In my career as an educational game designer, I mainly focus on the problem of getting a set of learning objectives that are met through gameplay. This approach works very well for teaching skills, but I don't think it's as strong an approach for teaching knowledge. There are just some things you can't learn by doing. Like the capitals of all the states, or the multiplication tables, or other things that are really more "memorization" than they are "learning".

But as Daniel Floyd points out in "The Power of Tangential Learning", we find it easier to remember things about topics that interest us. He suggests that games can be used to generate interest in a particular topic, which will cause people to seek more information on their own.

This is an approach we've begun to take with some of our educational games, but I'll post more about that at a later time. For now, lets look at a beautiful example of a game that is causing people to seek information on their own. In this case, it's the game Don't Look Back, and the topic of interest is The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the game, like in the myth, You travel to the underworld in order to rescue your dead sweetheart. Presumably, this is a reimagining of the myth, and not just a video game version, because instead of a harp that plays music so beautiful it causes the King of the Dead to weep, you have a gun. Hey, it is a videogame!

After defeating Hades in an epic boss fight, you must escort your Eurydice back to the land of the living. Here's where the game goes beyond a "rescue the princess" Mario-clone. Like the name of the game, and like the myth that inspired it, you can't look back at your late spouse. What was so hard about this for Orpheus was that he couldn't be sure Eurydice was really behind him. He had to trust she was there. Don't Look Back is a side-scroller, so you can be sure she's there. The challenge for you is that you can't walk backwards. This means that you must overcome the challenge on each screen without ever moving back to the right. Touching the right arrow key means Eurydice gets sucked back to Hades. Of course each screen has a path you can take without moving back, but the temptation is always there. Many of the screens seem like they would be so much easier if only you could move to the right a little bit. This is a really excellent touch. It lets you empathize with the characters of the story by sharing in a form of their frustration.

The only problem with Don't Look Back is that it is really hard! It has a very 4-bit retro look - Like the Atari 2600 and Colecovision consoles of the very early '80s - and it also emulates that eras level of difficulty. (Luckily it doesn't emulate the lousy control-response of some games from the early '80s.) Gamers these days might not appreciate how arbitrarily difficult parts of the game are. Happily, failure in the game only makes you restart the screen you were on. Games from the 1980s would have made you play the whole thing over again from the start if you failed more than a few times. Still, a more approachable game might have reached more people. As Psychotronic from Jay is Games said: "It takes a specific kind of gaming literacy to make these jumps and dodge beneath these leaping creatures." I agree. It took me a while to obtain the above late-game screenshot!

Play Don't Look Back.