Microsoft’s Neil Thompson says educational games will cause game industry to lose money
Remember those news bits about the Wii and DS being used as educational tools in classrooms around the world? What about those educational games like Brain Training and the like? Those sound like great ways to make the non-gaming masses more open to video games, right? Well, Microsoft‘s Neil Thompson thinks otherwise.
Remember those news bits about the Wii and DS being used as educational tools in classrooms around the world? What about those educational games like Brain Training and the like? Those sound like great ways to make the non-gaming masses more open to video games, right? Well, Microsoft‘s Neil Thompson thinks otherwise.
It’s not that Thompson is against combining education and entertainment. He just thinks it’s a bad idea. Speaking at the recent Games 3.0 event, Thompson emphasized that instead of trying to combine the two, developers should concentrate on stuff that will sell, “because it costs too much money to get that wrong”:
We’re in the business of creating fun entertainment and the moment we try to pretend we’re in the business of education we’ve crossed the line and it’s dangerous for us as a company and as an industry.
Yeah, it all boils down to money, which is a bit understandable since we are in a financial crisis right now and hey, gaming is big business. Like analyst Colin Sebastian said, core gamers haven’t been affected yet by the economic crunch, but casual and mass market gamers have gotten a bit tight with their money. Parents have also been shown to still be wary of so-called educational games. Still, didn’t Nintendo’s Brain Training titles sell like a gazillion copies?
Nintendo has done some great work in producing products that are both fun and educational, Brain Training is one example, but I think for us to quote this as an industry and say let’s start producing edutainment type products – we’ll lose a lot of money. I don’t think it’s ever been done in a clever and good way because you lose the focus of it being fun and involving.
Thompson does acknowledge, however, that games can be used in education, but finding ways to combine the two isn’t the job of game developers:
Educators and government should understand what great education is in order to look at the products we produce and ask can they be used in different scenarios that can benefit children in their educational process?
Related articles:
- Analyst: economic crisis bad for small studios, console life cycles might extend
- Adults dismiss educational video games too quickly?
Via Games Industry
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