The "LA" in "PLAY"

School’s out. So what’s in?

“We want to be the Zynga of games, but on the long-term act more like Disney where we have a strong brand that parents trust and kids love using.” - Andrew Hsu

By now the school year is well underway - even if you’re at UCLA (darned quarter system). It was timely, then, that I recently watched this documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” about America’s heavily broken educational system.

The failing state of our schools has not escaped top game designers. Andrew Hsu is a school dropout, but with 3 degrees to his name by the age of 19, his pedigrees are above reproach. Now he’s using his formidable mind to solve the problems of education in America. His tactic of choice? Games.

We make social learning games for young children. The idea is that educational games mostly suck and we want to make them fun. I see games as these enormous opportunities for learning because games are simply abstract rules based on new systems. We want to make massively popular games that tens of millions of kids will play and the parents will actually support it. Most games we’re setting up now are learning agnostic. I think we can teach anything with games, and we’ll start off with math, English, biology, and memory training. Some parents have e-mailed asking about anti-bullying conflict resolution type of games. A leader from a youth golf organization e-mailed and there’s a lot of etiquette that we can teach there, for example.

Read the rest of the interview with Andrew here.