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MATH EFFECT
Designing games to teach higher-level mathematicsBy Trevor Burnham
I. Prologue
Game designers are under an insidious illusion: They believe that
setting
matters. Kids,especially boys, love games in which they explore the depths of space, hunting forancient artifacts and vaporizing anything foolish enough to get in their way. Those kidsrarely feel the same passion for solving equations. So, the conventional wisdom goes,let’s set those math problems in space!
!
Math Blaster
and, more recently,
Dimension M
have taken this approach, tweakingthe shoot-’em-up format by overlaying simple math problems on the targets. The goal isto shoot the right ones.
!
Is this attractive to kids? Undoubtably. Engaging? For a while. But it’s also a deadend. Training kids to blast multiples of 2 as fast as they can will teach them todistinguish even numbers from odd ones, but it will never answer the eternal questionof “Why?” The opportunity to instill an intrinsic love of mathematics is lost.
!
That these games pale by comparison to non-educational action games is a well-trod truism (the “spinach sundae” problem), but I would offer a different benchmark:the thousands of whimsical puzzles churned out by Martin Gardner over half a century.As Ronald Graham of UC San Diego famously said, “Martin has turned thousands of
children into mathematicians, and thousands of mathematicians into children.” Thesepuzzles are open-ended, with perhaps a hint or two, requiring the solver to carefullyconsider possible approaches and probe them for promising avenues. This is howmathematics is done at a professional level, though you certainly wouldn’t know itfrom the endless drills that make up the entirety of today’s education game market.Why can’t the experience of a Martin Gardner puzzle be encapsulated in a video game?
!
I’ll explain how such a feat might be pulled off in part IV. But first, an intermezzoon a subject near to my heart: What makes a game compelling?
II. Immersion
Part of the problem with using arcade button-mashers as the chassis for electronic mathtutors is that these games rarely hold anyone’s attention for long enough to teach acomplicated subject.
Dimension M
offers a modicum of storyline, but even a child cantell that it’s no
Lord of the Rings.
!
We live in a world filled with sophisticated games offering fleshed-out charactersand epic plots. Education games are rightly consigned to collect dust on a lessglamorous store shelf. The crudeness of education games is an obvious consequence of their niche status (and concomitantly smaller budgets), but I contend that their nichestatus is a product of their crudeness. This cycle must be broken if education games areto offer players an experience that will keep them attentive for more time than it takesthem to exhaust their trigger fingers. Education games must aspire to be
immersive.
!
One of the most immersive games of recent years is
Mass Effect.
Its technical brilliance—cinematic visuals, orchestral sound, galactic scope—are matched by anawesome amount of imagination. A staff of four writers painstakingly laid out a gameuniverse with several alien races, each with their own history and culture, and scriptedhundreds of unique characters to converse with. The game gives you an extraordinaryamount of freedom within the classic save-humanity-from-extinction framework: You
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can customize your character’s appearance (including gender), develop new skills thatdetermine the paths available to you, and make important ethical decisions.
!
For instance, midway through the game, a loyal friend, a Krogan named Wrex,confronts you when you realize that you have to destroy an enemy research facility. TheKrogans, unable to reproduce after the Turians attack ed them with a biological weapon,are slowly going extinct. Your arch-nemesis, Saren, has figured out a way to breedKrogans in this facility so that he can use them as soldier-slaves. Wrex holds you atgunpoint, insisting that you save the facility—an impossible demand. If you’ve focusedentirely on developing your character’s combat skills, then the encounter can only endin bloodshed. If, however, you’ve picked up some diplomatic ability, you can reasonwith him, persuading Wrex that he has to accept the tragic fate of his people for thegreater good of the galaxy.
!
A naïve game designer would interpret a player’s love of
Mass Effect
as a love of games that involve blasting aliens. I contend that the space operatic setting matters farless than the sheer amount of imagination that went into bringing it to life.
!
Consider the
Fallout
trilogy, with its darkly humorous take on a post-apocalyptic,mutant-filled wasteland. Or the
Grand Theft Auto
games, each of which is a violentHoratio Alger story of rags to crimelord riches told in a modern American city. Whichsetting is “better”? Would grafting math problems onto mutants or rival gang membersmake them more appealing? These games are not successful because they give playersnew and different things to shoot. These games are successful because their backdropsare so detailed, so believable. They reward the most urgent drive a child has:
curiosity.
!
One recent math game,
Lure of the Labyrinth
1
,
does offer a compelling storylinewith a vast, whimsical world for the player to explore, including dozens of characters.Interaction is somewhat superficial, but sufficient to motivate exploration. The puzzlesin the game introduce concepts drawn straight from the curriculum, like measuring the
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Link:http://labyrinth.thinkport.org/
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