Viewing entries tagged
educational
I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed by just how enlightening and informative good story-telling can be. After all, the whole reason I love stories so much is that it's one of the few ways we are able to empathise and learn about lives that are different to our own. In some ways, it's the closest we'll ever get to certain experiences, so when a story is able to inform as well as entertain, It really is a beautiful experience.
Generally speaking, art has the ability to teach us so much about the world and the diversity of human experience, and games are no different. In fact, games offer that special kind of interactivity that allows us to experience the foreign, or the unknown, while putting a little more of ourselves into the subject itself.
I remember one of the first video games I ever played was an educational one in school, which was built to teach the difference between verbs and adjectives. It might have been primitive 1980s technology of the time, but I was fascinated by it and ever since, I wished that every subject could be delivered in the same way. After all, each of us learn through many different methods, and I've always been better when I can see and interact with the subject matter.
We've come a long way from educational games featuring a dancing tomato that acts out verbs entered through a terminal interface. I wish I could remember what it was called, but when I was a kid in the 1980s all I wanted to do was make that tomato run and jump all day long.
Anyone who was old enough to remember the 90s will probably know what I mean when I say that it was a very environmental decade. It was when we learned that recycling was a good way to minimise pollutants and unnecessary rubbish. We were told to "think globally, act locally", and we ushered in a new way of thinking that included a level of expected responsibility be taken for our impact on the planet.
