The likes of Minecraft and Zelda turn the drag of time into a silvery chute you drop into and emerge from after hours in a state of flow. “If the point of life was simply to enjoy the moment that you’re in, we’d all be playing video games constantly. Teens were quickly coming to the conclusion that, as Atlantic culture Spencer Kornhaber put it in a recent article : Opportunities for gaming are everywhere, and teens are playing video games frequently…įully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games.ĩ9% of boys and 94% of girls play video games. Video gaming is pervasive in the lives of American teens-young teens and older teens, girls and boys, and teens from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Ī study by Pew Research in 2008 put it succinctly: On Facebook, Zynga games were gaining traction in that year by late 2009, Farmville would have over 20 million monthly users.
Something else important happened in 2008 Apple launched the App Store, spawning a Cambrian revolution of hundreds of thousands of games that could be literally downloaded into the pockets of high schoolers. (One notable exception of that era was Nintendo’s 2006 release Brain Age, a wide-selling handheld game that presaged brain training services like Lumosity and Elevate. The educational games listed above were a far cry from the generation of games of 2008: Top games that year included World of Warcraft, Halo 3, Super Smash Bros Brawl, Grand Theft Auto IV and Call of Duty: World at War, Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution. You mean like Oregon Trail?”įrankly, I couldn’t blame them Oregon Trail, from 1985, 23 years earlier, was still the most famous educational game, and along with others of the era, like Reader Rabbit (1983), Where in the World is Carmen San Diego (1985), Number Munchers (1986), and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (1987), had simply come to define the field.īeing stuck in time is not great in any industry, but in gaming, it was deadly. When I told people what I was studying, they would all have the same question: I started graduate school to study games and education in 2008, two years before the term “gamification’ was coined, inspired by the incredible acceleration of game technology and the ubiquity of gaming in the lives of the students I tutored and taught.
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