Chapter One
Games? Really?



IN 1982, John Carroll noticed people playing what was probably the first computer adventure game, "Colossal Cave." He observed then what we see now, people hunched over a computer spending hours figuring out how to get further in the game. He compared that observation to people who were giving up on something considerably more valuable to them, learning to use a word processor.

At that time, I had a job creating educational computer games for the Apple II and other, similar, machines. It was my first job out of college, and I'd already been bitten by the computers-and-learning bug badly enough that I'd designed my own major in it (back then, they didn't have such degrees). And, as a professional obligation mind you, I was playing computer games, including the "Colossal Cave" adventure. I was captured by the possibility of embedding important decisions in adventure games and creating learning environments.

And that is really what this book is about, the results of a twenty-plus-year jo ... read full excerpt from Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games ebook