Publisher: Sierra On-Line ©1986
The average American child is at school for approximately nine hundred hours per year. Needless to say, this is a huge encroachment into the video game playing schedule. Kids games suck because they’re educational; no one wants to come home from school and put on a game about addition on the old NES. The figure doesn’t include homework time, which when tacked on increases per year at a seemingly exponential rate. The hours allotted to learning are there, so overlap with gaming is intolerable.
As kids, we came home from school and unwound in the form of mindless shooters with far-fetched plots to rescue existence from hordes of aliens. Absolutely no useful knowledge is gained playing Contra and I for one am much obliged to Konami because of it. But consider this: what if learning on video games could be represented on a scale such as a number line? Games like Carmen Sandiego would be plotted to the right, with a higher value representing the amount of education that the game presented. The aforementioned Contra would fall somewhere damn close to zero on the graph. Now you may ask, “Why, Mike, are you making me use math?” Well, I can assure you that I both hate math more than you and that I’m coming to the point. Given your graph of the educational value in video games, most into the category of greater than or equal to zero knowledge presented. But what of the negative values? Do games exist that actually teach knowledge contradictory to what you learn in school? Could video games erase the damage done during those nine hundred wasted hours? Enter, Mickey’s Space Adventure: a kids’ game that lands itself aggressively far left of zero on the scholastic gaming chart.
One small step for a mouse, one giant leap for gaming.
Many games lose learning points with their poor translations and mockery of English grammar rules. Old school text adventures instilled in us the habit of speaking in clauses and followed a set of punctuation rules somewhat akin to ee cummings. While those games welcomed English mastery that Instant Messenger would later also embrace, they still forced a player to type. Mickey’s Space Adventure sent that concept the way of Atari console systems by introducing a system that allowed gamers to form simple clauses by highlighting words already typed for you on the screen. Sure, it makes snide comments such as “You’d be better off pressing it,” at you if you try to “Push Orange Button.” And the fun of generating responses such as “I don’t know how to pee,” when you instruct the game to do so is stripped away. But for the most part, the ingenuity of eliminating the tedious task of typing from gameplay is a welcome advancement when trying to achieve maximum laziness and mental inactivity. Similarly, true text adventures forced the audience to use their imagination to visualize the different events and locations through which they traversed. Space Adventure requires no imagination, displaying a picture of Mickey dawdling around in each new location with his trusty canine counterpart Pluto at his side. Truly, this is an adventure for the lazy. But that’s not what makes it so counter-educational.
A brief synopsis: aliens from the planet Oron in the Alpha Centauri system have stored the entire knowledge of their radically advanced race into a crystal, which a nameless thief stole and shattered into 9 parts. Coincidentally, there are nine planets in that orbit the sun. Can you guess what the space adventure will be? Of course the wily thief tucked each fragment neatly away in a hiding place on separate planets in the Earth’s solar system. Disney’s own Mickey Mouse has to hop onto a cheesy knock off of the spaceship in Close Encounters and track down each of the crystals in order to save all that the Oronians have accomplished from being forgotten. Following the imperative commands you relate to him in two, sometimes three word fragments, it’s up to Mickey, a retired steamboat captain and one-time wizard apprentice, to play astronaut hero.
I’m gazing in amazement too.
The genius part about Mickey’s Space Adventure is that it masquerades as an educational game. Thus, parents might be inclined to purchase it for their little rug rats and expose them to its covert agenda of teaching factual inaccuracies about the other celestial bodies in our solar system. This leads me to the biggest drawback of Space Adventure: in order to pilot the spaceship to the next planet of your necessary destination (the crystals must be recombined in order, for some reason) you must guess the planet correctly from a hint that is provided. Here’s the part that is included to trick parents: the hint comes in the form of an actual fact about the planet. Theoretically, however, you don’t have to really learn about the planets in order to advance. Eliminating Earth, since the game begins there, you have a one in eight chance of correctly guessing the planet you need to travel to. The odds increase in your favor by process of elimination as the game progresses too. Aside from this one minor marketing annoyance, when you land on the different planets factual trivia about them is displayed. Mickey can also weigh himself with a bathroom scale to demonstrate how gravity changes as planets increase and decrease in size. These few educational moments are easily skipped with the press of a button, and canceled out completely by what follows when you step outside of your craft.
According to Mickey’s Space Adventure, there are a race of ice creatures living on the Triton, moon of Neptune, who desperately need Mickey’s scarf to stay warm. Similarly, some type of green blob alien lives on Mercury, but he’s sad because his planet is so close to the sun and it is so bright. Thankfully, Mickey plays ambassador and gives him a pair of BluBlockers that prevent the extreme radiation and intense white light from blinding the poor creature. Never mind what your teacher said about Earth being the only planet with life in our solar system. Perhaps most predictably, Mickey’s encounter with an alien on the smallest planet orbiting the sun proves that dogs can exist in temperatures as low as –396º Fahrenheit. Yes, you do meet an alien clone of Pluto on the planet Pluto. The direct assault on science in this game is both fascinating and impressive. Did you know that an inflatable mattress might be used as a raft to cross a river of liquid methane? Well, you do now. Mickey’s Space Adventure teaches you things that you shouldn’t know, and will contradict things that science and education hold scared freely and readily. The game offers no distinction between its presentation of truth and fiction, and the intent to mislead is readily apparent. If you want to unlearn what you have been taught about space in science class, adding negative values to your quantified learning, then this is the perfect game for you.
Oh, and stay in school kids.
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