Jason,
If you are interested in a more expanded discussion of the impact of measuring educational outcomes and meeting standards in educational game design, I wrote more about that in a paper presented in an Australian computers in education conference last year.
http://genyes.org/programs/supplemental/edgames

Brad,
Sorry your comment got caught in the spam catcher for a couple of days. I agree with you, there is no doubt that gamers learn a lot of from games. Strategy, planning, even social skills are necessary to complete many game objectives. The problem comes when trying to align these things with “content” as defined by state curriculum and measured by standardized tests. I think the question has to be whether our goals as a society are truely aligned with standards, and truely measured by our current tests. And that’s a whole other conversation!

In reference to Pete’s comment about user focus, the August issue of Wired talked about the user testing that Bungie did for Halo 3. They took advantage of the “machinery” built by Microsoft to do testing on tradtional software products in order to tune their game experience. I too think the focus on the user is awesome, but it adds a tremendous amount of complexity and cost to the development process.

Not every game needs to have a huge budget to be successful. It’s great to watch the XBox Live Arcade develop and grow because it’s becoming a very viable way to develop and release on the cheap. This is HUGELY important to gaming in education because it proves it can be done.

Secondly, I think there are some great examples of educational games that can be cross-over hits. Expanding your market from schools to everyone really helps you be successful. Muzzy Lane’s Making History is one example.

This supports your conclusion that “educational games will not be developed or marketed the same way as other video games”. For me, the true complexity lies in supporting state standards and in showing mastery. Halo 3 has a large array of data collection allowing your friends to go online and see how you did. We need to develop similar ways of measuring learning in educational games that shows improvement and learning in a way that validates the time spent playing games.

For a wide array of parents, teachers, and administrators I think gaming has a stigma attached. Finding ways to help them understand that games aren’t all about killing, that games have built in systemic teachings (problem solving, analysis, etc.), and that games can help kids get a deeper mastery of subject matter by immersing them in the subject matter is extremely important. Sadly, I think it’s a “chicken or egg type problem”…

Take a game, for example, like World of Warcraft (http://tinyurl.com/hfzmt) It is a multiplayer online role-playing game that requires high level problem solving and collaboration to complete the game’s objective. It can be argued that this type of game is more social than some face to face social activities.

Games like Civilization (http://www.civ3.com/) really get into what it takes to create a society and how to work together to achieve a common goal.

So we can create the perfect educational games, but I think its also important to recognize these types of games for their educational value as well.

Cheers

I wish every teacher and every educational software developer would adopt this commitment to the user, the learner.

pete