In the past few weeks, Alex Games and I have been planning a talk and set of workshops that we’ve been invited to deliver in Galena, Illinois on November 5th. Called Networking For Information (or NFI), the meeting will bring together a number of teachers, educational technologists, and researchers; Alex and I are leading a day’s worth of events — a formal keynote, followed by us highlighting the learning practices embedded in commercial videogames, followed by a workshop in which we’re going to ask participants to get hands-on experiences with both games designed for pure entertainment and games designed for learning.

Both of us are very interested in the learning opportunities within Flash games as of late and we’ve decided to dip back into Social Impact Games, a great clearinghouse site of games and game mods which use games towards non-entertainment goals. (Though, of course, I’m skeptical that there really are any games designed for “pure entertainment” without a significant learning component). Given the economic downturn, Alex and I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few games which feature explicit financial components, which may be used for teaching financial literacies.

An early and interesting example is that of Cyberbudget, a game sponsored by the French government In it, players attempt to balance the French national budget, avoid deficits, and present budgets to a virtual parliament. Unfortunately, I don’t know very much French, so I haven’t been able to get far in the game — but it’s apparent that a lot of work was put into making it an engaging simulation, with excellent graphics, both complex enough and gamey enough to actually be fun. The game appears to work like many excellent Flash games work, by providing a deep gaming experience with enough glitz to avoid making you think it’s a boring lesson on fiscal responsibility.

Now, compare it with the only working American budgetary game I could find on Social Impact Games — the New York City budget game. This thing’s a total miscarriage, as far as I can tell. While certainly a complex simulation, the interface issues render it approximately as interesting as, well, being a city employee actually balancing a budget. That’s to say, the game isn’t actually much of a game and appears to be simply a calculator for determining the impact on a budget deficit of one’s choices. For kids, especially, there’s nothing here to draw them in, nothing to scaffold their learning of how to make fiscal choices, and no rewards whatsoever.

This is exactly the problem I’ve had with some of the educational learning environments I’ve come across in the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning literature — systems which provide excellent tools for supporting tasks, but are rarely engaging without some kind of curricular, organizational frame around it (okay, okay, I’ll say it, without school forcing students to use them). There’s a lot of skepticism around the rhetoric of games being the shiny, new savior for education, and I’m certainly sympathetic to those who complain about the hype around gaming and virtual worlds. But, it seems obvious that without the graphical, narrative, and interactive expertise of professional game designers being put to use on simulations like this, we’re just going to end up with more New York City budget calculators, and fewer interesting simulations like Cyberbudget. Polish matters in developing learning systems, and the apparent frivolity of looking like entertainment is not necessarily the enemy of learning serious content.

The global economic outlook seems, at best, uncertain in recent weeks, and increasingly bad just this morning. While these kinds of games obviously won’t get us out of the mess facing us right now, they do point toward a long-view way out of it — we’ve had decades of people “gaming” the market poorly, for personal and short-term gain, and now that’s coming back to collectively bite us. More regulation is one answer, in my opinion, but so is instilling a new approach to “gaming” economic systems. Honing resource management skills, better understanding the dynamics of multiple economic factors, better showing the potential social impact of economic decisions — games do all of these things, and better utilizing games to teach these skills seems a no-brainer for designing a preferable long-term economic future.