German Girls re Goofy. An Investigation into the Knowledge Deficiencies of Digital Games that re Designed for Learning

Digital games seem to have enormous educational potential. But something goes wrong. Although the field of digital games is booming, games that are designed with an educational purpose in mind have a large variety of deficiencies. The treatment of knowledge in games is a decisive factor. There is an obvious difficulty of balancing the virtual vs. the real–a phenomenon in games that is not yet well-understood. The paper demonstrates how knowledge in games may be properly used as knowledge–a step towards learning effects. German Girls are Goofy or even Stupid The present paper does not deal with simulation games or with games for testing. Those games have peculiarities that need a specific treatment. Instead, we focus “true” games1 such as adventures in which players are engaged in missions, explore virtual worlds, and solve a variety of problems. It is obviously not easy to develop pleasant serious games. Figure 1: Two screenshots from the German educational Game MISSION: WISSEN that has variants for boys and girls The recent German computer game MISSION: WISSEN, i.e. “Mission: Knowledge”, (release summer 2007) which is illustrated by Figure 1 is designed for students at an age of about 11 to 13 years. Copyright c © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. The designers, the developers, and the publisher proudly announce the games’ gender-adaptive pedagogic concept. This sounds great. A closer look is shocking. “Pedagogy” as the designers and/or developers understand it and as the publisher supports it means, for instance, that boys facing harder problems during game play are repeatedly encouraged to try again, whereas girls facing those problems may immediately consult the help function (Wiegand 2007; 2008). Girls are goofy! Maybe, goofy is not the right word. Better, developers and others seem to consider girls stupid. The case of the game MISSION: WISSEN! reported might be extreme, but it is shading some light on the difficulties designers, developers, and publishers have with serious games. There are some recent comprehensive investigations into the difficulties of designing games that teach such as, e.g., the report (Jantke 2006a). The number of flaws in digital games designed with some educational purpose in mind is annoyingly large. This paper is addressing a single aspect: the way in which knowledge is treated in the game world. Digital games as quite new media are bringing with them a variety of phenomena we are not used to. For illustration, we are not much used to distinguish the real from the virtual. The relationship between the real and the virtual has been discussed in (Jantke 2006b) with a certain emphasis on e-commerce. In virtual worlds such as, SECOND LIFE players are dealing with virtual goods and virtual currencies like, e.g. the Linden$. Linden Lab, the enterprise operating SECOND LIFE issuing the Linden$, does not have a bank license and, thus, its money is only virtual, although players are willing to exchange real for virtual money. In several virtual worlds the behavioral pattern to aim and shoot (Björk & Holopainen 2004) occurs quite frequently. Aiming is always real, but shooting rarely is. In contrast, other phenomena in virtual worlds are always real such as pictures and knowledge. For illustration, readers should think of digital games such as LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER A A Proceedings of the Twenty-First International FLAIRS Conference (2008)