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If you picked B or C, you're in good company, based on the audience panel on games and education at this year's PAX East. During the panel, game developer and teacher Steve Swink gave a talk about both the state of education today and how video games can play a role in saving it.

He went on to show a slide of a classroom, complete with those neat rows of desks that we all remember. He explained that schools treat students as memory sticks and that they feed all sorts of information into kids and then request that it be repeated back verbatim. The problem with that, he said, is that it doesn't offer opportunities for real-life applications. Standardized tests, with those infamous little bubble sheets, don't do education justice. Teachers are basically downloading information to children, and then asking them to regurgitate it on tests. It might have worked hundreds of years ago when public education was established, but it's outdated and doesn't work today.

Video games, Swink said, are complicated and can better equip us to be prepared for the complexities of life. Try to explain Civilization to your grandmother, for example, and it becomes clear that the game requires you to take a vast sea of information and narrow it down to make important decisions each time you play. As a result, someone who plays Civilization walks away having learned something, and in a way that's much more complex than the way information is presented in school.