A while ago, my brother and I were talking about some of the games that are playable with little ones around and just about every one that came up was Wii only. Then this weekend, he noticed that his XBOX 360 had updated after not having network access for almost three months. The new interface was very subdued and “family oriented” compared to the edgy/industrial menu theme that the system shipped with. This got us going on talking about the we “family friendly” ads for the XBOX and then somehow we got on the topic of Spore as being one of those family friendly games (at least at the first two stages) one could play with little kids in the room.
Later, that got me thinking. I was really big up on Spore when it was being developed… thinking that it could be a great classroom resource and its “all platforms everywhere” would really help get it into people’s hands. But as we found out through the hassles of DRM and soft science (and Will Wright’s explanation), things didn’t really go the way that they could have. But what about being able to use this game in the classroom?
In true COTS form, I think you could take the game, with the instructor understanding the shortcomings and move through it explaining the shortcomings, much in the way that John Bohannon suggest in his review (the soft science link). But would this be “ethical/proper/allowed”? While I can’t answer that, I think it should be allowed.
Students could arguably learn just as much from comparing and contrasting popular/lay theories and ideas with peer reviewed work and understanding what is removed from a system arguably take just as much understanding of the system, if not more than merely appreciating the whole. So rather than trying to use this game to teach about evolution or the development of societies, it might work really well as a case study or low risk assessment to determine what students really understand about a given system.
Leave a Reply