devil's advocate, and game philosophy

Wow! This blog is becoming a delicious soup of ideas and thoughtfulness (there goes the metaphor-ing again)

I'm thinking that weekly meetings/seminars could help alleviate some of the synchrony and continuity issues (we could try to mimic a game company model? Have board meetings and memos? Fax machines? Coffee and danishes......?? Pseudo show-and-tells about the skills and roadblocks we're finding, and someone to transcribe meetings...)

To be a devil's advocate on turning all of our half-baked ideas into full-fledged plans before we start the course (i.e. narrowing down a specific message to deliver): - I think we can only help ourselves by having clear, achievable goals set out early on

- but one of the goals I was hoping to achieve with this game was to make it 'entertaining', as a priority that might even supersede 'educational', because I think this is the biggest challenge that educational games are currently facing: they aren't fun.

Maybe developers get so caught up in meeting the demands of their curriculum, that energy that should be directed to making an entertaining storyline, captivating/challenging conflicts to resolve, inspiring or dynamic graphics (all stuff I love in games), gets sacrificed along the way by a well-meaning 'we must teach these students about these 12 cytokines and these 3 immunology exam answers' mentality.

By making a biomedical 'simulation' game, I was thinking that the learning could be of an almost passive/exploratory/serendipitous nature: the character is navigating this mysterious, biomedical landscape, encounters objects and structures, can click on these things (maybe a page of an encyclopedia/game manual//immunology textbook pops up to explain the protein your cell has just bumped into..) and possibly interact in complex/simple ways with these biomedical things (depending on the game story).

.. I'm sure everyone feels this way, and that we all want to avoid a game that spoon-feeds, as opposed to a more subtle, show-don't-tell immersive learning experience.

I think I'm trying to say that maybe we should keep our 'lesson plan' more amorphous, or stuck to the mantra that if the content is scientifically informative/accurate, the game is engaging and has high replay value, then the messages can be different for every player and the learning takes care of itself...?