Trip Hawkins has been involved with video games in just about every way a person can be. He championed the publishing model by founding juggernaut company Electronic Arts; he created a multibillion-dollar empire in EA Sports; he worked in hardware with 3DO; and he stepped into the mobile space in a big way with Digital Chocolate. Hawkins, now 61, is trying something new.

His latest venture is

The game’s overall ambition is to equip children with skills to help them handle bullying and manage challenging emotional and academic situations. The free game, which is aimed at children 6-12 and is set in a fantasy world with dogs and cats, unfolds across chapters, the first of which was released in February and has already seen more than 400,000 downloads on iOS. Chapter two arrived in July, and additional chapters are planned for release throughout 2014.

Children can play the chapters at their leisure, and they only have to spend about an hour per week to complete an entire lesson plan in a month. According to If You Can, the game covers the equivalent of a year’s curriculum at leading SEL teaching schools, and only for the cost of $5/month, which is a major savings compared to traditional schooling.

“If you were getting SEL curriculum through a private school, you’re [spending] $35,000 a year, and private tutors cost typically $50-$75/hour,” Hawkins told me. “The typical child playing our game is going to probably spend three or four hours, maybe five hours, a month and it’s going to cost them a $5/month subscription. So it’s a pretty good deal.”

A new dashboard app for parents, available on iOS devices or on the Web for PC or Mac, serves as a companion to their child’s gameplay. Parents can log in and see lesson themes, updates on their children’s accomplishments, and get ideas for how to translate the in-game lesson plans to real-world situations.

Why, at this stage in his career, is Hawkins turning to education games? “It’s something really critical that fell through the cracks,” he says about SEL teaching, which involves the fostering and nurturing of things like citizenship, character, and values. Hawkins says that in the past, children grew up alongside their parents, and as such, they were given constant attention and nurturing. But with the arrival of the urban, industrialized, and technologically advanced world, parents left their homes to work all day, leaving their children in public schools where they often don’t know anyone. Hawkins says schools didn’t do much in the way of SEL because teachers felt parents should handle this part of their children’s development. As a result, SEL teaching “fell into a crack,” he says.

“The game industry is mostly always been young men that want to make games that they want to play; and I certainly operated that way for the first 20 years I was in the industry,” he says. “And now in the last 20 years, I’ve become a parent, and have learned about these needs and issues and I want to do something about it.”

That’s where If You Can Company and If come in. Hawkins wondered what could be done to scale up SEL teaching so that children everywhere could benefit from it without having to pay the thousands in tuition and tutor’s fees mandated by educational institutions like the Nueva School that his children attended.

“Now in the last 20 years, I’ve become a parent, and have learned about these needs and issues and I want to do something about it” — Trip Hawkins

“One thing led to another, and I finally realized that I was in a position to try to do something about it by basically putting this kind of knowledge in a game,” Hawkins says. “In a way, I think this is a harbinger of a future industry where gameplay as the foundation of a media experience [and then] games as a platform from which to send serious curriculum with legitimate methods of assessment of learning.”

“By just watching what my kids were learning through this innovative school area, it just dawned on me that, ‘Wow, this is a really critical skillset,'” he added. “Nobody ever taught me these skills, and I’ve suffered because of it.”

The reason Hawkins is turning to mobile platforms for If is because he says the way you communicate with children is by meeting them where they are. “If their attention and motivation is on a mobile device on a game anyway, why not use that as a 21st century platform for learning?,” he says.

To create the actual lesson plans featured in If, Hawkins and his team worked with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning; and the Institute for SEL, a group of former teachers from the Nueva School.

“The design of the curriculum is modeled after what a really good and expensive private school, like the ones my kids went to, what they would learn about social and emotional learning in a year of school,” Hawkins says. “And we teach basically the same kind of lesson plans, the same kind of academic measurements, and we deliver a year’s worth of that learning over the course of a calendar year. And particularly as we get it out on more devices, more screen sizes, we feel like it’s something like there will be millions of devices and plenty of people will have an opportunity to learn from it and benefit.”

What separates If from a game like SimCity is that though there is educational value to Will Wright’s iconic simulation game, it was not created for the specific purpose of teaching. “He never planned any specific curriculum; he never did any assessment of learning, so that’s why there’s an opportunity for us in the game industry to build a new category,” Hawkins says.

Part of the reason Hawkins is so enthusiastic about video games as a teaching tool is because, unlike passive media like TV or film, video games actively engage the user. “It wasn’t just an accident that television became known as the boob tube,” he says with a laugh. “I think we’ve known for a long time that passive media puts us to sleep.” Early in his life, Hawkins played lots of tabletop role-playing games. He found that he felt more energized and stimulated after playing tabletop games like Dungeon & Dragons that required him to think and strategize than when he was absorbed in TV. That’s because humans learn best by doing, he says.

“You think about the last year you were a full-time student at school, compare that to the first year you were out of school–when did you learn more? There’s just no comparison,” Hawkins said. “You learn much faster in real-world situations. And then the power of the computer has the ability to simulate almost anything you want and crank out simulated real life situations at a much faster pace and to do things that go way, way beyond the scope of what a human being could do in a real life.”

“You think about the last year you were a full time student at school, compare that to the first year you were out of school–when did you learn more? There’s just no comparison. You learn much faster in real-world situations” — Trip Hawkins

“The best way for us to learn about ourselves is by having the fantasy of pretending to be other people,” he adds. “And that’s what we do all the time in games through role-playing and simulation and fantasy. And it’s really true; you can have so many more synthetic experiences through computer simulation than you could possibly have in real life. And it allows you to be able to then reflect and organize your thinking about what does that all mean and how do you apply that to yourself and your real life.”

Currently, If is only available through the App Store, but I wondered if one day his company could align with a major educational institution or organization to offer the game as part of an official curriculum. “I don’t rule that out, but you need to know yourself and what you’re capable of doing,” Hawkins says, admitting that he has no experience with foundations or running a non-profit company. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t have a social purpose or a social conscience,” he added. “It’s definitely our longer-term goal that as many people as possible benefit from this kind of human knowledge. And there’s nothing that prevents us in the future from giving the product away to certain needy customers.”

Since If is released on a chapter-based model, I was also curious if there was an opportunity for new content to focus on current events or trends. I brought up bullying, a topic that unfortunately hits the headlines often. Hawkins said If’s lesson plan teaches children about empathy and sensitivity, and some levels even have story elements around the topic of bullying. But as for releasing new content based on current events, Hawkins said this isn’t really possible because If’s content is created ahead of time.

“What’s maybe not as easy for us to do is, on short notice, suddenly say, ‘Hey, let’s completely change what our game is today.’ It’s a production pipeline, but it’s really like producing a bunch of interactive movies,” he says. “And the content gets produced, and gets put on the shelf, and then gets pulled down off the shelf when the customer gets to it and is ready to consume it. So we may not have the facility to reinvent the movie every day; it’s more prescriptive. We can’t just radically change what the product does every day on short notice.”

I also wondered if parents might be skeptical about trusting a startup company and an unproven educational model with something as important as their child’s life and emotional development. Hawkins said he understands this concern, but pointed out the the lessons in If were designed by experts.

“We’re all going to be better off if a decent share of the time we spend on [tablets and smartphones] actually has some benefit besides just keeping us busy” — Trip Hawkins

“We understood from the beginning that there would be these questions if a bunch of guys from the game industry came in and say ‘Hey, we know how to take care of a child, we know how to teach a child.’ And we didn’t do that,” Hawkins said. “We brought in the experts. We’re working with an all-star team of these teaching masters and research experts. And they’ve been integrated into the team in the same way that athletes and coaches were integrated into EA Sports. I think EA Sports was successful because people were able to recognize that I was committed to the products being authentic; I was a lunatic about it; In fact, Madden football at EA became known as Trip’s Folly just because I wouldn’t allow the game to not be the real thing even if it was going to take years to get it right. So it’s a similar situation here.”

On top of that, because If is free-to-play, a parent or teacher can try the game before subscribing. Hawkins is confident, too, that once you try the game, you’ll understand the value. Reviews for the game so far bear this out. “Pretty much everybody that does that gives a two thumbs up,” he says.

Finally, Hawkins said he sees a bright future for education-themed games like If. In addition to his new game, the market includes LeVar Burton’s recent Reading Rainbow project, SimCityEDU, MinecraftEDU, and interactive math game DragonBox, among others. This category is only going to grow larger thanks to the rise in devices like tablets, he says.

“There are a handful of examples I think of flagships for what ought to become a whole new industry category that is following these [education] principles,” Hawkins said. “And I think it’s going to allow the parents and the teachers to curate the quality and wholesomeness and value of what’s on this burgeoning tablet market that’s going to reach a billion or two devices over the next period of years. I think, by contrast, in the absence of these kinds of wholesome choices, there’s a lot of kids getting addicted to games that are really just for entertainment and are kind of a waste of time. And we’re all getting addicted to mobile devices. We’re all going to be better off if a decent share of the time we spend on the devices actually has some benefit besides just keeping us busy.”

You can download If today from iTunes. More information about the game is available at its official website.

Eddie Makuch is a news editor at GameSpot, and you can follow him on Twitter @EddieMakuch
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