Nowadays it can’t be debated that one of the most popular hobbies amongst both adults and children is video games. In only three decades the video game industry has made a place for itself that has become as culturally relevant and important as Hollywood. A media that was only considered as a toy for children is now a billion-dollar industry that arrivals some countries GEP. But aside from its great position in our economy, video games have become an integral part of many people’s daily lives in a way that changes many habits. It has become apparent though that video games are much more than a hobby for many people and have had a very positive impact on many people’s lives. With this in mind one of the big questions that comes up often is can video games be educational? Can they be used to help people learn things or potentially have a new application that makes it easier for people who have problems learning to learn easily?
To many people, this might seem like a difficult question, but the reality is that there is already a lot of work being done to try and make video games as educational as possible. Ubisoft is one of the best examples of a company trying to make their game more educational by using them as educational tools. Ubisoft has been long known for its historical fantasy franchise Assassin’s Creed but what many people do not know about this franchise and Ubisoft as a company is that they are also using the elements they developed for the Assassin’s Creed franchise to make tools that are used nowadays in Canadian schools. But what does that mean exactly? Concretely what it means is that they’re using the tools that they create for making video games to make a reproduction of historical societies. So, with all this historical research they did for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla they use their tools and their contacts with history buffs to create a replica of our life in a Viking village of those times.
As you can imagine tools like this help when you are trying to learn history, but this isn’t the only educational application of video games there is. When it comes to playing video games or setting up video games there happens to be a lot of things that you need to understand or learn to be able to make games play the way you want them to. Whether it is about learning to mod video games or set up a server to play online with your friends these things require a lot of knowledge that is not always easily available. You see many people who play video games learn these things by themselves as they want to be able to do things that they wouldn’t learn anywhere else. This is often the starting point of many people’s coding career whether it is because of their involvement in mod-making or because they learned out to set up servers and understand connectivity by themselves. For many gamers learning that an unmanaged VPS is always cheaper or whether to code in C++ for their favorite game comes from their love of video games.
The love for video games that many people have pushes them to learn things and experience new things that they wouldn’t otherwise. One such thing is language. For many people who don’t have English as their first language video games were a great way to not only come in contact with the language but also start to learn it. Since localization wasn’t what it is today many people especially in the early days of video gaming had to make do and learn English to be able to understand a video game they were playing. While to some this might seem like a low level of access ability it also made it more important for many people to speak English to be able to understand. The importance of being able to both speak can understand English became more apparent once video games became mostly a multiplayer online platform. There is no hiding it English is the most prevalent language in the Western world. With this in mind, it’s important to understand that if you play online you could play with somebody from any country in the world one of the languages that most people know nowadays to communicate with people from other parts of the world is English. So, in a certain way, video games are perfect to allow people to immerse themselves in a place where everybody speaks English making it much easier to learn it by speaking it.
As you can see video games can both be made as an educational tool, but they can very well teach people things by themselves without being made with this in mind. Like every other hobby people learn things by doing them and that’s not a surprise if you look at video games with a larger point of view than simply video games being toys. Nowadays video games are being used to tell grand emotional tails as well as create intricate and hard-to-solve puzzles. They allow people to experience beautifully woven narratives as well as intense skill-based gameplay that forces people to not only learn how to master the game but also practice their reflexes when it comes to making their place in this virtual world. Whether it is true it’s great design choices or thanks to the friends and people you meet online video games can benefit your life and be profoundly educational.