Go Forth and Learn; Video Games.

This is a screen shot of the assessment page of the the video game I am learning, Liberty Belle’s Responsibility Launcher on icivics.org. The assessment reflects how often I encountered one of the ten civic responsibilities and the number of times I answered correctly. I scored highly on getting an education and not so well on jury duty. Full disclosure, I intentionally answered some wrong to see what the game would do, but that Jury Duty question was very vague and confusing and I had to methodically use every choice the game provided in order to get the question right. By that time I was on my third run through of the game, I wondered if I had learned anything about civic responsibilities or not. This particular question had stumped me.

Within the game the player is asked to match a civic responsibility to statement made by one of the in-game characters and then through a quick series of choosing, placing and launching an anvil the player knows if the choice was correct.

In the screenshot above the three characters represent the citizens, each of them makes a statement regarding some civic responsibility. The thought bubble above the middle character is an example of this. Liberty Belle, the winged character, is the game and player interaction. The box to the right is where the player scrolls through Civic Responsibilities, in this screen shot it is voting. The picture above the concept is the anvil you will launch at the in-game character. The player chooses the correct concept anvil places it on the launcher below the correct character, if the concept anvil and the citizen character coincide with each other the anvil will be launched and land in front of the citizen, who will then stand on it proudly, if the player chose incorrectly the anvil comes down on the head of the citizen and the audio makes that dreaded “looser” sound and you keep trying until you are correct.

This screen shot shows the maximum number of citizens and each of their civic responsibility shown in the thought bubble. The three citizens I’ve already guessed correctly are floating above their anvils and the launchers below them have gone dark. In the box on the right with the civic responsibility you’ll notice the anvil is dark, that means that I have already chosen that responsibility with the correct citizen. In this shot you see Liberty Belle hovering near the bottom right basically being an annoying game interface, also annoying is the continue button, it shows up far too often.

I see the potential for this game to be an activator of knowledge about civic responsibility and not a re-enforcer of one. This game may be effective to begin an exploration of the topic but I think its focus is too narrow. But that will be the topic of my next blog – identifying this games strengths and shortcomings as a learning tool.