Re:
Im meeting with Joel Klein on monday, any edutainment games that you like already out there
is there anything close?
On May 1, 2013, at 5:42 AM, Jeffrey Epstein jeevacation@gmail.com wrote:
Play "Medal of Honor" or "Call of Duty" and you will learn war history. Here's what I've been thinking.
Video games are already great at teaching. If they don't assess your level and put an appropriate challenge right in front of you, the game fails. Challenge too hard and you get frustrated and quit playing. Too easy and the game is no fun. That is exactly what a good teacher or tutor would do. Fundamentally the thing that works is a 1 to 1 student teacher ratio. Even if you have a shitty teacher or tutor, you will learn a lot because that person gets to know you and challenges you at your level. That doesn't scale, but computers do. So we have to use computers to replace teachers - or at least augment them.
Today's video games don't try to teach stuff we care about. Well, except for shooting bad guys. The best scheme I've come up with so far is to use X-Prize or something like it to co-opt the existing video game industry. Give out a prize to the game that comes up with the best way of teaching kids anything from a normal school curriculum. Let them pick whatever they want to teach, any grade level, and just incorporate it into their product. That's the way to get the most brains and the most users for the least money. You want to skip convincing educators and parents about this stuff and just go straight for the kids.
Imagine you are looking at a door in a video game. It has some squiggly symbols printed on it. Little munchkins walk up to that door and say "Konichiwa." The door opens and they are greeted by a hot princess with big tits and a thong. The door closes in your face. You are going to fucking learn to read and pronounce Kanji.
Unleash that on 5th grade boys and then next thing you know, you'll have an entire generation of bilingual kids speaking Japanese to each other behind the backs of their parents and teachers.
Edutainment is for pussies. It doesn't work. Once kids catch on that you are trying to teach them something they shut down. We have to keep the boobs and guns and profit. You see how much money video games are making these days? Fuck educational reform. We need educational subversion!
Pablos.
Not by my measure. That's why I mention Call of Duty. These are some of the best selling "first person shooter" games. You are running around blowing shit up. People play them and love them, and have no idea that everything in the game is historically accurate. The battlefields, weapons, characters, etc. are all meticulously culled from the historical record. Kids play these games and the next thing you know they are correcting their history teachers in class. The important thing though is that they never compromised on fun, so they became commercially successful.
Pablos.