Accidental Education

Yesterday, I took a break from playing Assassin's Creed 2. I never finished it previously, but since I found the next game in the series, Assassin's Creed 2 Brotherhood, cheaply on Steam, I thought it would be fun to finish number 2 first. And it really is fun, it's a great game on so many fronts.

But I'm slightly off the point. As I was taking said break, I came across this thread on Reddit, where the original poster wonders whether the cities in Assassin's Creed 2 are modelled on the original, historical places. Now it turns out that as far as anyone can make them exact, they are faithful replicas.

Then the thread creeps off a bit, and a teacher explains how much he admires games like this. Not because he plays them himself, he doesn't, but many of his 9^th graders light up when he talks about the area and the time period, because they have “been there” so to say.

Several other games such as Crusader Kings II, the Total War series and Europa Universalis 1-3 are also mentioned, and the thread really brings out how much history and geography anyone who plays these games can learn without even trying!

Back in the dim mists of time, when I was in school, there weren't really any games like this. Sure there were plenty of games, but the technology required to make games like the once mentioned above was ten-twenty years away.

That was however, the era in which I discovered role playing games. And what a discovery that was! Before, I absolutely hated geography, loathed it's very existence, but RPG's changed all that. All in all I can honestly say RPG's and computer gaming have taught me English, Geography, a lot of History and even Math (which I also despise), and best of all; without even trying!

That's the actual point of this post I suppose. The art of not only making learning fun, but making it invisible as well.

So before you accuse a gamer of wasting his time, make sure they aren't actually studying...