Delicious Healthy Games

The appearance of a story on Ted Castranova's Arden: The World of William Shakespeare in last month's issue of WIRED began a discussion around The Education Arcade about academia's role in game creation and specifically in creating educational games (since that's what we do). This post by Ed. Arcade head honcho Eric Klopfer is the first in a series of posts we'll run on the topic. We hope to begin a discussion in the educational game community about their best practices, so please comment with links to some of your own thoughts and best practices!

To an outsider, the world of academia must seem like one sure-fire hit after another. If we look at academic journals (the mainstay currency of academia) we see primarily the success stories - all of the experiments and innovations that worked. Of course we insiders know that real successes are fewer and further between than they appear to be, but we generally keep those stories to ourselves. This situation is too bad really, since we are often destined to repeat the untold mistakes of our colleagues.

It is wonderful then, that Ted Castranova was able to bring the lessons he has learned with Arden to the fore in a mainstream publication like WIRED. Castranova is a researcher of virtual economies, who created the game (a heavily modded version of Never Winter Nights) to attract players to a world in which he could study their behaviors. The world turned out to be a great looking, but primarily unfun experience, that did little to attract players. Castranova, in the WIRED article, presents some tips for "Making Games That Don't Suck," which are good starters for anyone thinking about rushing into the game-making business, educational or not.

• Don't Be Overly Ambitious
• Go Low Tech
• Think About Your Audience
• Get a Full-Time Staff
• Concede Screwups

These are particularly relevant for the field of educational games, which is currently taking on the appearance of a gold rush, but which frequently operates without the resources of mainstream gaming developers. Throughout academia, industry, government agencies and non-profits, many people are flocking to educational games as the silver bullet to cure our educational woes. While I'm a strong believer in the power of the medium of games to teach and to learn from, I'm also of the belief that educational games need to be thoughtfully designed and considered from both the educational and entertainment perspectives (as Castranova lays out) so that these games "don't suck".

Baking Educational Games

I think of the process of designing and creating educational games like the process of baking (which I used to do quite frequently). When I did bake, I often liked to make things that were both yummy and healthy. It isn't easy to balance these two qualities. I could bake calorie-laden cakes filled with butter and transfats that were quite tasty, or I could make piles of oat germ laden sawdust that could reduce your cholesterol if only you could actually eat it. To get both of these factors balanced was hard, and I don't believe that there is universal solution (other than perhaps iterative experimentation). Some of the recipes worked really well for some groups of people, in certain contexts, with particular expectations. Similarly, in creating experiences that are both fun and filled with learning, I find that the success of different recipes (mixes of media, immersion, styles of games, learning goals, mixtures of content, etc.) depends quite a bit on the audience, context, content, goals and facilitation.

There are two recipes that I see followed quite a bit today to create a blended balance of what you want and what is good for you. One recipe takes the yummy calorie laden cake and injects beta-carotene, vitamin D and calcium right into the cake. This is no doubt a delicious cake, but its nutritional content is highly suspect. Similarly, designers of educational games that try to inject content learning into a game where it doesn't fit may create experiences that are somewhat entertaining, but their educational value is highly suspect. If your spaceship requires you to answer a math problem before you can use your blasters, chances are you'll hate the game and the math.

The other recipe simply takes all of the healthy content - wheat germ, oat bran, carrot juice, spinach leaves, etc. and bakes them into something that looks like a cake. It sure is healthy, but just because it looks like a cake, doesn't make it tasty. Many people designing educational games follow this recipe. They take educational content and do something to make it look like a game (i.e. put algebra problems in a 3D virtual world, or place the periodic table of the elements into a shooting arcade). While there may be educational potential in such an approach, these games often "suck," as Castranova found. Just because it looks like a game, doesn't make it a game.

So what is the magical recipe for a good educational game? I certainly haven't found it, if it exists. My colleague Scot Osterweil may have at least the beginning of the answer when he says that it is not about "making a game out of learning, but finding the fun in that learning". I imagine Castranova has something similar in mind when he says, "consider your audience." Additionally, choosing the right technology plays into the decision, as Castranova indicates when he advises people to manage their ambitions and go low tech. We might amend that to "go with the right tech." In some cases a game may require an expensive 3D virtual world, but in other cases a text-based game may be perfect, and yet others might be appropriate for mobile devices that you can take with you anywhere. Too much time and effort has been spent on trying to capitalize on the expensive 3D virtual worlds, and not enough on the smaller, less-flashy approaches, but both offer potential for educational games.

The Role of the Ivory Tower

I've already maligned academia for not having the tradition of publicly sharing failures, so now I'll try to make amends. Academia has a critical role in fostering the growth of the games industry, and the educational games sector in particular. Academia is the source of innovation. The commercial games industry just doesn't have the budgets, staff, configuration, history, or even the motivation to provide consistent innovation. A single failure can set a large company back quite a ways, and likely bankrupt a smaller company.

That is where academia can help. We can take risks and make mistakes. We can try the high-risk project that has a chance at being the next big disruptive success, but could also just fizzle. We can pilot and test new ideas just to learn more. Of course, we must provide value to our funders and partners, but that value comes in the form of both our products and our learnings.

Academia should not be perceived as the cheap alternative to commercial production (partially because it may not be so cheap), but rather an important place for innovation as well as idea and technology generation. These are integral components to pushing the educational games movement forward. In turn, academics should consider how and when to forge partnerships with commercial entities and other facets of industry to both facilitate flow of knowledge. In this way we maximize value to our funders and to the community at large.

We produce some of our projects at The Education Arcade almost entirely in house, but we work with partners on content and audience testing of those projects. Other projects start as ideas and prototypes here before they move on to production with one of our creative and experienced commercial partners. And still others we play merely a supporting role in, helping out with advice and feeding back research into the design.

But we also have another role in fostering the educational games movement, and that is producing the designers, producers, programmers, and leaders of tomorrow. This is really the only place where we might temper the advice of Castranova. He advises getting a full time staff, but most of our projects have a mix of undergraduate students, graduate students, and staff assigned to them. Undergraduate students and graduate students certainly have schedules that ebb and flow, and even the best of them are only around for a short time, but they provide insight, perspective, and a lot of creativity and hard work to the process. We in turn, hopefully, provide them with the experiences and opportunities they need to develop the skills that they need to grow the industry. Of course, when it comes time to produce deliverables it is always beneficial to add dedicated staff to these teams who can provide leadership, continuity, and pick up the slack when necessary. But we should not forget this important role as academic institutions, or else industry may suffer and so will we when we are forced to play more games that "suck."