Video Games for Students?

As a teacher of teenage students, I have discovered that almost every single boy likes to play video games—and many of the girls do, too. It can feel like pulling teeth to get them to read, write, or focus on work for significant lengths of time, but they are definitely willing to spend hours of free time with controllers in hand.

I often wonder: Would it be possible to help my students become deeper thinkers and better problem solvers by having them play video games? I would love to have the funding to provide all of my students with a 3DS and a copy of a Professor Layton game, or to be able to watch them experience the joys of Portal. (Apparently, Portal 2 actually does help kids to become smarter.)

In an ideal world, here are five games I would love for my students to play:

1) Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney 

If it were appropriate to give Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc to high school students, I might go for that one instead, but let's get real—some of the jokes in that game are just a little too dirty for a school setting. Phoenix Wright, though, has the potential to be a lot of fun. This game is very text heavy, which means a lot of reading is involved. The game is also full of clever crime-solving puzzles that require the player to interview witnesses, gather evidence at crime scenes, and properly time objections in court. Plus, the characters are quirky, hilarious, and dramatic enough to keep the game entertaining. I'd really love to see my students experience a game like this and grapple with its challenges.

2) Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

This is another text-heavy game with a terrifying premise: You are trapped with eight other people, and it's not guaranteed that everyone will escape alive. Not only do you need to solve challenging room-escape puzzles, but you must make reality TV-style choices to ally with or betray your fellow competitors—with potentially life-threatening consequences. The story is deep and the characters are fascinating. While I find the puzzles in this game extremely challenging, and worry that they could frustrate my students, I'd really love to see them swapping ideas and striving to come up with solutions together.

3) Final Fantasy Tactics 

FFT is still my all-time favorite game, even after many years of gaming. Not only does it have a fairly deep story about childhood friendships and class conflict, but the combat is satisfyingly complicated. To be truly successful at the game, you need to choose the correct combination of job classes, skills, and equipment. There is also plenty of room for experimentation and for choosing play styles that work for you. Final Fantasy Tactics is the sort of game that would take my students beyond first person shooters and teach them to control multiple characters on varying battlefields.

4) Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch 

Playing Ni No Kuni is like getting to live in a really good kids' movie for a while. The animation is great, the music is great, and the story is great. The main character, Oliver, experiences a deep loss when his mother dies, and is then transported to an alternate world where he believes he may have a chance of saving her. The combat system interesting due to the use of various party members who can attack, use magic spells, or deploy familiars. But more importantly, to advance in the game, you have to actually talk to NPCs throughout the game and figure out how to solve their problems. And to get every single spell in the game, you must read a lot and collect pages from the Wizard's Companion—a book that provides added information about Ni No Kuni's world and gives it great depth. This game has a compelling story and encourages deep interaction with its world. My students would be repairing people's broken hearts and collecting alchemy recipes in no time.

5) The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Not only is Ocarina of Time one of the best video games ever made, but it would be an excellent game for students to play. There is enough text dialogue to get them reading, and the story is worth it—the lore of Hyrule is deep, and you come to care about places like Kakariko Village and Lon Lon Ranch. The game's world is full of secrets and the temples are full of interesting puzzles. Players must choose the correct weapons, ocarina songs, and patterns of time travel to advance the story. While a few of my students have played this game, many are too young to have experienced it. It would delight me to introduce them to a true classic.

There are, of course, many other games that would be great matches for students who need to read more and work on problem solving skills. I believe that allowing them to do so through video games would make learning more engaging for them, and that it could potentially be a gateway to getting my students to confront intellectual challenges and to feel more comfortable with the written word. Maybe one day I'll get funding to test my theory!