I learned about Rhetorical Peaks at the Humanities Gaming Institute I attended last year. To my mind, it’s the most realized game so far made when it comes to trying to duplicate the kind of critical thinking instructors try to teach their students. Thing is, it can’t be played independently; it needs to be played in the context of a classroom, and under the guidance of a professor. It’s a game, still–can you solve the mystery?–but it’s not a game that uses a set of self-governing game mechanics to convey humanities knowledge, or ways of knowing.
Rhetorical Peaks is a study in making games for the humanities, both in terms of lessons to learn and pitfalls to avoid. My reading of it is that it trades immersion and autonomy for classroom-specific goals. My dream is that we learn to make games that don’t have those trade-offs: that they be immersive, autonomous games that teach the humanities’ ways of understanding the world.
Many people know Free Rice as a vocabulary-building program with a humanitarian bent: every time you get a question right, you donate 20 grains of rice to the World Food Programme. Now, however, Free Rice covers a host of subjects: grammar, math, geography, and, my most recent discovery, fine art.
You are given a famous painting and are asked (via a multiple-choice question) to identify the painter. Now, this may not be much of a game, per se, but I had to do a similar sort of assignment for a high school humanities class, and memorizing a huge number of famous painting and painters has proved remarkably useful to me.
Both installments of the Portal games have been lauded for the educational value of their physics-based puzzles, but now Valve is working to make education a more explicit goal of the games.
Educators coming together to explore how the principles of games promote learning
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