Listen to this episode of More or Less, featuring a charming tribute to Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons. It makes my point exactly about the benefits of stealth teaching.

A generation of young male nerds constructed elaborate fantasy worlds and flights of imagination while getting intimately acquainted with probability and basic statistics to a degree that grade 8 teachers can only dream. It really is unfortunate that the popularity of DnD was focused on a particular subset of the child population.

This raises an important question for the designers of future teaching games: Was the limited popularity of DnD because of the subject matter (Orcs and Elves) or because of the degree to which the math was near the surface of the play? Could you recreate the success for other groups of kids by changing the packaging, or would you need to make the math teaching even MORE stealthy?

Yesterday I was involved in a workshop for a bunch of teachers about new media. We spent part of the day talking about using games to educate and I gave them some advice, which I’ll repeat here.

There is no question that games teach skills and knowledge. You need only watch this video of a guy playing both ships in Ikaruga to see skill. Hold a conversation with a child about all 493 Pokemon (with stats) for a glimpse into the amazing powers of recall of the human mind. Moral content aside the only real complaint an educator can level against games is that they are teaching the “wrong” knowledge or skills.

Why is this so?

The answer is easy. We don’t play educational games because most educational games suck. The tragedy is that they seem to suck in a predictable, systemic way. When people get together to make educational games, they make EDUCATIONAL games instead of educational GAMES. The problem with this approach is that once you get past about age 4, the old “Hey everyone, let’s play the tidying up game!” trick stops working. Kids can tell when you are giving them something lame and unfun to do but calling it a game.

The key to making a good educational game is to have the educational part be a secondary rather than a primary focus of the gameplay. It’s difference between having a quiz show game with questions about European geography and setting Diplomacy in Europe using real city and country names.

In the first game, the goal (learning) IS the play. And if people aren’t in to the goal, they won’t play and the learning won’t happen. In the second game, the learning is a side effect of the goal. The goal of Diplomacy is to take over Europe with your little armies. As you master the game, you can’t help but memorize the map, just as a consequence of staring at it and talking about it all the time.

This isn’t new. Phys Ed teachers have been using games to trick people into doing exercises since the beginning of time, but for whatever reason, this knowledge hasn’t ported well over to the other kinds of games in an educational context.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. Oregon Trail and Sim City are shining examples of educational games done right. With any luck, Spore will be another.

Make fun games and ground them in educational knowledge instead of fantasy knowledge. The result will be addictive experiences that keep people coming back for more, while you drip feed test answers into their brains.