State of the Blog, October 2008: Ed Games from the 1980s Brings in New Visitors

10,000. That’s about the number of new visitors coming to this blog in a single day to read The Top 10 Most Influential Educational Games of the 1980s in the last part of September. It started when Simon Carless over at GameSetWatch linked to the article in a GameSetLinks post. Then GoNintendo listed the post as did LinkFilter. The most traffic came in after Maggie Greene at über-gaming site Kotaku mentioned it. Kotaku also garnered the most comments, four pages worth. Here’s a sampling:

where are the new Carmen Sandiego games?With the technology of today they could make an awsomely fun and educational game. With Blu ray you don’t have to just look at pictures , you can see video of the place and interact with the surroundings and have the cartoon overlays run around the city. It would be great! And all in High Def!

Several thousand more visitors came over once the post made the front page of Propeller.com. I even got 50 Diggs, a personal record. Many other sites picked up the story, including Aeropause and The Gadgets Page. And for a couple days, Educational Games Research made the top 100 Wordpress blogs. Briefly it was mentioned on the homepage of Wordpress.com, bringing in more visitors.

Several bloggers linked to the post, including Karl Kapp and Interesting Pile. Benny over at 4 color rebellion had some nice words for the list (“one of the best (if not THE best) gaming top 10 lists I’ve ever read”). Thorien at Epic Coalition had a flashback to his phone phreaking days. A commenter over at The Geek Show Podcast contributed some nice words:

Mavis taught me to type. Oregon Trail taught me to leave as early as possible and be as rich as possible. Math Blaster taught me that number punching means blowing cr*p up. I learned most of my American History, Geography, World History, and deductive skills through the chasing of that elusive Carmen Sandiego.

I really did like these educational games growing up. It’s really sad to see that there aren’t a lot of these kinds of games anymore.

phaesty over at Propeller.com had some additional nice comments:

Seeing the screen shots for NumberMunchers and the classic Oregon Trail just made me screech “OMG! I remember that!” in my office. I’d forgotten about NumberMunchers. Gosh, I loved those old educational games I used to pay in the MacLab at my elementary school. Nostalgia overload.

Lots of commenters injected some levity into the discussion. One over at Kotaku said:

It’s all fun and games until Carmen Sandiego munched some numbers and died from dysentery.

Another over at Propeller.com said:

The 5th grader in me always got a little bit of joy when the school bully died from Dysentery .

Feelings were mixed over the inclusion of Zork and Windows Solitaire. Some commenters felt one or the other should not have been included, while others expressed enthusiasm with the last two choices. Several games I failed to mention were brought up, as to be expected with any top 10 list. The best and those consistently clamored for, mainly M.U.L.E. and Rocky’s Boots, I added to an honorable mention category. Others were good educational games for their time, but never gained the popularity or influence of those in the top 10. A few were not worthy of consideration. For instance, Custer’s Revenge would fit better in The Top 5 Most Offensive Video Games, at least if anyone still played it.

Finally, errors and clarifications were caught by the multitude of readers, and thanks to the power of blogs I was able to quickly correct mistakes. Thus, the time I noted MECC stood for the Michigan Educational Computing Consortium instead of the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium was quickly noted, especially by residents of Minnesota. (In my defense, I’d recently watched the Wolverines play football, so the State of Michigan was on my mind.)

All told, it was a fun and exciting month for this little ol’ blogger. Who knew old educational games could garner so much attention?

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  By Karl Kapp, October 3, 2008 @ 5:11 am

  John,
  That is the power of a good post, the democracy of information. I’m sure you’ll have many other…

  Karl

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