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Serious video games could help boost the UK economy

It is a situation eerily familiar to most gamers — I am lost deep inside a pyramid, being pursued by a monster about to devour me in a spectacular way if I don’t make a decision pronto. The only difference to most other games is that the problem involves geometry. An arrow appears beneath my avatar’s feet with a length on it, say 5m. Above are four boxes consisting of triangles, rectangles and other shapes with sizes marked on the side. Unless I drag the box with the right answer down in front of me, I will be devoured. If I succeed, a fresh section of a stone path opens and the game moves on.

EDUCATIONAL

Called Pyramid Panic, it is aimed at key stage 3 of the National Curriculum in the UK (pupils aged between 11 and 14 years old) and is one of a family of “serious” or educational titles launched on Thursday by mangahigh.com. Others range from doing simple arithmetic to make flowers grow, to solving quadratic equations to guide a spaceship to its destination.

I found them surprisingly addictive, but the point is not whether they appeal to the likes of me, but whether they will catch on in the classroom, thereby delivering the holy grail of computer games — ones that pacify parents by actually educating while also helping bring about a revival of maths. To call them “serious” is, of course, a libel on the rest of the gaming industry. In, say, World of Warcraft you have to do calculations for crucial strikes and damage limitation, while academic dissertations are already being written on how skills acquired in multiplayer online games are exactly those needed in industry as the digital revolution proceeds. Clearly, anything that could engage kids in maths during their early teens could eventually have an effect on the whole economy. Maths is the bedrock of the digital age.

ADVANTAGE

Mangahigh’s advantage may be its lineage. It is being launched by Toby Rowland who, after failing in the first dotcom boom with clickmango, founded and nurtured the casual gaming site king.com to be a global leader with an impressive 17 million unique viewers. One of his board of advisers is the Oxford maths professor and occasional Guardian newspaper contributor Marcus du Sautoy, who is successor to Richard Dawkins as Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science. He says that maths, apart from helping to build the pyramids, has been at the heart of gaming at least since the Sumerian game of Ur (2,500BC), an embryonic backgammon. They both claim success when the games were tested in schools, particularly in retaining the attention of boys who would typically misbehave.

There are stacks of maths games around ranging from Arcademic’s Smart Suite to Kageyama’s Maths Training on the Nintendo DS, but Mangahigh claims to be the most sophisticated as well as geared to the syllabus. It is free, though there is a premium version it hopes to make money from (possibly as a cheap alternative to private tuition).

GROWTH

Casual gaming has seen huge growth during the recession and its center may well be London, which is home to king.com, playfish.com (with a claimed 100 million downloads) and the astonishing miniclip.com, which claims 50 million unique users a month. Its growth graph looks like the north face of the Eiger.

Maths is a subsection of serious games that are taking off on all sorts of levels. The UK’s Channel 4 TV station, which won a BAFTA award for its online game Bow Street Runner, has just released some impressive educational games related to the experiences of teenagers and is inviting pitches from one of the country’s sleeping assets, independent developers.

REVOLUTION

It is possible we are not far away from a revolution in which formal education will give way more and more to the attractions of Internet learning, including virtual worlds. Something is clearly happening, and Britain — with its skills in remote learning, gaming and independent developers — ought to be well-placed to take a leading role. Apart from anything else, wouldn’t it be great if future improvements in maths at school could be “blamed” on kids spending too much time on computer games.
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