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As we started writing this article, something funny happened. We wanted to look up some facts and history of educational games, and whatever we searched, the first page of results was filled with titles like “Why Edutainment failed” and “Why Educational Games Suck”.
The overall sentiment—on the internet, at least—seemed to be that people disliked educational games and thought they were useless ;)
So let’s explore that question: what are they? And do they actually work?
A definition
The definition below is the most common one we’ve found.
Educational Games are games specifically designed with the primary goal of teaching. Edutainment is an umbrella term for anything that blends education and entertainment.
In our experience, Edutainment and Educational Games are pretty much the same. The 90s made both these terms common knowledge and saw a big boom in “educational games”. They never really caught on in schools, but they saw decent success from parents buying it for their kids. Their kids were asking for games, parents thought games were a useless waste of time, and bam—educational games seemed to solve all issues!
As most kids from that period can attest, though, educational games were … terrible. They were neither educational nor entertaining. They had bad graphics and accessibility, but believed slapping on an “educational” label would make up for it. (And they were only half wrong. The standards of visual appeal lower drastically when you have a system of education that can simple force things on people!)
That’s why our search results returned all these dramatic titles about how badly Edutainment failed. All these people tried to play educational games and hated it. They didn’t have fun and didn’t learn. More and more screens were introduced into schools, and more and more studies showed that this just ruined learning.
When they don’t work
Is that it, then? We tried it, they’re a bad idea, let’s never do that again?
Of course not! Otherwise we would not have designed an entire educational curriculum of games!
While we don’t hate these names—“Edutainment” is a nice invention in any case—we do take issue with them. The term “educational game” is a misnomer, because every game is educational. Time and time again, studies show that FUN = LEARNING. They’re the same thing. Fun is derived from learning—and the more fun you have, the more you keep learning.
We’ve written countless articles about this fact. All games are educational, because the process of learning is the same process of having fun. For example, one might check out,
- Can Games Beat School?
- The World Needs Systems Learning
- Do Brain Games Make You Smarter?
- What is gamification and do we need it?
- What are serious games?
In practice, these educational games are nothing more than math drills with window dressing. Nothing more than rote exercises, but now on a screen and with animations.
To actually make it work, you have to design a good game. The game comes first. Because the better the game is, the more kids want to play it. And the more they play, the better they get at the skills that the game is teaching/rewarding.
As such, we will rarely say that we create “educational games” or that we’re an “edutainment store”. No, we just create games. Many of them are centered around specific topics in the curriculum, so that teachers/parents can apply them that way. Many of them teach useful skills like reading and math simply because you need those skills to win the game. Games are educational by default.
It almost takes more effort to NOT make them educational and NOT make them fun. These disliked educational games from the 90s are mostly the result of people clinging on to the old system of education. They forcefully inserted homework exercises and textbook paragraphs into a game that could have actually been quite good. They often took something kids were already playing—something that was already fun and educational—then made it worse by making it conform to school standards. (It feels a bit like adults seeing that something is “a hype amongst teenagers”, and then trying to join in without actually understanding why it went viral.)
When they do work
Okay, so when do they work? How can we put a positive spin on this and actually improve education?
We identified a few ways to do this, which became the main principles behind this online store.
First of all, educational games are almost always talked about in the vein of solo video games. One kid behind a screen, playing the game by themselves, maybe even as an assigned homework exercise.
This is not the only way to do it, but it is the worst way to do it. Educational games could be …
- Board Games (Including, of course, card games and such)
- Multiplayer Games (Multiple behind the same screen)
- Physical Games (Sports)
If you don’t want your kids behind screens all the time, go play board games instead. If you don’t want your kid sitting alone, make it a social experience with board games or multiplayer games.
These other game types have the added benefit of being physical. They require setup and teardown. They require other players, socializing, compromises, getting tired after a while. They are not addictive or filled with ads. They are much healthier and much more effective than a solo video game could ever hope to be.
That’s why almost 100% of our games are the other types. We invented One Button Games which you must play with a group behind the same device, which is possible because each player only gets one button. We made hundreds of Board Games targeting specific skills and parts of the curriculum.
Second of all, as stated, the games just need to be good. The educational part needs to be an integral part of the game, a core element that defines the game. What does that mean?
- In a game about counting, your most important action, which you need to achieve anything and win, is to count.
- In a game about multiplication, every single move must involve multiplying things in some way.
- In a game about spelling, you’re constantly spelling words.
- In a game about history, you’re constantly using specific actions and inventions and facts about that historic era to play. You’re not just playing some random game while being forced to read a wall of text once in a while.
- And so on.
The game design has to start with the thing you want to teach and explore. The educational component is the core action; everything else is the window dressing. (The exact inverse of what most educational games do.) If the educational component is some afterthought, then it barely teaches itself and most players can choose to just not engage with it. If you force it on the players anyway, it stops being a fun game where players actually have interesting choices.
As stated, this is not hard. Games are educational by default. They’re begging to be used that way. You just have to not ruin it!
For example, think of your typical video games.
- One about killing enemies with a certain health? Wow, we’re working with numbers all the time!
- One about building your own little city/kingdom? Wow, now we’re getting practice managing finances!
- One about going on quests to get “5 potions from the Fountain of Youth”? Wow, we’re working with numbers and reading maps all the time!
Or think of some very popular family board games.
- Scrabble: spelling words all the time, combined with a spatial component that forces being creative and evaluating multiple options.
- Catan: count and sell resources, trade, predict dice probability, use spatial awareness for optimal placement of pieces.
- Bomb Busters: make logical deductions and mental calculations all the time (numbers 1–12) to prevent a bomb going off.
Educational games should just be good games that focus on specific topics or skills at their core. It’s a plus if you can design the game to be as simple as possible, or as “laser-focused” on the topic as possible. It’s a plus if you can design the game so that it doesn’t requiring reading or advanced skills, so that young ages can play too. But these pluses are, again, just general tips and tricks for making good games.
Perhaps the biggest focus here should be on experimentation. Playfulness. The one thing games are best at. The reason they’re such effective learning tools is because rote memorization is not possible. Your cards are different, the board is different, your players are doing different stuff—so you have to think differently this game too. The game isn’t just a homework exercise where there’s one correct answer or one way you must do it, it’s a creative perspective on the skill that has you think out of the box.
A good educational game doesn’t “test” if you can do (or understand) one specific thing, it helps you “explore” the many creative ways in which that thing could be applied and its consequences. Each time you get a better score is your confirmation that you understand it better now.
How we use the term Edutainment
We’ve exclusively talked about games now. They’re the biggest part of our store, the most effective learning tool in most cases, and the most well-known type of “edutainment”.
They are, of course, not the only type.
Our store also contains stories, quizzes, puzzles, escape rooms, and more. Every topic can be taught in a variety of ways and all of them are better than a dry textbook or lecture.
An exciting story set in the Roman Era, for example, will be much more educational than paragraphs in a book. A quiz is a fun way to actually test what people know, without a stressful test or major consequences.
Scientific inventions/breakthroughs are often made after a long series of weird little problems to solve and mysteries to unravel. An escape room is the ideal candidate for experiencing that sequence, much better than a freeform game.
The important part is variety. It’s exploration and experimentation. Even though we do our best to design great games, we don’t actually recommend just playing games. Something like history is based on an endless chain of “cause and effect”, which is basically the definition of a story. A book will probably be better suited for conveying the important facts.
The benefit of the term “Edutainment” is that it doesn’t specifically refer to games. It just blends education and entertainment. And that’s why it is a pretty good descriptor for our online store. We sell entertainment, while making it easy for you to pick the version that most closely aligns with whatever you want to teach/explore today. We don’t just sell games, we sell all other types too.
That’s why we might use the word Edutainment from time to time.