I've written a little bit before about games as art, but my previous examples have all been games that comment on some aspect of life or literature. This is not to imply that all art needs to make commentary, or that games written for the primary purpose of entertainment or education are not art. There are some people who say that games are never art, though personally I agree with the other side of the argument.

It is easier, however, to argue that games that do have something important to say are art. As a game designer I find it particularly interesting when games are used to comment on the nature of games.

I'm going to talk about three of these games, but you should probably play them first if you don't want my biased dissection of the games' messages to interfere with your personal experience of them. So play them first, and I'll put my commentary after the break.

Play You Have to Burn the Rope.
Play Achievement Unlocked.
Play Upgrade Complete.

Questionaut is a simply gorgeously drawn and animated educational game in the same vein as Samarost. The game was created for the BBC's Bitesize series by Samarost creator Amanita Design.  The intent of the Bitesize series is to combine grade school quizzes with online games, and that's what Questionaut is. Your character has a balloon that is fueled by knowledge. In each level, there is a clever point-and-click puzzle that you must solve in order to get the attention of a character, who will then ask you a series of multiple choice questions. Answering a question correctly adds to your fuel, and an incorrect question subtracts from it. Once you have five bubbles of fuel, your balloon has enough fuel to move on to the next challenge. Questions and the levels are thematically related. There is an owl who asks you questions about animals, an old man who questions you on writing, and an ice-skater who lives near a giant bunsen burner quizzes your knowledge of chemistry. Arithmetic, probability, geometry, physics and English are also tested.

Clark Aldrich once said that about educational games that:
    "Game elements are the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down." (“Learning by Doing”, p. 85)

This is the attitude that learning is boring, and that we need to add the game elements to an educational game in order to make it bearable. I fundamentally disagree with this approach to educational game design. One of the central themes of Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design, is that fun comes from learning new skills. Games get boring once we master the skills needed to play them, and they get frustrating when we aren't able to gain enough competency. That's why it's important to make sure your games difficulty curve is optimized to constantly be just challenging enough.

There's a really interesting experiment going on over at GamingYourWay.com.

Richard "Squize" Myles, one of Gaming Your Way's two members, is posting every single build in the development of his new game X++.

Welcome to Games Can Teach. My name is Joe Rheaume, and I'm a designer and programmer of educational games. The purpose of this blog is give you some practical examples of how games can be used as educational tools.

I thought I’d begin with an example any casual game designer probably knows by now.

No one reads the instructions. You need a tutorial!

There are so many free casual games out there, that you'd better make sure any player trying out your game for the first time is having fun as soon as possible. Why should they spend the time to read about how to play if they're not totally sure the game is worth it? Even if they do try to read the instructions, chances are that not much is going to sink in. They see a big wall of text, and they have no context, because they haven't tried the game yet. Instant Cognitive Overload.