I learned how to navigate by compass and map from Arma on the account of you kind of need to, to play certain game modes.
I have never learned shit from “educational” games because they all fail at being games. They’re tests with some graphics added, that shit is boring and nobody cares, there’s no incentive.
Under FALGSOC, every game would teach you at least one skill
EDIT: I learned Sneaking from Gothic because to sneak in that game you have some guy explaining it to you and that came in very handy as a teenager
Shouting “Are you not edutained?!” to a crowd of children as a small child emperor gives me a thumbs down symbol. I must die a mathiator’s death.
Edit: Addiator* It was right there.
They have released the Subtract-a-gator. Mods, please save me.
KSP is the best educational game there is in terms of learning to fun gameplay ratio. The physics are simplified, but accurate enough to gain an intuitive understanding of how spacecraft navigate in orbit
Mario Teaches Typing
The Typing Of The DeadTYPE FASTER OR THE ZOMBIES WILL EAT YOUR BRAIN!
You say this, but like all the Humongous Games edutainment games ruled. Pajama Sam, Putt Putt, Spy Fox, Freddi Fish… Classics!
Spy Fox lives rent free in my head to this day. I remember its puzzles because they all made perfect sense - stuff like learning the “scissors” martial art to beat the guy who bragged about being a master of the “paper” martial art - which isn’t something you can say about most point and click adventure games lmao.
Kerbal Space Program legit taught me a lot.
I still crashed every ship I made, but I still learned a lot about space travel
Did I ever land on the mun? Yes. Did I ever land on the mun at less than 5,000km/h? No.
But it did finally help me grok “thrust forward to go up, thrust backwards to go down” and some other orbital mechanics.
Landing, with extreme prejudice.
I kept sending out Duna missions then breaking my save with the kraken trying to build a moonbase while it was in transit
I landed on the Mun before the map view was added to that game. You had to set up your whole transfer via dead reckoning, and there was a chart of speeds and altitudes that someone made that you could consult to see your approximate orbit. It was fun!
I learned about arawanas from that amazon trail game.
One of my favorite Arma missions was we all loaded in for a night mission, and I was squad lead, and we realized that the mission designer didn’t give us nods. So we did the whole mission with flashlights, flares, glowsticks, and at several points were literally navigating by the North Star (ARMA has an accurate starmap that changes over the course of the year!). Such a cool memory.
I feel like the more you have to learn something in order to utilize game mechanics, the more likely you are to retain information.
ie survival games with foraging mechanics can instill the basics of foraging, plant species, and how said species need to be processed in order to be edible, because the player is able to mechanically benefit by learning those things
I learnt a lot as a kid from an old point and click horror game called Biosys, about being stranded in a set of biospheres. It had a great in-game encyclopedia about the plants of various biomes, and you needed to use it to safely find food and water, etc.
Also learned about mescaline, white angels trumpet, and mutant maneating plant vampires that keep stealing all your precious CO2 facehugger style…
I’ll add mine in, Morrowind taught me how to use city transit before I had ever even visited a city. Different types of transit having different loops, pros and cons, and various transfer hubs.
Hey, some of those JumpStart games were pretty rad! Also Math Blaster and OutNumbered. And we can’t forget the grandpappy of edutainment games, The Oregon Trail!
But your overall thrust is correct–in order to be a successful edutainment game, it has to be fun first, educational second. That doesn’t have to be a distant second, but if it’s not fun no amount of education you cram in there is ever gonna get conveyed anyway.
That’s not necessarily you not learning, it’s you not having fun. “Any good game can be educational, but no educational games are good” would be a more accurate title for this post, even if it’s blatant hyperbole.
I played a lot of Mathblaster that was mentioned in this thread and I still suck at math
Sounds like a personal problem.
Obviously Mathblaster is not a suitable tool to teach math
For reals though, my parents were vehemently down with the initial pikemon craze, I was 6-7 in 98 and they noticed how much reading is involved in the video and card games, there’s a bunch of math in the card game (there is in the video game but they didn’t really play them and it’s optional as hell). They thought the TV show sucksd and Digimon was a better cartoon but were pretty quick to notice this was really helping me learn some basic shit. I’m certain Pokémon gave me the early gains in reading comprehension and analysis cause knowing the most about Pokémon made you cooler than other kids. I found out you could find fan translated versions of Japanese episode scripts with screenshots from the Japanese broadcast making for a pretty solid summary of what was coming in 6 months cause people posted that kind of stuff in the early late 90s to 2000s interwebs. There were kids in my class who were certain I had some sort of inside connection to the Digimon production cause I’d read fan translations and was doodling Digimon in class that would appear in the show later on. So Digimon appropriately taught me that using the internet as a resource of arcane info and not a place for flash games could be useful as hell. My early gamer years also helped me be a wise consumer, once again my folks were pretty smart in getting me some gaming magazine subscriptions (they were like $12 for a year, so it wasn’t a big deal) so I could compare write ups and reviews and make informed choices as to what I’d want for Christmas and stuff. My cousins and friends would have game shelves filled with obvious shovelware, I learned to be choosy fast and once again, my folks were very cool with frequent game rentals cause it was like $15 to get 3 for a week and you could test drive before making a full commitment. This is partially cause they also really like video games, I’ll be heading over soon for Christmas eve and we will be getting drunk and playing Mario Kart. So yeah, tldr: gaming can for sure learn yiu stuff and I have pretty cool parents who are at the very least informed consumers.
Idk what Math Circus or coolmathgames.com taught me but those were all unblocked and had some fun games
I assume you have not played any games made by MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium).
They’re the ones that made the OG Oregon Trail, Lemonade Stand, Dynopark Tycoon, Odell Down Under the fish simulator, and a series of point and click puzzle games like Museum Madness.
I haven’t played all of their games but all the ones I have played are bangers.
I played Oregon Trail, allthough due to it being an internet phenomenon, not like natively. From what I recall, it doesn’t actually teach you all that much about the actual oregon trail unless you go read some long ass texts that have no bearing on actual gameplay?
Like I’m sure it teaches you, quite vividly, that movement through the wilderness by wagon trail sucks major ass. It’s like the Assassins Creed approach of having a good game and then for the educational part (not that AC doesn’t teach you at least a rough idea about some historic events) you can visit the in-game wikipedia as if I couldn’t just visit the actual wikipedia
I learned Frog Fractions from Frog Fractions.
My very first video game was SimEarth which taught me how to be a weird dork.
