Donkey Kong Jr. Math Doesn’t Add Up

Donkey Kong Jr. doesn’t care about you or your education. His iconic 1983 classic, Donkey Jr. Math, purports to be an educational game. It says so right on the box, it’s part of the educational series, so who can disagree? I can. Excuse my language, but I find the very notion to be bananas. If you play Donkey Kong Jr. Math hoping for it to teach you something, you’ll find little about the game adds up. The truth about Donkey Kong Jr. Math is more shocking, more sinister, and frankly, much more interesting than it being an educational game. Well, at least a little more interesting.

Let’s do this by the book – the dictionary to be precise. For a game to be educational, it needs to educate. The verb educate can be defined in multiple ways, including “to train by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill, trade, or profession,” “to develop mentally, morally, or aesthetically especially by instruction,” “to provide with information,” or “to persuade or condition to feel, believe, or act in a desired way.” All great definitions, all hard to apply to Donkey Kong Jr. Math specifically.

Before I get into that, though, we should narrow the scope of what a game can educate someone about in order for it to count as an educational game. If the standard was simply educating you on literally anything, then technically every game ever could be described as an educational game because you generally learn how to play a game better as you spend time with it. I refuse to give DK Jr. such an easy win.

Not to put words in Mr. Kong Jr.’s mouth, but by classifying Donkey Kong Jr. Math as educational, what he’s likely getting at is that it has the ability to educate you regarding a practical life skill outside of playing video games. I’ll take a wild guess and say that in this case that skill is math. Donkey Kong Jr. Math educates you about math. Allegedly.

Going one step further, I’d say that education about this skill needs to be the core focus of the game. Otherwise, you could start classifying all kinds of crazy things as educational games since they may incidentally develop practical skills. Is Pokemon an educational game because it requires you to have basic reading ability to fully enjoy the game? No. Is Super Mario 64 an educational game because it helps you develop your hand-eye coordination? No. Is Animal Crossing an educational game because it teaches you the importance of money and manipulating those around you to get ahead in life? Maybe. I admit that the line here can be vague, but I’m sure you at least equally vaguely understand what I mean. If a game specifically holds itself out as educational, then it must revolve around the education of a particular skill.

Now that I’ve placed sufficient stipulations onto this “educational game” definition to ensnare DK Jr. into my trap and rig the argument in my favor, we can proceed.

First of all, Donkey Kong Jr. Math doesn’t provide any actual instruction or information about how to do math within the game itself, so that kills like half of those dictionary definitions. This game plops you on a screen full of numbers and mathematical symbols and expects you to know what it all means already. I have for the sake of both fairness and thoroughness read the game’s instruction manual from cover to cover in search of arithmetic instruction and I can kongfirm that I still don’t know how to do math. I did however discover that the bird characters in the game are called “Nitpickers,” which fits the spirit of this exercise well.

Given the lack of any instructional value to the game, Donkey Kong Jr. Math instead relies on the looser definitions of “educate” as its last hope. It seems iffy to say that it tries “to persuade or condition to feel, believe, or act in a desired way” in regards to your math ability. While you could certainly feel conditioned to improve your math skills while playing, the “desired way” portion controls this definition.

Whose desire are we talking about here? Unfortunately the developers haven’t shared an opinion on how they wanted people to feel, believe, or act as far as I can tell. Nothing in the game directly clues you into their intent either. Does DK Jr. desire you to be good at math? He doesn’t express much of an opinion either way in-game. At best he celebrates when you defeat the other DK Jr. (whom the instruction manual refers to as “Junior (II).” Not a family situation that anyone wants to delve into deeply). That feels like it’s more about how he values the competition of the game itself than any development of your mathematical ability.

I also don’t think it’s appropriate to go all “death of the Kong” in a situation like this. It’s not like you could attend school and get a pass for flunking your math class by saying you didn’t desire to learn math well. Some standards outside your own should apply to a supposedly legitimate educational tool.

You could argue that the game counts as “supervised practice” or that it helps you to “to develop mentally” sans the instruction part. Those definitions at least roughly resemble the experience that Donkey Kong Jr. Math provides. In the Calculate mode, Donkey Kong Sr. holds up a sign with a specific number on it, prompting his two offspring (?) to wage a battle to the death by recreating that number through the power of math. Each player needs to add, subtract, multiply, and divide their way to victory, basically plotting out the fastest route to the goal with their knowledge of basic math equations. That could be considered a form of practice…maybe it even has the potential to develop your mental math skills…but is that enough?

Obviously, it isn’t. And not just because I have a vendetta against DK Jr. Ask yourself: if you dig deep into the heart of Donkey Kong Jr. Math, what is it really about? You do math, sure, but you do lots of other things too. You need to find numbers, maneuver across the screen, climb vines, and come to grips with DK Jr.’s weird floaty jump. Nintendo didn’t title the game “Math” they titled it “Donkey Kong Jr. Math.” There’s a paragraph on Wikipedia dedicated to people whining about the controls of this game, so let’s not pretend that the Donkey Jr. part of the equation isn’t just as significant as the math part.

Believe it or not, DK Jr. did not invent the competitive math format. Various forms of mathematical sport date back to at least the 1800s, and just like Donkey Kong Jr. Math, skill in a math competition does not necessarily translate to skill in math as a whole. You definitely need to be knowledgeable on the subject, but the competitive environment requires a different skill set on top of that. These competitions test your ability to perform under pressure, your ability to adapt, and perhaps even your ability to jump across vines. I don’t know a whole lot about how these kinds of things are run.

All of these factors combine to take the competition out of the realm of pure, practical mental development of mathematical knowledge. In Donkey Kong Jr. Math, math is just another game mechanic to master like jumping. When you play Donkey Kong Jr. Math you don’t learn how to be better at math so much as you learn how to be better at Donkey Kong Jr. Math. Any educational value is incidental.

Let’s be real: if we were to consider Donkey Kong Jr. Math an educational game, it would be one with a very limited, short-lived use case. You need to be old enough to understand how to play games and do basic math, but young enough to need to reinforce these concepts outside of school. It would be uncharacteristic of Nintendo to release a game with such limited appeal. Something deeper must lurk beneath its educational label.

The appeal of this game does not lie in it being a good study buddy. If you don’t believe me, ask veteran game designers Masanobu Endo (of Tower of Druaga fame) and Shigeru Miyamoto (you know who this guy is):

Let’s take a moment to analyze how bizarre this exchange is. This discussion occurred in 1986, about three years after Donkey Kong Jr. Math released in Japan. Apparently this game endured in the hearts and minds of the public well after its initial release? That’s pretty weird, but not what I’m getting at.

Look closely and perhaps open some Wikipedia pages to find these guys’ birthdates. Neither of these men appear to have been toddlers in 1986. Nintendo also probably didn’t employ grade schoolers at the time. I guess I can’t say this for certain, but Mr. Miyamoto, Mr. Endo, and this supposed staff full of DK Jr. Math enjoyers at Nintendo probably all knew how to do basic math competently. In other words, we can only conclude that none of these people are playing Donkey Kong Jr. Math for its alleged educational value. They enjoy it because it’s a fun, competitive game that just happens to have math mechanics.

“But wait!” shouts DK Jr., crying out from the shadows in his undoubtedly stupid sounding fictional monkey voice. “What about the ‘+-×÷ Exercise’ mode!”

“Can you repeat that?” I would say, not entirely sure how you’re meant to pronounce +-×÷.

Then I would say “you have a point DK Jr.! In that mode, you are essentially just solving math problems. It’s like you bought the world’s most convoluted practice test book. But what are you really practicing for? Math? Or the real game, competitive Calculate death match?” We don’t consider training mode in a fighting game a substitute for an exercise routine, so I don’t see why we should count this!

Look, maybe that’s not my best argument but ultimately I resist defining Donkey Kong Jr. Math as “educational” because it makes it sound less interesting than it is. Even if you love learning things like I do, something about the term “educational” likely activates your self-preservation instincts and shuts down your brain. In reality, any educational value to be found in this game is low; it instead explores relatively strange territory by implementing math in a light enough way for it to come across more like a legitimate game mechanic than a desperate attempt to force you to learn. Yet society will largely remember it as little more than an “educational game” and write the idea off as a failed curiosity.

While I wouldn’t consider Donkey Kong Jr. Math to add up to be an educational game, there’s still plenty to learn from how it uses math as a game mechanic. It may even have value in sparking interest in math by approaching it in such an arcade-style manner. Perhaps some mathletes and math magicians got their start with Donkey Kong Jr. Math. In any case, I have to hand it to DK Jr. He may not be a licensed educator, but he knows how to think outside the box…and then falsely label that box as “educational.”