I learned from the game as surely as I learned from the teachers at St. John's the Baptist De La Salle and from the books that I checked out from the library. It filled my head with information at a time when you seem to retain everything you chuck up there. I know that I am not alone, even if you don't remember why you know that San Marino has a strong postage stamp industry.

But the problem is that historians, preservationists, and cultural critics don't take this medium seriously.

"People just ignored this stuff, either purposefully or not," Ian Bogost, a serious videogame developer and Georgia Tech professor told me. "Maybe they just thought it was fluff or maybe they didn't know about it."

As far as I can tell, not a single academic paper has been written about the boom in edutainment games in the 1980s and 1990s. Not one! While Mimi Ito's Engineering Play chronicles the rise of the genre, it focuses more on the educational philosophies embodied in the games more than the content transmitted within the form.



Keep in mind that it's standard practice to look at primers and textbooks. These games serve the exact same function -- and may even be better at getting the information to stick -- and yet they've received no critical attention. We just don't know the geopolitics of Carmen Sandiego, and in some sense, it's really important to find out. What did the game include about history? More importantly, given the brevity of the information presented, what did it exclude? Were there outright falsehoods in these games or racial, ethnic, or gender biases? We don't know the answers to any of these questions.

The medium doesn't lend itself to easy study. Gaming technology has relentlessly advanced, leading many a game to practical obsolescence within a few years. To critique Carmen Sandiego in its original format, you'd have to keep an old DOS or Apple machine hanging around. Or you could run an emulator like I did to grab all the screenshots above. It's not totally ideal, but it certainly works for getting at the content of the game. That is to say, it's not impossible to study these edutainment games as objects of historical inquiry, but we're just not doing it, the work of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games notwithstanding.

Now, a new generation will be introduced to the ACME Detective Agency when Where in the World in Carmen Sandiego? returns as a Facebook game. The new version has the potential to be even more evanescent than the old, offline versions. Who is thinking about the preservation of these digital acculturation tools also known as games? My guess: no one.

Ok, enough historian handwringing. Go back up to the gallery and enjoy your trip down memory lane. I know that I did. But don't forget: if you're a Ph.D. student in American History, feel free to forgo your examination of the cultural implications of Miami Vice to focus on excavating the edutainment games of the 1980s.