking the economy wins!

Yesterday's Mario and Sonic are today's Paul Krugman or Milton Friedman? Not quite, but PRWeb's talking about the next most intriguing thing: serious academics converting their lecture hall charts, speeches, and blackboard scribblings into something more progressively interactive and mnemonic, like video games.

I know, not really new news. Back in 2002, for instance, the BBC wrote about a UK study which concluded that "simulation and adventure games such as Sim City and RollerCoaster Tycoon, where players create societies or build theme parks, developed children's strategic thinking and planning skills." But in those latter games, the educational effects were serendipitous, not intentional. The difference when a Harvard professor like Niall Ferguson picks up the mic? He wants to create games that directly, i.e. intentionally, address core education issues, say for instance the tricky particulars of modern global conflict.

Ferguson's sudden inspiration derives at least in part from a little known developer in Newburyport, Massachusetts called Muzzy Lane. Founded in 2002, this largely academic team of game designers just released a World War II simulation called The Calm & The Storm, which not only attempts to model that conflict in multiple dimensions (think a vastly more complex and historically minded version of Axis & Allies) but also includes teaching tools like student game reports, teacher viewing modes, and scenario discussion questions. Ferguson apparently got a look at the game and was smitten with its "entirely new level of historical sophistication."

Sophisticated, yes. Educational? Tougher to say. I reviewed The Calm & The Storm last month and as a longtime wargame dabbler, was initially enamored with its military-industrial mechanics and economic realism. But after sustaining dozens of bizarre, hopelessly unrealistic outcomes, I came away disappointed with the game's abysmal artificial intelligence. Serious wargames of yore may lack Muzzy's intriguing education aids and real-world economic models, but they're as yet quite a bit more scholarly behavior-wise than The Calm & The Storm.

It's pretty simple. In the end, education-oriented or no, a game has to live up to its own standards. If your game is supposed to simulate X and Y, then it darned well better. The Calm & The Storm doesn't--not yet anyway. In time and with patches, perhaps it will. In the meantime, I'll cross my fingers that Muzzy's collaboration with Ferguson yields something more internally consistent when it comes to bottom line behavioral fidelity.