Edutainment: Even Funnier than the Name

I got a good laugh this weekend when my girlfriend got ahold of a copy of The American Girls Premiere, a hilariously bad computer game from the Windows 95 era. The idea of the game is that you create your own "plays" using characters from Pleasant Company's American Girls line of books and toys, which gets funny when you boot it up and realize the characters move like they've had some kind of nerve damage, talk in Stephen Hawking-like voices, and malfunction constantly when you play back your creations.

This immediately brought back memories of more "educational software" from my childhood. My elementary school occasionally let us boot up games on the Apple IIe computers that were so functionally limited that their only possible use was to type dirty words into the inputs and laugh as the computer printed them very matter-of-factly on the screen.

The paragon of these games was, of course, Oregon Trail. In case you don't remember it, here's a rundown:

You play as a family of settlers in a covered wagon. You have to provide food, clothing, and other needs while making decisions about how you travel across a historical rendition of the United States. The point of the game is to name your family members Poop Head, Booger, Fatso, and Butt Breath. After doing this, you starve them until you start getting such disconcerting messages as "Butt Breath is ill," "Butt Breath has dyssentary," and finally, "Butt Breath has died." At this point, you are presented with a tombstone on which you leave the epitaph "Yo mama is fat." This way, anybody who plays the same copy of the game for years to come will pass by this same spot and be shown a tombstone reading "Here lies Butt Breath. Yo mama is fat." They will have no clue who did this or when because, honestly, it could be anybody.

The funniest thing about games like these is that they're supposed to be educational. Of the two I've mentioned (both of which were produced by The Learning Company), though, one of them actually succeeds in that purpose.

That would be Oregon Trail. Even though I spent 100% of the time I played that game goofing off with it, in the course of goofing off I still learned something. If you'd asked me, back then, what the Oregon Trail was, I could have told you.

The American Girls Premiere doesn't quite work that way. Check out this video (may or may not be safe for work) and feel free to leave a comment if you learn anything from it.



Another example of this is Highlights for Children, which my parents subscribed to when I was a kid. One of their perennial features, Goofus and Gallant, had great goof-off potential in predicting Goofus's bad behavior. If Panel A shows Gallant brushing his teeth every night, what must Panel B show Goofus doing? Simply not brushing his teeth, or perhaps turning on all of the bathroom faucets and flooding the entire house every night? (a concept that, if I remember, was often parodied in an Animaniacs segment called "Good Idea, Bad Idea.")

Once again, it was a situation where, despite using the product for my own twisted purposes, I couldn't help but learn (in this case, what people consider to be socially acceptable behavior) from it.

Before I graduated, I considered seeking a job with Highlights, which has offices in my area. After checking their job board, I determined that it wasn't a prospect, what with my not having an education degree or "equivalent experience" and all (make a note: good way to specialize).

Aside from the proper education and experience, it almost goes without saying that one of the main points of creating entertainment for children involves getting inside a child's mind to find the proper mix of educational elements (or possibly when to exclude those elements altogether)--being able to think, "if pushing the boundaries was one of the first things on my mind, what would I do with this book/game/video/etc.?" and then go back to being an adult and find out how to make the product still functional.

I'm often disappointed by how stringently unoriginal a lot of educational entertainment (or educators themselves, for that matter) seems to be. When I look back, some of the stuff I learned the most from is the same stuff that makes me think, "What the hell was I on?"

Here's Cookie Monster at the disco. I challenge you again: find the learning.