The Engagement Layers of 'Papers, Please'

Papers Please is a gem of a game that I couldn’t recommend more highly – especially for those that aren’t really interested in video games. However, instead of reviewing the game or nerding out over the themes, art style, or gameplay, I’d like to dive into how Papers, Please remains engaging and enjoyable when it seems on the surface that it shouldn’t. You see, on paper (no pun intended) Papers, Please sounds like a premise that should be 100% devoid of fun – a trait that it shares with public education. But Papers, Please is interesting and engaging from start to finish, and there is something

there that I think  games, education, and gamification can learn from that.

WARNING! This post contains spoilers, but not enough spoil the game. You should still play it if you haven’t.

In Papers, Please, you play as a citizen of a fictional eastern block country that has been assigned to work at an immigration checkpoint and determine whether people wanting to enter the country have sufficient documents to enter legally. The gameplay is very simple, you have two stamps – Accept and Deny – and you must look at each person’s set of papers and decide whether to let them into the country or turn them away. If you are correct in letting people through you earn money to feed your family, and the faster and more accurately you can correctly see if they should be allowed through or not, the more money you can earn. However, when you incorrectly let someone pass or turn them away, you are given a citation, which ultimately results in a dock in pay. The reward structure is simple and binary; do things right and you get a reward, do them wrong and you get a punishment. It’s a classic Skinnerian feedback and reward structure

At least that’s how you think it works.

CREDIT: Flickr User ANDVERSUS 

A Quick Sidebar

A common criticism of educational games and gamification is that they rely too heavily on Skinnerian reward structures to drive engagement. They sell the user on the opportunity to perform an action, and then either be rewarded or punished depending on whether or not he or she performed the action correctly. 

For readers less familiar with B.F. Skinner’s contribution to Psychology, he is most well known for clearly demonstrating the idea (that we now take for granted) that says the pattern by which people react to rewards could be used to train people to do things. By giving rewards for correct behavior and punishments for incorrect behaviors, we can ultimately change how organisms behave. He trained rats to push a lever in order to receive food, and it seems like we believe – based on how widely those who are striving for student engagement have adopted his ideas – that this a good model for engagement. Engagement is about mental involvement and enjoyment. By using Skinner's model for rewarding behavior to increase engagement we must assume that because that rat continues to push that lever to get his food, he must be thinking in his mind “I am loving this!” Or by association, do we assume that the people who click the button that says “Watch video for a chance to win an iPad Air” are thinking to themselves “I am loving this!”?

No. There’s just no way.

However, it seems in both cases we are implying a belief in Skinner’s core philosophy - that the emotional and mental context of the participant doesn’t matter. What matters is that the rat keeps pushing that lever – for as long as we can make him. To my mind, this sounds like the opposite of engagement – instead it sounds like mindless participation. Sure we can use this model to get students to play an educational game for hours, but that's quite different from them actually utilizing their mental faculties to make connections and process information with a level of attention to make it meaningful. The main goal of engagement should be to push students and users to use their brains in as many unique and as deep of mental processing tasks as we possibly can, and you can’t get that from simple Skinnerian reward structures. On the other hand, tasks that require deeper thought and consideration, or more personal and varied interpretations are interesting and fun. But how can education, games, and educational games foster this type of deeper introspection and conflict resolution.

Back on Track

Let’s look again at Papers, Please.

Did I say that the reward structure and decisions in Papers, Please were simple? I lied; they’re not. Papers, Please presents the player with an ordinary and binary decision: accept or deny this person entrance to the country.

Then, onto that it layers a reward system: do it correctly, get money; do it incorrectly and lose money. By this model we are still in Skinner’s wheelhouse – simple, binary rewards and punishments.

The correct answer gets a reward, incorrect gets a punishment

However, Papers, Please still has several twists to throw our way. The gameplay is broken into days – each day takes about 15 minutes. On day 4 a woman tries to gain entrance to the country in order to see her son. Her papers are not correct but she pleads to be able to enter anyway. If you deny her access you earn your money, same as always, but if you have the guts to fight the system you find something else remarkable – there is another reward structure in place for doing good deeds. If you allow her entrance, you still get the same citation and no extra money, but the game rewards you with an in-game achievement – a type of gaming currency to reward players for extraordinary actions.

So then our reward model has to change. You still have a binary decision to make, only now we’ve uncovered that there are some instances where following our gut and being compassionate will yield different rewards. Another layer of rewards is present and these rewards are at odds with the previous reward layer so there is no way we can get both simultaneously.

But Papers, Please isn’t done. On Day 8 a member of a group of revolutionists informs you that you are being watched and then provides a list of people you must allow to enter the country.

So the reward structure changes – this new entity will reward you for breaking different rules, which sometimes also go against your new “Good Samaritan” way of playing as well as the initial reward structure of money and citations. Another layer of rewards is now at odds with the existing reward structure. 

On Day 9 a guard bribes you to detain more people – so we can add another layer of rewards.

On day 12 the organization you work for informs you that you are being watched and so any actions of terrorism will get you arrested. This is another layer of rewards and punishments that the player must weigh with each decision to accept or deny people entrance.

Finally, every day the player must choose how to use the money they earn, allocating money for food, rent, heat, and medicine. This is affected by how much you earn during the day, which is often determined on how many bribes you accept, as well as the primary reward of completing your job well. Every day you make the same silly little decision, but the longer you play, the more difficult it becomes to make the "right" decision because there are so many consequences for each little decision that need to be weighed. 

There are more issues that arise and complicate how the player makes decisions within Papers, Please, but this much is enough for our discussion, and will help limit the amount of spoilers I include. When viewed in this light of conflicting reward structures, the method that Papers, Please uses to drive engagement starts looking less and less like a Skinnerian program of regular and predictable consequences and more like balancing and deciding what bad consequences one is willing to live with in order to obtain the rewards that are most meaningful or important. For that, there is another prominent psychologist whose theories can explain what is going on:

Kurt Lewin

Kurt Lewin was a social psychologist that explained the types of internal conflicts that humans can face when navigating difficult decisions. For him, the choice between an action that would provide a reward and one that would provide a punishment was not a conflict – there was nothing to decide because everyone would always choose a reward over punishment. Conflict, for Lewin, would arise inside the minds of people forced to choose between two rewards when wanting both, two punishments when wanting neither, or between two situations that present a collection of both rewards and punishments where he or she must select which set of consequences to accept. These internal conflicts were how he postulated we made meaningful choices, by understanding the nature of the conflict surrounding a given decision and then resolving that internal conflict and making the decision.

This is useful from an engagement perspective because resolving internal conflict is inherently more meaningful than performing actions to get rewards because the final “reward” is us no longer feeling conflicted. This reward comes from inside, is more personal, and requires deeper thought than responding to a Skinnerian reward structure. It is more engaging. Papers, Please takes this engagement to its limit by finally rewarding you for your personal choices, with the game branching into 20 unique endings depending on how you play your 30 days as a document inspector.

However, just to prove that this model for understanding and designing engagement is not limited to Papers, Please, consider instead another engaging interaction provided by video games: Super Mario Bros. If we were to think of Mario in terms of rewards and punishments, we would probably miss the main engaging factor of the game – the thing that makes it more than just trying to get coins and not die. Think about the red mushroom.

Is it a reward, or a punishment?

In reality, it’s both and neither – the paradigm of rewards and punishments doesn’t accurately describe what it is.

Just like with Papers, Please it is easier to understand the engaging nature of a red mushroom when you think of it as one of Lewin’s internal conflicts. When a red mushroom pops out, the player knows it’s good and that they should grab it, but immediately it flees in the opposite direction and forces the player to run towards peril in order to catch it and obtain the reward. Every time a red mushroom comes on screen the player needs to make a split-second evaluation whether or not the prospect of getting “big” is worth the risk that the mushroom presents. They need to solve internal conflict, and then act. Without that decision-making process, the action would be meaningless and would fail at engaging the player. 

If instead of designing traditional games, educational games, or gamification around the idea of rewarding and punishing players for specific behaviors we tried to create small moments of internal conflict and then help the player resolve them, I believe the result would be more engaging player experiences. Sure, simple rewards and punishments do get people to act a certain way, but they don't get people to care. On the other hand internal conflicts are something we all care about and we are naturally driven to resolve. Papers, Please gets players engaged in the idea of document fact-checking by designing more than just a reward structure, but layering rewards to weave a complex and difficult context around making a very simple decision. Thus, engaging interactions seem to not just be about giving students or users rewards that they care about, but also layering the experience with several levels of interaction and evaluation in order to make each decision more difficult to unravel and thus more intrinsically rewarding to solve. 

What do you think? Is internal conflict a good and replicable approach for designing engaging interactive experiences? 

That Time I Built an App for my Daughter

Early sketches of my main characters

Earlier this year I had the chance to design and build an educational app for my daughter. She's two
and a half, very energetic, and the reason I do everything I do. In reality, I was asked to build any old educational game as part of a school assignment, but instead decided to make it more meaningful by connecting it to her, while giving us more opportunities to hang out together - even if I was calling it homework.

The reason I wanted to build a game for my daughter is because she loves the iPad™ - but sometimes I don't love her playing it. I struggle with the idea of screen time and the reality of what I see with her when she plays these devices. I don't think that giving children iPads™ is inherently evil, but it is easy for me to see that not all experiences built for the iPad™ are created equal. Sometimes when Lydia gets on the device her eyes glaze over and she doesn't move or react - while other times she laughs and gets engaged; she explores and touches; or she mimics constantly. In order to help her have more positive experiences with technology, my wife or I usually sit with her when she plays, so that we can make sure her experiences are more interactive and uplifiting - and also to make sure she doesn't accidentally buy $100 worth of Smurfberries. While I was watching her, I began to recognize the kinds of experiences that she really responded to, and which caused her to shut down and become a passive "watcher." Then, when I read this article on toddlers, and them needing to learn through free exploration early on, I decided I wanted to put my belief that the tablet could be a device for learning and growth to the test.

The Foundation is Set

So I had an idea of the type of educational experience I wanted to create - one that would get my daughter involved mind and body, would encourage exploration, and would cause her to be her normal playful self while using the tablet - but even in concept it was too vague and provided me with very few design action items. In order to make my game design more concrete, I needed to connect it to a real set of experiences or emotions. And that's when I realized I wanted her to behave the way she does when she plays with sidewalk chalk.

Screenshot, Gameplay Prototype 1 - No, I'm not joking

My daughter doesn't love finger paints, she doesn't like the sticky mess that gets all over her hands, and she doesn't go at anything with reckless abandon like you would expect a 2-year-old to do - but once we got her sidewalk chalk she drew all over everything outside. When she is playing with sidewalk chalk she laughs, is social, makes faces, jumps up and down, shares, interacts, and plays. As an experience it is a perfect contrast to how she acts when she gets on the iPad™ and her face goes dead, and she just sits there. So I had my core experience, I wanted my app to feel, for my daughter, like playing with sidewalk chalk.

Just to be clear, this core experience is not to say that I wanted to make a sidewalk chalk app, but more that the emotions and behavior that experience elicited out of my daughter would be my success metric - I would know I had succeeded by how closely her reaction to the app matched how she played with sidewalk chalk. This gave me something concrete - at least in gaming terms - to design for.

I began prototyping various concepts - drawing apps, apps that let you play with digital clay, apps for poking or stroking a character, etc. I went through several ideas until I came up with what would become Splat! Along the way I was able to pick up extra requirements: usability for young children and tablet apps is a real barrier. Most apps are designed like traditional computer programs, requiring input like the click of a mouse in order for it to register. What this means, in reality, is that most inputs for tablets require both a down and up motion - like a click you have to touch and then take your finger off. Toddlers don't touch apps like that. They expect the app to react as soon as their finger touches it, any time that their finger touches it. Often I will see my daughter get frustrated, and she'll be holding her finger down on the screen, waiting for the device to register the touch, while the device is actually waiting for her to take her finger off to register it. Then, she'll try to touch a button, but her thumb will be touching the screen in the corner, and so the device won't register the finger because in terms of "clicks" you can't have two running at a time. It's easy to understand for people who are used to working with computers, but toddlers expect something to happen every time they touch the screen - and the joy comes in the surprise of what does happen.

Design Process

Somewhere around Prototype 10...

My design process revolves around iteration and playtesting. I like to use playtesting and rapid prototyping to work out my greatest fear on a project at any given time, and then when I feel confident I've conquered one design fear, I move onto another. Hands down, my greatest fear beginning this project was the art. The central concept behind Splat! is that with each touch the toddler is either generating cute, squishy characters, or getting them to make faces. Not being extremely confident in my art skills, I thought to myself that I would design and program the game and then get someone else to do the art. When I did finally realized that if it was going to happen, I would have to do it - I decided to use the same process I use for creating games to create art. I drew hundreds of little characters and then opened my notebook up and showed my 2-year-old. I payed close attention to which drawings she liked, which faces she mimicked, and which she just passed over. Each time I started a sketch session I was able to make a more refined character based on what she had liked, and by the end I had a solid idea of what I could draw that she would laugh at.

Once I had conquered my fear of the art, I made a prototype to test the user interface, and see if my sketches/wireframes were too complex for a toddler. When Lydia played with it I learned more about what types of buttons she knew were buttons, and how her first reaction with any app is to just start hitting anywhere - so I decided to make everywhere a button that would do something. Then I tested the core gameplay mechanic, then I tested the ability to use it to teach colors, then I added changing emotions, and each time I brought it back to my 2-year-old to see what she thought. She was my toughest critic and most honest client. It was very eye-opening to go through the process of learning how to make something that she would be happy with instead of just going with what I wanted to make or thought would look cool or sell well.

I repeated that same process - trial and error with a 2-year-old - until I had a game we both really enjoyed. It took me around 4 months to get it right - but as soon as I had it done it became one of her favorite apps (probably second in line after PBSKids).

That was my process, and while it may not seem like the most efficient way to design an app - I learned more and was stretched more as a designer by having my end-user part of my design team than I had in any project previously or since. I really had to take my agenda out of the interaction, and let her drive what I made - while still trying to sneak in the educational elements.

It's a simple app, but I am very proud of it.

In the End

Final Screenshots

I considered the app design for my daughter a success. It's loaded on her iPad™ now. When her and I play it, we play it together. She laughs, looks up at me, and we have a good time making faces at each other.

That's the success story of my meaningful school assignment, but not the end of the story. I was content for a long time to just keep the experience I gained building and designing as what I got out of the app, and never thought it was the kind of thing I should publish. I'm used to working on teams, and hiding my own ideas amidst the great ideas and work of others. But then a close friend suggested that I publish this app, that it could potentially do some good. I decided to go for it and see if an app I made for my daughter can help other parents and other children. I know she doesn't mind sharing it, so I guess I can too.

Splat! A Creative Expression Game for Toddlers is now available on the Apple and Google Play Stores.

   

Educational Game Design First Steps: Find a way to Avoid "Testing"

I go through pages and pages of handwritten notes
at the beginning of any design process.

This last week I moved out of the research phase of my educational game design, and started incorporating the things that I had learned from educational research on games, feedback, motivation, and memory retention. I also looked at many examples of current educational games - both good and bad. When I started this journey, I wanted to make sure that whatever I created could not only make a difference in the lives of the children that used it, but also demonstrate that the meaningful growth of an honest educational experience and the lighthearted catharsis and escapism that come from a well-crafted game were not mutually exclusive.

That having been said, my last post "Why do all Educational Games Suck?" and Other Nonsense garnished the most views of any article on my blog so far. It seems that I may have hit a nerve, and a lot of readers agreed with my sadness at encountering so many educational video game titles that seemed to fail at being games. In that post I lament that so many educational games resemble fancy tests rather than games: they have one right answer, and provide feedback for the answers provided. In general, these games seemed to be built on the foundational idea that drilling problems is how one learns. Also, besides the potential detriment to the game as an instructional tool, giving someone cascades of problems to answer is a lousy game mechanic and it makes for a lousy game (I've covered this more thoroughly in my last post).

Needless to say, my experience researching both effective and ineffective uses of games gave me a strong sense of what I did not want my game to be. By the end of my research, there were so many don'ts on my list of game design parameters that I became less and less confident that could satisfy them all. Starting the design process led me to understand the reasons I found so many educational games that sucked, and start to empathize with the game developers who came up with those games.

When you are designing an educational game, it seems like all roads lead back to "testing."

How do you do well at this game? You answer questions
correctly? Yeah, that's called a test.
Photo care of play.google.com

But the fact of the matter is that the test game mechanic is almost impossible to avoid in an educational game. It's always there because in the end we are in fact trying to educate the player. Now, I'm not going to go into a discussion on effective testing methods, the widely varying forms of educational evaluation, or other topics central to educational testing - as that lies outside the scope of what I wanted to focus on. What I will say is this: Within educational games, rules and mechanics are there to create an environment where the student gains some knowledge or understanding - and the only way to get at that, the only way to know if a player has achieved that particular type of progress, is to give them some type of test. If, as a designer, you cannot allow that test to blend seamlessly within a game environment, the transaction will feel forced, but if you allow the game to override the importance of the educational experience, and the test that evaluates it, then you are left with a fun game that has little to no instructional value.

This is the balance beam that I found I had to walk: no matter how much I hated it, the testing mechanic had to be there somewhere. Both traditional games and educational games have tests, but educational games run a higher risk of being nothing but a test. Educational games usually have a logical connection between the testing game mechanic and the concepts that the designers/developers intend to teach. Designing an educational game is hard because the testing part of the game is easy to come up with, but the rest of the game is much more difficult without adding so much game that the education is lost. This makes it so that as you are coming up with the structure of your game, it is natural for your brain to decide how to implement testing, and so you think ( and I've done it tons of times too), "That's it, I've got my core game mechanic."

Here's an example of what I mean, let's take a look into an educational game design meeting:

Designer 1: So, we know that we need to create a web app that teaches children the importance of brushing their teeth, but how do we make it a game? 

Designer 2: Well, if we can reward them for properly demonstrating that they know the importance of brushing their teeth, we can help motivate them to progress and learn more about teeth brushing.  

Designer 1: Ok, so we could give out achievements for answering questions correctly, or we could develop a tooth version of Asteroids, but each time they lose a life they would have to answer a question about teeth in order to keep playing.  

Designer 2: What if we had them explore the inside of a mouth from a the perspective of a piece of bacteria, and then every time they want to progress they have to answer a question about dental hygiene. 

Notice how all roads seemed to come back to testing these students/players? That's because at some point the game (or the developers that made the game) need to know if the player has learned anything about brushing teeth. Even in attempts to be innovative, the test game mechanic is pervasive in educational game design.

But after seeing so many games I disliked, either as games or as pretend educational experiences, I knew I had to find something else. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to paint Designers 1 and 2 as idiots, or even as straw men in order to make a point. I've been in meetings that have gone just like this, I know Designer 1 and 2 by name. But since the "testing" part of any educational game is so central to making something have instructional value, it can be very difficult for designers to see beyond it to find other potential game mechanics.

This became a giant roadblock for me in the design process of my current app, and it was very difficult for me to overcome. No matter what type of game I brainstormed, it all seemed to come back to a test-like game model. But then I realized, as I was mulling over some old video games that had a major impact on my perception of the medium, that testing and evaluation should exist in an game that teaches you something, but there is a way to have them not necessarily be the game mechanic that drives the progression of the game. You have to take your evaluation one step further and come up with ways to allow your players to demonstrate their knowledge other than just answering "Do you know this? Yes or No."The testing can be the inspiration for the final game mechanic, but that gameplay should take the concepts that need to be tested and force the student to use them.

In order to comprehend, you must first assimilate.
In order to apply, you must first comprehend.
Photo care of juliaec.wordpress.com/

I came to realize that I needed to come up with a structure for my players to demonstrate that they knew what they were being taught (fractions in my case) without having to answer questions about it. In educational terms, I needed to access a higher level of Bloom's Taxonomy - a concept for organizing how deeply a person has learned something based on how they use it. Bloom's Taxonomy says that the people who use their knowledge to create more knowledge, make connections, or build something unique are demonstrating that they have a deeper knowledge of that thing than they would if they were just memorizing it. By creating a design that required players to take their knowledge one step further and operationalize it in the game setting, I was able to come up with more complexity and depth for my fractions app. Also, once I had blueprinted a more "if you know it then show me you know it by how you play" method of testing my players, the game mechanics that I had been struggling with flowed naturally and logically as part of my following brainstorm sessions. In essence, I discovered that if I wanted to evaluate whether or not my players had learned fractions, I needed to put them in situations (not to be confused with word problems) where they would need to use fractions in order to win. By changing how I looked at evaluating student progress, I was able to break my game design writer's block and push my design up to another level.

And the really crazy thing is, it wasn't until I went to write about my experiences that I realized this is exactly why I named this blog The Same Footsteps in the first place - because I believe education is about getting people to do the things that make them learn rather than sitting and learning the things that they should know.

What do you think? Post a reply in the comments. Remember that I will be posting regularly throughout my game design process. If you or someone you know is interested in how educational games are made, subscribe or follow me on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter. 

"Why do all educational games suck?" and Other Nonsense

How can I do this instead of homework?
Image credit of Flcikr User jimsheaffer

"Why do all educational games suck?"

It's a question I have both heard and asked multiple times. So I have to admit that when I began studying educational games, game design, and game mechanics, I was secretly wondering if it was a doomed endeavor. Naively, I thought to myself that if several decades of programmers and game designers had been trying this for so long, I would have nothing new to bring to the table. I didn't know how I expected to create something that would be any different from the educational games for which I had turned up my nose most of my memorable life.

To be clear, I do have a tendency towards hyperbole and exaggeration. All educational games do not suck. Please forgive the sensationalism in my title, it was intended to make a point.  I don't want to discuss this question literally, but instead get at what people are really asking and the emotion behind it - Why do so many people continue to have so many bad experiences with educational games?

While it is true that I have in front of me at any given time, several examples of good educational games. Even in my youth, I played hours and hours of Treasure Mountain, Reader Rabbit, and one particular Little Critter (tm) reading game (forgot the name), and I have very fond memories of those experiences.  As an adult, I have loved several educational video games as well. However, after reviewing hundreds of educational games with the simultaneously more and less forgiving eyes of a designer, I have to admit that I'm still asking. Why are so many educational games terrible?

To put what I mean in perspective, I don't count as a hardcore gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I once sunk 40 hours into World of Warcraft in a single weekend. Video games are emotionally addicting (there, I said it). They place the player in an ongoing loop (called flow) of challenge and success that feeds his or her desire to progress, achieve goals, and receive rewards. In theory, this is what it seems like educational games should also be striving for - to catch learners in a loop of challenge and reward that helps them to progress, pushes them to their limits, and rewards them for 'well-played' outcomes.

So - reverting back to my original, hyperbolic and sweeping generalization - why do all educational games suck when compared to other video games?

The first, and most obvious, answer for me is money - but that's not the reason. Not only is this not where I would like to go with this discussion, it also is no excuse. As the non-hardcore gamer that I am, I have really come to embrace indie video game titles - passion projects built on low budgets, and sometimes by only a couple of ambitious developers. That must be it then, right? The money, along with differences in skills between software developers of both genres result in the differences in quality. Right? Wrong. I have met some very talented developers and game designers, and on multiple occasions they have expressed the desire to be involved in projects that are more socially responsible, but there are no projects to be found.  Money, developer skill, and other reasons such as the tendency for educational games to be geared towards children (and therefore less appealing to adults) are great reasons why any one educational game might be worse than any one non-educational game, but these fail to answer our central question. What I really wanted to know is why educational video games, in general, seemed so much worse than recreational video games, in general.

I think it might just be a matter of semantics.

Let's imagine that I present you with an apple slice, and tell you that it is a piece of candy. Even if you had no experience with apples and took me at my word, chances are you know what candy is, and would think that my apple slice was not near as tasty as most of the candy that you had eaten previously. However, if I told you it was fruit, you would think it was pretty darn tasty (assuming you don't hate apples).

For some reason, the vast majority of "educational games" aren't games at all, but that's what we keep calling them.

Let's imagine an educational app that is designed to teach PreK children colors, and does so by having a cute talking monkey present them with a few items, and ask that they click (or touch) and drag items of a certain color and give them back. That sounds like an educational game, right? Well if we strip away the monkey, what do we have? What is this interaction at it's core? It is a question, and a correct answer; in other words it is a computerized worksheet or a test.

Hundreds of touchscreen apps, websites, and desktop softwares have been sold as educational games, when in reality they are merely worksheets and drill-and-kill problems with fancier art, music, and reward systems than you would find on your average math homework. While I must admit that I wish my math homework had involved more talking monkeys, the fact remains that if you take a multiple choice test and have a talking monkey ask the questions, it is still a test - not a game.

Games involve interactions defined by rules, goals, rewards, and  - most importantly - allowing the player to use any means (within the rules) to accomplish his or her goal. If you are playing Zelda (tm) and you need to get past a guard, the game doesn't care whether you stand and fight, throw a boomerang at him, or run and hope he can't catch you.

Games create an environment and define the parameters of success,
but the rest is up to you.  Image by Lanea Zimmerman

In a test, you are presented with a hypothetical situation and must provide the best answer; but in a game, your goal is clearly defined, and you have to come up with and execute a strategy to achieve it. That's what makes games so difficult to build in the first place, and why I think educational games come off more like tests, and less like games.

Maybe if educational games were more like games we would like them more. Or, conversely we could just start calling them tests, then we would think they were really fun tests, but as it is the semantics doom the majority of educational games (let me stress once again that this is not the case of all educational games). If they were called something other than games, we would hold them to a different standard, but since they are trying to be games, but lack the fundamental mechanics that make games what they are, educational games come across as really lame games.

That's what I think. What do you think? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

Update: "Other Nonsense" 

As this post is the result of the beginning stages of my "research" phase (which mostly boils down to reading a lot of academia and playing a lot of games) in my Game Design Journey, I wanted to include one last thought I had while sifting through list after list of "Top 10 Educational Apps" and "Best Games for Learning [anything]," etc. 

While in the above post I remarked at how I thought it strange that drill-and-kill educational apps claim to be games, I also wanted to remark that I think it equally - if not more - strange that people continually try to assign educational value to non-educational games. For example, I've read several internet threads similar to this one, claiming that HALO (or substitute any mainstream game that is clearly designed for recreation) is educational because it teaches kids about physics, teamwork, and problem-solving. I just want to go on record and say that this I think this practice is ridiculous. My metric for whether or not a game can be considered educational is whether or not the player learns something that the game designers intended, more than they would have if they had not played the game. I think you can learn just as much about problem-solving getting your foot caught in a fence as you can playing HALO - so it doesn't count. 

I think this really is our desire, in general, to further justify the amount of time we spend with video games, and the fact that we feel a need to do so makes me sad (I'm not saying I haven't done it). 

I like to imagine a day when the educational video games are all games, and the recreational video games aren't being sold as educational if they aren't. 

Embarking on A Journey: From Gamification to Game Design

A couple of months ago, I set out to write a literature review on the effectiveness of gamification in instructional settings, and I hoped to find more academic literature on the topic. Honestly, I had a hard time finding anything. To get at what I was looking for, I decided I needed to go a little deeper, and instead look for academic studies focusing on or around the core components or psychological principles behind gamification - because you would never find any physics papers on "Why stones fall to the ground," but there has been a lot written about gravity.

What I found, I must admit, was quite embarrassing. Embarrassing for me.

You see, when I originally became enamored with gamification I thought that it was some revolutionary design method that contained within it a brave new world of ideas for turning education on its head. I was interested in dissecting what game design and marketing techniques had to teach the educational industry, how to build a canon of new "gamification techniques,"and then study approaches to increase learner engagement with these new techniques. I was interested in badges, achievements, levels, and What I found was that gamification is not new, and once reduced to it's component parts it is pretty easy to understand. It is simply the act of applying the core principles for creating engaging experiences in games to instructional settings. I realized that none of those things (badges, etc.) are really what makes up gamification, but just one arbitrary expression of the mechanics that are fundamental to making engaging user experiences.

Understand yet why I am embarrassed?

I was looking for something new, something revolutionary, I thought I had found it in the staples of gamification, and I thought gamification was centrally different from educational games. What I found was that gamification comes out looking more like a rising tendency for designers/educators to apply a specific set of methods that work in games to other educational settings in order to gain and maintain user engagement - probably connected to the rising trend in our society towards video game use in general. I've mentioned in previous posts how I feel about user engagement in the education industry, and I've always known that was the end goal, but I didn't connect the dots between game design and gamification. Up until that moment, I had never once thought that an effective study of gamification is really a study of game design, with the intention of extracting operational principles for use in non-game settings.

I'm sure you're all giving me the facepalm of a lifetime, "D'uhh!" you're saying to yourself. Well, I agree - that's why I'm embarrassed.

But I've found that I'm not the only one that made that particular mistake. If you look at the only one-star rating of The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Instruction on Amazon.com, you'll see that at least one other person who read that book(an excellent read) was disappointed to find "nothing new" in a study of gamification methods, which coincidentally looks at game design and game mechanics and discusses how to apply those core principles to non-game settings.

This discovery has led me to change course in my studies of gamification, and so I've labeled this blog post the beginning of a journey, because in the future I will be researching game design, with the intention of applying those engagement principles in my other instructional designs, rather than continuing my study of gamification.

Even before this realization, I had really come to embrace the idea of gamification according to the definition provided by Kapp: "using game-based mechanics, aesthetics, and game thinking to engage people, motivate action, promote learning, and solve problems." which includes applying core mechanics of games to designs up to the point where they can either be classified as games or at least as very game-like. I already believed that building an educational game could be classified as gamification. Now, I've pushed that belief a touch further so that I believe proper gamification is building a game, and that works for instruction because the principles that make games enjoyable, rewarding, and interesting can also make instruction enjoyable, rewarding, and interesting. 

Thus begins my new series of posts, what I learn and what I think others can learn about instructional design from games. I call it my "Game Design Journey."