1) What age did you start playing strategy games?
9'ish.
2) What where the first games you played?
A wide gamut of early games.
3) What is your favourite game?
Depends on the day; Fallout II, Freelancer, early betas of Counter-Strike and my mod for the Warband engine are near the top of my personal lists.
4) what about it do you like in particular (gameplay graphics models scale)?
First off, as a game designer, I hate your list.
Nothing personal, but if you're trying to learn more about this topic, you need to know your territory better.
"Gameplay" covers everything from U.I. to balance systems to game design to replayability; games can have superb points in various areas, yet be inferior to the point of being lousy titles due to deficiencies elsewhere within that area alone.
A game can be brilliantly conceived, yet so lacking graphically that it is not enticing; it can have great gameplay and graphics, yet be dragged down by consistently-poor sound design.
What makes a game "good" is a very complex subject.
It's better not to bother asking that question, basically; the answer's pretty meaningless unless you ask for a lot of details, and then it's taking away from the central thrust of your questionnaire.
5) Do you believe you have learnt from games?
Absolutely.
6) If you like history, did you get into it because of games like age of empires and total war, or the other way round?
The other way around, definitely. I don't regard games like that to be "history" in any real sense.
7) If Total war, Age Of Empire and Europa Universalis games where to be used as part of education, would you be interested?
No.
They distort history considerably in order to be the games the designers wanted to achieve, or bog the players down in myriad details that wouldn't serve a useful educational purpose.
A better example of a game that could serve as a history lesson would be a title using the Warband engine where the player is a Neolithic tribal leader and has to get his tribe through a tough year of drought and winter, while interacting with other tribes, engaging in trade and finding raw materials to help the tribe support itself, with a lot of emphasis on tool-making, understanding the interactions of early societies and the experience of hunting, gathering and generally trying to survive in an early human world.
This game doesn't exist, but it could. A good educational game about history should be immersive; don't just talk to people about history, take them there, make them feel it in their bones.
Why do you think games used in education are so ....basic
Because the people who approve them are generally older people who were born before video games existed and frequently don't relate to gamer culture, or the people whose papers they approved of, allowing them to become professors in turn. In short, the blind have led the blind in this field to a really amazing degree.
They are also the same "educational computation" people who constantly have their grad students reinvent the wheel and write whole new projects to duplicate things you can do with common, off-the-shelf Web development kits on a regular basis, and other major issues abound in terms of how they approach this subject.
In short, the academic people who are mainly in charge of determining what gets built are idiots who couldn't get work as coders outside their field and most of them should have gotten fired, but people were so desperate to get "computer science" instructors into academics in the 1970s and 80s that idiots became tenured professors and consultants and have retarded serious progress in this area for a couple of generations. It's as simple as that.
This is changing, but very, very slowly.
9) Can you see any draw backs in using games for education?
Developed properly, by game designers with input from educators about the information to be taught and metrics for measuring that education has occurred, no. Can a game educate anybody about anything? No; there are a lot of topics that I wouldn't teach via a game, like auto mechanics, where muscle memory is important, or chemistry, where to go beyond the basics it's both pretty abstract and very mathematical.
However, this isn't how it works, thus far; most decent educational software is written by game developers for profit but aimed at low age cohorts, using simple repetition and a bit of action (which is why the "kiddie education" games are actually fun and usually fairly polished- their developers expect to make a profit using a fairly conventional yardstick).
The stuff written for teenagers+ is usually written in universities by graduate students who are mainly writing it to get their degree; most of that stuff is incredibly poorly designed and is neither fun nor particularly effective as an educational medium.
The reasons for this are economic in nature; the wrong incentives exist and the market isn't functioning properly.
Basically, all of the people claiming to teach this stuff or anything like it at a high-school level or higher should be fired, and the free market should be used to encourage conventional game developers to tackle this problem.
Game developers understand the technical side far better than unpaid or poorly-compensated students do; they understand what "fun" means and what a decent U.I. looks like and what players expect in terms of design decisions; they aren't likely to come up with some horrid thing that could use WSAD controls and a mouse but instead decided to use the numpad because the grad student is a leftie and "just prefers that, because it's so logical" and similar brain-dead things that happen constantly when these things are built by the academic community.
If the money spent on all of the dead-end projects that get produced every year (and it's a very considerable sum) was instead used to kick-start conventional game developers who needed funding and were quite willing to produce an educational project at a profit with the funding providing their venture capital, we'd have dozens of serious, polished educational titles every year, instead of hundreds of one-off, poorly-developed and designed projects that mainly line the pockets of people who couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag and wouldn't know the difference between D20 and Sacred if you whacked them over the heads with their respective manuals.
