Homework Assignment: Video Games

Cafe Society
1

A hundred years ago, books were a form of entertainment. Today, they are homework assignments. Will a day come where forms of electronic entertainment will be considered routine homework?

Will youngsters be asked to write a game report on a “classic”? “Final Fantasy 8 is a rollicking fun single-player RPG adventure where trio combinations from your party perform actions such as conversing with NPCs, playing the card collecting mini-game and battling monsters…”

Now that most households can watch a movie from home, why can’t elementary school students study film like collegiates today?

Is this already starting to happen? In the US? In Japan or Korea (where more people are immersed in electronic entertainment)?

An argument could be made that the skills learned from video games (hand-eye coordination, critical thinking, math, and even socialization in the case of MMORPGs) rival traditional subjects taught in schools today in terms of usefulness.

2

Assignment 1: Give a detailed description of the evolution of the Chocobo in late 20th and early 21st century. Your answer should be no less than 100MB long.

I think it may well be happening, future high school teatures are allready being trained here http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/23/t_t/video.games/

3

That’ll never happen. I mean, FF8 a classic? No way!

4

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR FF7. THEN AGAIN, FF7 HAS BEEN OUT FOR YEARS, SO WHY HAVEN’T YOU FINISHED PLAYING IT ALREADY?
The pinnacle of Chocobo evolution is the golden chocobo. The evolution of a golden chocobo takes a long time and a lot of money. First, you have to catch a green chocobo. Then you have to breed a blue chocobo, then a black chocobo. The various nuts and grasses are key in somehow altering chocobo DNA within just a few generations. And what’s with the explosion of chocobos when mogs just disappeared for two whole games? Did Square do market research that said that people don’t like mogs but they like chocobos and wanted to deal with lots of different types and breed them and everything? Finally, you breed the black chocobo to get the golden chocobo. The reason the golden chocobo is the pinnacle of chocobo evolution is because it can cross any type of terrain and allows you to get the most unbalanced summon spell ever created by Square, the Knights of the Round. The Knights of the Round is unbalanced because once you have W-Summon for one member and Mimic for your other two members, you can hit Sephy with 13 attacks six times in a row for 78 attacks. Also, the summon spell takes forever, so you might as well go and get a sandwich while waiting for the spells to end so that you have something to munch on during the final, 8-minute cutscene. I don’t like the cutscene because it is so ambigious in what happens. I mean, does the meteor really destroy the whole world or just Midgard or what? If you have a really good sandwich, you can wait for the credits to finish rolling, where you get one more cutscene with Red XIII and some of his kids at the ruins of Midgard, which means the entire world wasn’t destroyed, but what happened to people? Was Midgard destroyed by the meteor or did it decay later like real cities? Did the chocobos survive? The golden chocobo is also the best because you can use it to always win the chocobo races at the Golden Saucer, but that whole area of minigames is boring after about 15 minutes. And that’s how chocobos evolved and why the golden chocobo is the pinnacle of evolution.

How’s that? Another A+ paper, if I do say so myself.

5

Since video games are an art form, I suppose scool assignments based on games would resemble Art Studies or English Literature or other such right-brain topics:

A Decade of Side-Scrolling Shooters: From Scramble to Einhander
Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein 3-D: Homage or Rip-Off?
The Continuing Growth of John Carnack’s Ego
Who’d Win – Mario vs. Sonic

:smiley:

6

I’ve got no cite for this, but I’ve heard of cases where it’s already happened… although, granted, usually in individual classes, not system-wide.

For example, there was a game a while back called “Oregon Trail” where, as you might imagine, you played as a settler on the Oregon Trail. Sure, the graphics and even gameplay are horrible by today’s standards, but it wasn’t bad at the time.

I distinctly remember more than one person telling me over the years “oh yeah, we had to play that in Mr(s). Such-and-So’s class.”

There are any number of ‘educational’ titles available these days, which are technically video games. They aim for children, even the very young ones, and teach anything from shapes and colors to algebra and beyond. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see these popping up in classrooms more and more.

I think that, in the proper environment, even non-educational videogames could be quite educational. Of course, this would require a rather liberal school system, so don’t expect this in your public schools… or even most private schools for that matter. But…

How about a history class on World War II? How do you get the kids interested in that? Well… how about the videogame Battlefield 1942? I play this a lot myself, and since many of the missions are at least based on historical events, I find myself looking up information on them for tips on strategy. Better believe I’m learning stuff here… because I want to, not because I have to. So tie it into the various lessons: “Tonight’s assignment: The battle of britain, with odds in the nazi’s favor. Then, play again with the odds in Britain’s favor. Your assignment is to write 1000 words about the importance of aircraft in world war II.”

There are any number of games which at least touch on historical events. There are several based on famous works of literature. There are a huge number of games which require various other skills, such as deductive reasoning in a murder-mystery game, or basic physics as in one of those build-a-mousetrap games whose name I can’t seem to remember offhand.

Of course, not all videogames are suitable for the classroom.

I can’t think of a single good reason to play, for example, Doom or Duke Nuke’em, during class or as homework.

But I guarantee, the kids would do their assignment that night. Most of 'em, at least. :smiley:

7

I could also see a (aaaah! I’m not a morning person and am currently stricken with aphasia- ummm module? Segment? Unit?) on the development of computers and the growth of the pc and console markets making use of emulators that include video games from various generations of machines.

A few years ago, there was a travelling museum exhibit which included arcade machines from the original Computer Space to current releases.

The unit could also teach some lessons in economics (The battles and marketing strategies between Atari and Nintendo, then Nintendo and Sega, then Nintendo, Sega and Sony), and intelectual property (Both educating students in the current laws, and having debates on whether those laws are just).

8

Classic Games and Emulators: The Ethics of Abandonware

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What about a “game” that allowed you to explore the surface of any planet in the solar system. There’d be no objective like shooting aliens. But your assignment could be a report on geologic formations so you explore one of the moons of Saturn and write a report on what you find there.

Since the games that are popular now are based on literature and, by extension, movies they probably wouldn’t make sufficiently deep sources for research. But the same technology that makes video games so realistic could be used to simulate any environment or situation that would.

To learn about history, you could wander the streets of New York in 1929 on the day of the stock market crash. For natural science, follow a bee on his route of pollen collection. etc. etc. etc.

10

My two main weaknesses, pedantry and video games, together at last.

Must resist…

…nope, I can’t…

Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy VII, eschews a simplistic examination of late-twentieth century ecological issues, complicating the usual Manichean perspectives advanced in socio-political discourse (i.e. “Jobs versus the environment”). As well, it studies aspects of the issue not generally brought to debate, such as the contribution of millienial religious traditions (as represented by Sephiroth) to apathy towards ecological destruction…

My next work: Rowling’s Voldemort as Nietszchean Überzauberer.

:smiley:

11

Might I suggest you back to school and use that for your doctorate? Enough of that kind of stuff with the right field of study and the university will basically be begging you to take it.

12

Überzauberer!!! LOL. :smiley:

13

Rjung

I figure Scholastic, McGrawHill or whoever put the material together would pay some sort of licensing fee for use of the games.

14

Hamish wrote:

In fact, the entire series is preoccupied with environmentalism and The Kaballah. You can pull in everything from Carolyn Merchant to Gershom Scholem.

15

I would if I thought I could get away with it, though my last essay of my bachelor’s was “Coming Out of the Coffin: Vampirism and Homosexuality in Interview with a Vampire.”

Also, a friend of a friend wrote her last essay on an anime series.

16

On second thought, I’d go with a double-barrelled title that uses a quotation. They sound more impressive. Something along the lines of “‘There is only power’: Voldemort as Nietzschean Überzauberer.”

Frankly, that would be an easy essay to write. And if I were a postmodernist, and believed in the uselessness of authorial intent, I could make a case that Voldemort is the hero of the Harry Potter series. :smiley: