Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20170402/Interview

Feature interview: Coin945 and Deltasim

Interviewed by Thibbs
Starting in the 3rd quarter of 2016, some readers may have noticed a curious uptick in the number of articles WP:VG has been gaining in the areas of children's gaming and educational gaming. In last quarter's issue, the Newsletter reported that nearly 38% of WP:VG's DYKs were youth-oriented or educational in nature and this quarter we are reporting DYKs for titles like Reader Rabbit and Where in Europe Is Carmen Sandiego? Looking into this phenomenon more closely this quarter, the Newsletter has identified two editors primarily responsible for these efforts: Coin945 and Deltasim. Both editors appear on the article creation leaderboard reported in last quarter's issue, and this February one of them (Coin945) attained the #1 spot for overall article creation. So why children's and educational video games? This quarter the Newsletter interviews both Coin945 and Deltasim to find out what lies behind it all.
Any questions left unasked? Any comments, concerns, or observations? Let us know in the Discussion section below!

1. How much of your time is spent editing educational/children's video game articles? Approximately how many have you worked on? Do you find that you are engaged more in article editing or in article creating? What are the oldest educational/children's games you have edited? Which series do you consider to represent your best efforts in this genre?

   I would say around 90% of my time here at Wikipedia these days is spent covering educational / children's video games. (When referring to the educational side of things I like to use the 90's term edutainment in the sense of "educational entertainment". I'm not sure if it's an archaic term now, but I still like to use it). The other 10% of the time, I'm improving or creating articles on something completely different like Disney songs (e.g. Beauty and the Beast's "How Does a Moment Last Forever" or Tarzan's "Two Worlds"), or closer to home I'm drawn to Myst-clone adventure games (such as those of Cryo Interactive) that may not be strictly educational yet nonetheless take inspiration from genuine historical information from which they weave their own web of fiction. Many of these contain very uncanny valley-esque 3D graphics or FMV that has not aged very well, so they may look a bit outdated or goofy. Yet they're fascinating and important artefacts nonetheless, if not in isolation then certainly when taken as a whole, and the ones I chose to explore generally are backed by numerous third party reliable sources lying around the internet and print just waiting to be popped into the articles. --Coin945

   I'd say I've worked on around 100 educational/children's articles. (On another slightly off-topic point, I think it's a misnomer to use "educational" and "children's" interchangably. This also irks me with other media such as how people often associate "animated" with "for kids" in the film industry, which results in companies being nervous about targeting their more challenging films directly at adults, but that's another story). Some recent edutainment/children's games I've worked on include: Detective Barbie, Math Blaster! (which sustained 92 weeks on the Billboard charts for Top Education Computing Software!!!), and Amazon Trail II. I've brought 10 Disney's Animated Storybook articles (which maybe should be merged?), Madeline, Star Warped, Pyst, The American Girls Premiere (co-created by Blakegripling ph (t c)), Opening Night, Reader Rabbit, Star Wars: Droid Works, and Where in Europe Is Carmen Sandiego? to DYK. I've edited countless others... --Coin945

   Honestly, I find article creating to be more fulfilling and fun than article editing. There's just something thrilling about starting from scratch, knowing that you're about to jump into a black hole and start rummaging around for long-lost content. It's surprising how much literature there actually is on the games I choose to work on. I'll sometimes abandon projects if I feel the sources just aren't there, but in the vast majority of cases my computer will be be categorically clogged with compelling facts. Or at least you have enough leads to deduce the information is out there and locatable. That is, after you do a bit of sleuthing. Conversely, I don't particular like trying to consolidate/rearrange/tinkle with the info of an already-established article. In terms of the editing side of things, my issue in general is that I tend to be a bit of a completionist, which means I like every piece of info I find to go into the article. I would ideally like my Wikipedia articles to be the easily-accesible be-all-and-end-all pieces on the topic, summing up what the literature says and rendering all other sources (which may be near-impossible to locate) obselete. But in practice the few times I fully attempted this (Madeline which I worked on with Aoba47 (t c), Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time, and Pilgrim: Faith as a Weapon), I had a slight obsession that lasted for days and days. I would search the ends of the Earth just to find those few more sources with a tad more info. I would keep artificially inflating the article size with fascinating (only to me?) trivia. It was like that famous "One More Turn Syndrome" from Civilization IV. Only it was "one more link" or "one more search engine" or "one more language". Not good for my health. So I try not to do that anymore. Recently I've gone back to writing shorter articles on a wider range of topics - in general I think breadth is more important than depth anyway - the amount of work taken to bring an article to the upper article classes (GA/FA) could be used to create a baseline article on many many other topics - so why have 10 Good Articles when you could have 100 C-class ones? That's just me though, and in saying this I fully understand that there is a balance between breadth and depth and that one can't half-ass their articles. (Landing in at #2 on this Leaderboard is not something I'm particularly proud of). In some cases I've noticed there are many sources out there, for instance numerous reviews listed at Mobygames, but I'm unable to access most/all without a bunch of detective work as the reviews generally lie in lost weblinks or out-of-print magazines, so it can be frustrating when you know a game has a bunch of literature yet you have major issues creating an article based on potential soucing. --Coin945

   There's actually a very fascinating story behind one of the oldest video game articles I created. Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? (WinDiCS) is a 1989 Carmen Sandiego state-specific game that was created to give the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction a way to teach kids about their state, while allowing educators to teach kids about how to use an online database, quite a revolutionary idea for its time. The state made an agreement with Broderbund for the North Dakota Database Commitee (a group of 14 educators) to research and write the clues, while the software developer shoved them into the game template they'd used for the previous three games (World, USA, and Europe). The project was a prototype; if successful it likely would have been applied to the other 49 states, and... *cough* I'm getting a bit too detailed. Hehe I apologise. I find this all really fascinating. Anyway long story short the game didn't do very well and has become exceedingly rare. I added a paragraph to the Carmen Sandiego (video game series) page using the tiniest of info-fragments I could find circa 2012, and some time later the game saw a bit of a resurgence, beginning with a YouTube review, a Let's Play, and a collaboration between video game archivist Frank Cifaldi and WinDiCS head Craig Nansen, which has helped bring the game back into the light after 28 years. From what I've read of the story, Cifaldi had read that list of games, and when he stumbled upon my WiNDiCS paragraph was shocked it was the only Carmen Sandiego game to not have been donated to the The Strong National Museum of Play, so it gives me a fuzzy feeling to know I may have played a small but significant part. I'm actually quite surprised by how full the WinDiCS article is now, considering how obscure the game is. Like the Hebrew language, it kind of miraculously came back from the dead. I managed to find sources from all over the place, helped by numerous others such as the friendly folk at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request, and it's blossomed into a fabulous example of what's possible when you put in the work to rediscover a lost work that was hiding in the cracks, caverns, and corners of the world. So yeah, that project I'm particularly proud of. --Coin945

   I would say the Carmen Sandiego series illustrates the best of what I can do in the edutainment space. When I first explored the Carmen Sandiego articles on Wikipedia, I realised it was all a bit of a mess. Different games of the same name were all lumped into the same articles, and it wasn't very clear where one game stopped and the other began. I saw this had a flow-on effect to modern blogs and articles, which commonly mixed up references and images. At the same time, the articles were full of fancruft (some of which I believe has crept back into a few of them - I'll have to check on that). I made it my mission to discover every single Carmen Sandiego game and seperate out the info into distinct articles, and as of 2017, the list could not be more clearer. I recently added a game timeline to the franchise article that spells it all out quite nicely. In my travels I even discovered new entries in the series that I never knew existed. These popped up during the 90s' Carmen Sandiego fever, and include: planitarium shows, a concert series, two albums, and the Carmen Sandiego Day project (that became so popular it was apparently covered in Time magazine!). I'm very proud of my work in this space. Throughout my journey, one thing I discovered was that it was much easier for me to work on individual game articles and sum up the content in the series article, rather than to start with the series and spin it out into game articles once sections became to cumbersome. So I'd generally stuck with that philosophy up until quite recently with my series article escapades with Deltasim (t c). I've been trying to replicate my Carmen Sandiego success with Reader Rabbit, but The Learning Company had an unfortunate obsession with re-releasing in the 80's and 90's, and it's really quite difficult to keep track of it all. For instance from what we've discovered, the first game in the series has been called over the years: Reader Rabbit and the Fabulous Word Factory (1983), Reader Rabbit (1986), Talking Reader Rabbit (1990), Reader Rabbit 1 (1991), Reader Rabbit 1 Deluxe (1994), and Reader Rabbit's Reading 1 (1997). Pheww!! --Coin945

   
   Recently I've spent essentially every week working on those sort of articles. I worked on perhaps a dozen series and twice as many standalone games. I see myself better engaged in the editing area, since creating articles can be tricky to give a sufficient notable start. I feel the urge to create an article like Forever Growing Garden because it's one those games that contains a topic not commonly taught in edutainment, in this case botany. The oldest edutainment game I have edited is Freddi Fish and the Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds. If I had to choose a series, I would say that the Fun School series are my best efforts, since they were seldom edited by anyone else and I built the article up almost from scratch. Deltasim (talk) 15:34, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

2. Why Educational and Children's video games? Do you have children of your own? Did you play similar games when you were young and is it the nostalgia factor that motivates you? Is it the under-represented nature of the topic and the need to fill a void in coverage? Some other reason?

   Two of the very first projects I ever worked on here were children's MMORPG Club Penguin (rest in peace...) and children's book series Horrible Histories , so my heart has always been in this type of content - particularly those which strike a nostalgic chord for me. On the whole, I think video games are a genre that are yet to be taken seriously from art scholars as it is simply so new. But within video games, I think the edutainment space isn't perhaps given the respect it deserves. I am a big believer in the gamification of topics to make them more paletable and interesting. Whether it be Duolingo which is currently helping me learn French, Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher which introduced me to many complex philosophical concepts, the marvelous games of iCivics that taught this Australian guy all about American politics, or Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time which in 1997 instilled in me a feverish desire to devour history and understand cultures other than my own. --Coin945

   I don't have kids, although I hope to someday. I would like to see their eyes light up as they learn new things through interactive experiences just as I did back when I was a child. I was spoiled with Carmen Sandiego, The ClueFinders, The Magic School Bus, Madeline, and many more. And the thing is, I'm sure many others were too. I've had conversations with people about games, movies, and TV shows from our childhood, and it's funny how this media just sticks with you after all these years. I recently replayed the 1996 version of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and posted a screenshot to Facebook, which sparked a cathartic nostalgia-fest amongst all my friends. We may look at these games now and think of them as silly or badly-made or "for kids" or not "real" games, or not well-known, or franchise cash-ins or whatever, but at the end of the day, some of that's a misnomer, while the rest of it is true and a credit to the developers who created successful games under considerable creative, time, and budgetary constraints. Many of these ended up being commercially successful and numerously awarded. To some profound degree I think educational games shape our view of the world from a very young age... well at least they did mine. With bright colours, interactive minigames, goal-based plots, and recognisable "trustworthy" characters, they allow us to learn about the world without realising that surreptitious trick is even going on (a point that is reinforced time and time again when reading the literature on every educational game series I work on). And I think it is a cruel trick of fate that educational franchises just aint what they used to be here in the 21st century. I mean, we do have things like brain train games on the Nintendo DS and apps/browser games for kids, but it's just not the same. --Coin945

   I've done a lot of research into this and the conclusion I've come to is that their downfall is concentrated in the sale of The Learning Company to Mattel in 1998 for $3.6 billion - the acquired property turned out to be a dud and Mattel had to quickly sell off all their assets to recoup some of the loss. You see, TLC had become known for gobbling up educational companies, and it would later come out that they'd been secretly firing most of their development teams, repackaging old games with cosmetic changes, and pushing the retail price of new games through the floor which directly affected development budgets ergo the quality of new titles. They also built up a bunch of debt that they got around with creative accounting. All this had an effect in the educational space similar to what happened in the lead-up to the video game crash of 1983 - too much bargain bin shovelware clogging the market. I know there are other factors here too, such as the influx of action-packs FPSes that grabbed attention more than the patience-testing adventure genre, but I can't help wondering if this played a part. In any case, the questionable deal with Mattel severely affected the industry's faith in the genre. As many educational games of the age were adventure games and the genre were associated with one another (another fallacy - see Re-Mission for an adult-oriented serious game that both educates and provides healthcare to cancer patients - one counterexample of many), I wonder if the decline in both genres is related. In any case there is a substantial amount of research available on this whole deal, and it makes me sad that by the turn of the century the most famous brands and companies in the educational space kind of became buried. I know that for instance, the Carmen Sandiego property was owned by five different companies in the space of five years (Broderbund - 1997, The Learning Company - 1998, Mattel - 1999, The Gores Group - 2000, Riverdeep - 2001) and after being bounced around like a ping pong ball it ended up in the hands of a company (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) that perhaps doesn't have the know-how, resources, or desire to give the lucrative asset a mighty comeback, Disney's Star Wars style. How I wish wish wish that they'd port all the games made after the DOS ones (which can be played via online emulators) to Steam. They'd make a pretty penny and make a bunch of people super happy. I wonder if they know they're sitting on a goldmine... Oh and by the way the CEO of SoftKey (which would purchase The Learning Company in 1995 and take its name) was none other than Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank. It's historical snippets like this - all the corporate shenanigans behind the educational software of my childhood and others' - that just keeps me endlessly fascinated by it all. And a part of me wishes that by featuring the best of edutainment's past as DYKs, perhaps a young game developer will come along and be inspired to teach the next gen about something through a really effective piece of educational entertainment. That's not the reason I do what I do, but I'm not going to be averse to this potentially serendipitous side-effect. --Coin945

   
   I'm single person without children, but I have quite a nostalgia for the games I used to play at a young age, getting counting, maths, the alphabet and spelling in my head. Then I decided to preserve everything I remembered, right here in the articles. I'm also fascinated by discovering things I didn't know about those games previously, such as how they were developed. To me it's like a legacy of my younger days. Deltasim (talk) 15:35, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

3. Do you find that searching for reliable sources for these topics is any different from searching for reliable sources for mainstream video games? Is it more difficult? What kinds of sources have proven to be the most helpful in this genre?

   The life of a video game editor on Wikipedia is hard, as I'm sure any of us will tell you. Especially for older games. Sources are often very hard to find. Great gaming websites become dead links. It can be near impossible to play the game to get a good idea of what it's all about and effectively write gameplay sections (like a navigational game I worked on called Jenny's Journeys) as they're often of obsolete formats that I can't access - a problem you don't get with other media; consider a 500 year old work of Shakespeare that can be republished with a new cover and picked up at the local book shop. In some cases all you've got are traces of information found in forums and blogs, and the available snippets of Google Books entries, which you use to find clues to other information. Oh, and be prepared to deduce the name of the game in every language, as sometimes the greatest sources are not in English. You play Poirot as you trawl through The Wayback Machine trying to find a successful cache of a long-gone link. Stumbling upon the official main page for a 90's game, or a interview with the developer, or even discovering the game's name in a few other languages can be like all your Christmases coming at once. Generally all images in Wayback links are dead, but on the off chance you've got a winner that's some key visual information for the design section (see Putt Putt Travels Through Time for an example). Sometimes I'm tempted to dump info into as article as quickly as I can for fear that the link will be dead by morning. (This has happened to me before - I once found a fantastic design document for Carmen Sandiego's ThinkQuick Challenge in PDF form through a Google search, and a few weeks later the link was no more. It ceased to exist. It was an ex-link). That new feature on WayBack that allows you to search keywords rather than verbatim weblinks has been incredibly fabulous for me as it means I can fish for content like any other search engine. It's thrilling to know I'm bringing games - which once upon a time brought joy to so many and still are buried into a fragment of their conciousness - back into the light for their moment in the sun. (And on a side note it's quite amusing to read the Let's Play comments sections for games I never played as a kid, yet which have obviously etched fond memories deep inside the commenters' brains. It's like an alternate universe where things I never knew existed in my 22 years of life have had a fervent effect on their experiences) --Coin945

   
   It requires a bit more effort than your regular video games, since googling the information doesn't make it appear quickly. Sometimes the original companies that made those games have not successfully documented their products or fully elaborated on them. I keep my eyes peeled for interesting paperwork, whether it's a magazine, manual or leaflet. The most helpful source I know is the Internet Archive website. Deltasim (talk) 15:35, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

4. Depending on the targeted age group, children's games often have considerable overlap with non-games and software toys (The Manhole, Metamorphabet, etc.). Have you dealt with any releases like that yet? Do you plan to? Releases like this (consider also educational software and interactive e-books) often lack plot and gameplay and may not conform in other aspects to WP:VG's article guidelines. If you were to write a new article on such a title would you try to adapt the WP:VG Manual of Style to fit the release? Would you lean more toward adapting one of the Manuals of Style suggested by WP:SOFTWARE, or would you free-style it?

   I've heard of The Manhole. It was a precurser to Myst, no? I saw a Let's Play on YouYube and was equal parts intrigued and confused. It didn't really look or feel like a game; more like a playpen of buttons to push and knobs to turn. Reminded me of the Fidget Cube. I haven't yet felt a non-game or software toy itch to scratch. Or maybe I have...? I mean, is Bridge Builder a non-game or an engineering tool? Is SimCity a software toy or a training tool for anyone planning to run for office? Which entries in the List of space flight simulation games page are games and which are so realistic they are of value as teaching tools for astronauts? You could internally argue about all this minuitae for so long you forget to hit the edit button... I would consider something like Duolingo to be educational software and something like the interactive storybook series Disney's Animated Storybook to simulateneously be classified as interactive e-books. So I guess those topics already take my fancy. In many cases (like The Sims for example) you can easily fill out the gameplay section while you'll have a much harder time with the plot. So in that respect you'd just follow the Manual of Style while leaving out sections if they don't apply. Alternatively perhaps you have a great plot but not much gameplay - I remember a role-playing text-based game article I created on A Dark Room which fell into this category. I've taken a leaf out of the playbook of educational TV series articles like Sesame Street and Blue's Clues though by including something you won't find on other video game articles; a section called "Educational Goals". I think the whole "What is a game?" question is somewhat meaningless and strangling to an industry that can achieve great things when it stops being rigidly defined and allowed to embrace exploration and creativity. One of the best games I've played in recent years was Her Story. Is it a game? Who cares. It's just labels. I had a great time experiencing it. --Coin945

   
   I haven't heard of the first two titles. I find that doing articles on the older games is higher priority than the new ones to ensure their preservation. It is true that games like Microsoft Dangerous Creatures lack plot, since it's an encyclopedia without any adventure elements in it. It would be nice to have an optimum manual of style to ensure that those articles become professionally edited and not a trivial mess or staying a stub. I believe there should be a Manual of Style to match the genre of edutainment, whether it is an interactive storybook, encyclopedia, adventure game or other types. Deltasim (talk) 15:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

5. Have you tried reaching out to others in potentially related areas (e.g. WikiProject Children's literature or Wikipedia:WikiProject Education)?

   I once wanted to work on the Horrible Histories franchise article (which includes books, TV series, video games, stage shows, exhibitions etc.), and reached out to someone who had worked on one of the individual HH articles to cross-pollinate. In this example the collaboration did not take off. When I created articles on Disney songs, I contacted Wikipedia:WikiProject Disney to take a look, but I don't think the page was very active and my request was left alone. When writing an article on the Slovenian video game Pilgrim I used sources in Italian, French, Slovenian, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Serbian, and Polish - which was an epic struggle - and I remember contacting the Wikiprojects of those various languages to copyedit my work. As I recall nothing happened as a result. So I do things like that now and again, but as of yet I haven't attempted it in the educational/children's literature space. Nice idea though! --Coin945

   
   I have occasionally worked on Children's books, notably Pinkalicious and a failed attempt at Cameron Stelzer's Pie Rats. I'm not as motivated to do those articles, but it's nice to have a change from the edutainment area once in a while. Deltasim (talk) 15:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

6. Have these articles been generally well received by the WP:VG community? Have you noticed any pushback from other editors? What kind of reaction (if any) do you tend to see from peers?

   In general I think if you write an article well and use good sources, then anything you do on Wikipedia will get praise. So those are always two goals to aim for. However, I don't think educational/children's games are at the top of the list of articles for improvement within the Wikiproject. Which is understandable. At the end of the way we're all volunteers and we edit what we want to. However, upon a bit of Wiki-hopping, I've noticed we currently have pages on: educational video game, list of educational video games, gamification of learning, games and learning, education as a positive effect of video games, and video games in education. Obviously a lot of overlap that will need to be checked (I can forsee a few "merge" tags). But that still demonstrates that the WP:VG community has often come back to the educational side of gaming along their various travels through a wide variety of genres. Still, WP:VG Newsletter's analysis on the genres of GA/FA articles didn't even have an "Educational games" section... All that said, I have noticed that the four major milestone of WP:VG are all percentage based, which in my opinion leads to a deletionist philosophy. Taking the milestones to their fullest extremes, WP:VG should theoretically be better off if they delete all their stub-class articles (possibly even their start, C, and B articles) as they will then have then inched closer to a 100% "GA-Class or better" rate, which I think is highly damaging to an ongoing encyclopedic project. I vouch for numerical milestones, as it reduces the inclination to send articles straight to WP:AFD if they're not created at a certain quality level. But that's neither here nor there, just an additional point to why it can be hard to work on articles when the sources exist but they're not at your immediate fingertips, which is par for the course for 90's edutainment. In any case, I think it's important to remember though, as Thibbs (t c) eloquently referred to in a recent AFD I was involved in, that: "notability is based on the existence of suitable sources, not on the state of sourcing in an article".--Coin945

   
   They've mentioned articles I created, now and again. I sometimes get deletion requests on the articles I create due to lack of notable sources, but I am quick to amend that problem. A quick request for deletion, gives me the impression there is a lack of interest in improving those articles. Deltasim (talk) 15:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

7. Has the emphasis been entirely on software titles or have you done any editing on children's consoles like the Texas Instruments offerings from the 70s (Speak & Spell, Speak & Math, etc.), the Connor Toys consoles of the 80s and 90s (VideoSmarts, ComputerSmarts, etc.) and the various VTech consoles of the 2000s (Socrates, the LeapFrog consoles, etc.)? What about video-game-toy hybrids like the Skylanders, Disney Infinity, and Amiibo systems? Do you plan to expand into the area of educational/children's hardware?

   I've head of LeapFrog before, but none of the others you've mentioned. They don't strike my immediate fancy - possibly due to companies/consoles being much harder to edit than individual games as the "read [literature]-to-write [in article]" ratio is much higher for me. Could be a nice place to look to for the future. I have found that nostalgia does play a bit of a role for me with my work though, and having not used any products by these companies I would be a bit in the dark in that respect. I don't have any interest in working on video-game-toy hybrids. At the end of the day, I'm just one Wikipedia editor with a topic that takes my fancy. If there was, say, an edutainment task force within the WikiProject, then I'm sure those things could be included in its scope! --Coin945

   
   I'm not familiar with old children's consoles. Sega Pico was the nearest I edited. I'm nowhere near the familiarity to edit the game-toy hybrids. I'll stick with the oldies and concentrate on improving them to ensure other users are better informed about them. Deltasim (talk) 15:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

8. How do you think these titles fit in with the history of video games? For example, the Speak & Spell is a 1976 handheld system featuring a display screen, on-board educational games like Hangman, and a library of interchangeable cartridges. However the Milton Bradley Microvision is generally regarded as the first handheld console to feature interchangeable cartridges. Do you think the broader video game community is overly quick to dismiss them as mere toys falling outside the scope of video games instead of giving them historical consideration alongside traditional consoles?

   I watched a fascinating program from 1986 which discussed the educational practicalities of programs such as Reader Rabbit. The interesting talk raised points such as: conducting research on the game to assess if it acually succeeds in teaching word skills, and if the game was worth the price considering it was a lot more expensive than books. We've moved so far from that point now that those questions almost seem quaint. That video cemented in my mind that these games are an intrinsic part of cultural history, let alone the history of video games. In particular, many of the games I've researched have a specific importance in the history of girls and video games; for a time developers were wondering how to create games that "girls" liked that were different to the shoot-and-kill games that appealed to "boys". The solution many came to was by adding things girls supposedly liked like shopping, pink, princesses, cooking, and makeup etc. But others such as Creative Wonders (with their Madeline series) created games targeted at girls all about getting them to use the most powerful weapon at their disposible. Their brain. Yes, this all seems completely generalistic in terms of gender, but that's the industry at the time and it made a considerable impact in gaming becoming a lifestyle brand for females. To a certain degree, educational games were what developers used to get girls into gaming. That's what my research has shown me again and again as I research information for different game articles. As recently as 1997 (after numerous female-led franchises had become firmly established), The Buffalo News released an article entitled "Software Designers Get With The Program -- At Last, They're Discovering Girls"". I'm sure similar articles are being published to this day, sadly. So anyway, that's just one one key example. --Coin945

   
   I find that edutainment certainly fits the history of video games, since they were developed in personal computer's beginnings. For example Fun School and Reader Rabbit were created, when effective edutainment was pretty rare in those days. The creators certainly had an advantage in the software market. Those long ongoing series like JumpStart are popular even today and are a real credit to the primary and secondary schools around the world. The Microvision from what I read certainly does fit within the scope of a video game console as do the Tiger Electronics and other handheld LCD game devices. Microvision has got the unique game Star Trek: Phaser Strike, so that reinforces it's place in the scope. Deltasim (talk) 15:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

9. How much attention do you think educational and children's titles receive by the mainstream? Have you learned anything surprising from your work with these releases?

   TechThought wrote: "For some reason, educational games are getting an increasingly bad rap. Educators are questioning their merits on social media. Studies are popping up saying they don’t help. Psychologists are cautioning parents about impact on attention span." It's sad that there are some that share this sentiment. It's surprising when compared to the literature of the 90's and 80's, which often can't praise these games highly enough for their work in teaching kids about various aspects of the world and beyond. Entertainment vs. education. Hmm... It's a toughy. Yes, escapism can be good. Let's use media to explore the "what ifs" and the "if onlys". But I think it can be just as good to use games to help us understand the universe as it is rather than as we wish it were. Slipping into grumpy old man territory, I do wonder if kids these days are missing out as they may choose to spend their time with the latest Vines or Reddit threads, rather than actively seeking useful knowledge that will help them advance in life. Learn about the fragility of Democracy *before* a potentially Democracy-ending election. Discover why belief in gravity is different to belief in God. Learn how to do maths so you won't be shortchanged at your local Starbucks. Educational games have always been a midpoint between "boring" learning and "fun" leisure, and it's this compromise that makes it a much needed feature of human experience. The shorter attention spans of people these days has probably made it harder to invest large amounts of time into completing reading projects. (#Buzzfeed). Film is often the solution for people... but often you watch films and wish you could have a more active role in this otherwise passive experience. You want to make the decisions, and explore the environment, and talk to the people, and solve problems, and discover clues etc. And that's where I think the magic of educational games come in. Let's be clear though. Even the most fantasy-driven game can have elements of learning, be it reflex-training of first person shooters or imagination-building of Minecraft. But perhaps they a bit too far on the covert side of the spectrum in terms of educational content. --Coin945

   
   From what I see there's not a great interest in the edutainment articles by the mainstream. I think they are treated more as side projects. Action shooters and Adventure games are the more popular choice to edit in the video games area. My work may make a difference to show parents and/or schools what they're missing for the learning audiences. Deltasim (talk) 15:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
   
   

10. What are your plans for the future? Any next steps you'd like to share?

    At the moment Deltasim and I are working on JumpStart. It's currently in their sandbox and we're quietly editing away. I took a hiatus as I'd never played any of the games so didn't feel that magnetic pull but I may return soon to continue working on it. Humongous Entertainment games (Putt-Putt, Freddi Fish, Spy Fox, and Pajama Sam) are also in my sights. I'd also like to work on the games in The ClueFinders series as they were exceedingly popular at the time and their articles are sorely lacking. I also wanted to create an article on each notable Reader Rabbit game. But that project became sidelined when we began work on JumpStart instead. I also share Deltasim's desire to create a band of edutainment editors whose work might strike a chord with wistful page-watchers. A simple task would be to head to the articles we've worked on and tidy up the citations for us - not my favourite job in the world. You can also go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Requests for some nice ideas for projects to work on; for example we still don't have a series article for The Oregon Trail (which is the longest-running gaming franchise in the universe - 3 days older than Pong)! --Coin945

    
    I plan to continue establishing notability for the forgotten and underrated video games. I would certainly love it if me and Coin945 could establish a team of editors to explore the internet, then create and edit any article of an edutainment title worth mentioning. Focusing on series would come first, while individual games with their own unique teaching traits can be done almost in tandem priority-wise. Memories may flood the website, before information does. Deltasim (talk) 15:36, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Notes

+ Add a commentDiscuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try .

• I do not think the difficulty of sourcing reviews of 90s PC games is lost on any WPVG regular. The onus, however, is on the editor creating such difficult articles to provide adequate sourcing: not random Internet blogs, sites without editorial vetting, or press releases (primary sources), but citations to the 90s print media where that era's games would actually receive coverage. (This means relying on traditional library reference works and magazine indices.) It's easy to use the digital scarcity of 90s print sources to insinuate that it's very possible for sources to exist, but readers come to Wikipedia to read verifiable fact and we do not help them by creating reams of articles on individual games with very weak sourcing. More appropriately, we should be shooting for well-sourced series and overview articles, and let individual edutainment game articles spin out summary style from there. czar 08:24, 14 April 2017 (UTC)