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How Gaming Helped Educate a Generation

How Gaming Helped Educate a Generation

Video games teach us all sorts of important things that we apply every day in the real world. The Zelda series can train us for almost any puzzle-based problem, making us aware of our surroundings, like a detective finding clues and building them together. Minecraft teaches us how to build and govern our own communities. These two series are great examples of how all games can be educational.

The Legend of Zelda was one of the first action-adventure games of its time, teaching us all a system of dungeons and puzzles that would be echoed forever in future games. Ocarina of Time , one of the highest ranking games in the world, uses the player’s awareness of their surroundings to solve puzzles. The Deku Tree is a good tutorial for that kind of problem solving, showing the player clearly what needs to be done with the specific placement of objects. Furthermore, learning by trial and error is the key to the entire game. Not only with puzzles, but with the enemies too. Each boss has a set patterns of attacks and one specific weakness. Often, inexperienced players won’t crack the case right off the bat, and will have to retry battles before succeeding. By assessing their own approach to battle, players gain insight into which strategies are working, which need to be tweaked, and which should be abandoned altogether. Only by learning how to turn a critical eye on their own strategies can players hope to become adept fighters, using the slew of tools, items, and weapons at Link’s disposal to positive effect.

The real world application of these skills comes into effect with situations we all take for granted. Zelda ‘s puzzles can help us focus on how details can come together to create something larger. This can help with ordinary tasks like deciphering Ikea furniture instructions, where the details are in tiny screws. They can also help with learning by trial and error, like evaluating and improving your skills after your first job interview flops.

Minecraft is also one of the highest ranking games in history, and for equally good reasons. Each time you start a new game, Minecraft generates a unique world filled with hills, forests and lakes. Whatever the player chops at or digs into yields building blocks — trees provide wood, the earth dirt and stone. Blocks can be attached to one another to quickly produce structures. Players can also combine blocks to craft new items. Take some stone blocks, add a few pieces of wood, and you make a pickaxe, which then helps you dig more quickly and deeper, till you reach precious materials like gold, silver and diamond. Mobs, the game’s creatures, can be used for crafting, too. Kill a spider, and you get spider silk, handy for making bows and arrows.

How Gaming Helped Educate a Generation

Minecraft has many possible, complex real world applications, however the most fascinating to me is what the game’s community teaches. As discussed in this New York Times article, Minecraft servers offer us a crucial “third place” to mature, where we can come together outside the scrutiny and authority of home, school, and work. We have been using social networks like Instagram or Twitter as a digital third place for some time, but Minecraft imposes different social demands, because we have to figure out how to respect one another’s virtual space and how to collaborate on real projects. In some respects, Minecraft can be as much a social network as a game. The relationships formed in such collaboration projects are the most significant in application to the real world. Interacting with communities of like-minded people, and often working as a team to create something, are essential to any business environment. In addition, the community support alone can teach us how to handle problems and overcome obstacles.

Ocarina of Time and Minecraft are two of the most significant games in video game history, standing the test of time for many reasons. One of those is that they’re examples of gamified education with real world application. Ocarina of Time teaches puzzle solving and trial and error skills, and Minecraft teaches how to build and maintain a community. Video games will always be teaching us more than we think, adding to this list constantly with both past and present examples.

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