5 reasons games are the freaking best way to educate

I'm number 3. Thea. It's a silent "h".

I don’t know if you’ve heard of this game called Oregon Trail, but it’s kind of a big deal. I hadn’t played Oregon trail in 15 years until last Tuesday when I came across the original Apple ][ version AND TOTALLY PWNED IT. Of course, my years of real-life frontier experience between then and now may have had something to do with it. Shootin’ bison, mendin’ wagon wheels – it’s hard work man. But besides that, here’s five things I noticed:

1. Games stick with you. I remembered everything about the game 15 years later. The game is admittedly crazy intuitive and there’s no learning curve (thanks to the old skool y/n-style command system), so it’s as easy to get into the first time as it is the 50th time. The game is 80% strategy and 20% shootin’ bison, but even the bison shootin’ had stuck with me – and I remembered what kinds of challenges (cholera, drowning) were in it, so I could plan in advance for them.

2. Games are universal. Part of why I remembered the challenges of the game is thanks to the public education system that made it available to every single kid in my generation. “You have died of dysentery” became a nostalgic cultural icon some years back. The mass distribution is definitely a factor in the game’s popularity, but see here’s the thing: we all had the same effing textbooks, too. No one remembers those. No one talks about those. No one’s writing blogs about those or quoting them on t-shirts. And no one’s searching the internet for the original version to read it again just for the lulz.

3. Games give you skillz. I totally know when not to try and float my wagon across a river now. You laugh – but theoretically a game could teach non-life-saving skills just as easily. And because of reasons 1 and 2, you’ll remember that stuff decades later.

4. Games are crazy addictive. Games stimulate whatever brain chemical is released when you accomplish a goal that makes it feel good. They offer goal accomplishment in the easiest and most accessible way there is. Which is why we’ll play games all weekend long until there’s grease stains on our undershirts and the cat has deserted us for someone who actually feeds it – instead of, say, filling out job applications. This can be a bad thing for obvious reasons, but as a learning tool, the power of  quick, easy goal accomplishment can’t be underestimated. It’s like if masturbation could make you smarter.

5. Games are fun. Most people don’t go out of their way to learn new things. They do, however, go out of their way to have fun. And if “out of the way” boils down to a 5-minute Xbox download while you kick back with a Pabst, all the better.