Microsoft: Educational games a waste of money

With the success of such “games” as Dr. Hiroshima’s Big Brain Suduko How Old Is Your Japanese Coach, it is little surprise that publishers are desperately scrabbling for a piece of the action in their ambition to saturate everything that passes through this industry. One man, however, has his head screwed on and ironically, he hails from Microsoft country.

“We’re in the business of producing fun, not education,” warns Microsoft’s Neil Thompson. “It so happens that certain products we produce have educational value. We’re in the business of creating fun entertainment and the moment we try to pretend we’re in the business of education we’ve crossed the line and it’s dangerous for us as a company and as an industry.

“We’ve got to concentrate on producing great quality commercial products that will sell, because it costs too much money to get that wrong.”

I never thought I’d say that a man called Thompson was right about videogames, but here we go — I’m with Thompson on this. While he concedes that games can be used as educational tools, he also stresses that if the industry as a whole decided to push educational games to capitalize on the few big successes, a lot of money will be lost.

But of course, I’d say that’s true of everything, not just educational games. Isn’t that right, New Xbox Experience?