Tangential Learning in Games

In the video above, Daniel Floyd talks a bit about the divide that has appeared between games meant purely for entertainment and those designed for "edutainment", where the primary purpose is to teach something.  Many games from the edutainment side of the gap keep the educational material at the forefront of the game, force-feeding players the content.  Whiles games like this may serve a purpose in the classroom, the reality is that few students will chose to play those kind of games on their own.

Floyd suggests a solution from the philosophy of James Portnow, among others, known as tangential learning.  The idea is to focus on developing an engaging entertaining game, but to include snippets of real events.  For example, games like Call of Duty that are set during historical wars can include history such as generals and political leaders or actual battles, leading players to develop more knowledge of the era as they play.

Tangential learning can also come from references included in the game, which may lead players to learn something new as they seek out information directly related to the game.  For example, the Final Fantasy series has the famous villain Sephiroth, named for the 10 attributes in Kabbalah.  A player visiting Google or Wikipedia to read up on the lore around the character could easily stumble onto information on his namesake.  The trick is to find a way to make it clear when a name is an actual reference without bludgeoning the player with the information.

I noticed the effects of tangential learning in my own classroom shortly after Angry Birds came out.  Many of my students had the game on their phones and were quick to open up the game when they had downtime.  Simply from playing the game, they had developed some knowledge of projectile motion, including the shape of the path a projectile follows and the way the projectile's velocity will change as it moves.  It had a big impact on how I was able to teach and what I was able to ask of my students to have them begin with that intuition, rather than starting from scratch.

I don't see tangential learning, especially in the form of references as described by Floyd in the video, ever becoming a primary focus of educational gaming.  This approach leaves a lot of uncertainty as to whether a player will ever recognize, let alone act on, the presence of a reference.  However, when game designers keep this in mind as they develop games meant as pure entertainment, this kind of tangential learning can absolutely have benefits in the classroom.