After playing several games from the Final Fantasy series, I started to wonder if games like Final Fantasy do a better job teaching critical thinking skills than public schools. To be fair, courses such as calculus, chemistry, and physics are far more rigorous than playing a video game but the bulk of classes I endured in school were liberal arts and humanities. Throughout high school and parts of college, I had several classes where you simply just memorize a set of facts and spit them back out on a multiple choice test. I usually did very well in these courses but I felt like I wasn't really learning or smart. All I was doing was memorizing facts for a test.
Of course, I did have challenging courses. There were exams that made you think about every choice to the question. For those exams, you couldn't just jump straight to the correct answer because you could have made a mistake in a series of calculations and get the answer wrong. You had to find the correct answer and figure out why every other option was incorrect. Even then, the hardest questions always had the option "none of the above" which would always leave you with a seed of doubt.
As challenging as these courses and exams were, there was something regarding the critical thinking skill that they could never do. However, games like Final Fantasy did it all the time. In games like Final Fantasy, you fight several bosses and you have several different options how to defeat these bosses. In other words, you are given a long series of tasks and you are given a toolbox filled with stuff that will help you complete those tasks but you have to figure out how to complete the tasks yourself.
For example, the standard logic of most RPGs is that you get stronger the more you fight. If you come to an enemy that is too strong, you can typically grind up levels to become stronger and destroy your enemy. However, if you find out that the boss has a weakness to ice, you can try using some ice magic on the beast to kill it faster and advance in the game. Maybe you don't have any ice magic available. If that is the case, you might be able to collect healing items from other enemies and save them for a boss fight. If this isn't an option, you might have magic that will speed up your party or slow down your enemy which will allow you to deal more damage or take less damage.
Two notable bosses from Final Fantasy 7 are Jenova Life and Carry Armor. Jenova Life will fight by only casting water attacks like Aqualung. What makes this fight so memorable is that a water ring can be found shortly before the boss fight. The water ring lets a party member absorb water attacks. If you give one of your party members a water ring, you already won the fight. Jenova can't hurt you. If that ring isn't picked up or equipped, the boss fight can actually be challenging as Aqualung does a lot of damage and hits everyone in the party. In this situation, the water ring is pretty much a free pass.
In this way, the game encourages experimentation and exploration to figure out what is the best way to manage your resources and get the most amount of plunder/money/experience out of every random battle.
The second notable boss, Carry Armor, is memorable because of how difficult this boss can be. This boss is unique in that is has two arms that can capture two of your party members and hold them hostage. If your third party member is dead and both the other members get captured, you lose and the game is over. Carry Armor is one of the few bosses that does this and this boss makes solo character runs really tough. The two arms of Carry Armor can be destroyed which will disable the boss from holding your party hostage. This boss in particular reminds you that You cannot always rely on the same strategy all the time. With this boss, it is useful to use a spell like Trine which targets all opponents and destroy the arms first.
Final Fantasy 5 and Final Fantasy Tactics are the games where strategy is experienced to the fullest. In Final Fantasy 5, almost every boss fight requires a different strategy. In Final Fantasy Tactics, each battle will have a different amount of enemies and some fights have different victory conditions. What makes these games unique is the amount of randomness and uncertainty. Often times, I've been destroyed by a boss or battle up to 20 times and I was forced to either optimize a particular strategy or create a new strategy.
In my opinion, games like this are good preparation for facing the real world. I'm not saying that getting good at Final Fantasy Tactics will turn a man into a successful day trader or beat out the stock market, but these games may encourage kids to ask the following questions.
What is my goal/objective?
What resources do I have available now?
What resources can I acquire in the future?
What are the obstacles that are in my way?
Do I have a back up plan in case things go to pot?
How long will it take me to reach my objective?
What is possible?
Can I achieve this?
When facing the real world, a man might have the goals of buying a house, starting a family, creating a business, or earning a certain amount of money. These goals may conflict with each other so he has to prioritize the goals that he deems most important.
Each goal will require a certain amount of resources, mostly money. At that point, a man needs to figure out how much resources he needs and how to achieve them. At that point, he needs to know what financial position he is in currently and figure out how he can accumulate more resources.
He will know what his current job is, how much money he spends in a month, and how long it will take to save up a certain amount of money. Now there are always unknown factors that aren't that reliable. He may find a better job that pays more money or he might get fired for a petty reason. It is always good to have a back up opportunity. If a man is a customer service representative, he could take classes to eventually become a computer net-worker. He will have to spend time and money to dedicate to these studies. Will the possible increase to earnings be worth it? If so, how long will it take to pay off?
All these kinds of questions and considerations are things I've experienced in some fashion while playing games like Final Fantasy, Sim City, or Advance Wars. It is for these reasons I think these video games teach kids better critical thinking skills than 50% of public schools.
No comments:
Post a Comment