Well folks, my brief stint as an occasional blogger at Games Can Teach is coming to an end. I’ll be starting a postdoctoral teaching fellowship at Luther College in the fall, and thus leaving GCT in the able hands of my soon-to-be-former co-workers and co-bloggers.

Before I go, however, I’m happy to be able to introduce Virulent, an exciting new game from the Morgridge Institute for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  The game is available as a free app for the iPad through the iTunes Store, or through the game website.

The recent controversy in the popular press over the Electronic Arts release Medal of Honor got me thinking about the ways that “black hat” narrative perspectives can be effective in educational games. If you’re not familiar with the controversy in question, the short version is that the game was originally designed to allow players in multi-player mode to select to play as the Taliban in a present-day military conflict set in Afghanistan. They’ve since removed that option, for what it’s worth.

I understand EA’s original idea from a game-design perspective – I think this New York Times editorial sums up the perspective nicely. But I also understand, and am sympathetic to the reasons why U.S. military, their families, and Americans generally find the notion of killing Americans, even fake digital Americans, as a form of entertainment supremely distasteful and inappropriate.

Because I’m not a recreational gamer, however, and because I spend a good part of my work day thinking about how to use games and simulations as meaningful learning experiences, I had another reaction to this controversy:  What if instead of a recreational game, Electronic Arts were building an immersive simulation to train U.S. troops prior to deployment to Afghanistan? In that case, wouldn’t the opportunity to play as the Taliban be a really useful (if uncomfortable) learning experience?  Isn’t the ability to see the world through the eyes of one’s enemy a really important tactical skill? Couldn’t it even (if the simulation was realistic) import some strategic insight that could save American lives?

I don’t really know anything about the military, so I’m kind of guessing here. But I can think of a couple of other educational games where putting the player in the bad guy’s shoes is, I think, a really effective design strategy.  I’ll discuss them after the break.

CellCraft is an educational game that seems to have been designed with the specific purpose of education the public (or at least the casual game market) about cell biology!

The game slowly introduces you to the mechanics of cell biology through a series of very well-designed tutorials. Each level will introduce one or two new problems that a cell might encounter, and then present you with an new enzyme, organelle, or function that the cell can use to deal with that problem. Gameplay is similar to a simple Real-Time Strategy game, which is a perfect fit for the educational content. Matching game elements to learning objectives is probably the most difficult part of educational game design, and this is a great example of a game that does it well. The tutorial makes good use of metaphor, explaining that ATP is like energy; glucose is like fuel; mitochondria is like a power plant; amino acids and fatty acids are building materials; enzymes and vacuoles are your defenses, and ribosomes are like factories. Many players of RTS games already know how to collect and use fuel and materials to build things with factories, so the metaphor helps reinforce the relationship between gameplay and learning objectives even more.

Talesworth adventure is a wonderful logic puzzle set deep in a dungeon maze of a medieval fantasy world. You don't have control over the main character, Questy, simply runs headlong into danger. Instead, you need to strategically place bags of treasure and one-way doors in order to guide him to the end of each level. While it may not have any explicit educational value, the types of lessons you'll learn while solving each level is a perfect preparation for the kind of logical problem solving a person needs in order to learn computer programming.