Deceiving Children

Normally I would not advocate lying to children. Although my father did it to me:

Dad: "remember Cole, you don't like Butterfingers. You should give them to me, since I do like them"

Me: "ok daddy!" (I lost many Halloween Butterfingers that way!)

However, in the world of educational games, I think that tricking the kids is king. In his book, The Last Lecture, (a very non-academic resource) Randy Pausch talks about this very idea being the brain child of the Alice Project. The idea is, make the game fun, and the students won't even realize they are learning. I think it is important that they play educational games for the fun factor rather than the learning factor. It is kind of like those high school English novels we all had to read. Many of them were great pieces of literature, but we still hated reading them because we were forced to. If we can trick the kids into forgetting the forced learning part and focus instead on the fun, they start to enjoy learning.

So one important question then is "how do I know if my game is fun enough?" I really liked the first item on Marc Prensky's list of Digital Game Based Learning Principles. He basically says that the game should attract both the target audience and those who are not the target audience. As far as game developing goes, I am of the opinion that as much attention as is given the educational aspect of the game, an equal or greater portion needs to be put into the fun part of the game.