Comments on: The Power Of Tangential Learning

By: AngieAyala19

AngieAyala19 — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:57:32 +0000

If you want to buy a house, you would have to get the home loans. Moreover, my mother always takes a credit loan, which occurs to be the most fast.

By: Gylfi

Gylfi — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:24:54 +0000

The guy’s got a healthy point, but he underestimates the beauty of games for their own worth, He just thinks we have to stop playing and use wikipedia, as if games were simple movies.

Videogames don’t need wikipedia to teach something, the holy, monstrous means of interaction doesn’t need the player’s WILL to go look wikipedia, interaction doesn’t tell you “see how cool is it? now go learn about King Arthur, please”.
Interaction, if well exploited, lets you realize what it feels like to actually BE King Arthur or Hamlet during his moral dilemmas, to make his CHOICES, to reflect and rack your brain about them.. interaction IS thinking as itself, it’s not a means thru which you’re invited to think.
It’s what happens when you’re given 4/5 choices to progress thru the plot and only one’s correct, and to “guess” it you have to re-consider king arthur’s life, his psychology, the whole story up to that point and historical informations about the environment… so it’s not “your” choice to seek wikipedia, it’s the game itself, with its interaction, that forces you to THINK about the historical informations given thruout the game’s narration.

This is what the man clearly fails to understand, underestimating videogames, and giving them the same value as long as they show you learnable notions.. while there are poor and good games based on their depth and problem-solving structure.

By: myname

myname — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:37:18 +0000

I have this fond memory of playing Zac McCracken accompanied by a dictionary (english is not my first language) – understanding every single word was crucial to completing the game, and my dad never wanted to help me – but he did give the dictionary i have beside me her on the table today – 17 years later – and with that and the countless of C64 and Amiga games i grew up with, i now speak and write great english. (punctuation and grammar is however my weak spot in both my languages!)

By: mister slim

mister slim — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:33:18 +0000

The Sephirot actually falls under the Stuff I’ve Learned From Comics category. Damn you, Alan Moore!

By: Reid

Reid — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 02:39:10 +0000

Hell . . . I’ve learned more about rocks from Dwarf Fortress than I did in Geology class. If only they had told me about the demons if you dug deep enough!

Seriously, its like Oregon Trail for Geology.

By: Downloads_Plz

Downloads_Plz — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:04:32 +0000

Just to throw a link out there, he also has one more lecture up, this one about Video Games and Storytelling, which you can view here…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jdG2LHair0

By: Erlend M

Erlend M — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:55:51 +0000

I learned the names of the two moons of Mars by playing the original Doom. But I think this kind of tangential learning works only for a certain kind of person, with a natural curiosity and a good memory for facts and names.

Besides, there’s really no incentive for developers to include more tangential real-world information in their games than is strictly necessary. For instance, how many of the people who bought Civilization wouldn’t have bought it if the Civilopedia didn’t include historical information? My guess is hardly anyone.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:54:44 +0000

That was awesome. One good point after another.
People have been thinking this for literally decades now though.
Anyone watch The Last Lecture by that poor professor who died on pancreatic cancer? Some extremely large and powerful companies and universities have been delving in to this idea for yonks now. It’s just taking a while to get going, probably due to technical restrictions. Not really an issues any more thought. The average PC is rather powerful these days…

By: sigma83

sigma83 — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:28:10 +0000

‘I thought it was very cool and interesting they had all of that in the codex, even though it wasn’t very well integrated into the game, tbh.’

Let’s hope they put it into the next game!

My particularly favorite tidbit was their explanation of antigravity: Ships are built with their floors perpendicular to the direction of thrust, so that the movement of the ship keeps people standing by virtue of inertia. For situations where the ship stops moving, the floor is painted a different color from the ceiling.

Genius!

By: Bobsy

Bobsy — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:20:06 +0000

I already mentioned in the Ensemble article what Age of Empires’s help file did to me. It’s 100% exactly what Floyd describes there, and I can say with complete certainty that it works. Thanks to a Hittite-based demo and its accompanying Microsoft-format documentation, I took a degree course in ancient history and archaeology, and in 2004 I went and visited the ruins of Hattusus for myself. It was a kind of weird experience, kinda similar to visiting Castle Clinton in New York after playing Deus Ex I guess.

And speaking of Deus Ex, which Josh also brought up, it is such an advantage to that game that it’s set in the real world. Lots of games are ostensibly set in the real world but you’d struggle to really know it. Most WWII games for example: clearly set in the real war, but they rarely set foot outside the boundries of the conflict in question. Yes, we’re soldiers fighting the Nazis, but… but come on. World War II was not just about soldiers fighting the Nazis.

(secretly wishing for a concentration camp liberation moment in Call of Duty, or a game where you’re a London policeman in the middle of the blitz…)

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:12:27 +0000

There’s the opposite problem: if you begin to use tangential learning, you have to allow gamers to differentiate between reality and fiction. For example, I remember a letter in PCG a while back where the author of the letter claims to have learnt about physics from Star Wars: X-wing Alliance. So it’s a double-edged sword.

By: Esha

Esha — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:49:37 +0000

That was a good essay, it did have one rather obvious and gaping flaw though, I felt. It was console oriented. While I respect and understand that the general gaming audience of such a topic is probably going to be made up primarily of couch gamers (which doesn’t include me, I game from an office chair, thank you very much!), that’s not always the case.

The thing is, lots of PC games do this and frequently. Even today. So the essay is a bit flawed because the divide between entertainment and education, and the tangential learning he’s apparently not seeing is only applicable to console games. Let’s take a look at the most recent major release for the PC: Spore. Spore is very silly, but it might inspire someone to look into evolution after playing it, and that’s a fine example of tangential learning in and of itself.

Moreover, a person doesn’t always have to be enriched by Superliminal Learning. I don’t know why the values and virtues of a good story seem to be so forgotten, but being exposed to a good story I find is as enriching as anything else. Some of you will know I like to cite this example, and some of you will roll your eyes… I don’t care! Well, alright I do but it’s a relevant point. Mask of the Betrayer. There, I said it. MotB had one of the most enriching stories since the likes of Planescape, and it was one that brought the topics of theology and bloody existentialism to the table.

Existentialism!

Okay, I’ll stop that now.

The thing is, it was a wholly enriching story, and after completining it (once one had gotten past the torrent of emotions), one could sit and think about all the topics brought up. It was a really fun water-cooler game because D&D theology is always so very interesting, and an absolutely fabulous mirror of the evolution of our own theology (in its own way).

There are lots of games like this, and the secret is that they aren’t console ports. So if learning and cultural enrichment really wants to make its way into games, it’s more that those who develop games for consoles need to stop and look at what the PC exclusive games are doing right.

Or is it that the PC audience is simply taken as being more intelligent than everyone else as a given? But I’m not goinig to go there. How could I possibly go there? I mean… Warcraft. So it can’t be that. I don’t really know then why PC exclusive games generally tend to be more heady, but usually they are.