Games that aren't games
Everybody wants to make education more fun and engaging. At the EdTech Month Hong Kong events and at EDUtech Asia 2023 in Singapore I encountered many companies that highlight the use of gamification in their products. While I applaud this effort to engage students, real learning games seem to be scarce. Let me explain why I say that.
Example, Duolingo is a gamified app for learning a second language. It’s been very successful and people, including myself, use it to learn, but it is not a game. It is a series of quizzes. They ask you ask you questions, and they celebrate with sound and visual effects when you get the answers correct.? They do a number of other things very well, which is why I continue to use the app, but this is not a commercial for Duolingo.
According to Collins Dictionary:
“A?game?is an activity or sport usually involving skill, knowledge, or chance, in which you follow fixed rules and?try?to win against an?opponent?or to?solve?a?puzzle.”
This is where the definition gets tricky, and we see how so many apps can call themselves games without meeting my criteria. I believe a learning game should have a narrative and give the player control to make decisions and experience the story in their own way. Games develop characters, including protagonists and antagonists, and they are explicitly designed and written to evoke emotions and curiosity. We learn from every game we play, whether it is Clash of Clans, Angry Birds, Call of Duty, or Madden Football. We learn tactics and strategies. We solve problems and develop skills. Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. We learn about tools, weapons, vehicles, places, and characters. A learning game is simply a game where we intentionally incorporate elements into the experience that help the player to learn things that we want them to learn.
So, why is it that there are millions of commercial games and so few games developed specifically for education?
All of the games I mentioned earlier have made millions, if not billions of dollars for their developers. Commercial games have a huge potential market and, while most games don’t make millions of dollars, every game that comes out could be the next breakout game like Angry Birds. Learning games have much more limited earning potential, so, generally speaking, those with the talent for making great games, don’t spend their time on games for education.
As a result, teachers and EdTech companies make their own games. Not to offend anyone, but most of the time these “games” are not games, they are quizzes, and they are often completely void of anything resembling fun or game play. I’ve come to conclude that it takes 3 disciplines to be involved to create an effective and fun learning game for education.
I want to point out that I called them “disciplines” not “people”.? These are skill sets and although there are people who specialize in each of these disciplines, there are also many whose skills and experience span more than one of these disciplines.
When creating a learning game, we need an educator to clearly define the learning objectives. They know the curriculum and what specific things need to be learned. They understand the target audience and what their current context is. This knowledge is crucial to creating a game that is designed properly for the age, interest, and prior knowledge level of the students.
An instructional designer should understand learning science and be able to design for systems thinking, higher-level cognitive skills and durable skills like communication and collaboration. The instructional designer is also working closely with the game designer to mask the learning and assessment elements in the game, while including the right amount of repetitiveness, tempo, and ramping challenge to reinforce the learning and demonstrate progression.
The game designer comes up with and tunes the core game play mechanic, so it is not too easy or too difficult. They work with the educator to design characters and a narrative that the student can relate too. Every aspect of this story and character development should be intentional and aligned with learning objectives, agreed upon value systems, and intended outcomes from playing the game.
Bringing all of this together successfully can be difficult, time consuming, and possibly expensive. This is why there are so few games developed especially for education. The good news is, advancement in AI tools is making the development, and even the creative processes, easier and faster. There are also more and more EdTech companies that are investing time and resources in developing game design skills. Game design, like almost anything else, can be learned.
There are also a number of organizations providing resources to help educators develop games. Here is just a sampling of organizations to check out.
Games-Based Learning Alliance (GBLA)
领英推荐
Serious Games Society
IGDA – “Learning, Education, and Games” Special Interest Group (SIG)
There are also hundreds of thousands of educational games sold or freely distributed. Many of them aren’t really games, but there are some exceptional examples of real games for learning, if you look for them. Here’s a short list of companies I’ve interacted with that I know are making real learning games.
?Triseum
?House of Math
?Active Floor
?Press Start Academy
?Petraverse
?My apologies to other education game developers I’ve talked to for not mentioning you explicitly here. The list is too long to include everyone. Please respond in the comments and share what you are doing in learning games design and development.
Co-Founder and CEO
11 个月Great initiative Eric!