100 Days of Design - Kickoff

For the next 100 days, I will be designing a web, elearning, or game interface every day.

I have a close friend who decided one day that he wanted to be an animator. He was in his mid-20's and had never gone to school. He didn't even have a high school degree. But he wanted it, and he was ready to do whatever was necessary to get it. For the next several years he drew as many drawings a day that he could - he didn't let his lack of skill stop him, and he would soak up tips and tricks like a sponge. He wrote everything by hand, in perfect cursive, no matter how long it took him so that he could train his hand to do what his brain was thinking. And then, later when I met him, he was phenomenal. It seemed to me that he had "made it." He was there; he had gained the skills he wanted and now he could do the work he dreamed of doing. But he hadn't stopped. He still drew like a fiend, multiple characters a day - everyday if he could. He was convinced that he was still not very good, and the only way he could get to the good drawings was to churn through "bad" ones every day. They say you have to make 10 terrible films before you can make a good one; well he took that to heart and then some. He believed that he would need to go through that much in a single day to get into a groove where he was happy with his work. And that's remembering that the sketches he thinks are the "bad" ones look better than just about anything I've ever drawn in my life.

I think I need to take a page from his book.

Recently design and development for my large game project lost its funding, and I've found myself between work and between projects. So, for those of you who subscribed to this blog for the "Game Design Journey" posts, those will be on hold for a bit while I sharpen my design skills.

And that's exactly what I intend to do - sharpen my skills. I want to run through a regimen of design challenges so that I can emerge better at what I do. It's been awhile for me, and in that time I've taught design seminars, applied for design positions, and talked a lot of design theory - all in all it's been a lot of design talk, but it's also been awhile since I really stretched myself to design an original interface. So, I've decided to get back into a groove of actually designing interfaces and I hope to ground myself again in this type of work and further improve my skills (I've already started reading graphic design blogs and I'm getting super excited because that is something I could really use some help on).

As always, any feedback, criticism, encouragement, or other comments are SUPER helpful.

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.