A while ago I played a Nintendo console game called Earthbound 2 during an ... intense ... period of my life. It's a Japanese style RPG that features a lot of emotional storytelling, to the point that the community has an in-joke that the real boss is the "try not to cry challenge". As they say these days, "content note: suicide".
The original was never released outside of Japan - but there is an unofficial fan translation - and there's rumors that this is because some of the topics would be seen as controversial or not age-appropriate for the usual target market (at this point the teacher in me is screaming into the void).
The rough plot is you grow up in an idyllic rural town, where no-one locks their doors and kids can wander freely around at night - then a bunch of fascist pigs (literally!) takes over and you're in fighting monsters mode. It has very simple graphics and music and mechanics, but it lives off its storytelling.
Along the way the game alternates between slapstick humour and emotional gut punches, touches on innocence and grief and violence and revenge and abuse, death and horror and love and redemption, and offers a not-so-subtle criticism of capitalism and consumerism running wild. One reviewer said its "the closest games have yet come to literature".
It certainly mixes and cuts across the five kinds of understanding from the Egan book review, with a lot of irony thrown in. One moment you're visiting a family member's grave, another moment you have to hunt for a "pencil eraser" because there's a giant pencil blocking the path ahead.
(The game is from 2006, and neither it nor my post is a comment on the current world situation.)
The meaningful experience I had is it washed so many tears out of me that I somehow recovered from a phase of depression and found the will to live again.
If any teacher can pack that much meaning into their classroom, they're doing the world a service. (They've probably also at least heard of Egan.) But I fear some manager somewhere would have opinions on how "age appropriate" some of the topics are, so we'd end back at "Grade 1: learn about your families".
The best game I ever played was Kerbal Space Program. Not only it teaches you orbital mechanics, delta-v, some engineering, but you can also learn quite a few things about what can go wrong in an unpredictable way. If you never played, I highly recommend doing there and return mission to Eve on the first playthrough. The rules are simple: no interplanetary probes, you have to get 2 kerbonauts to the surface of Eve (the purple planet) and back, on your first try playing this game. Quicksaves are okay and you can do as much experimenting on Kerbin as you want.
The kind of computer games I play tend to be high on reflexion - in this way they are rather like solving maths problem, except less challenging (but more fun).
I played a lot of Europa Universalis 4 and Crusader kings 2 though, and those games teach you a lot about history - if you play them with a critical mind.
The #1 goal for any state is to survive. And in the pre-modern period that EU4 covers (around 1450-1800), the best way to grow stronger was to expand and capture more resources. As a result, to ensure their own survival, states are forced to adopt an imperialist strategy, swallowing smaller neighbors in order to keep up with other states who are doing the same thing. Eventually, only a handful of states are left.
The Victoria series of games, on the other hand, tries to simulate the industrial revolution from ~1830-1930. According to some historians, the main change during this period is that economic development became much more profitable through capitalism, while war became much more destructive (as the world finally discovered in World War I). This probably explains why large, prosperous countries rarely start wars with one another today.
On the other hand, a focus on economic development isn't necessarily peaceful. I also felt like I finally understood colonization (e.g., the Scramble for Africa) after playing Victoria. But I think I've written enough for now.
Just today I was having students listen to and comment on episodes of my podcast. One of them mentioned this quote from THE PRINCESS BRIDE (the book):
[‘Life isn’t fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it’s a terrible thing to do. It’s not only a lie, it’s a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it’s never going to be.’
Would you believe that for me right then it was like one of those comic books where the light bulb goes on over Mandrake the Magician’s head? ‘It isn’t!’ Isaid, so loud I realty startled her. ‘You’re right. It’s not fair.’ I was so happy if I’d known how to dance, I’d have started dancing.]
I read that in high school and had almost the same reaction. The pressure was off. There was nothing wrong with the world. It was my expectations that were wrong.
Book—I remember reading The Dead one wintry night. The last part focuses on the protagonist’s warm feelings for his wife only for them to be dashed when she confesses her love for a dead young paramour. I could feel the “snow…General all over Ireland” in the dark windows outside my room, corresponding to the protagonist’s emotional whiplash. A wonderful story.
Video game—There’s a poignant moment in the Terraria: Calamity mod. Throughout the game you’ve been getting little lore drops every time you kill one of the dozens of bosses from some unknown source, sometimes merely giving information but sometimes expressing emotion—disgust, loathing, and most frequently regret. In time you learn that this voice is that of Yharim, the tyrannical godslaying king whose actions long ago gave rise to the messed-up world in which you play.
Late in the game you fight a dragon-phoenix boss. Kill him and you get the classic “second health bar”—as a phoenix, he revives in a more deadly second phase. But now he starts singing while attacking you! For the first time in the game the music has vocals and lyrics. The dragon is reporting to his master Yharim that he will never defeat you, the player character—but he wonders if death at the player character’s hands is what Yharim was really orchestrating all along. As you fight the toughest enemy in the game so far the song makes you ponder—am I really just a pawn in Yharim’s schemes? Am I being manipulated to slay the gods he failed to slay? Am I, who have slain so many creatures, any less a genocidal maniac than Yharim? Do I even care what the answer is? Am I in the right for killing the sole remaining dragon of the entire species?
And you get that great feeling when you kill the dragon-phoenix for the second time, this time for good. Yet now you must consider whether yours is truly a moral victory or whether you’re no better than the author of the eponymous Calamity.
It’s not video game storytelling on the level of better known examples like Undertale. But it still hits hard with volunteer-made pixel art and music!
I think that playing cooperative video games has been a consistent source of bonding. Anything in the same room is great. Team games of Goldeneye late at night at Neal's as a kid on Nintendo 64. Shouting room to room for backup with Starcraft in college dorms. Puzzling through haunted Luigis Mansion with my youngest son. Even single-player games can become cooperative if you can switch off and play in the same room.
There's something about building towards a shared goal that brings people together.
in my opinion it was lavender town in the og pokemon games - the story about cubone made me cry and i know lots of other people feel the same. i also cried so hard at the end of "the fault in our stars" by john green.
The past two years our family of four has played Mario Wonder all together at the winter solstice. It's a game that gracefully handles our different video game skill levels, and the kids really enjoyed noticing how much better we were at it this year. Nothing terribly profound about it, just lots of cozy, relaxed delight. My favorite experiences with books have also been about connection. My kids have never loved being read to. We're able to do some reading aloud these days but for novels they would much prefer to read them on their own (and ideally for me to read them on my own too). It's sometimes hard for me to get through yet another middle grade novel about a magic school when I have my own list of books I'd like to read, but when I do I'm always glad I did because hearing what they take from a novel we've both read provides so much insight into their ever-changing brains. And middle grade books are at least frequently less depressing than books detailing techniques for maintaining the attention of 30 kids at once, though I suppose that book too was a meaningful experience; it reminded me how grateful I am to be able to homeschool and to have SiW.
A while ago I played a Nintendo console game called Earthbound 2 during an ... intense ... period of my life. It's a Japanese style RPG that features a lot of emotional storytelling, to the point that the community has an in-joke that the real boss is the "try not to cry challenge". As they say these days, "content note: suicide".
The original was never released outside of Japan - but there is an unofficial fan translation - and there's rumors that this is because some of the topics would be seen as controversial or not age-appropriate for the usual target market (at this point the teacher in me is screaming into the void).
The rough plot is you grow up in an idyllic rural town, where no-one locks their doors and kids can wander freely around at night - then a bunch of fascist pigs (literally!) takes over and you're in fighting monsters mode. It has very simple graphics and music and mechanics, but it lives off its storytelling.
Along the way the game alternates between slapstick humour and emotional gut punches, touches on innocence and grief and violence and revenge and abuse, death and horror and love and redemption, and offers a not-so-subtle criticism of capitalism and consumerism running wild. One reviewer said its "the closest games have yet come to literature".
It certainly mixes and cuts across the five kinds of understanding from the Egan book review, with a lot of irony thrown in. One moment you're visiting a family member's grave, another moment you have to hunt for a "pencil eraser" because there's a giant pencil blocking the path ahead.
(The game is from 2006, and neither it nor my post is a comment on the current world situation.)
The meaningful experience I had is it washed so many tears out of me that I somehow recovered from a phase of depression and found the will to live again.
If any teacher can pack that much meaning into their classroom, they're doing the world a service. (They've probably also at least heard of Egan.) But I fear some manager somewhere would have opinions on how "age appropriate" some of the topics are, so we'd end back at "Grade 1: learn about your families".
The best game I ever played was Kerbal Space Program. Not only it teaches you orbital mechanics, delta-v, some engineering, but you can also learn quite a few things about what can go wrong in an unpredictable way. If you never played, I highly recommend doing there and return mission to Eve on the first playthrough. The rules are simple: no interplanetary probes, you have to get 2 kerbonauts to the surface of Eve (the purple planet) and back, on your first try playing this game. Quicksaves are okay and you can do as much experimenting on Kerbin as you want.
The kind of computer games I play tend to be high on reflexion - in this way they are rather like solving maths problem, except less challenging (but more fun).
I played a lot of Europa Universalis 4 and Crusader kings 2 though, and those games teach you a lot about history - if you play them with a critical mind.
For anyone who wants to dive into what games like EU4 teach about history, I recommend the "Teaching Paradox" posts on Bret Devereaux's blog: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/teaching-paradox/
He's a historian of Ancient Rome, and he goes in depth analyzing how the mechanics of each game demonstrate an underlying theory of history.
For example, in this post he analyzes the "security dilemma" in EU4: https://acoup.blog/2021/05/07/collections-teaching-paradox-europa-universalis-iv-part-ii-red-queens/
The #1 goal for any state is to survive. And in the pre-modern period that EU4 covers (around 1450-1800), the best way to grow stronger was to expand and capture more resources. As a result, to ensure their own survival, states are forced to adopt an imperialist strategy, swallowing smaller neighbors in order to keep up with other states who are doing the same thing. Eventually, only a handful of states are left.
The Victoria series of games, on the other hand, tries to simulate the industrial revolution from ~1830-1930. According to some historians, the main change during this period is that economic development became much more profitable through capitalism, while war became much more destructive (as the world finally discovered in World War I). This probably explains why large, prosperous countries rarely start wars with one another today.
On the other hand, a focus on economic development isn't necessarily peaceful. I also felt like I finally understood colonization (e.g., the Scramble for Africa) after playing Victoria. But I think I've written enough for now.
Just today I was having students listen to and comment on episodes of my podcast. One of them mentioned this quote from THE PRINCESS BRIDE (the book):
[‘Life isn’t fair, Bill. We tell our children that it is, but it’s a terrible thing to do. It’s not only a lie, it’s a cruel lie. Life is not fair, and it never has been, and it’s never going to be.’
Would you believe that for me right then it was like one of those comic books where the light bulb goes on over Mandrake the Magician’s head? ‘It isn’t!’ Isaid, so loud I realty startled her. ‘You’re right. It’s not fair.’ I was so happy if I’d known how to dance, I’d have started dancing.]
I read that in high school and had almost the same reaction. The pressure was off. There was nothing wrong with the world. It was my expectations that were wrong.
Book—I remember reading The Dead one wintry night. The last part focuses on the protagonist’s warm feelings for his wife only for them to be dashed when she confesses her love for a dead young paramour. I could feel the “snow…General all over Ireland” in the dark windows outside my room, corresponding to the protagonist’s emotional whiplash. A wonderful story.
Video game—There’s a poignant moment in the Terraria: Calamity mod. Throughout the game you’ve been getting little lore drops every time you kill one of the dozens of bosses from some unknown source, sometimes merely giving information but sometimes expressing emotion—disgust, loathing, and most frequently regret. In time you learn that this voice is that of Yharim, the tyrannical godslaying king whose actions long ago gave rise to the messed-up world in which you play.
Late in the game you fight a dragon-phoenix boss. Kill him and you get the classic “second health bar”—as a phoenix, he revives in a more deadly second phase. But now he starts singing while attacking you! For the first time in the game the music has vocals and lyrics. The dragon is reporting to his master Yharim that he will never defeat you, the player character—but he wonders if death at the player character’s hands is what Yharim was really orchestrating all along. As you fight the toughest enemy in the game so far the song makes you ponder—am I really just a pawn in Yharim’s schemes? Am I being manipulated to slay the gods he failed to slay? Am I, who have slain so many creatures, any less a genocidal maniac than Yharim? Do I even care what the answer is? Am I in the right for killing the sole remaining dragon of the entire species?
And you get that great feeling when you kill the dragon-phoenix for the second time, this time for good. Yet now you must consider whether yours is truly a moral victory or whether you’re no better than the author of the eponymous Calamity.
It’s not video game storytelling on the level of better known examples like Undertale. But it still hits hard with volunteer-made pixel art and music!
I think that playing cooperative video games has been a consistent source of bonding. Anything in the same room is great. Team games of Goldeneye late at night at Neal's as a kid on Nintendo 64. Shouting room to room for backup with Starcraft in college dorms. Puzzling through haunted Luigis Mansion with my youngest son. Even single-player games can become cooperative if you can switch off and play in the same room.
There's something about building towards a shared goal that brings people together.
in my opinion it was lavender town in the og pokemon games - the story about cubone made me cry and i know lots of other people feel the same. i also cried so hard at the end of "the fault in our stars" by john green.
The past two years our family of four has played Mario Wonder all together at the winter solstice. It's a game that gracefully handles our different video game skill levels, and the kids really enjoyed noticing how much better we were at it this year. Nothing terribly profound about it, just lots of cozy, relaxed delight. My favorite experiences with books have also been about connection. My kids have never loved being read to. We're able to do some reading aloud these days but for novels they would much prefer to read them on their own (and ideally for me to read them on my own too). It's sometimes hard for me to get through yet another middle grade novel about a magic school when I have my own list of books I'd like to read, but when I do I'm always glad I did because hearing what they take from a novel we've both read provides so much insight into their ever-changing brains. And middle grade books are at least frequently less depressing than books detailing techniques for maintaining the attention of 30 kids at once, though I suppose that book too was a meaningful experience; it reminded me how grateful I am to be able to homeschool and to have SiW.