Of Algebra, Physics, and Zombies: How We Can Get Math Skills Into Students’ Braaaiiinsss

Scary noises.

Hand guns.

Flesh-eating monsters.

Poorly lit hallways.

Survival-horror games are probably the last thing any parent, teacher, or administrator wants associated with a public school classroom. The oft bizarre plotlines and highly visceral visual effects make the grisly coating of blood on the inner side of our television screens and computer monitors come to life, causing grave discomfort for those warily playing at 3:00 AM and praying that nothing is going to grab them from the underside of the couch. Generally speaking, these violent ghoul-fests are games in which the player is expected to outlive hordes of brain-craving zombies and overcome objectives similar to those of protagonists in a number of horror films. Also true to horror films, when the main character fails his or her objective, there tends to be a particularly gruesome result: violent decapitation, monsters ravaging the character’s body, and innards being carelessly strewn across the virtual environment.

"Violent decapitation"

I’m not ashamed to admit that it took me until halfway through my undergraduate college career to stomach a survival-horror game, and even then, I was uneasy about playing whenever I was home alone. My first experience with the genre came from watching my best friend fight his way through the Raccoon City police station in Resident Evil 2, and I can still recall the terror I felt seeing a so-called “Licker,” one of the more disturbing monsters in the game, burst through an air vent in the ceiling of the virtual building (I may or may not have jumped out of my seat from shock… Don’t judge). When Resident Evil 4 was released on January 11, 2005, I decided it was time to ‘man-up’ and play through one of these horrifying games despite my concerns that the winter brought early darkness and I was going to be forced to spend most of the game playing through without the company of friends. Overcoming my deep-seated fear of things that go bump in the night, I successfully managed to beat the game in about fifteen hours with no major pants-wetting episodes to speak of.

"I can still recall the terror I felt seeing a so-called 'Licker'."

To my surprise, the experience left me wanting more.

Eventually, I found myself going back and playing through the entire Resident Evil catalogue; then came the popular titles Eternal Darkness (Gamecube) and Dead Space (Playstation 3). For some reason, I couldn’t get enough of the genre that once had me cowering in the corner. There came a point where I began questioning what was so gripping about these games that they could keep me playing even though I shuddered at the prospect of sitting through a single, gory horror movie.

Why were they so adept at keeping me engaged regardless of my distaste for blood and guts?

And what does this have to do with education?

It turns out these two questions share the same answer.

There’s no denying that survival-horror games carry a great deal of baggage with them since their degree of violence makes the act of brutally murdering drug dealers in Grand Theft Auto look like a playground game of cops and robbers, but there is something inherently different about them that causes them to stand out as intellectually useful with regards to the learning process. Even though there is a waging war over the effects of violence in video games (which I won’t get into here), survival-horror – at least, some survival-horror – brings an element of strategy to the table that is not included in other violent games. The real beauty of a game like Resident Evil 1, Resident Evil 2, or Dead Space is that your resources are incredibly limited, meaning that violence is generally not the best way to get out of the sticky situations the game designers drop the player into. As one might expect in a zombie apocalypse, there’s only so much ammunition laying around and with swarms of the living dead in the way, the player can’t afford to use up all of his or her bullets on enemies that are not posing an immediate threat. Compounded with difficult combat controls (particularly in the original Resident Evil games), it’s not prudent to go around shooting up anything that looks at you cross-eyed (which, if you think about it, is probably the vast number of enemies in these sorts of games).

What I am discussing here is the development and scaffolding of critical thinking-based reasoning skills through puzzles and logic problems. Though survival-horror games may not share many superficial qualities with your run-of-the-mill Sudoku, I would argue that both contain the elements of strategy needed to successfully complete a Rubik’s cube or foster the skills needed to understand (in a general sense) mathematics and scientific investigation. While there is research indicating that broad skill development of perceptual and cognitive abilities is not inherent in playing any one game, there is reason to believe that video games designed as individual training interventions with specific learning objectives may be extremely helpful in isolating complex skill deficits for students with problems in those areas of understanding (Kearney & Pivec, 2007; Boot, 2007). It seems reasonable, then, to assume that a game that regularly assesses the player’s ability to conserve resources and avoid combat (i.e. stay out of harm’s way via stealth) would be a useful tool in honing and testing a student’s ability to solve real-world problems relating to resource management and clever thinking (a reflection of how a geometry teacher may use several individual proofs to illustrate the more general rules of symmetry or corresponding angles).

The key to successful skill acquisition lies within the instructor’s ability to guide learning through the linking of several different experiences, meaning that a teacher attempting to illustrate principles of logical problem-solving would be best served to have his or her students play a game like Resident Evil and tie together all of the various events in which they had to deduce a “best” solution (thereby identifying a common thread: namely, the skill being learned). The game, in this sense, becomes a learning-powered vehicle that carries many different evaluation and synthesis-based activities, all of which are guided by the embedded narrative and “boss” assessments that model one or more important, underlying concepts.

However, parents, teachers, and administrators typically agree with the frequent (and, from an educational standpoint, often justified) concern that violent games do nothing but teach players how to be violent, making the survival-horror genre appear to be a poor source for the derivation of any academically valuable knowledge or skill. Fortunately, though, this is remedied by the fact that the typical survival-horror game is not constructed as a disjointed series of baddies to be dodged, parried, and shot in the head, but rather as a maze containing challenging puzzles that need to be overcome before moving onward. Zombies, aliens, and other monsters are usually more of an obstacle meant to interfere with the game’s more important learning objectives (overcoming resource depletion, resolving a series of brain teasers, and identifying when and where is the best application of a given strategy). Resident Evil 4, for instance, features a puzzle that requires the player to shift groups of blocks to form a specific pattern while being chased by marauding suits of armor wielding deadly axes. In this case, the player is forced to synthesize several different skills, including knowing how and when to move around the room, evaluating when it is safe to shift the blocks such that he or she will not face a macabre beheading, and understanding how to move the blocks to form the correct symbol and successfully unlock the door.

Slide tiles similar to the sliding blocks in Resident Evil 4.

The superficial elements of Resident Evil, such as the lumbering suits of armor and the daring, block-moving police officer in the above example, delicately add a layer of story telling that masks the nuts and bolts of several math, science, and logic problems commonly taught through the use of worksheets and other, more traditional, classroom materials. Providing students with the opportunity to explore a fictitious world in this way encompasses what I have come to call artificial relevance, or the addition of a compelling, engaging narrative that gives seemingly irrelevant tasks a degree of importance relative to the story being told. This concept serves to explain why I found myself enamored with playing and beating Resident Evil 4: the storyline made outwardly boring puzzles (like moving blocks) interesting and important by binding them to my goal (saving the president’s daughter from crazed cultists), which inherently led me to utilize the provided tools (the main character, the controller, and their combined ability to make my avatar run and push) to build upon and practice my critical thinking skills (how to logically move the blocks into the required formation to escape). In the end, the game’s numerous opportunities to follow this line of problem solving shaped my understanding and play of all survival-horror games in addition to providing me with a means to practice logic skills I had not used in quite some time.

The blood and violence, incidentally, were only tangential artifacts of the story and ultimately proved insubstantial when considering the game in its entirety, perhaps explaining why the carnage did not become the misery I expected it to. Unlike the vast majority of horror movies I’ve seen, each survival-horror game I’ve played has afforded me enough ways to test my thinking skills that I have never spent much time worrying about how scared I am or how disturbing the images on the screen are. Overall, the engaging nature of the genre indicates that survival-horror designers are incredibly effective at creating instructional tools that have evaded educators for decades; by thinly veiling critical thinking elements with the flashy gore that has proven to be a consumer favorite, the genre has led gamers to unwittingly exercise their fundamental skills in math and science.

Nevertheless, we are still faced with the argument that aside from the violence, there is little that games like Resident Evil and Dead Space do to further the skills assessed via state-mandated examinations like the CAPT. Why would a math teacher who needs his or her students to succeed at specific types of math problems devote the time and energy necessary to break-down and rebuild the very general thinking processes embedded in a game like Resident Evil? While game designers do a fantastic job including critical thinking opportunities in their software, there is indeed very little of what could be considered academic content (multiplication, division, fractions, and so on). However, we need not view this as a fundamental flaw in the use of such games: just because such content is not present does not mean that it can never be made present. The lack of a specific task or series of tasks provides educators with the profound opportunity to create their own survival-horror, educational games in which the puzzles are not simply a collection of logic problems, but also assessments of mathematical and scientific knowledge.

Take this example of a potential math-based survival-horror game:

Alternate Exterior Angles

The primary protagonist (a debonair, young doctoral student) stands on one side of a steel bridge separating him from a grotesque mutant on the opposing side. Though the player knows it is only a matter of time before the mutant crosses the bridge, he or she has access to a control panel that changes the placement of the steel beams composing the bridge’s path. Instead of developing the scene in a very broad, non-academic way (i.e. without any math-based foci), the game producers have designed the control panel such that it mimics the creation of a geometric proof illustrating the rules governing alternate exterior angles. The game prompts the player to use his or her knowledge of standards-based skills (like calculating angle size using available information) to change the position of the beams, forcing the mutant to walk the greatest possible distance to get across (allowing the protagonist plenty of time to escape). The control panel layout allows the skill being assessed to range from knowledge (having the player choose from a multiple choice list of theorems explaining the best course of action) to application and evaluation (allowing the player to analyze and design a solution based on a combination of experience with alternate exterior angles, variables, and numerical data). This way, the educator responsible for the classroom ensures that the students fulfilling the objective are doing so in a way that is appropriate for their level of understanding and ability. Should these elements alone not be challenging enough, the teacher can employ a timer to accelerate student problem solving or allow many monsters to cross many bridges at once, forcing the player to synthesize many different theorems in order to accomplish his or her goal before he or she becomes zombie food. Once the instructor drops additional puzzles into the mix, some involving spatial skills and some involving the number of bullets left to pump into zombies, he or she will find him or herself with a very entertaining survival-horror geometry class.

While parents and administrators may not share my openness and understanding of using survival-horror video games in an academic setting, their tailor-made consumer appeal makes them an ideal tool to reach out to the next wave of technologically minded students. Math educators can potentially learn a lot from mimicking the work of survival-horror game designers who have illustrated how a succinct approach to learning can be both valuable and compelling. Science departments finding themselves short on solutions to the daunting problem of getting more kids into engineering, physics, and chemistry can utilize the Resident Evil method to better help students enjoy the subject matter and develop a healthy intrinsic motivation to continue studying it outside of the classroom. It falls to us, as teachers, to be more open about how we can meet that end and how willing we are to push the envelope in grabbing their attention like so many undead hands grabbing at our tattered, blood-soaked jeans.

With that, I hereby declare the decades of fear and cowering in the corner of the educational community over. It’s high time for game designers and educators to get together, pool our professional resources, and make a difference for the next generation by combining our strengths into a cocktail of epic learning.

In the very appropriate words of a favorite auspicious zombie hunter: “I know you're scared; we're all scared, but that doesn't mean we’re cowards. We can take these [Deadites], every last one of them. We can do it… With science!”

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Boot, W. (2007). The effects of video game playing on perceptual and cognitive abilities. Dissertation Abstracts International, 68, Retrieved from PsycINFO database.

Kearney, P., & Pivec, M. (2007). Sex, lies and video games. British Journal of Educational Technology,38(3), 489-501. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00712.x.