Let’s Play Edutainment

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how Let’s Play videos can be used to address serious topics, thus resulting in edutainment content that is appealing to a younger audience.

Let’s Play videos (LP) usually document a player’s gameplay and enhance it with an additional story arc due to the player’s commentary. Depending on the type of the game, the player’s story arc can also be used to tell the viewers a unique story. This is mostly the case when an open world sandbox game is being played as such a game can act as an empty stage for the player’s performance.

For instance, the sandbox game Minecraft provides the players with a procedurally generated environment that they can explore or use as a building site to construct impressive buildings. Independent of the player’s approach, each play session will be unique and allow the players to tell a unique story. Furthermore, content creators can use the game as a movie set and produce exciting movies with the help of video editing.

However, utilizing a computer game as an empty stage also offers the opportunity to produce edutainment content. During the gameplay, the content creator can discuss serious topics, thus delivering the content in a way that is appealing to a younger audience and computer game players in general. Hence, they will pay more attention to what the content creator is discussing and potentially start to get interested in the topic being thematized.

Ultimately, this approach can help to raise the general awareness for important problems as it delivers the content in a way many young people can identify with. In addition, watching a LP can be more immersive than watching a small news report on TV.