Combining useful learning with an enjoyable reward system
Computer games get a lot of bad press at times, but they aren’t just for pure entertainment or promoting violence and gore. They can also be used to impart useful skills and communicate ideas. According to Kathy Sierra, the best teaching systems utilize some of the most engaging aspects of games.
Brains love play. Find a way to bring more play (or at least a sense of playfulness) into someone’s life, and you might just end up with a fan.
Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users
Games work by rewarding certain behaviors. By the process of trial and error, the player learns what works and what doesn’t, and gradually pieces together a strategy to win.
It turns out that most learnable skills can be turned into a game.
Daniel Cook, Lost Garden
Games can be a safe sandbox for people to try things out, and learn skills which can later be applied in real life.
Darfur is Dying
Darfur is Dying provides an insight into the lives of refugees of Darfur; their living conditions and stories.
This game was meant – however temporarily – to put you in the shoes of the 2.5 million refugees from Darfur, now living in camps in Sudan and Chad.
And it does. You have to choose which member of the camp to send out to forage for water, while avoiding the gun-wielding Janjaweed militias. Dying in most games just makes your character pop back to life, an unharmed carbon copy. In this game, if the character is captured, you are told of their fate, and may have to choose another character to continue. If you don’t learn fast enough, your pool of possible characters becomes increasingly narrow. When you come to the screen to choose a new character, missing persons are faded out. Over time, more and more of the characters are faded out as the population of the refugee camp dwindles. This has a much more chilling than temporarily loosing Mario.
To play the game you must make choices, and each choice has harsh repercussions. Sending out a full grown man is not allowed; he is likely to be killed. Sending out a full grown woman might be a good idea, because she can carry more water back for her family, but she risks rape and abuse if captured. The alternative, to send out a young teenager or child, also has consequences, such as abuse and kidnapping and perhaps even death.
Simple game mechanics are used to emphasis the point of the game. If your character is captured, the consequences are made clear with the ‘play again’ message.
As someone at a far off computer, and not a child or adult in Sudan, would you like the chance to try again?
In most games the ‘play again’ mechanic is just a flashing button.
The game leaves the player with some sense of the awful events transpiring in Darfur, but it also seeks to spread the message further. The ever present Take Action button allows players to pass the game on to a friend, send a message to President Obama, and several other ways to spread the word and get involved.
Free Rice
Free Rice has not one, but two altruistic goals; to increase the players’ vocabulary*, and win rice for the UN World Food Program.
For each answer you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the Un World Food Program to help end hunger.
It’s been a huge hit, garnering mentions in the Washington Post, USA Today and the New York Times, as well as BBC news, and CBS.
The game play itself is a bit like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The player gets a question, and four answers to click on. The strength of this game is its simplicity. It’s very easy to get into a state of flow, and move through the questions with very little friction. The education and the game play are seamless.
As you get pick right answers, a wooden bowl on the right hand side of the screen begins to fill with rice. This positive feedback is instant, and very encouraging. When the bowl is full, the rice is moved to a little pile at the side, and the bowl is emptied out, ready to be filled again.
When the wrong answer is given, no more rice is added to the bowl, and the correct answer is displayed on the next game screen. Whether wrong or right, the game slips by very smoothly, with no complex actions required from the player, only trying to choose the right word. Correct answers gradually increase the difficulty of the words, while incorrect answers lead to easier questions.
It’s a pure and uncluttered experience, with a much softer emotional impact than Darfur is Dying. The player is already quietly helping the cause, so rather than trying to make a fierce, one-time impact, Free Rice aims to entice the player back again and again to play a little more.
*Originally the game focused only on vocabulary, but now you can also work on your grammar, identify countries of the world, pair famous paintings with their creators, explore chemical symbols and simple maths.
Lord of the Flies
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, tells the tale of a group of school boys stranded on a tropical island, and their descent from order into chaos. The game begins with an overview of the island which is the setting for the book. The game is made up of a series of quizzes about the characters, symbols and meaning of the novel.
The first game challenge is a simple matching game, where objects and quotations must be matched up to the correct character. Ralph is associated with the conch shell, which the children use during meetings, while Jack his rival, is paired with a knife and a mask. Piggy is associated with his glasses, which the children use to light a signal fire in the hopes of being rescued. After the quotes and objects have been properly assigned, the player is rewarded with an insight into the meanings behind the character names.
After each challenge, the player is taken back to the overview of the island, where subtle changes indicate that time has passed, and events have occurred. By the end of the first part of the game, there are tiny tents on the beach where the boys have built shelters, and a pig’s head sits on a stick in the middle of a clearing, after Jacks’ first hunt.
The second challenge is about symbolism. Objects must be matched with what they represent. The conch for example, stands for Law and Order, while the pig’s head stands for Chaos and Evil. Quotations supporting these ideas appear as the game is played. The idea that the pig’s head represents evil references the following quote.
Then he backed away, keeping his face to the skull that lay grinning at the sky.
The game reveals not just the meaning of the book, but also some of the process of uncovering it.
By the end of the second challenge the island ravaged by fire as Jack and his tribe seek to hunt down and murder Ralph, their original leader.
The third challenge is about the nature of the book itself. Is it just an adventure story or is it a fable about good and evil? By the time this quiz is completed, the zoomed out view shows the island has been found by a ship, and the children are being rescued. The final screen features a condensed biography of the author, William Golding.
In the comments section, both teachers and students hint that they would like more levels, more characters, more quotations and generally more depth. The Lord of the Flies game successfully combines knowledge with enjoyment, in a format which could be reused for a lot of other novels.
Tips for Creating an Educational Game
- The information and the game mechanics must sit well together. A literary subject like dissecting a book is not going to work well as a first person shooter. But war history might.
- Squeeze some extra meaning or atmosphere into the basic game mechanics. “You have been captured by the militia”, rather than “Game over”.
- The graphics don’t have to be too flashy. Gorgeous eye candy can lure in new players, but they stay if the game play is good, and the experience is smooth. Good gameplay will lead to a lot more worth of mouth advertising than the thin veneer of shiny graphics over a poorly made game. Especially for online games, simple stylish graphics can be much faster to load than something overly intricate, and it’s no good loosing players at the loading screen. Some games may not require any graphics at all.
- Help it to spread. Include links for people to easily send the game to their friends, or post on the social networking sites. People love to spread fun experiences, but fun, educational experiences, even more so. For charities, it can be an extra way to raise awareness.
This is a great idea. I am interested in this, Thanks.