Week of Jan 11, 2021
Welcome to another issue of my weekly letter! As I teased in last week’s “special edition” I intended to tweak the format a bit to improve the flow. Please let me know if you like/dislike it. Without further ado…
Weekly Reads
- What Could Video Games Teach Schools? (SuperJump) – a great read, I personally resonate a lot with two points: games encourage people to learn with “autonomy” in “a place to fail” [safely].
- Video Games Deserve a Place in School Curriculums (SuperJump) – I’ve been making very similar points in the ‘Nostalgic Game Review’ column drawing on my personal experience, learning English and other stuff via great games.
- Video Games Can Actually Be Good for Your Mental Health (Vice) – OK. the games and the gamer population in this study are arguably biased, but I agree that if you pick a good game and ‘consume moderately’ (remember to eat and sleep healthy!), it should help you feel happier, and a lot of times learn something.
- Discord Gaming Parties Are Better Than Zoom Meetings (Wired) and How Discord (somewhat accidentally) invented the future of the internet (Protocol) – Both articles are about Discord and how it became what it is today. It reminds me of the early days (pre-facebook) of WhatsApp, which stayed focused on solving one specific problem (product experience), then customers and revenue will follow. OK, I am not a product manager, and the story of Discord is still evolving… but let’s allow ourselves to be inspired by the positives 🙂
Thoughts
We’ve gone a long way from the days of Street Fighters or Bubble Bobble. Nowadays there are so many different genres of games it’s hard to keep a count. Yet there are still some lingering misperceptions on video games being either something kids play for fun, or something horribly addictive that will cause kids to fall behind on their work/education. Focusing on these traditional ideas is not only unfair to the vast amount of games out there today, but also result in missed opportunities.
As we continue to navigate through the challenges brought to us and our kids by the pandemic and distance learning, there are a few underlining opportunities that stand out:
- As pointed out in the articles above, games provide a safe place to fail and learn, and it’s goal oriented design provides a great urge for kids to learn more in depth and autonomously. So why not leverage this more so students perceive school work as fun and fulfilling, rather than mundane chores?
- Distance learning has forcefully deprived kids of their social interaction with peers, and the effect of that, in the duration longer than a year, isn’t even well understood yet. Why not leverage gaming, or in-game communication and collaboration like Discord and gather.town to enable kids and school staff?
- Our education system today was created long ago to scale to the general public. Which means one instructor against 20~50 students at any given subject. Without more modern tooling, it comes with the disadvantages of traditional ‘scaling’: you get reduced personalization (or, in some angle could be perceived as reduced quality) since it’s only efficient to draw a lower bar where there’s a higher chance for every student to excel.
- With the modern advancements on ML and AI, along with gaming, I strongly believe there should be a new way to help minimize such compromise. A parallel example to this would be how some games accommodate different playing strategies and styles to achieve the same goal (OK, sometimes it’s alternative endings, but I digressed…). Why not apply the same principles and allow kids to learn the topics in their own ways, while ML/AI help teachers to pick up deep insights and provide more personalized guidance and coaching?
- This may also help improve the perception and impact of the teachers’ work, which can hopefully address another issue I’ve never understood: It seems like we (in the US) never have enough teachers and yet they continue to be poorly compensated. Seriously, if we want better education, the teachers need not only be paid better. They need to be paid very well.
To summarize, we can leverage gaming, along with AI/ML to help kids learn better, have more fun and social interactions, while hopefully also better enabling our teaching staffs.
Nostalgic Game Review
I apologize but I will have to move the Nostalgic Game Review to its own column (#nostalgic game review) at a monthly frequency. The reasons? I write/edit too slowly right now, and it adds up as I tried to tweak the format of this newsletter/blog. Also, it feels more natural to keep topical blogging and game review separated to some extent. I am hoping to have the next episode by end of January.
Stay Tuned…
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