With this, you’re probably wondering how does this information tie into foresight? Well, almost all games require careful foresight, overcoming challenges in a game is what players aspire towards and being able to provide the player with the necessary information to plan ahead to achieve their goals.
Keep in mind that this isn’t me telling you how to create games with teaching foresight in mind, this is just some of the observations of a nerdy chap who has played plenty of games that happen to make me think carefully about my decisions and I just wanted to share them with you lovely readers.

First things first, what is foresight and how to grasp it

According to the Cambridge dictionary foresight is described as “the ability to judge correctly what is going to happen in the future and plan your actions based on this knowledge”. (FORESIGHT | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary, 2021).

I always found foresight to be a very tricky thing to teach people how to improve upon, it simply comes down to experience in the particular activity that you’re taking part in, which is gained by taking part in an activity or task over a certain period of time, where you are able to fully absorb the information that is being presented or hidden from you, causing you to plan your next move accordingly.

Ultimately, improving your ability to plan ahead comes down to trial and error, with certain tasks requiring more foresight than others (e.g., Planning a wedding compared to deciding what you want for dinner, totally different ballparks.)

I’m sure that there are many different tutorials that will try to teach you some ways of improving upon your skills in planning ahead, but it is incredibly subjective in regards to the tasks and activities that you’re taking part in, especially if they happen to be complicated in their execution. As the old saying goes, Practise makes perfect.

How can this be adapted in games?

The main things that need to be decided upon when creating a game would be what kind of information does the player need in order to accomplish their goal and how you will present this to the players?
What type of information that the player need is a rather tricky question to give an answer to as it heavily depends on the type of experience that the game is offering the player. This is due to different genres of games requiring the player to keep track of differing amounts of information depending on the genre of the game they’re playing. For example, real time strategy games like those from the Age of Empires series would need to share a much larger amount of information to the player (Things like player and enemy unit locations, their health, what they can build, train and research, the amount of battlefield can be seen, etc.) when compared to a side scrolling platformer like Super Mario Bros (Things like Player, enemy and hazard positions, their current time and score).

After deciding on the What, the next important decision is the How. How exactly are you going to present this information to the player as and when they need it. This answer is also dependent several factors of the game being created, such as the type of gameplay, how deep are the gameplay mechanics and how much of the story (if there even is one) is a factor to the overarching experience.

With these factors in mind, there are a multitude of ways a designer can provide information or components that are necessary for the player to proceed in their game. These include:

• Through the game’s mechanical systems which provide the player who simply plays the game or accomplishes a specific task with new abilities, skills or equipment that they can work towards acquiring in order to achieve their ultimate goal of winning the game (Similar to the progression models found in Role playing or action-adventure games).
• As the player reaches certain parts of the game’s story, they may be presented with information that either supports or hinders their progression through the game. This can be achieved through character dialogue, reading documentation that the player finds during play or through changes caused by events in the story or through the player’s actions (similar to puzzle games or point-and-click adventure games.
• This one is related to the first point on this list with the player interacting with the game’s mechanics, however this point covers the simple act of trial and error, where the player gains information about the challenges that they face through the game by facing them head on and then figuring out the best way to overcome their problems through repetition, learning what to do/not do in order to succeed.

Whilst the information that is provided through events of a game’s story can be entertaining, unless the player knows what’s about to happen, it doesn’t really provide the player with the opportunity to plan ahead for the situations that can occur, due to the linear nature of most stories found within games.

Because of this, most of the situations where the player is given an opportunity to develop their skills in foresight in games tend to occur in the situations where the player is engaging with the game on a mechanical level, using a combination of the information being presented to them through the options available to them, whilst being encouraged to try again or try a different strategy if they are unable to overcome the challenge being presented to them.

Useful Examples I’ve played

I could give a simple list of ideas and suggestions that any budding developer or designer could use in their own projects but I think it would be a much better idea to give a few examples of games that I have personally played that have made me exercise my own skills in foresight in order to achieve success. Whilst I can’t guarantee that these games will be ones you may enjoy (subjective tastes are a factor), I can promise that these games are at least interesting in some way so please give them a look if they pique your interest.

Darkest Dungeon

This game offers a grim take on the turn-based dungeon crawling role playing game realm, not only with a strikingly unique visual aesthetic, but also on a mechanical one. One of the main themes of Darkest Dungeon is making sure that you properly prepare your party with the appropriate supplies, party members, training and equipment before going on adventures into various dangerous territories, each one offering their own monsters and hazards that you need to be mindful of, otherwise your party won’t have much hope of surviving, both physically and mentally.

Monster Hunter: World

The Monster Hunter series offers a slightly different take on the same core idea of preparation that Darkest Dungeon offers, only on a much more personal level since you take direct control of a hunter that is sent of various mission to fight monsters of various shapes and sizes.
Throughout the game, you are encouraged to equip yourself with not only supplies, different types of weapons and armour which grant you effective protection and offensive capabilities against the monsters you may face (e.g., equipping fire resistant armour against a fire breathing monster), but also knowledge gained through studying the physical attributes and behaviours of the monsters you encounter. This is so that you can learn their weak spots, what weapons and armour are most effective against them and most importantly, how they move and fight so that after a few fights with these creatures, you wind up becoming familiar with these daunting creatures and organically learn the best ways to overcome the challenges that are presented to you simply by playing the game (and doing a little bit of homework if you’re so inclined).

An additional layer of foresight is added to the way you customise your character’s visual style as well, as you acquire materials from fighting monsters, you are able to preview the different weapons and armour sets that will be available to you, should you gather the required amounts and types of materials, encouraging players to seek out greater challenges in order to gain the different weapons gear that they may want.

Fallout New Vegas

Although this game may seem rather dated by today’s standards of visual fidelity, it certainly makes up for it with some of the best world building and character progression systems I’ve ever seen. This is reinforced by the fact that in the game you are granted full control over the ways you can create your character, both thematically in regards to where you stand in the game’s overarching story and interactions with the people you meet within the Mojave Desert and also in gameplay with an in-depth character progression system.

This system encourages players to think about how they want to build their character through a perks system that offers players a horizontal means of character progression, giving them access to a unique set of skills and powers depending on if the player reaches amounts of skill points, allowing for each player to create unique experiences by letting them think outside of the box when approaching any problems that they may encounter.

E.g., The Cowboy skill makes it so that you deal more damage with certain weapons if you have a high enough skill with Guns and Melee or the Terrifying Presence perk grants you the ability to intimidate people through dialogue if your Speech Skill is high enough, just to show a couple of examples of the ways you can build your character how you want to play.

Dota 2

This, along with other games that follow a similar style of play (such as League of Legends or Smite) by having separate teams of players take control of unique characters as they work together to be the first team to destroy the enemy base. These types of games offer a wide selection of playable characters with their own strengths and weaknesses as well as items that allow players to further augment their own abilities or provide some means of dealing with their opponent’s characters in some way or another, depending on what needs to be accomplished.

These games encourage players to carefully think about their choices both before and during a game since every character has advantages and disadvantages when facing each other and the items that you can purchase can help to either alleviate any potential dangers of your opponents or improve your characters innate strengths and weaknesses, depending on the choices that you and your allies make. In Dota 2 a good example would be buying an item that prevents your opponent from attacking for a short period of time or buying an item that immediately heals all of your nearby allies in the middle of a fight, just to name a few.

Overall, foresight comes down to having the opportunity to think about what you should do within any possible situation you may be faced with and games are no stranger to encouraging this style of thinking within their players. It’s important as a game maker to recognise what kind of information you need to provide your players, based on the game you’re making and giving them the necessary means of carrying out their plans in order to succeed in completing the challenges you face them with.

The post Observing how games teach players to think and plan ahead first appeared on Ludogogy.

Hopefully this article should give you a cursory glance into what systems are and highlight what to consider should you look into utilising games as a tool for learning about systems of any kind.

What is a system?

It can be deceptively tricky to provide a straightforward answer to a definition of what a system is, but fear not; as described in the Field Guide to Consulting and Organizational Development, systems are an organised collection of parts (or subsystems) that are highly integrated to accomplish an overall goal. (Authenticity Consulting LLC, 2005)

The main components that are necessary in order to classify virtually every system you can find are:

• Inputs, which are resources or facilities used by the processes to complete tasks and achieve goals of the system
• Processes or Activities that utilise the inputs in order to create the tangible results or…
• Outputs, which are the end goal of the system and can include the creation of specific products or
  complete specific tasks.

Basically, it is a bunch of things, people or subsystems, each with their own tasks, functions or processes which produce specific results that ultimately come together in order to accomplish or create things that would either take way too long to complete if carried out individually or would be impossible to complete without the extra assistance they would have access to whilst being part of a much larger system.

When laid out like this, you might notice that virtually anything that you do can be categorised as being part of a system and figuring out how these systems work and getting the individual parts to work together or combining them in a particular way in order to achieve the goal that you want is the basic idea of what systems learning is.

I feel that the best phrase to sum this up would be “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” This is especially true if you think of tasks such as baking a cake or building an engine as individually, each of their ingredients or components don’t do much, but when you carry out tasks to combine them in a specific way, you end up with things far greater than when you first started (In this case, an edible cake or a working engine for a vehicle). (Lumen Learning, 2017)

Different types of systems

Now that the basics are covered, one of the more interesting things that I wanted to discuss about systems as a concept is that there are a variety of different types of systems which are comprised of different actions or tasks to achieve certain results. Whilst the list of the many different kinds of systems the we interact with throughout life is far too long to show in this article, I feel that it is important to touch upon a much smaller and easier to remember way of categorising systems.

This set includes; Simple systems where there is only one single path to a single result (e.g., pressing a button or riding a bicycle), Complicated systems where there are multiple paths to the same answer (e.g., Chopping wood or cooking a recipe) and Complex systems which feature multiple paths to multiple answers (e.g., Assembling a football team or examining human social hierarchies).(Feld, 2019)

It is important to figure out which of the aforementioned categories the system you’re working with belongs to as it will make the development process much easier for you in the long run, especially if you’re looking to develop a product that you intend to use to teach people. This is where games can offer a unique opportunity in teaching people how to think about systems learning.

Games as systems and how they can be used for systems learning.

So, what does thinking with a systems-oriented mindset have to do with creating games? Well, everything, if we’re being honest here. Games (especially video games) fall into a unique category of adaptive complex systems with the added benefit of the different components within the game’s system being entirely customisable, in regards to the content found within the game being developed, and how it behaves based upon its interaction with its userbase.

This includes everything from the surface level; sounds, art and animations, to the calculations, processes and behaviours that occur under the surface; which form the core experiences for the user. As such, you have the potential to create games that can simulate virtually any system you wish, provided you have the firm understanding of the system you want to simulate and have the capability and the resources to translate it into a game setting.

Because of this innate flexibility in how you can structure games as a system, it would be much easier to answer the question of ‘how do you use games to teach people about systems learning?’ by simply saying ‘Just make games…’.

Whilst true on its own, based on games being customisable systems, it doesn’t really give a satisfying answer. It misses out on highlighting the true potential of being able to replicate any kind of system and displaying it in a way that gives the creator full control over the desired player experience.  It also offers  the chance to learn about specific systems through a more interactive, customisable, potentially safer (depending on the system you’re simulating) and playful way.

I feel I have some potential for punditry on the topic of games as a learning tool as I’ve had the opportunity to work as a designer within a serious games company, helping to develop a testing tool for doctors specialising in Neonatal resuscitation, with scenarios featuring different parameters such as patient conditions, time limit and equipment available to the user. In addition to testing the capabilities of the users taking the tests, the product also gathered analytics on their performance so that their supervisors could figure out what they are doing well and which areas they needed to improve. (Here’s the product in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aDzjJTWUsc)

Things to keep in mind

Some of the things that you should try asking yourself or your team when looking to create a game that simulates a particular system include but are not limited to:

• What system do you wish to simulate?
• What type of system do you want to replicate or portray in your game? (Simple, Complex or
  Complicated)
• Do you want to simulate the whole system or only part of it? (Being a manager or a team
  member of a sports team)
• What type of product are you looking to create? (A testing tool, a teaching tool or a game
  with educational and/or entertaining aspects.)
• Who is your target audience? (Children, teenagers, adults, novices or experts of a particular
  field etc.)
• What type of game do you want to create to best represent your system? (Not just genre,
  I’m also referring to creating tabletop or card games as well, depending on your budget,
  audience and goals)

These questions should be taken simply as things to consider, should you not be too sure on how to
proceed or if you’re on the right track. Finally, don’t worry too much about getting your product
right in the first draft, that’s what testing is for and by far the most important thing to remember
whilst making a game is to have fun with it.

Hopefully this wall of text proves useful for you and your system oriented endeavours. Thanks for
reading, hope you’re all staying safe and well and here’s to a new year of interesting things to do!

The post Learning about systems using games. first appeared on Ludogogy.

Now it’s all well and good to sing the praises of these games but we need to first understand what Wargaming is all about before we dive into who uses them and why they’re popular with different audiences.

What is Wargaming and where did it come from?

One of the simplest descriptions of Wargames comes from Decision Games; which says “a wargame is a model of a military situation which players can control” (Decision Games, 2020). Expanding on this further, it has the players of the game take on a commanding role within a military scenario and has to plan their strategies and make decisions based on their current circumstances within the given scenario in order to achieve victory against their opponent.

Humans have been playing games that simulate the idea of military strategy with game pieces representing their forces for a very long time, with games such as Go and Chess being usually the first games that spring to mind when someone typically thinks about strategy games.

However, according to the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society (HMGS), we know that most of the Wargames that would see use within a military setting evolved from these aforementioned games. The first attempt of a militarised Wargame being introduced in 1811 by the Prussian Baron von Reisswitz which used a table set to a specific scale, filled with sculpting sand, modular tiles, rulers and dividers to regulate movement and porcelain unit blocks.

Although it was well received by the Prussian and Russian aristocracy, Peterson(2012) highlights that military officers didn’t adopt it as a strategic tool due to the original version of the game presented to the royal family was far too expensive to reproduce commercially and due to the Baron being preoccupied with the ongoing Napoleonic wars, the rules and mechanics of the game weren’t refined to function in a reliable manner that best represented the situations that could be found within military skirmishes.

Further Developments in Wargaming

This was up until 1824 where his son George Heinrich Rudolf Johan von Reisswitz took it upon himself to develop the game further into a more reliable and structured game that would better simulate the experience of leading an army.

He would reintroduce this game as Anleitung zur Darstelling militarische manuver mit dem apparat des Kriegsspiels (Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame). Along with this new name, there were some major changes that would help to improve the structure of the game as well as better quantify the circumstances that may occur during military skirmishes.

These changes included; the introduction of game pieces that represented units of troops which could take a set amount of damage, their actions are represented by dice rolls and can’t be moved by the players themselves, Topologic maps that featured real locations and more natural terrain and finally the introduction of an umpire, an impartial and experienced military officer who interprets and carries out the orders of the players by carrying out the dice rolls and managing the positions of the players troops. (Von Reisswitz, 1824)

After introducing this revised version of his father’s game to the King and Generals, it was very well received, especially from General Von Müffling who declared “this is no ordinary sort of game, this is schooling for war. I must and will recommend It most warmly to the army”. As a result, the king ordered this game to be mass produced and distributed to every regiment in the army. (2012)

This fun little relic of a game is still being used today, thanks to the translation work of Bill Leeson, so definitely look into him if you’re interested in how this game is being used today.

Kriegspiel – translated by Bill Leeson is available from Amazon

Why is it used by the military?

Now that the history lesson is out of the way, there are many reasons that military personnel would make use of wargames in the midst of training. Here are just a few that spring to mind;

• By far the most obvious and important reasons to utilise Wargames during military training would be that they are cheap to purchase or develop when compared to purchasing the necessary training equipment and hiring training staff to carry out in person training exercises.
• Depending on the game, sessions can be very time efficient, especially when you need to restart or create a new scenario. This allows for more time for training when compared to having to restart a live action training session where you have to manage multiple people and reset or replace pieces of equipment after each session which can be time consuming and more difficult to manage than pieces of a game (much less irritative too which is a plus).
• Having the capability to be easily customise the scenarios that are presented to your players is a boon, especially if you want to test how someone handles situations within certain parameters (Having multiple players serving as allies or enemies, having fewer resources or troops than usual, introducing a time limit, etc.).
• Having a specified set of rules and objectives that the players have to follow makes it easy for supervisors and trainers to keep track of any analytics based on their performance and choices as they play, especially when combined with the customisable parameters from the previous point.
• Finally, conducting training through the use of Wargames offers a safe and controlled environment where mistakes can be made without fear of injury of anyone involved. (This is especially true when it compares to the risks posed to trainees during live fire exercises)

What’s the civilian appeal?

Although most Wargames are made with the intent of being used to assist with training military personnel, there is a huge market within the civilian market for these types of games. Being a professional civilian and having grown up playing a wide array of games, I can definitely think of some reasons for why these games would be appealing to the average joe.
Firstly, depending on the game’s historical setting, they can offer the players the opportunity to learn more about the history behind the events that are being represented within the game. This leads to the next point which is these games allow the opportunity to roleplay as a commanding officer within the game world, especially if the setting is a favourite of the players. Another reason could be that the players enjoy the intellectual stimulation that these games can offer. The last appealing aspect of these games is the chance to engage in some friendly competition with friends and family, especially if the setting is a one that the players are familiar with.

How can businesses benefit from these games?

If utilised correctly, Wargaming could be beneficial to be used with the training of teams within the business world. Aside from points that are fairly similar to why these games are popular with the civilian audience (Teambuilding exercises, friendly competition etc.), the main thing that must be considered when utilising these games would be the type of training you wish to support and choosing the right type of games to support that kind of experience you wish to provide to your employees.

The diagram below does show that Wargaming does support the training of decision-making skills, it is important to note that there are many different forms of decision making skills, with the main split being between improving the ability to make more informed decisions based on the knowledge and education of your workforce or improving the capacity to make choices based on analysed data gathered through research.

Although it is rather complicated at a glance, this diagram is just a quick glimpse into the potential training possibilities that can be offered to businesses if they implement them in a sensible way that benefits their work force.

To wrap everything up, Wargaming is a very unique beast within the gaming world that is enjoyed for reasons that change depending on the audience that plays them, be it a tool for training the commanding skills of military personnel, a potential means of testing and training the decision making capabilities of the workforce of commercial businesses, or as an intellectually entertaining way to kill some time with friends and family.

For lack of a better phrase, there’s something here for everyone!

The post Focus on… Wargaming and Wargames first appeared on Ludogogy.

I don’t really think I’ve ever had the chance to properly document the reasons why I have spent a vast majority of my life working towards being a games designer and why games matter to me, and  to have the chance to actually share this with an audience of lovely readers is a pretty cool experience. With that being said, I hope you find it an enlightening or at the very least entertaining read into my personal history with games.

It all started with games…

Some of the earliest of memories that I can remember involving games would be playing games such as Wario Land, Tetris and Pokemon on the family Game Boy and Saturn Bomberman and the Lost Vikings 2 on the Sega Saturn. Additionally, me and my siblings would also take over the family PC to enjoy games such as Age of Empires, Theme Park World, The Sims, Dungeon Keeper and Black and White. Steadily moving onto the first 2 Playstation consoles with game series including Crash Bandicoot, Ape Escape, Klonoa and Dark Cloud to past the time before getting my hands on the Nintendo Gamecube, thanks to my friend showing me Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Mario Sunshine and the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

I eventually got my hands on a Nintendo Wii to share with the family along with an Xbox 360 so that I could enjoy some of the latest titles the gaming world had to offer, introducing me to the world of online gaming thanks to Call of Duty and Halo game series on the Xbox as well as discovering the realm of MMORPG’s with World of Warcraft on the PC.

I could be here all day adding to my unreasonably long back catalogue of games but I’ll just leave you with the knowledge that I’ve currently got a PS4, a 3DS,  a large library of PC games on my Steam library and a handful on my phone, not to mention a constantly evolving collection of Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic the Gathering cards and board games. If you name a game, chances are I’ve played it or heard of it in one way or another, but why is this important to getting into the mind of this rather eclectic young man?

Well random rhetorical question asker, playing games was both my hobby and my coping mechanism whilst growing up with high-functioning autism and having little to no interest in conventional activities that other kids my age were taking part in such as music, art or sports and always gave me something to use in order to connect with other people that I interacted with.

This led to me managing to make like-minded friends who introduced me to other forms of media such as TV shows, cartoons and movies as well as helping me break out of my comfort zone and try new interesting physical activities such as Go-karting, Bowling and Laser-tag whilst also introducing me to games that I may not have heard of, thus feeding my hobby even more!

Forming my career path

I think it’s safe to say that I am rather fond of games and whilst brushing up my grades at college, I discovered that they offered a Games Development course I leapt at the opportunity and had an enlightening 3 years learning the basics of art, programming and designing games, with the opportunity of flying to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show (aside from the jet lag from a 12 hour flight…it was amazing!). This didn’t stop there, with me spending the next 4 years studying Games Design and Development at the University of Greenwich, primarily focusing on the design side of things including; Sound, User Experience and Interface Design.

I also learned more about Serious Games which completely changed my preconceptions on what games could achieve in the educational, medical and rehabilitation sectors and provides a vastly different experience that found along the likes of conventional educational games such as Reader Rabbit or Mavis Beacon.

In a nutshell, serious games are products that are tailor made to solve problems that the client and designers wishes to solve within an interactive and entertaining way. The goal of these games could range from a broad audience, providing adjustable motion-controlled minigames intent on assisting in the training of patients with low motor skills to games that are intended for a very specific purpose, like a game that tests the knowledge of doctors who specialise in prenatal resuscitation.

During my 3rd year, I managed to acquire a work placement in Milan, Italy with the serious games company Imaginary SRL and work on these rather specific examples as a consultant games designer. To say that this trip was an enlightening experience would be a gross understatement, especially since it was the first time that I’d moved away from my family home and country (go big or go home eh?), I managed to learn conversational Italian despite never learning the language before and it was the first taste of working within the games industry and I can safely say that I want be involved with more of these kinds of projects, serious games or otherwise.

How Games Design has shaped who I am

I firmly believe that I don’t think that I would be the person that I am today if I hadn’t taken the extra step to learning more about how games are designed and developed. This is most likely due to me believing that there is no entirely useless knowledge as being a game designer is all about creating experiences of all kinds, meaning that it is important to be at least familiar with almost all things that can be found or experienced within reality, whilst also keeping an open mind to trying new things and ideas I may not have originally come up with myself (especially in the world of food…why didn’t anyone tell me tasting things tasted so good?).

This open-mindedness has also been useful when I’ve had to work with teams as I although am comfortable with making decisions and directing people, I’m more than happy to concede the leadership role for someone who is more knowledgeable or competent than I am while I take on more of a supportive role within the team. I also make it a point to make sure that everyone on the team has some form of input in the current task (inclusion is important after all).

Outside of my professional setting, having an open minded approach has actually improved my ability to socialise and connect with people in both social and professional settings by actually focusing my attention to the interests of the people I’m talking to and then leading the flow of the conversation to those interests or to subjects that are similar to them (very handy if you’re not 100% sure about what to talk about with someone).

All in all, contrary to the common stereotype of gamers not being social, I’d like to think that it’s thanks to games that I’m the outgoing, albeit slightly cheeky social butterfly that I am today who’s always on the lookout for new and interesting experiences.

I think I’ll finish up here but thanks for reading this rather verbal barrage about my character origins and if you ever want to chat, I’m always about on Linkedin or other avenues of communication (I’m sure Ludogogy has my email tucked away somewhere), might even break the ice with a game of Magic if you fancy it.

But for now, I’ll leave you with both a fun picture I took at an MC Escher exhibition I found in Milan as well as a quote from Lorewalker Cho, a wise old Panda from World of Warcraft that I think captures how I try to view life:

“Eyes open, always be learning”.

The post Why game design matters to me – Part II first appeared on Ludogogy.

I think that the best way to start this particular article is to introduce myself, I’m Thomas Ackland, a budding games designer who strives to produce ‘non-serious’  and serious games that are both entertaining and as accessible by as many players as possible.

This appreciation for games was started by, no surprises here, a lifetime of playing a wide range of games from an early age and having the opportunity to begin learning about games design and development at college, I haven’t looked back since.

Whilst my list of played games is far too long to share without being boring and irrelevant to the point I want to make; I’ve decided to share a couple of games with you that inspired me from both a gameplay/level design and a character/narrative perspective.

Whilst these might not objectively be the best games available (and the games you make may require a different approach to their design), I hope you’ll find this interesting and informative enough to also give these games and design ideas a look for yourself.

Gameplay/Level Design

One of the many problems that game designers often struggle with is how to best teach a player how to play their games. Before the introduction of game design rules that we use now, many games were treated like traditional games, such as football or solitaire where you could teach someone by telling them the rules, showing gameplay or they’ll learn over time as they play.

Whilst there isn’t anything inherently wrong with this approach, the unique thing about computer games is that there are ways that you can teach a player as they play. Without the necessity to use; jarring tutorials, a bunch of notifications or voice lines that you have to read or listen to or a still image showing all of the game’s controls.

The first game series I wish to mention that taught me the rather valuable lesson that if the game levels are designed well, the player can learn about the nitty-gritty of the game just by playing through the levels is the Megaman series developed by Capcom (1987).

The different levels of the Megaman game series are all designed in a way that allows the player to experience the game’s mechanics through play, without the need for the aforementioned information providers. Essentially emulating the “show, don’t tell” writing technique(THE HISTORY OF “SHOW, DON’T TELL”, 2016) in a way that shows the user how the game mechanics work within a controlled environment through gameplay and player experimentation, without implicitly telling them through dialogue or text.

After the mechanic is introduced to the player, they are presented with a corresponding challenge that tests them on their knowledge of the mechanic in order for them to proceed through the level. I feel that this is a more engaging and fun way of teaching and testing the player simply through an effective use of level design.

Character/Narrative Design

The argument of whether plot driven stories or character driven stories are better than one another is a very divisive topic among authors and audiences alike. In the context of games, I feel that creating characters that I enjoy seeing and playing as, are very important to get right, especially if I’m going to be exposed to them for a large duration of my play time. With this being said, having a concrete plot that keeps the game’s story moving nicely can’t be neglected.
Overall, it’s important to strike a balance between having believable, fascinating characters and a riveting plot for the characters to interact with. You can’t really have one without the other in this context. (Weiland, 2010)

The next game I want to share that has a story that achieves a good balance between an intriguing plot as well as having memorable characters to both play as and interact with is Psychonauts by Double Fine (2005). The premise is you are a young man named Raz, who enrols into a summer camp for young psychics (people with the ability to levitate, set things on fire with their minds, that sort of thing) and works with an organisation called the Psychonauts to unravel a mystery of the camp-goers going missing. This is achieved by exploring the summer camp in the physical world and literally going into and exploring the mental landscapes of various quirky individuals in order to learn more psychic powers and acquire more leads in order to get to the bottom of the mystery.

This game manages to work with both an engaging plot that is moved along by a large cast of interesting characters with the added benefit of having the mental landscapes you explore reflecting the character themselves, (an army soldier having a boot camp, a disco girl having a party etc.) adding an extra level of depth to the characters you interact with in the story.

My Serious Games Experience

While it’s nice to share some of the interesting commercial games that inspired me to pursue games design as a career, my time learning about games design lead me to the existence of Serious Games and I was lucky enough to be properly introduced to this format of games through a work placement with the lovely people at Imaginary SRL in Milan, Italy.

During my 1-year placement, I worked as a consultant games designer on a major training program that simulated the experience of working as a neonatal resuscitation specialist. The intention of the product was to be used by neonatal doctors in Singapore in order to test their knowledge of scenarios which were created to the client’s specifications.

I fulfilled several roles including; managing the games design documentation, communicating with the clients in Singapore, drafting designs from the scenario information provided by the clients and QA testing the product throughout its development.

Overall, learning about games design has provided me with a wide range of possibilities that I never expected to experience such as; learning another language, living independently in another country and showing me a form of games design and development which allows me to provide people with games that accomplish more than entertaining their users and I can’t wait to see what new discoveries emerge in the world of games design, serious or otherwise.

The post Why Games Design matters to me – Part I first appeared on Ludogogy.

What is Neurodiversity?

Neurodiversity or being neurodivergent is a term that was created to describe the social movement towards having different neurological conditions being accepted and respected within society. Nick Walker highlights that the Neurodiversity Paradigm is to be understood to be a form of human diversity that shares the same social dynamics of other forms of diversity (such as power and oppression) and seeks to reduce cultural prejudices and oppression by highlighting that accepting diversity is a great source of creative potential (What is Neurodiversity?, 2020).

The TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) version is that everyone’s minds work differently from one another and that is something that should be widely accepted as a biological fact part of what makes someone unique.

Different types of Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity is a rather broad term which categorises many different neurological conditions that would cause someone’s neurocognitive functions to be different from those who’re considered neurotypical (Someone that society deems to have normal cognitive functions). Some of the conditions that fall under the Neurodiverse category include; Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Dyscalculia and Tourette Syndrome.

It is important to note that psychotherapists who integrate this paradigm in their work aren’t attempting to “cure” any of these aforementioned conditions, but rather work with people to find ways of accepting their condition provide support for those who learn differently and help them overcome any oppression that they may’ve experienced in their life.

Dr. Nick Walker has shared a nice post on his website which provides useful terms and definitions around this subject so check that out if you can. (Walker, 2014)

Extra steps towards Neurodiverse design

Whilst the appropriate design decisions really depend on the product that you’re working on, it is important to take into account some choices that would be beneficial to a neurodivergent audience.
The first few steps that I’m going to share are provided by the British Dyslexia Association and covers
most of the basic design choices that I feel are necessary to cover the bare minimum requirements
for most neurodivergent users without being too taxing or difficult to implement. (British Dyslexia
Association, 2020)

• Make sure that you’re using sans serif font such as Arial, Comic Sans, Verdana, Tahoma or
  OpenDyslexic. These make the text appear less crowded and easier to read.
• Stick to a font size around 12-14 or an equivalent (1-1.2em or 19-19px) as a larger font size is
  easier to read.
• Avoid underlining and italics as this may look too crowded for some readers, use bold text
  for emphasis instead.
• Ensure that headings are at least 20% larger than your normal text and ensure that any
  hyperlinks that you use look different from your headings and normal text.
• Use single colour backgrounds and avoid using complex or distracting background patterns
  or pictures.
• Use dark coloured text on a light background, ensuring that the background isn’t white as
  this would create a contrast that is harsh on the eyes.
• Avoid using green or red/pink as the most common form of colour-blindness is red-green or
  Deuteranopia.

In addition to these steps, Kay Sargent shares their insight on WorkDesign Magazine on designing
with Neurodiversity and Inclusion in mind and points out some of the different sensitivities within
the different neurodivergent conditions which is well worth the read, especially as it includes
information including how some Neurodiverse people are particularly sensitive to sensory inputs
such as sounds and sight. (Sargent, 2020) With this in mind, it would make the design decision of
having user inputs provide visual and auditory feedback such as sound playing and colours changing
when the user presses a button or an option in a menu be beneficial to a neurodiverse user.

I hope that this helps you get in the right mindset for approaching design that is beneficial to a
Neurodiverse audience and to finish off I wanted to share a particularly interesting conference paper
which shares a framework for involving Neurodiverse children in within the design process of new
technology, definitely an interesting read! (Benton et al., 2014)

The post Thinking about Design with Neurodiversity in Mind first appeared on Ludogogy.

As Sherrelle Walker explains, this is due to our brains being structured in a way that causes us to seek out coherent narrative structure in the stories that we hear and tell, then using this structure to absorb any information within the story and then connect it with any of our own personal experiences.(Juliani, 2014)

This is especially true with children with the Writer’s Bureau (2009) and the British Council with the BBC (2016) highlighting some of the benefits of telling stories throughout their growth which include;

• Increased confidence, self-esteem and understanding of empathy.
• Improved listening skills and verbal proficiency.
• Learning about various concepts like shapes, colours and objects.
• Learning about tasks and activities such as taking care of animals or preparing a meal.
• Discovering diverse cultures and people from around the world.
• Understanding emotions and how to cope with certain feelings.
• Offering a method of relaxation by enjoying stories during their downtime.
• Improving the development of their imagination.

Although there are many benefits to utilising stories within education, there are several challenges that come with the territory. Most of these challenges come from the stories that you’re hoping to use, the implementation of the story and its relevance to the subject being taught.

Mcnett provides a useful table of learning objectives that can be referred to in order to test the viability of a story that is intended to be used within an educational setting. They also point out that a story that doesn’t accomplish any of the objectives in the table doesn’t necessarily rule out the story being beneficial to the situation it’s used in, rather it runs the risk of being considered irrelevant to the current situation and a waste of time.

Although it is important to find stories that are relevant to subject matter that you’re hoping to tackle, if you don’t present the story in a way that captivates the audience and makes them want to listen, then you’re just wasting time and you might as well just hand your listeners a textbook about the subject they’re being taught.

Luckily you don’t need to be an actor to tell a convincing story and the British Council has a handful of techniques and skills that can be practised in order to improve your approach of storytelling, such as;

• Adapting the story in your own way
• Rehearse the story so that it feels natural when telling it.
• Vary the volume, pitch and tempo of your voice to exaggerate expression and to differentiate between you narrating and playing a character.
• Utilise body language, including your hands and face.
• Engage with the audience through eye-contact and looking at your audience as you speak.
• Utilise silence and pauses for dramatic effect where necessary.
• Remember to pace yourself to match the mood of the story.

(British Council and BBC, 2016)

This is only really scratching the surface of using stories as a teaching tool but hopefully this serves as a decent start to anyone who may be interested in learning more about a way of teaching that has been a long-standing yet effective method throughout human history.

The post Making an impact with Educational Stories first appeared on Ludogogy.

What is teamwork?

Firstly, teamwork is usually defined as “cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of
persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.”(Dictionary.com LLC, 2020)
Seems like a pretty simple way to understand what teamwork is as a term that highlights what it
says on the tin. However, it is important to realise that teamwork isn’t exclusively used by teams and
can emerge through random acts of cooperation between people who may be outside of your own
team.

This leads to an intriguing situation where it is essential for teams to have effective teamwork to
thrive but you don’t necessarily need a team to display good teamwork. One such way of viewing
the idea of good teamwork would be as The Happy Manager describes as a set of behaviours and
attitudes that encourage the desire to succeed through a sense of unity and enthusiasm in sharing
common interests and responsibilities in order to complete the tasks. (The Happy Manager, 2020)
This leads to the more robust and flexible definition of teamwork being “when a group of people
work together cohesively, towards a common goal, creating a positive working atmosphere, and
supporting each other to combine individual strengths to enhance team performance.”(The Happy
Manager, 2020) A bit longer than the standard dictionary definition, but is more useful for our
purposes of figuring out how to best design games that feature teamwork.

Types of cooperation

I found that one of the most important questions that I feel needs to be asked when designing a
game around teamwork is “What kind of reliance on cooperation do I want to put onto the players?”
This question came from when I was perusing my library of team-based games to determine any
differences between them, after a while I noticed that they tend to fall into 2 categories, games that
force cooperation or games that incentivise cooperation.

Forced cooperation games are ones that are rather rigid and go all in with the idea that the players
need to work together in order to achieve success, regardless of their skill. This is typically due to
these games utilising functions which require the assistance of other players to be accomplished.
Whilst these games are satisfying and certainly give the feeling of working as a team to accomplish a
shared goal, it can lead to frustration through the simple act of people on your team not cooperating
with you, ultimately leading to nothing getting done.

One of the main examples of a game that falls into this category would be the Left 4 Dead game
series where if you’re incapacitated by the enemies of the game, you need the assistance of your
fellow survivors in order to get back on your feet or to stop whatever’s attacking you at the time.
Left 4 dead (Valve 2008): Being incapacitated, needing the help of your allies to get back up.

Games that incentivise cooperation are more relaxed in the sense that the tasks within the game are
accomplishable on your own if you’re skilled enough, but are far easier or offer more rewards when
you work with your teammates to complete them. Although this is a far more flexible approach than
the previous category, it may lead to players acting selfishly should they feel that their teammates
aren’t playing well enough or against their wishes.

One example of this would be the Counter Strike game series which has two teams facing off against
each other, one team needing to plant and defend a bomb at a specific location and the other team
needs to stop them from achieving this, all while trying to eliminate each other. These tasks are
accomplishable by a single player, it is much easier if you work alongside your teammates to get the
job done.

Counter Strike Global Offensive (Valve 2012): Counter-terrorists preparing for the upcoming mission.
Interestingly the aforementioned cooperation categories are by no means exclusive to one another
as there are some games that have managed to combine elements between these two categories to
make some interesting experiences to provide players with the best of both worlds. Games such as
League of Legends have two teams of 5 players choose from a wide selection of characters with their
own strengths and weaknesses to push through and destroy the enemy base whilst defending your
own.

These games combine the elements of these two categories in a way where the things that the
player is able to accomplish within a match is determined by many different factors including;

• The character they have chosen, with some characters being able to accomplish tasks that
  others cannot.
• The performance of the players, their allies and their opponents, with strong players being
  able to easily assist weaker players who are being overwhelmed by their enemies, making
  their weaker allies stronger and able to contribute more to the current match.
• Completing certain objectives throughout the map which has difficulty ranging from being
  able to be fought alone, to needing the help of your teammates to succeed.
  League of Legends (Riot Games 2009): Blue team members fighting off red team members after
  destroying a tower.

Although it can be beneficial to develop a game that combines the best of both of the
aforementioned categories, it also has the risk of combining the weaknesses as well, with
despondent teammates able to actively sabotage your team’s efforts by either not assisting with
completing objectives or ‘feeding’ the enemy through deliberately letting them kill the player,
making the enemy stronger to the detriment of their own team.

Whilst this is more of a personal musing that has been acquired through extensive playtime and
observing games being played at both a casual and professional level, I feel that there is something
of value to be shared from thinking about team-based games in this way.

Things to keep in mind for designers

This section is a set of take-away thoughts that may be helpful to you if you wish to develop games
which have players utilise teamwork.

Firstly, this is more of a reiteration on what was discussed in the previous section but I feel it’s
important to reinforce it here. The main thing that you must ask yourself is “What kind of reliance on
cooperation do I want to put onto the players?” This just makes it easier to decide on how much
freedom you wish to provide the players of your game through the mechanics that they interact
with within the game.

Next, depending on how you answer the previous question, allowing players to choose the types of
roles that they wish to fulfil as they play is very important as this will allow players to play to their
strengths whilst giving them the opportunity to improve their skills at a role they may not be
comfortable with. A good example of a game that does this would be League of Legends which
categorises their playable characters into a variety of roles and they have a match making system
which allows players to choose the role they wish to play in the upcoming match. All in all, it’s nice
to give players agency and freedom to play how they want to.

Lastly, you need to give your players the ability to quickly and effectively communicate with their
teammates. Seems simple enough, but many games still rely on either a typing text system which is
antiquated and forces the player to stop what they’re doing in order to type out their message,
leaving them vulnerable, or a voice chat system, which is reliant on the players having either the
necessary equipment or the desire to talk to people, which isn’t always present. However, many
games utilise a ping system which provides a quick and simple message or notification to
teammates, depending on the type of ping used.

The best example of a ping and callout system used in games would be the one in Apex Legends,
which offers players a wide selection of context sensitive callouts which depend on the player’s
actions and condition (such as “I’m reloading” or “I’m getting shot at”) and notifications (such as
“Someone’s been here”, or “I’m defending this area”) that depend on what the player is looking at
and are quickly accessible to the player without breaking their flow of gameplay.

Finally I wanted to share a neat little article by Leszek Gorniak on Gamasutra which covers some very
important topics in setting the foundations of designing games as a team which utilises creating a
‘Design Compass’ which is something that helps a team to share the same idea for the design of the
current project and also utilising a method they call ‘Question-Driven Design’(2019) which has you
focus on asking questions when faced with design problems which helps to easily break down the
problem that you’re facing in a more manageable way.

Definitely an interesting read if you want to have a slightly more diplomatic approach to solving
problems with fellow designers and developers.

All in all, teamwork is a very interesting beast that exists regardless of being in a team and when
utilised effectively, great things can be accomplished. So, get out there and practise good teamwork!

The post Musings on Developing Games Featuring Teamwork first appeared on Ludogogy.

The gamification of human activity is by no means a new idea and from a young age, humans have been developing their skills and learning through playful activities including games, which have a unique ability to get players so involved in the gameplay that they enter a unique state of ‘flow’ as they carry out engaging activities within the game.

This has led to the creation of games which aim not only to provide player experiences that are entertaining and engaging, but also try to provide a means of teaching the player or allowing them to hone their skills within certain situations. (E.g. Games which are focused around Mathematics or practising a particular medical procedure.)

Whilst the main obstacle that most educational games will face is creating an engaging experience that will encourage the intended users to keep playing the game, there are other problems that educational institutions face includes:

• Players being afraid of being labelled a gamer by their peers.
• Teachers being unable to properly benefit from these games due to either their inability to properly utilise games within a classroom setting or their attitudes towards games don’t support their use as a learning tool.
• The cost of acquiring the necessary technology and equipment to support the use of educational games and the hiring of specialised staff to maintain and repair the equipment.

The European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) has categorised the challenges that these games face into 3 dimensions(Fernández-Manjón et al., 2015) that each pose unique challenges along with the lines of work need to improve the effectiveness of the implementation of these games within an educational setting.

The Socio-cultural Dimension revolves around the negative image that society has applied to videogames due to the association of multiple cases involving violence, sexism and game addiction. There is also the cultural mindset of school being a place for “serious” activities which excludes playing games and makes including game-based activities to be difficult to include within certain classes.

The main challenges that must be overcome in order to reduce the overall social rejection of games being used as an educational tool are;

• Improving society’s understanding of games as another form of artistic accomplishment, similar to film and music whilst also improving society’s general understanding of the videogames as a medium with what Squire calls “literacy of games”.(Squire and Giovanetto, 2008)
• Avoid designing educational games that include unnecessary violence, sexism or discrimination when presenting conflicts or plots to the player, focusing more on providing informative content that doesn’t distract from the lessons being taught.
• Educating all the involved parties on the social potential and benefits of using videogames as a learning tool, utilising recent research results to reinforce your claims.

The Educational Dimension, which revolves around the concerns of the educational value, teaching effectiveness and efficiency of results of games used as teaching tools as well as the training that teachers will require in order to adopt the new technologies and working habits they may be unfamiliar with in order to effectively use games as a teaching tool.

In order to improve the educational value of games, the necessary measures may include;

• Improving the access of educational videogames in existing and future educational resource repositories by encouraging teachers to both search for and assess the effectiveness of games to be used within the educational sector in a similar fashion to how other educational materials are currently registered. (Looking at educational content, target students’ age group, content etc.)
• Creating effective user and best practise guides for games that may be complicated and difficult to teachers who’re lacking in game literacy.
• Creating communities centred around educational games, allowing educators to share their knowledge and resources with others within the educational sector.

 The Technological dimension focuses primarily on the excessive costs of developing educational games, the lack of effective support tools that allow effective monitoring of the results of player activity and the capability of schools being able to provide suitable devices that can run educational games.

The lines of work necessary for the problems in this dimension to be overcome aim to reduce the technological barriers that increase the difficulty of developing educational games and deploying them within the educational sector, whilst also making it easier for teachers to use the tools that they are given. The required lines of work include;

• Lowering development costs and providing new development tools and methodologies to make he creation of games cheaper and simpler.
• Look into participative models which allow pedagogy experts to easily work alongside programmers and artists within the game development process.
• Reducing the technological requirements of deploying games within the educational sector, striking a balance between having games that aren’t graphically intensive but are also attractive to the player.
• Explore the possibility of developing games that allow students and teachers to use their own devices without disregarding accessibility, security and privacy of the users.

Whilst these points may not be entirely relevant to every development project, they are important things to consider when tackling the problem that educational games face and hopefully we’ll start seeing more games being used within the educational sector without the social stigma that often follows them, leading to a more engaging and fun learning experience for everyone involved.

The post Things to keep in mind when developing Educational Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Before we can take a basic look into motivational design, it is important to understand what is gamification and the link that it has to designing products that motivate their intended users to interact with the product being developed.

Games have always had the powerful ability of keeping their players engaged through a variety of ways such as compelling stories or experiences that are hard/impossible to find in average day-to-day activities.

As a result, domains outside of games such as social media and educational tools have been keen to capitalise on the ability to engage audiences using gamification, a process that applies features and elements typically found in games, such as points and achievements into contexts and situations that involve user interaction. Organisations that have been utilising gamification to increase user engagement within a variety of different scenarios include;

• Recyclebank, who are looking to promote positive social change by rewarding users with local deals and savings as they recycle their waste.
• Duolingo with the use of progress bars and awarding the user with badges and in-game currency to spend on customising the app’s owl mascot and accessing more interesting or quirky lessons in their desired languages. (e.g. Flirting or Idioms)
• Serious Games companies, such as Imaginary SRL creating applications and games to address and solve an underlying problem they are approached with.
• Social Media websites such as LinkedIn utilise a progress bar showing your ‘profile strength’ as the user adds more information to their profile such as previous jobs, skills, portfolio links etc.

The effectiveness of any form of gamification is primarily dependant on the ability to encourage the feeling of intrinsic motivation within the intended users, causing them to keep wanting to use the product on a regular basis. This is where effective use of motivational design methodologies come in handy, one good example being the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as discussed by Richard. M Ryan and Edward L. Deci of the University of Rochester(Adams et al., 2000).

This theory posits that people will experience intrinsic motivation to carry out a task if it allows them to satisfy three motivational constructs, based on human growth tendencies and psychological needs, these being:

• Autonomy: allowing the user to make their own choices and feel that they aren’t being controlled.
• Competence: giving the user opportunities to challenge themselves and improve their skills in carrying out given tasks.
• Relatedness: providing the users with the capability to connect with other people through inclusion or sharing their interests.

Although many games designers have initially attempted to distance themselves from the negative aspects of gamification, where most designers would simply tack on gamified elements to their products just for a quick and easy way to boost user interaction. There are many designers working to improve gamification through useful design methodologies by highlighting its strength as a tool to motivate learning and interaction by effectively using both game elements and psychological constructs. (similar to the ones discussed within SDT)

This is only scratching the surface of the rabbit hole that is motivational design, but I hope that this serves as a nice starting point for people who are interested in this topic.

The post A (hopefully) Simple Look at Motivational Design first appeared on Ludogogy.