XplanaZine

The video game industry has grown to a staggering $25 billion, and the fastest growing segment of that industry is phone gaming. The global mobile phone gaming market more than doubled in 2003 to $587 million from a year earlier and is expected to grow six-fold to $3.8 billion in 2007, according to estimates from Informa Media Research in London.

That growth is paralleled by growth in the online gaming arena and intense focus by the various media tech giants in the lucrative sector.

In higher education, publishers and other information providers have been quick to point out that the market for gaming simply has not manifested yet in education. This should be translated to say that they have not yet found a way to create products that support their current paradigms for production and sales. In reality, the market is there and that opportunities await for those are willing to take advantage of the interest.

The obstacles to gaming in high school and higher education, from a production and marketing standpoint, have been:

• Lack of definition of product needs: Unlike the more mature video gaming market in general, educational gaming for profit is still in its infancy when it comes to definition and market. Through the work of Henry Jenkins and The Education Arcade consortium, visions are being created and communities are starting to form, but the progress is slow.
• Lack of good models for creation and distribution: There is yet a cohesive and comprehensive vision for game design and production in Higher Education. Without accurate product definition, creation and design are problematic. Distribution is hampered by the monopolistic monoliths represented by universities, publishers, and bookstores. The keys to success lie in partnership with publishers or universities and direct-to-consumer distribution and marketing.
• Lack of curriculum integration: This is perhaps the biggest challenge for educational gaming. Revolution, a game being produced under the auspices of the Education Arcade, is a wonderful approach to teaching early American history through role playing and experience. It would be more attractive to distribution channels like publishers, however, if it were tightly integrated with the established curriculum guidelines used in their textbooks and mapped to those. This is true of all games that emerge in Higher Education. It is not enough to have a great game. The game must fit within the existing curriculum parameters and standards for a given discipline and be mapped to those in a flexible manner.
• Lack of faith in customers: Game creators believe in their customers because they know people are doing this already at home. Others, however, shy away from the gaming industry in education because they are afraid instructors, in particular, will not be able to handle the technology. One solution, perhaps, is to create a “no instructor left behind” program that will utilize federal funds to ensure that teachers can have fun and learn just as effectively as their students.

The online gaming market will grow ten-fold in the next ten years and is driven by a market hunger for experiential play. In Higher Education, we have long known that students learn best when information is placed within meaningful contexts and they are allowed to practice what they are learning in “real situations.”

Learning by doing is nothing new but it has often been an obstacle to the classroom as that environment is better suited to other pedagogical models. Educational gaming is the best available solution for learning by doing. The remaining challenge is to create better definitions of the final product and to integrate our games with existing curricula frameworks so we can convince everyone to play together nicely.