Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.

…to quote from our unconventional teacher.  Part time malevolent reality-warping super AI with a God complex, part time calculator, and (evidently) part time instructor.
Source Quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOFZ5fv_pb8

 

I have to admit that when I played System Shock 2 as a teenager I wasn’t really paying attention to the educational aspects of the game… sort of how every student does the first time through their school career.  I had the presence of mind to recognize an excellent game, but for the most part was unaware I was incurring some small-scale education, sometimes from SHODAN herself.  As game theorists and our reading of “What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy” would tell you, it turns out she’s actually kinda good at teaching us.

It helped that she’s an awesome villain, to the point that you can’t help but like her a little bit for it, but you don’t start the game knowing who is who.  You begin with a simple and eloquently done tutorial to grasp the basic mechanics of how the game works, and then it unceremoniously drops you into a horror plot.  Even then, the learning process is still happening, though you’ve now graduated from blowing up stationary objects to being thrust into a situation with few resources, a lot of very dangerous and sneaky opponents (System Shock 2 is one of the first examples of a “Survival Horror” game, although it was simply called an FPS at the time), and a number of dubious and dangerous options.

Thankfully, you’ve got Captain Polito to help you along during those first tough stages.  She’s quite buddy-buddy with you very early in, and helpful in a limited way due to being stuck on a different part of the ship.  As the ship seems to be disintegrating around you and worm-infested prior humans are running amok, having a normal face to deal with comes as quite the balm as she directs you toward rectifying the situation and staying alive… at first simple objectives (crawl under the destroyed corridor, find a better weapon, jump here, etc) followed by increasingly complex ones (find the key, reactivate the power grid, hack the security system to clear out The Many) with multi-faceted options for the player as to which approach they wish to take.  In this, System Shock 2 is effectively three different games in the same setting, depending on how you choose to go about the game.  Whether you choose the stealth, brute force or psionics approach, they’ll all work in different ways, and make the game play out entirely differently.  About midway through the game, (SPOILER ALERT) SHODAN reveals herself as impersonating the now-dead Captain Polito.  She then informs you of just where you are on the proverbial pecking order and tells you how to deal with The Many directly.

So throughout this game you’ve been absorbing the challenge of your chosen role,  learning what sorts of alcoves are most likely to contain desperately needed supplies, where to find sensitive materials on the ship that you need to progress, and which weapons to use against which enemies more effectively.  By the end of the game, you’ve mostly mastered this act and the game almost seamlessly plays as a true first person shooter vice survival horror, with more emphasis on upping the challenge and combat difficulty than on learning new lessons.

A very similar sequence can be seen in both Portal games as new skills are gently introduced throughout the game, until the puzzles begin combining elements in new and devious ways, creating the challenge element.  Incidentally, that game also has a malevolent AI, this one named GLADOS, and she likes to test things and lie about cakes and murder people with gas.

Sounds an awful lot like the novice-journeyman-mastery cycle.  I haven’t had any of my prior teachers admit to being a malevolent Skynet-esque super villain, but I’m open to the idea.