<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>shafyy</author><text>&amp;gt; If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn&amp;#x27;t focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the problem. I think if you define &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; as the curriculum taught in school, this is not possible. There&amp;#x27;s no way around working a ton of math problems to get better at math. You maybe can make it a bit more engaging if you pack it in a video game, but it will never be fun for most people.&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I think, the educational role of video games must be to spark interest. For example, KSP sparks interest in aerospace engineering, and I bet there&amp;#x27;s a significant number of people who went on to study rocketry because they played KSP.&lt;p&gt;Sparking interest is an important function. In fact, I think it becomes increasingly important as a lot of material and courses are now available for little money ubiquitously. Great education starts with a spark of interest.&lt;p&gt;Let me explain in more detail:&lt;p&gt;Back in the days, an important part of going to school was having access to knowledge. Now, thanks to the internet and millions of amazing humans, knowledge is accessible all over the place, virtually for no money.
Today, the &lt;i&gt;motivation&lt;/i&gt; to learn something is therefore more important. To get motivated, first you need to know that something exists, and second you need to know if you like it or not. Before motivation comes sparking interest. And here, video games have an extremely important role to play - and unlike &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; video games that are math exercises disguised as video games, video games that can try to achieve the spark can be genuinely fun to play.</text><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; games.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; educational games.&lt;p&gt;People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.&lt;p&gt;If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn&amp;#x27;t focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.&lt;p&gt;Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you&amp;#x27;re trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)&lt;p&gt;But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that&amp;#x27;s easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.</text></item><item><author>shafyy</author><text>We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don&amp;#x27;t want to play &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; games. They just want to play fun games.&lt;p&gt;And, let&amp;#x27;s be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.&lt;p&gt;Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; games.&lt;p&gt;So, what we&amp;#x27;re trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.</text></item><item><author>speeder</author><text>I own a educational game company.&lt;p&gt;Long story short: it doesn&amp;#x27;t sell.&lt;p&gt;At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.&lt;p&gt;1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play.&lt;p&gt;2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won&amp;#x27;t tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON&amp;#x27;T have kids the same age.&lt;p&gt;Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.&lt;p&gt;Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,&lt;p&gt;Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don&amp;#x27;t have the necessary media connections.&lt;p&gt;Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very &amp;quot;incestuous&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Video Games Are the Future of Education</title><url>https://nabeelqu.co/education</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>eru</author><text>Geology is a big part of Dwarf Fortress.  They take their different stone types very serious.&lt;p&gt;About &amp;#x27;German Grammar&amp;#x27;: check out Heaven&amp;#x27;s Vault &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Heaven%27s_Vault&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Heaven%27s_Vault&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;But honestly, humans don&amp;#x27;t learn languages by understand their grammars with the logic part of their brain.  Games would be ideal to produce comprehensible input, and test players on their comprehension via actions, instead of making them reply with words.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s some evidence that trying to produce language to early in your learning just ingrains bad habits.  So instead you can just follow increasingly complex instructions to show that you understand.  See &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Input_hypothesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Input_hypothesis&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain><item><author>mcv</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; games.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s the problem. Because they are educational. And because they are both educational and fun, people are much more engaged to learn from them than from &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; educational games.&lt;p&gt;People who play Europe Universalis learn way more about early modern history than they ever learned at school. As Randal Munroe pointed out, you learn way more about orbital mechanics from KSP.&lt;p&gt;If you want to make truly educational games, you shouldn&amp;#x27;t focus on the educational part, but take the educational part and wrap it in tons of fun.&lt;p&gt;Of course there are topics where this is going to be hard. I have absolutely no idea how anyone could make a fun game that revolves around German grammar. (Or do I? The best way to learn a language always seems to be to actually use it with a native speaker. Having a friend who speaks the language you&amp;#x27;re trying to learn would be a great way to do that. There might be something here.)&lt;p&gt;But something like geology could be part of a simulation where you need to find certain resources, and that&amp;#x27;s easier once you understand how those resources are formed. And then there needs to be something fun to do with those resources, of course.</text></item><item><author>shafyy</author><text>We also tried to make educational games and came to a similar conclusion. The truth is, kids (or adults) don&amp;#x27;t want to play &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; games. They just want to play fun games.&lt;p&gt;And, let&amp;#x27;s be honest, games that try to teach you math or science are just not as fun as Fortnite or Minecraft.&lt;p&gt;Now, you can make the case that some games are educational by mistake. Like Minecraft, Age of Empires, Sim City or Kerbal Space Program. But noone would see them or describe them as &amp;quot;educational&amp;quot; games.&lt;p&gt;So, what we&amp;#x27;re trying to make now are creative games. In my opinion, creativity is extremley important and there are fun ways to be creative, that are not eductional in the strict sense. For example, Lego comes to mind.</text></item><item><author>speeder</author><text>I own a educational game company.&lt;p&gt;Long story short: it doesn&amp;#x27;t sell.&lt;p&gt;At my company we identified, at least if your target is kids, two ways to sell edu games.&lt;p&gt;1. Sell them to institutions, like governments, schools, companies, whatever. Thing is, the features they look when choosing a game to buy, are ones most likely to make the game unfun, the end result is often boring stuff noone WANTS to play.&lt;p&gt;2. Sell them to the public directly, but word of mouth here is often poor, specially if your age range is narrow, for example if your target is kids between 4 and 8, the kids will play the game, love it, but parents won&amp;#x27;t tell other parents to buy it, most of their friends probably WON&amp;#x27;T have kids the same age.&lt;p&gt;Thus if you are going for fun games, you need path 2, and to do path 2 you need a ton of exposure that is NOT word of mouth, we found out this means or you have massive marketing budget, or you have some kind of connection to media so they advertise you cheaper.&lt;p&gt;Our biggest competitors all ended being media companies themselves, for example Disney is an obvious one, but another was Toca-Boca, at first they looked like a tiny indie studio, but somehow they ALWAYS get featured in multiple magazines, store front pages and so on, eventually I found out they were created by a multi-billion media empire named Bonnier,&lt;p&gt;Since then I found that is easier to get money from creating other things, since I don&amp;#x27;t have the necessary media connections.&lt;p&gt;Well, even NORMAL games often need media connectios (for example, Jon Blow was a journalist before he made Braid, Nintendo literally printed their own magazine for a while, the indie clique that existed around TIGSource was heavily tied to CMPMedia, many of them being presenters in events, or being friends of their employees, or working for them directly, the whole thing is very &amp;quot;incestuous&amp;quot;).</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Video Games Are the Future of Education</title><url>https://nabeelqu.co/education</url></story>