The Power of Tangential Learning
September 20th, 2008- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN0qRKjfX3s
The video above is a collaborative work between James Portnow and Daniel Floyd discussing the concept of Tangential Learning. It is based off an article by James Portnow, the full text of which can be found below.Winston Churchill once said: “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.”We have known for some time that games are the answer to this problem. The problem is that most of the games we create to solve this dilemma attempt to teach rather than allow the player to learn.This article will discuss ‘tangential learning’, the concept of exposing players to knowledge rather than actively trying to teach them.Simply by presenting the player with opportunities to discover interesting ideas that they may not have otherwise come across you are setting the groundwork for learning. This investigation will focus on how to build on that groundwork and lower the barrier to autodidactic learning…without substantially raising development costs or taking away ‘fun’.
The Problem
When someone flips off the switch or puts down the controller they should walk away refreshed, having enjoyed their leisure, but should that be the limit of what they experience? Does it have to be? Clearly not.When someone walks away from a play experience they should have the opportunity to bring something from their recreation into their life. Because we are an interactive media we have the greatest opportunity to facilitate learning and bring real benefit to the interactor, yet so often do we deny our users that opportunity.Why? Because there is a divide between games which are meant to do good and those meant to entertain. This divide is unlike that in any other media. We seemed paralyzed by a past paradigm where games that were intended to do good for the user were made by a totally separate group than those meant simply to be enjoyed. This separation was reinforced and encouraged until those two groups finally became two separate industries, the ‘videogame industry’ and the ‘edutainment’ or ‘simulation’ industry. The problem is that, in digging this trench, both sides discarded something very valuable. Though this is not universally true, it is my opinion that the edutainment and simulations industry gave up “fun”, while we gave up “good”.
Tangential Learning: The Basics
Ever watch a movie where they hold you down and hit you in the face with the point? A lot of modern educational games are like that. Why don’t we want that? Because really, getting hit in the face is not very fun. So what’s the answer?
To enable and facilitate learning rather than to educate… (I think the rest of this article is going to be deconstructing that sentence.)
So what does it mean to educate? In this context ‘to educate’ is to set out with the goal of teaching a person a specific thing. Games like the Math Blaster or Dafur is Dying or even Typing of the Dead take this approach. The problem with this approach is that it’s laborious, heavy handed, and often slower/less effective than just picking up a textbook or newspaper.
Study after study has shown that kids and adults alike assimilate information better when they are studying topics which they are interested in rather than things which they are forced to learn for school or work. The real failing of the above approach is that it simply attempts to jazz up things which the user doesn’t inherently care about rather than trying to get them engaged in the topic, caring in a personal way.
The advantage that traditional video games have is that the user inherently cares about what they are doing. This enthusiasm is (comparatively) easy to channel or transfer to other activities, which brings us to the topic of tangential learning.
Tangential learning is not what you learn by being taught but rather what you learn by being exposed to things in a context which you are already highly engaged in. The simplest example is, of course, film. I’ll use The 300 as an example. That film was hardly intended to educate and yet everyone I know now knows who Leonidas is (though I think I’m still the only one who knows what it says on his tomb…).
The film didn’t educate, it served to stir discussion and spur interest. People who knew anything about the battle of Thermopylae would naturally disseminate that information in conversation in a way that was palatable and acceptable to their peers. Additionally this simply exposed people to something they didn’t know they were interested in, which is one of the often one of the biggest barriers to learning.
I knew several people who googled The 300 and ended up at the Wikipedia page for the historical battle of Thermopylae. This spidering of ideas and correlation of interests is what tangential learning is all about.
(And we haven’t even discussed the people who simply said to themselves, “This Leonidas guy is pretty cool…I’d like to learn about him.”)
So, Tangential Learning is simply the idea that some portion of your audience will self educate if you can facilitate their introduction to topics they might like in a context they already find exciting and engaging. Is this enough?
First, my answer is an emphatic yes. It costs nothing, it does some good.
Second, my answer is, “No, there is more we can do.”
Tangential Learning and Games: A Common Misperception
A question I get a lot is, “Is tangential learning possible in games without limiting yourself to historical themed games? “ Yes. Absolutely and indubitably!
I’ll give an example of how tangential learning, barely implemented and taking no development time, can serve to introduce players to new ideas. Do you know how many RPG gamers who have never gone to Temple know what the Sephiroth is simply because the Final Fantasy team decided to name a character after it? If .1% of their audience discovered what it is they’ve just facilitated the learning of 10,000 people.
Tangential Learning and Games: Better Implementation
Setting up kernels of fact or parables regarding real events in the midst of a fantastic sea of game fiction is not, as you may have guessed, the best way to invite players to educate themselves. So how do you highlight what elements of your game have more to them?
You could take the straightforward tact of games like Xenosaga and simply make everything referential. Of course this takes a lot of effort and preplanning. Alternatively, you can take the simplistic approach of simply highlighting the names of things which are referential; effective but a little tacky. But really, there are more subtle approaches that games can take to clue in the interactor to potential learning opportunities.
There are a million such techniques, but I’ll give you two as examples:
I personally like games that give information or quotes during the loading screens. This allows you to utilize otherwise dead space and point the player in the right direction regarding tangential learning opportunities.
The inclusion of clearly referential objects also informs the player of prospects for potential learning. For example, if you include Excalibur as a sword in your game, it is much more likely that your audience will connect the fact that the sword Masamune in your game might have some basis in “fact”.
There are other options, however. From things like the Civilopedia to the Mass Effect Codex, games have attempted to provide a space for players to access tangential topics from within the game. Making these things more accessible is indubitably a good idea, but is this approach too intensive? To heavy handed?
First, I’ve had a passing thought on the ‘Civilopedia’ of the future…Wikipedia. Wikipedia links could be easily implemented for any PC game and requires no development time or additional storage space. Additionally Wikipedia would allow the user to follow their interests in a way that a traditional in-game encyclopedia simply never could.
As far as it being too heavy handed, after much debate I’ve come to the conclusion that, so long as the player never has to interface with it, things like a Codex or Civilopedia are not too heavy handed. Done well, they can add to the depth of a player’s experience without making them feel like they’re being forced to partake in an educational experience.
Of course this is just the surface, and there are a myriad of other techniques I haven’t even begun to envision to encourage tangential learning. I hope this has inspired a few of you to try and think through this problem. I look forward to playing through your thoughts.
We have become a mass media. This is a fact that we cannot fight. Our actions have consequences. Where we can, where it costs us nothing, we must do what we can. At least this is my belief.
I want to end this by apologizing to the edutainment industry. They embody this philosophy. Their efforts are often the noblest for the least reward. I believe that they have the right approach to humanity…perhaps just not the best method to merge that with “games”.
I do not believe we should sacrifice the soul of what we do in order to give it meaning. Games, first and foremost, need to be fun.
But what they must be is not all they can be.
