The educational track

What if education got a helping hand? We seemingly play games, we seemingly read books, we seemingly learn. What if we unite this? And here we have a setting to the larger stage and I will admit that Ubisoft has the baton. They got it when they aded the Discovery tour to AC Origin. And when we weren’t in a rush to get the achievements we would have learned a decent deal of life in Egypt. The embalmers, the beer makers and so on. I stated it before, Ubisoft screwed up [plenty, but not that game. That one they got right and credit should be given where credit is due. 

And Ubisoft (others too) have been sitting on top of a whole range of IP that they could redistribute in a ‘plus setting’. The stage is decently easy. We have the person we play, we unite the maps of AC Origins and AC Odyssey and we go to town. Remove the wild animals, remove the enemies and so on. Then we add the tracks and works of 

Homer, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, Hesiod, Democritus, Socrates, Empedokles, Anaxagoras, Herodotus and many more (well over 300 more). When set in a time line we learn and we now have an educational program. This can be done for Greece and Italy (aka Roman empire). The finny part was that I would have expected that Ubisoft had picked up on this, especially after the discovery tour. And let be honest, it is a much more interesting way of learning. See it as missions, from person to person, take a gander from where they were born to where they stopped living (or until the big works are illuminated). We see all thee boring books (not all mind you), but to use games to educate has not been explored enough and weirdly enough Ubisoft has an inside track here the renaissance  (AC 2, Brotherhood), US independence war (AC 3), And there is plenty more to tip on and with streaming systems seeking a larger hold, having the games with optional educational side will be a growing thing and lets be clear the expected $200,000,000,000 that the analysts state that gaming represents might go longer for Ubisoft if they find the larger application and I reckon that AC Origins (with Odyssey) might show to be a larger cash cow that could help them stretch time, time they basically no longer have. I would grasp at all options to stretch what is there. And they are not alone, but they are as far as I can tell the most visible one. 

We need to realise that not all games have an educational option, but those who do could have a larger stage to fill and a larger appeal (especially to parents). And don’t knock the idea. To get kids (11-16) interested in classical education topics is hard enough, getting them to walk the timeline of Homer and write a paper in it (with screenshots) might be the new setting no one in education considered before. It might not be their fault, but I reckon it is the foot in the door Ubisoft desperately needs at present.