What we can learn from the video game on the teaching and educational materials

This essay studies a commercial video game in order to identify questions that could also be asked of educational materials and games. For this purpose, we have chosen a specific video game: World of Goo (WoG) because, on one hand, it illustrates distinctive characteristics of video games as a "new media" object (Manovich, 2006), and on the other hand constitutes a particularly interesting case with regards to the way in which the puzzles to the solved by the player are linked to the game's didactic content. The essay's analysis of the game concentrates on three main categories: (i) As a media object. In which sense is WoG a "new media" object? Who makes it? How is it distributed? What are the characteristics of the community around it? (ii) From the point of view of the game's language. Which aesthetic decision were made by the authors? What are the salient features of the user interface? Which representations predominate? (iii) From the point of view of the knowledge that is essential to playing the game. What is the game's objective? Which puzzles are presented to the player? Which knowledge is needed to solve them? How is the player involved in the game? Which are the hints provided to the player? Which are the winning strategies? How can they be discovered? These categories provide powerful questions for the study of educational materials in general, as well as clues about how video games can be used in school not just as teaching tools but also as didactic content to be studied in itself. The analysis of WoG allow us to distinguish what we call needed knowledge to the game of those who appear as accessories and present only in the scenarios. We propose this distinction as central to the design of educational materials.