Video Games at School: A Guide Through the Maze
The historic first-time inclusion of the video game This War of Mine into the curriculum of schools is an event comparable to the Copernican Revolution in terms of Poland’s national education. As it turns out, video games make for the perfect learning environment – being more than just a sweet glaze over the bitter pill of education.
This War of Mine is one of the greatest successes of the Polish video game industry in the last decade. It tells the story of civilians attempting to survive in a besieged city, which, though it remains unnamed, echoes the events of the war in the Balkans, while it also bears similarities to the civil war in Syria as well as to the Warsaw Uprising.
In truly nightmarish conditions, the protagonists of the video game must make dramatic decisions. Sometimes, in order to survive themselves, they must put the lives of others on the line. In video games, war is most often depicted as spectacular. Here, such aestheticisation is nowhere to be found – the war in This War of Mine is gruesome and unjust. It does not present opportunities for heroic deeds, but instead forces one to remain in constant fear. This approach made the game instantly popular – as soon as the release of its trailer – and it went on to become a great success, thanks to which the company 11bit Studios became a recognisable brand worldwide.
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Still from ‘Magritte’, photo: creator’s archive
For a long time, video games in Polish schools did not enjoy the greatest of reputations. The first results of Polish research into video games especially highlighted their negative impact on children and teenagers: their addictive design, the way they teach violence, and the way they distract us from our responsibilities.
I belong to the first generation that had access to video games in schools. Within the first IT departments, back in the 1990s, video games were somewhat of a forbidden fruit – they were often installed on computers (pirated versions of course), but actually playing them was strictly prohibited during class. Breaks were somewhat of a festivity for us – my primary school friends and I would make the most of our 10 minute breaks: trying to lift off, bomb an enemy and safely make it back to landing in F29 Retaliator all before the bell rang, or escaping from the oriental palace in Prince of Persia (which almost always resulted in a fatal free-fall from a high altitude). Time flew by relentlessly. The break would then end, and the teacher would get up from his computer with the smug smirk of a benefactor who had already been too permitting. Almost as if he were letting some offence slide – because as we all know, there is a time for studying and there is a time for play.
Games were thus in no way related to what school wanted to teach us. We had to make these connections for ourselves – like that one time when, already in high school, witnessing the bloody body of the Prince of Persia after another defeat, a mate loudly moaned: ‘Bohun, szczo z toboju?’ [‘Bohun, what’s up with you?’ said using archaic Polish.]
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Still from ‘The Oregon Trail’, photo: creator’s archive
And we were not even the first ones to experience all that. Americans were the pioneers of combining education and computers. In the year 1971, when computers were still almost exclusively the domain of universities and research institutes, Don Rawitsch, a student at Carleton College in Minnesota, was completing his teaching internship at one of the local schools. He was teaching history, and upon realising that his school had access to terminals connected remotely to the university mainframe, he decided to spice things up a bit for the benefit of his students.
With the help of two friends, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, he created a simple game about the American settlers’ westward journey, called The Oregon Trail. The player’s task was to first gather food supplies to last on the journey, and then to survive hunger, disease, broken wheels, and other dangers similar to those which had first afflicted the settlers on their way to the West Coast. This type of historical experience was completely different than that of reading a history book: students could experience the dilemmas and emotional struggles of the settlers firsthand, experimenting only to fail time and time again, as reaching the titular Oregon Trail was quite a feat.
Though Rawitsch made the game only for the needs of one specific course, it quickly grew popular and made its way to schools all around the nation. Subsequent editions – which eventually acquired proper graphics and a soundtrack – appeared on the market in the following decades, up to the 21st century. The Oregon Trail also broke ground, allowing later educational game developers to flourish – from the later versions of the game sprouted The Learning Company, a trademark that enjoyed great success at the turn of the 1980s and the 1990s.
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Still from ‘The Oregon Trail’, photo: creator’s archive
In the 1960s, a new revolutionary concept for an education system arose, one which was to supplement traditional schools with computers. The PLATO project entailed a network of terminals distributed all over the country, all connected to a central supercomputer located at Illinois University. In the 1970s, PLATO was installed in schools. For many young Americans, this constituted their very first encounter with a computer. All applications run on PLATO were, by definition, referred to as ‘lessons’. The system also entailed a user-friendly programming language, thanks to which teachers could create their own lessons.
Very quickly, the system began to feature elements that were not lessons, such as pedit5, perhaps the first RPG video game in history, which, in order to remain lowkey, took on the name of the user group within which it was created … so as to stay under teachers’ radar. The PLATO administrators were not only programmers, but they were also educational researchers, and so they knew how to behave in situations where a cunning pupil tries to outsmart a teacher – instead of a smack on the hands with a ruler, it’s better to recognise the effort.
Games quickly became a central tenet of big PLATO presentations, because they displayed the graphic capabilities of the system uniquely well, and so an entire generation of teenage coders was raised in the U.S. These were coders who oftentimes were no worse than their older colleagues at MIT or the Silicon Valley, and who taught themselves programming by playing around on school terminals.
When the PC era came about, educational programmes would sometimes become huge successes. This was the case not only for The Oregon Trail, but also for the Carmen Sandiego series, whose aim was to teach geography (and whose protagonist recently was brought back to life in the Netflix mini-series Where on Google Earth is Carmen Sandiego?). This wave of success began to dissipate at some point, however, and in the second half of the 1990s, the development of educational programmes was simply no longer cost-efficient.
When computers made their way to Polish schools, the golden era of educational software was just coming to an end. There was no permanent place for them in schools, if only for logistical reasons – computers were only installed in IT labs, so it wasn’t possible to make use of them during other classes. Furthermore, schools were still suspicious of video games, although there were some exceptions.
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Still from ‘Magritte’, photo: creator’s archive
One game made its way into a Polish language textbook at the start of the second decade of the 21st century – namely Magritte (2007). This simple adventure game was initially part of Marcin M. Drews’s diploma thesis, whose topic concerned the possible application of video games in education. Drews had previously taken part in the creation of another famous Polish adventure game – The Mystery of the Statuette – and had also been an active participant in the Games Research Association of Poland in the early years of its operation.
Today, Drews is known especially as an enthusiast and promoter of knowledge about Lower Silesia’s historic sites and as the co-creator of the YouTube channel Łowcy Przygód (Adventure Hunters). The main protagonist of the game, Peter, is a thirty year old man with a difficult past, who attempts to drown his sorrows in alcohol. One day, an eerie man knocks on his door, The Son of Man from the painting by Magritte. Peter receives a ticket to Wrocław, where he will face his past. He wanders around a strangely transformed Wrocław – actual places and back alleys get mixed up with personal memories and elements of Magritte’s paintings. While learning more about Peter’s past, the player also delves into the history of Wrocław and the works of the Belgian surrealist; clearly, the game is a brainchild of someone who was in love with both the artist and the city.
Drews’ game made its way to the Polish language textbook Lustra Świata (Mirrors of the World) as an example of a work that has the potential to improve cultural awareness. And rightly so, because today, video games are an important part of cultural discourse. When my high school friend saw Bohun in the Prince of Persia, he was after all largely correct – Prince of Persia grew out of the cloak-and-dagger adventure cinema genre, the feats of Douglas Fairbanks and the like, whose forefathers were Walter Scott and the elder Dumas, who in turn inspired the historical novels of Sienkiewicz.
As it turns out, video games make for the perfect learning environment – being more than just a sweet glaze over the bitter pill of education. Above all, they allow students to experiment, to learn from their own mistakes, and to gain new skills at their own pace. Defeat is never final – in a well-designed game, it motivates one to keep on trying.
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Still from ‘Plato Moria’, photo: creator’s archive
This War of Mine is an especially interesting example, because it very rarely directly judges the player. There is no ‘voice from above’ here, condemning you for stealing from someone weaker or sending a companion to his certain demise. The heroes must simply live with the consequences of their actions, and the player has to answer for themselves as to whether or not they’ve done the right thing or not. Instead of heroic proclamations, which are featured in most depictions of war to which today’s students are exposed, this game raises painful questions.
This War of Mine may prove to be a great addition to a school’s curriculum, but only time will show how successful it will be. There are many obstacles along the way. We still don’t know exactly how the game will be provided to schools and students. We also don’t know how many teachers will decide to step out of their comfort zone and make use of a medium that functions completely differently than literature or film do.
Most of all, we have to keep in mind that this sort of project requires not a singular decision, but a systematic commitment and an active community to realise it. Because introducing video games into schools is neither as new or as rare of a phenomenon as it may seem. Eight years ago, the company Valve, the owner of Steam, the largest online game store , even came forth with a special offer tailored to the needs of teaching institutions. The Steam for Schools programme was supposed to offer games and experimental environments specifically adapted to the needs of pupils. Wonderful lesson plans bloomed, and the press was full of articles about the brave new world in which children learn through play. However, the programme was shut down before it could truly blossom, and today, barely any traces of it remain.
So here’s to hoping that the notion of including This War of Mine in the curriculum of schools will not share the same fate – it is far too good to be thrown away.
Originally written in Polish by Paweł Schreiber, Jul 2020, translated by Agnes Dudek, Oct 2020
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