Why does understanding the architecture of successful entertainment games, as we studied in the previous chapter, matter to us in the construction of serious learning games? It matters because we want to retain the entertainment factor as we either incorporate instructional content into existing game structures or develop a new game to help teach our content. Going either way requires us to understand fully the nature of both so that their integration provides the maximum effectiveness of each.
In this chapter, we take a closer look at the different types of games created primarily for entertainment, classifying them in a continuum ranging from pure games of chance at one extreme to games of pure skill at the other. We look to see which structures most readily accommodate instructional content while also retaining the aspects that make them fun.
We then look at a practical method of integrating games and content by converting instructional content into rules having the same structure as the rules that define entertainment games.
Within the realm of cognitive games, it's useful to divide games into three major categories: games of chance, memory games, and games of skill (see Figure 16.1). Although many games have components of each, most games are primarily of one type. Roulette and bingo, for example, would be considered games of chance. There's very little you can do to affect the outcome. You just wait to see whether you're a winner. In the case of bingo, you might play more cards to facilitate an earlier win, but that doesn't turn bingo into a game of skill.
Perhaps just to spice them up, all types of games can and generally do involve an element of chance. Consider Scrabble or the many card games in which players must work with randomly selected tiles or cards and yet can still apply strategies that greatly improve prospects of winning. A combination of skill and luck determine the outcome, but with luck, anyone can win. An inexperienced player can defeat a highly skilled player, thus making the game interesting to a wider range of players. Generally, however, the greater skill you have, the greater likelihood of successful outcomes especially through repeated play.
Somewhere between memory games and games of chance are games dependent on recognition. This is where we might place Name That Tune and Pictionary. Jeopardy is primarily a knowledge recall game, but a good dose of chance determines whether familiar topics are available to a player.
As we move along the continuum from games of chance to games of skill, the value of strategy increases. SLGs reside where strategies and skills are fundamental to the game. Let's examine each game category in more detail.
Games of pure chance do not provide opportunities for strategic play. Figure 16.2 illustrates content to be learned in games of chance. Before they can play, players need to learn the rules—at least some of them, although there are usually few rules in games of chance. The roll of the dice, the draw of the cards, a spin of the spinner, or the computer's random selection determines the player's fate.
Games of chance have little applicability for serious learning because chance determines outcomes completely, rather than the player's performance. Learning is needed but confined to learning Rules of Play and Outcome Rules, which are particular to the game itself. There is little transferability to performance outside the game.
Figure 16.3 illustrates the added learning required to succeed at memory games. From a learning perspective, memory games can promote drill and practice when failed items are presented to the learner again. Memory games such as You Don't Know Jack and Jeopardy provide frameworks that can be used best for testing, but there are more efficient and effective approaches for instruction (such as the Corrective Feedback Paradigm introduced in Chapter 13) and for testing. Perhaps their greatest asset is wide familiarity with their Rules of Play.
These games can be modified for learning applications, of course. For example, challenges can require learners to perform accounting tasks or to correct grammar. There is no limitation to simple recall, such as naming the authors of famous books or the inventors of various devices as is often associated with such games. Further, the basic structure can be used to select challenges to the learner based on past performance. The tasks presented by a Jeopardy card can actually be generated or switched to make them appropriate for players/learners as they work to complete a full panel (see Figure 17.2 in the next chapter).
Memory games are generally neutral with respect to the type of content to be learned or performed. We call these games extrinsic because the game is unconcerned with the instructional content, looking only for “correct” or “incorrect” outcomes to determine what will happen next. If any instruction is provided, and it often isn't, it is an incidental adjunct to the game structure and not actually part of it. (We'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of extrinsic games in just a moment.)
Games of chance and memory games contrast with strategic games in fundamental ways. Although nonstrategic games can provide a useful environment for drill and practice, they are insufficient and inefficient for helping learners develop skills. Tasks in these games are often selected at random without instructional logic.
Nonstrategic games don't easily incorporate learning multistep tasks or provide authentic contexts to help transfer learning to application in job performance. Further, their repetitive nature can become boring, at least partly because the game structure is (purposely) not related to the performance skills to be learned and applied. In fact, each answer given by learners is usually discrete and unrelated to previous or subsequent answers. The game fails to underscore and clarify relevance of this play to the learner. In contrast, serious learning games focus on strategic game structures. (See Table 16.1.)
Table 16.1 Utility of Nonstrategic and Strategic Games for Learning
Nonstrategic Games | Strategic Games | |
Good For | ||
Drill & practice | ✓ | ✓ |
Sustained engagement | sometimes | ✓ |
Relevance and value | ✓ | |
Learning new skills | ✓ | |
Multistep tasks | ✓ | |
Authentic tasks | ✓ |
Figure 16.4 illustrates components of strategic games—games in which players make decisions to achieve goals and receive rewards. Note that content is brought into the game itself and consists of three major parts:
After learning at least enough rules so that players can take acceptable actions, strategic game players need to learn or develop strategies to reach the greatest reward(s). In many strategic games, players must discover or construct essential strategies through play and trial and error. Hints may be offered, but solutions may not be revealed. This requires learners to focus and think. It also builds motivation and enhances the rewards for learners who succeed by developing successful strategies.
Players may also have to achieve a certain level of performance competency to make “power” options available that, even when available, may not be presented or explained—thus rewarding experimentation and further learning.
Context, challenge, activity, and feedback are the primary components of instructional events. They are also, quite interestingly, the primary components of contemporary electronic games. This isn't coincidental, to be sure, and the CCAF structure is extremely helpful for the development of SLGs (see Table 16.2).
Table 16.2 Parallel Uses of CCAF for Entertainment Games and SLGs
CCAF | Entertainment Games | SLGs |
Context | Use a context or story to set expectations and help players make sense of the Rules of Play | Use context to create relevance to the player/learner |
Challenge | Use challenges to set goals for players to achieve | Use challenges to define problems learners should expect to encounter |
Activities | Use activities to involve players and determine contingent outcomes | Use activities to develop and practice problem-solving skills |
Feedback | Give points and other rewards to represent progress toward goals | Show consequences of player's/learner's decisions and performance |
A primary difference between strategic games and other types of games is that strategic games are built on the content to be learned. The content can be fictitious facts, concepts, processes, and procedures or useful content to be learned and applied on the job. The key point: Most strategic game rules are if/then relationships the player/learner is expected to learn. They provide a natural environment for integration of meaningful and useful content.
As shown in Figure 16.5, a very popular and effective strategic game structure involves level-ups. Multiple levels segment content to avoid overwhelming beginning players/learners. This is akin to advancing learners from working on sets of enabling objectives stepwise up to full performance goals. Players need learn only a minimal set of rules to get started. Games that require learning an extensive set of rules at first are much less appealing, of course, whether instructional or not.
The initial rules to learn are the Rules of Play, which enable the quickest commencement of play. Playing yields the opportunity to learn Outcome Rules, typically by witnessing the consequences of actions.
Once some Rules of Play and Outcome Rules are internalized, players can begin to develop and apply strategies. This approach to instruction and learning is classic constructivism (Jonassen, 1999), in which learners actively discover and then come to appreciate the utility of discovered concepts. Learners apply strategic methods to determine relationships, rather than having them dished out to them in bullet points.
As we've seen, it is helpful for building SLGs to understand that rules determine the quality of a game and the fun as well, but there's more to consider. And this is particularly important to understand when blending games and instruction:
What actually makes many games fun is discovering how to use rules to achieve desired outcomes.
When players develop rule-compliant strategies to achieve specific goals, they feel empowered and rewarded. They feel good about themselves and their learning. They feel eager to demonstrate, even if only to themselves, what they can now do. This is learning at its best.
In a single-player game, it's fun to demonstrate how quickly and efficiently you can meet a challenge. You look to beat your prior performance. In a multi-person game, you hope your opponent has not developed as much understanding or ability as you have. And if your opponent is equal in this learning, you hope your opponent will make mistakes, perhaps because of having practiced less.
From this perspective of game analysis, consider how much of the fun in games is derived from learning and practice. And how much learning and practice contribute to successful game playing. Games and learning clearly go hand in hand.
In many games, fun comes from discovering the Outcome Rules and the power of various strategies. To take advantage of the motivational energy of fun, we need to resist the common temptation of instructional designers to teach rule-based outcomes and strategies explicitly. Keeping in mind that we learn important lessons from making mistakes, we need to let learners make mistakes and witness the consequences of those actions. Trying to head off mistakes by explaining and demonstrating everything in detail prior to letting learners see what they can do, not only reduces the scope of what learners might learn but also reduces the motivational characteristics that games offer. And, it takes the fun right out of the game.
Both Outcome Rules and strategies are exactly the content to be learned when developing skills. Well-designed instructional games minimize the time and effort needed to learn the interface, so play can begin as soon as possible. With an intuitive interface, player/learners can focus primarily on the rules and strategies needed not only to succeed in game play, but also on the real world tasks they apply to. When the context is similar to the context in which learners will actually perform, transfer of learning to performance is increased, the learning experience is said to be authentic, and learners will consider their time to have been well spent.
Let's look at the Sunny Side Grill, this time from the SLG perspective.
This example game is fun and challenging to play. Its success as an SLG derives from making nearly all the Rules of Play and Outcome Rules the very same content learners need to learn to be successful in their jobs. In other words, the Content Rules, Outcome Rules, and Strategies overlap almost fully.
As a short-order chef, most food preparation is relatively simple, consisting mainly of placing items on the grill or in a skillet and transferring properly cooked items to a plate. But timing and sequencing become very challenging when simultaneous orders come in for foods that vary significantly in cook time (see Figure 16.7).
This game is primarily about determining when to start cooking each food item so all items on an order ticket finish cooking at almost exactly the same time. Players/learners drag raw foods onto the grill or skillet in any order and at any time they wish.
What's critical is that cooked items are cooked for the correct amount of time, not too little or too much, and served while all items are still hot. When there are multiple items to be served in the same order, it's important not to let some cooked items get cold (they turn blue if they do) while waiting for other items to finish cooking.
As the player demonstrates ability to prepare orders and serve plates of the correct foods, properly cooked and at appropriate temperatures, the game advances to the next level where challenges increase. Some of the ways challenges increase are:
Challenges at higher levels are both more difficult and more typical of actual situations employees will face. See Figure 16.8 for examples.
A continuous running clock is available as an aid, and relative cook times are available for reference (see Figure 16.9).
Items on the grill continue cooking and customers continue to wait while learners are looking up cook times. As a further incentive to learn relative cook times so it won't be necessary to look them up repeatedly, player/learners find a mess in the kitchen to clean up when returning to the game after each reference to aids. Let's look at the underlying rules.
Note: Plate orders appear one at a time in Level 1.
Although we've only looked at Level 1 of this game in detail so far, note that game rules are the content we'd want learners to learn. Simply presenting this information to learners would not have nearly the same impact or meet the criteria of meaningful, memorable, and motivational learning. In fact, the information is very likely to be forgotten before the new chef got to the kitchen. Playing this game (which you can do at http://bit.ly/1KJiQWw) makes the value of this experience quite clear. I had to return to Level 4 and practice many times before I successfully completed Level 5, but I had no thought of giving up until I'd met the challenge. You'll probably have the same experience and definitely would if you were actually an aspiring short-order cook.
As the game advances through its multiple levels, the challenges become considerably more difficult. Not unlike the classic Lucille Ball skit in which she and best friend Ethel have to individually wrap chocolates and keep up with a speeding conveyor belt in the factory, game players will have more food on the grill finishing up faster and faster. It becomes difficult to serve all food properly cooked and at the right temperature, until you can instantly recall relative cooking times. It took me many tries to meet the final challenge, but the game kept me practicing through all the repetitions necessary for me to have fully mastered the relative cooking times and also to have developed the ability to keep multiple orders in my head while working through them. Unfortunately, there was no opportunity to just gobble up my mistakes, like Lucy and Ethel did.
By the way, the player/learner is exposed to additional rules and needs to develop new and more complex strategies to succeed at the game. Subsequent levels require various combinations of foods on each plate, with multiple plates needing to be ready to be served at the same time. Chefs have to scan all plate orders going to the same table and manage increasing numbers of items cooking at the same time. Some of the more advanced game strategies and content to be learned include the following:
Understanding the components of SLGs informs the process of building them:
Learning content will transform into and constitute most of the Outcome Rules and nearly all of the strategies.
Rules of Play will likely require some special rules devised specifically to create the game framework, such as user interface protocols, conditions for changing levels, and so on. Outcome Rules may also include some game-specific mechanisms, such as performance scoring and rewards.
But the great benefit of this understanding is that it identifies exactly what needs to be done to create an SLG.
Of the three classes of games, games of chance, memory games, and games of skill, the latter, games of skill, take the most advantage of player strategies and relates to the most important purpose e-learning addresses—the development of valued performance skills, including skills in which decision making and strategy determine success. SLGs work with skill-related content to achieve performance objectives.
The components of SLGs are: