What are you doing with your life?

[cjmcray]

I've been spending a lot of my time lately working on a cartoon concept of mine, called codename:zack. It may never make it to television or comics, but I find writing new stories and drawing new pictures for the concept fun. It's like a hobby for me.

[Delphine]

The United States has to completely revamp its education system before anyone would truly appreciate a well done edutainment game, and lol good luck with that one.

[Arcade]

Beat spinball for like the third time... and I had forgot how of a bitch that water "Chase the Eggman" part was in sonic 1...

[Crowbar]

It's sweet how both Dasher and Arcade were able to post only about games in a thread specifically dedicated to OTHER things you do with your life.

The irony of this statement is that I, too, recently beat Spinball again (and I think it was also about the third time ever).

[Opa-Opa]

About edutainment...

I remember those Magical School Bus games that came along with the CD-ROM craze where everything had to be animated, make a noise and full talkie. Those were good but I think I was already too old and linked to "real" games to appreciate them. I think the only educational game that I really remember having some direct effect was Mario Teaches Typing. It actually did.. uh... teach me to type. I hardly look at the keyboard nowadays.

Actually, the Lucasarts adventure games thought me most of my English. I really can't remember when I knew it well enough to play those games, but I do remember playing them with my brother when I was 7 or 8 and he was 12 or 13 and that being very significant. Before that, all I could read was "press start button", "options", "easy", "hard", "game over", "congratulations", "thank you for playing", "the book is on the table", those kind of things. That learning is pretty understandable, and it's been several years since I realized that. Adventure games back in the day not only obligated you to read full dialogues to find out what you had to do next, but you also had to choose what you'd say and make sense with that. It also thought you to verbalize, creating full sentences for your actions ("Pick up mug", "use mug with barrel o' grog", "walk to the sun"). Later, since Sam and Max I believe, with those games becoming more and more intuitive and getting rid of the HUD filled with verbs, that was lost. Nowadays you have no verbalizing of any kind, with the same kind of click doing the "look", "pick up" and "use", and that makes sense, I mean if you click a door you probably want to open it, close it or go through it, but I always felt that some richness there was lost.

[P.P.A.]

I actually learned my first bits of English via English Pokémon cards.

[Wooduck51]

I currently work as a window cleaner, sometimes pressure washing, janitorial, and am still trying to make money off the medium size collection of gamebirds I raise. I continue to work on my drawing skills, am attempting to learn the violin, learning how to work on my car, learning what I can about farming, etc. And also driving roughly two hours to see my best friends whenever I can.

[Crowbar]

the medium size collection of gamebirds I raise.

That is a manly passtime.

[Wooduck51]

That is a manly passtime.

Even more so because you can butcher them with your bare hands and then roast them for dinner whenever you want to.

....I also work full time as a computer engineer and am getting married next month.....

Two pages late, but.... CONGRATULATIONS! Best wishes to both of you!

[Sniffnoy]

Can anyone *name* any really good educational games which are good *as* educational games? I remember playing Operation Neptune when I was little, and that was a fun game, but it was just a fun game with math questions shoehorned in. The interruptions were annoying (thankfully there were none in the final level!) and I'm sure they would have been far more so to anyone who didn't like math and kept losing health to them. Similarly I recall playing a puzzle game called Spelling Jungle (I can hardly find any record of it now, guess nobody cared about it) which I thought was a good puzzle game, but again, the spelling aspect was entirely shoehorned in. Of course, given that it was supposed to teach *spelling*, I guess they did as good as they reasonably could have. The way that aspect of it worked was that each level had a number of letters, which you had to pick up in the correct order before returning to your raft. (If the same letter occurred multiple times in the word, you could pick them up in any order that correctly spelled the word.) But each level told you how to spell the word; if it hadn't, it would have been trial-and-error gameplay, which is in general not fun and I definitely don't think would have been so in this context. So every N levels (I think 5) there was a spelling quiz on the recent words. Nothing but the dumb memorize-and-spit-back our school system is built on. As I said above, since it was supposed to teach English spelling, I think they did as well as they reasonably could have - the English spelling system is basically just an irregular splitting into independent semi-regular systems, not, y'know, regular but with nonobvious implications.

Now there certainly do exist games made to actually illustrate points as games, but what ones are there aimed at, well, the people "edutainment" games are aimed at? (As opposed to games made to illustrate points of military strategy or political science, e.g.) Been many years since I played it, but I vaguely one of the Math Blaster games being a partial success - I vaguely recall that, inbetween the dumb math quizzes and the not-at-all-math-related-games, there being one or two parts that actually managed to illustrate mathematical principles through the game... but I don't really remember so well.

Part of the problem is that so much of what kids are expected to learn at that age is just facts with little context - both problems; it's both a problem in that it doesn't make for good games, and a problem in that it's a terrible basis for an educational system even outside of that. I figure, as it is, you give a kid puzzle games if you want to get him thinking, and then, well, you hope that becomes a habit.

Not sure what this illustrates, but as a data point, it's interesting to note that you can't really learn physics from playing physics puzzle games. The reason being that when we speak of learning physics, we mean learning *precise* physics; whereas most people's intuitive notion of physics is good enough for solving such puzzles. I guess then you have stuff like the West Point Bridge Design Contest, which actually *does* require a rather more precise knowledge of physics, but is not really the sort of thing most people would consider fun.

Actually I'm kind of surprised that puzzle games *don't* make more math people, but I guess this is largely due to most people having no idea what mathematics consists of... I encountered recently a Flash game, called Minim, in which one is given a graph, and one must apply edge contractions to reduce it to a single vertex, with only certain edge contractions being legal; and yet one of the rules about which edge contractions were legal - namely, that if two adjacent nodes were labeled with the same number, you could contract that edge, and the resulting vertex would be one number higher - actually had a note next to it, saying, "this is not mathematical". Apparently because it didn't involve addition or multiplication or anything, this wasn't "mathematical" to the author. Yikes.

[Shadow Hog]

I'm a Computer Scientist graduating in May, and I still don't have any job offers lined up.

Granted, the reasoning behind that is probably that I haven't really bothered, considering Comp. Sci. is one of the hotter fields at this time, but still...

[j-man]

I was thinking about applying to Sumo Digital. They're based in Sheffield, so me and Lee could hang out and be bishy together.

[P.P.A.]

I was thinking about applying to Sumo Digital. They're based in Sheffield, so me and Lee could hang out and be bishy together.

And Zorg could interview you and you could drive Ferraris and stuff.

[Crazy Penguin]

I was thinking about applying to Sumo Digital. They're based in Sheffield, so me and Lee could hang out and be bishy together.

Do it dude! We could have slumber parties and my apartment!

[j-man]

Fingers crossed, mate.

[Arcade]

In my free time I write scripts for a TV show that will never be made, and I am also working on a script for a kids movie that of course no one will ever buy, of course, at my slow pacing, that stuff will be finished when Robots rule over the world...

[Syntheticgerbil]

Can anyone *name* any really good educational games which are good *as* educational games? I remember playing Operation Neptune when I was little, and that was a fun game, but it was just a fun game with math questions shoehorned in.

I mean, I think that's pretty much the right way to do it if you are going to do it. I have a great appreciation for the Humongous Adventure Games for kids (Freddi Fish, SpyFox, and Pajama Sam), but none of the games my company makes are anything near that good.

Instead we are making a tedious web games series right now teaching you not to huff household chemicals. It sounds fun and hilarious, but it's not after episode 1.

[Opa-Opa]

I was thinking about applying to Sumo Digital. They're based in Sheffield, so me and Lee could hang out and be bishy together.

I was thinking the exact same thing yesterday. But I live in the other side of the world. =(