I am designing a language learning videogame to teach Korean in order to explore the cognitive potential of games. (That's for you, Peggy.) And so, Runesinger is a videogame to teach elements of the Korean language through play.
Loosely speaking, Runesinger is edutainment or an educational game. Considering what Runesinger is brings up potential to discuss and even to brainstorm a few things that Runesinger is not. By looking at the negative cases, one can avoid them.
Peggy Weil suggested two categories of negative cases, which I shall call: (1) Education without Entertainment and (2) Entertainment without Education.
In an article on evolutionary psychology of videogames, Noah Falstein quoted Marshall McLuhan as saying "Anyone who thinks there is a difference between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."
If I am aiming for the intersection of Education and Entertainment, then a Venn diagram covering the features that comprise both education and entertainment can help us visualize the issue.
If Education and Entertainment happen to be independent aesthetic outcomes, then one may expect, given no further information, that the probability of creating edutainment to be the probability for the intersection of possible permutations of a design. Simply put as probability functions:
p(edutainment) = p(education) * p(entertainment)
This suggests the likelihood of achieving those aesthetic requirements can be abysmally low, by pure chance. For example, suppose there is a 10% chance to meet the entertainment goals. Suppose there is a 10% chance to meet the educational goals. Achieving all goals is expected in 1% of the cases.
0.01 = 0.1 * 0.1
Those odds are not encouraging, but notice that any additional uncertain and independent requirements also lower the probabilities. It is not just the problem of edutainment, the intersection of education and entertainment, any uncertain and independent requirements make the occurrence of such a work small.
Some of these are reasons are from lack of experience on the part of the developers. There is a smaller set of educators with entertainment experience as there are a smaller set of entertainers with education experience. There is some of this due to a lack of interest. Educators snub their noses at entertainment. Entertainers also hold their low in the dungeons of glamor, not the ivory towers of academia.
Some of the reasons for the improbability of edutainment are from the divergence of the psychology of entertainment and education. In many cases, one aesthetic goal is sacrificed to better serve the other. Guitar Hero is more fun by tricking the subconscious into thinking it is mastering more than it actually is.
On the side of Education: Titles like Typing Master provide an ergonomic introduction to typing in top form. Titles like My Spanish Coach provide recreational word translations. But they are still entrenched in the tradition of educational exercises: multiple choice, flash cards, word find. Rosetta Stone has several multimedia flash card drills, and association exercises.
On the side of Entertainment: Titles like Guitar Hero create the enjoyment of being a lead guitarist without the fine tuned controls and feedback that takes years of practice to achieve the results that in Guitar Hero only takes weeks. SoulCalibur has hidden button combinations. God of War has on screen button combinations.
Without Education or Entertainment: So what would it be like to design something explicitly aimed to avoid entertainment and yet be educational? I'm reminded of the Latin flash cards I programmed in Pascal in high school, or the flash cards I used for Kabbalistic and Cube of Space correspondences, programmed in JavaScript while at San Francisco State. Or the morse code programs that were part of my military intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. These drilled you, eliciting a response and providing feedback on the response. They taught you, structured you by stimulus and response, by nearly operant conditioning, minus the bit of candy. It was so simple a chimp could do it.
I'm also reminded of dull infomercials, seminars, sponsored articles, books, and lectures on sundry topics from various sources, such as late nights of childhood TV, preemptive counseling in the United States Army, most every political speech I've heard from anyone of any affiliation, a few lectures at Game Developer's Conference, and some class sessions in the interactive media graduate program. Some, like the infomercials provided information to elicit a sale only, and not to empower the audience. Some, like the sponsored seminars, were not much better than an infomercial for the speaker or their association. Some, like the lectures, looked educational and sounded educational but the audience was no better equipped to do anything or think anything than if they had skipped the lecture. Some even went so far as to convince the more foolish members of the audience that they were becoming educated, in the sense that Ambrose Bierce meant when he wrote, education is "That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding."