Thi Nguyen’s book, ‘Games: Agency as Art’ is not about learning games or games-based learning specifically. But the viewpoint about all games that he advances has huge implications for games-based learning. It offers us a framework for learning games that focuses us on our tools and their potential, and opens up the scope of what we can do with, to and for players of learning games.

This isn’t a review of that book. Rather, I’ll explain his central argument in straightforward terms, and explain what I think it can offer games-based learning practitioners.

Games reverse the usual practice of choosing means to meet ends

Games are often seen as frivolous. Players are frittering away time; at best amusing or entertaining themselves. Even when people defend games against this criticism, it’s often by saying that games can serve some other, serious end. That ‘serious games’ can offer a social critique, or that games can be an engaging way to tell important stories.

But Nguyen argues that we don’t need to appeal to these higher goals, because games do something incredibly valuable in their own right: they get players to adopt particular ends and means. Bernard Suits defines games as a ‘voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’. When we take up this attempt, we take up the goals and rules of the game – the magic circle – as a temporary end.

Although some players, for some games, play to win or profit, many of us play largely for an experience. This inverts the normal way of things: in life, we tend to define our ends and live by means to suit. When we play games for the experience of playing, we temporarily take up the game’s ends, specifically to give ourselves the experience of the means we use to achieve them. 

When the striving is the point, our agency takes centre stage

In this kind of gameplay, the particular quality of how we strive towards the game’s ends becomes central. We’re more likely to play games that offer experiences that we value. Often these are ones where we’re in control; where we have agency. Otherwise we may as well watch a movie or read a book. 

That agency can take many forms, but we often get a special kick when our actions, decisions and solutions have a certain elegance. When we spring a well-planned trap in chess, or finally solve a vexing puzzle in a game like Myst or The Room. Most of all, when meeting the challenge is at the very edge of our capabilities.

These kinds of experiences not only exercise our agency, but develop it. By acting and seeing the consequences of our actions, we learn. By testing our capabilities, our agency grows. In everyday life, this usually happens in arbitrary, random ways: many things are too hard or too easy, or develop our agency in ways that are not particularly useful.

Game designers can sculpt the agency of players

When we play games for the playing, we use our agency in the way suggested by the game: by its goal, its rules and its environment or obstacles. In chess, we develop our capacity for agency in strategy, tactics and anticipation. When playing poker, we develop agency in calculating odds, bluffing and reading others’ intentions.

The goals, rules and obstacles – by dictating the kind of agency that we use and develop – become the tools the game designer uses to sculpt. And the clay is no less than our agency. A tweak here or there in any of these three areas can dramatically affect what agency we exercise, and how.

The goals and obstacles of life can offer similar opportunities. But game designers can sculpt in a more focused way. Where life confronts us with a dizzying confusion of conflicting values and options, games work by narrowing our focus, telling us what to care about and offering us possibilities for getting it. Where life can frustrate or bore us, games can set the level of challenge to bring out a motivating and enriching sense of flow.

Shaping new agencies for players is a powerful way to frame learning

Nguyen goes as far as to suggest that games are a technology to hold different agencies, the way books might store lessons on different topics. And just as a collection of books becomes a library, the range of games available to us is a library of possible agencies – by playing more and different ones, we can expand the range and depth of our agency.  

All this, the book explores without specific reference to learning games, although Nguyen often frames this in terms of a benefit to humanity. But if learning is our focus, this way of looking at things holds extra power.

What is the agency you want your learners to exercise? Which games or experiences already exist that touch on that agency, and how might they inspire you? How can you extend more agency to your learners, so that they’re really acting out the skills and capacities you want them to take away and use beyond your game or experience?

Your tools are your goals, your rules and the obstacles you choose

And in terms of crafting the exact experience we want, we have three powerful tools: goals, rules and obstacles or environment. Thinking of these tools as settings that you can tweak, in design, in playtest and revision, can unlock creative flexibility to shape player agency.

What will you reward within the game, to make players care about it? What combination of rules will offer players the chance to generate ideas for, and then try out and develop, the kind of agency you want from them? What obstacles will inspire them to rise to the challenge?

We’ve always had these tools. But seeing them as sculptor’s tools, and specifically the agency of our players as our clay, unlocks our ability to focus on and work that clay. If our concern is learning, this helps us shape what really matters: the catalogue of agency our learners can access.

Games: Agency as Art is available on Amazon

The post Using Games to Sculpt Agency first appeared on Ludogogy.

You can download The Gift Horse for free, but making a small donation via Kofi will help to support Ludogogy, and make it possible for us to develop more games for download

The Gift Horse invites you to tune into the animal which has attached itself to you – and find out more about it and yourself.  You can play on your own or with others, and either put aside time for a play session, or make the game a regular practice which fits into your everyday life.

Play by journaling, having conversations or just in your head. The Gift Horse wants to give you an experience just for you, and invites you to become the player, and designer of, an adventure of discovery with your animal avatar.

The game is suitable to be used in learning settings to encourage reflection, maybe on roles within a team, or for reflective coaching. Its eventual applications are limited only by your imagination, as you are free to amend this game, or create your own game based on it.

The post Gift Horse Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

I sometimes like to counter the question ‘what can games teach?’ With ‘what can’t they teach?’. Jane McGonigal created a game to teach herself healthy behaviours for recovery from a serious brain injury, and that game has gone on to help thousands around the world improve their mental health and resilience. There’s anecdotal evidence to show that playing games has helped protestors to organise. Games have helped millions around the world find new ways to connect and socialise during a global pandemic.

Superbetter (the book) by Jane McGonigal is available on Amazon

One growing way for games to have a real impact on people’s development is the burgeoning use of tabletop role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons, for therapy. The Game to Grow non-profit ‘provides gaming groups for therapeutic, educational, and community growth’ and ‘promote awareness of the life-enriching potential of games across the world’.

Their flagship game is a roleplaying game of their own creation, developed after using Dungeons & Dragons for many years. The testimonials speak for themselves, with parents citing benefits from improved interaction skills to better impulse control to kids coming out of their shells. But the games they run are not just for children, and if we think through what role-playing games help people to learn and reflect on about themselves and their behaviours, it’s easy to see why.

Role-playing games set a stage for agency and exploration

In a game of Dungeons & Dragons, or a similar role-playing game, you create a character, through which you act. That avatar acts as a shield. You are not saying what you think or what you’d do, but what the character thinks or does. So you can try and test things, and connect with a viewpoint that may be different from your own.

With the help of the Dungeon Master or Games Master, you guide that character through a world of challenges: a space to test actions and consequences. A space where you can try things because any failure is game-based more than personal. A space where the challenges and journey mirror real-life things: you have to collaborate with the rest of the group and with some of the world’s inhabitants you meet along the way.

And you participate in a story arc, where your agency and your decisions result in your story beats. Any victory is yours, because you earned it. Anything more complex, including defeat, is yours to reflect on. And the game can raise all kinds of issues that you can be a part of: if a local village is engaged in an armed uprising against landowner taxes, whose side do you take? Why? What are the consequences, good and bad? And what does that say about you?

Real and relevant skills grow out of role-playing games

Whether your role-playing session is specifically a therapy session with a licensed therapist or not, if it’s a good session, this is likely to ask of you that you:

• Use social skills to persuade others and win them over
• Build and use esteem and confidence
• Co-operate and collaborate effectively to get results
• See things from others perspectives
• Take your turn and consider other players in the game
• Express yourself and your needs
• Creatively solve problems

And these skills don’t stay in the session. One participant in Megan A Connell’s Self-Rescuing Princess Girls’ Group said of a situation outside the session:

“I realized in the situation my character would not have said yes to this, so I decided to do what she would do, and I said no.”

The research is difficult, because every game of Dungeons & Dragons, or any other role-playing game, is individual – it’s hard to have a control and test group. But there is a growing body of research, and strong links have been found between role-playing and social skills, battling depression, moral development, suicide prevention, and a host of other positive effects.

Role-playing games can inspire learning game design of all stripes

This information is particularly useful if you’re somebody who could directly benefit from this, or a parent or carer of somebody who could. And with a positive psychology outlook, that shouldn’t be limited to those who are struggling. But what about learning game designers? What about educators, or L&D managers?

I think very little is as instructive as looking at what works well in one situation and asking how it can be adapted or learned from in another. If you’re looking to find, commission or design a solution that will help with some of the kinds of behaviours and skills listed, then look for something that works on some of the same levels. We can learn from how role-playing games:

• Encourage collaboration by making success contingent on it
• Set open challenges that players use creativity to solve
• Allow players to explore their identity by creating and playing another
• Bring about feelings that relate to real-life experiences, such as exaltation, challenge, uncertainty, empathy and others, and give space to explore them
• Allow agency and testing of actions and consequences

These are just a brief selection. In many ways, role-playing games are the most open and flexible games of all. Play isn’t limited by a programming language or the components supplied in the box. You’re limited only by your will and imagination.

This makes it a petri dish for what imagination can achieve – and where it excels, game designers and learning experience designers can and should learn from it. With the sheer amount that role-playing games can help unlock, the possibilities for players learning about themselves, and growing as people, are endless.

The post Dungeons & Dragons & Development first appeared on Ludogogy.

There are two ways to win most games (AKA Victory conditions). Either reach a certain goal first (get a number of points, reach the last square, checkmate your opponent), or have the most ‘points’ of one kind or another when the end of the game is declared (e.g. the deck runs out of cards or time runs out).

There’s nothing wrong with either of these set-ups. But they tend to promote a certain play dynamic among the players: straightforward competition. Resource acquisition. Racing. Slanting every situation for your own or your team’s advantage. Also, they don’t easily promote complex or nuanced decision-making: you should always make the choice that gives you the most points, or moves you furthest forward in the race.

For learning games, this can be a problem. Is this the approach you want to encourage? Is your learning experience about these approaches and skills? Do you need to develop players’ handling of complexity, or simulate the complexity of real-life decisions and goals? It’s easy to sleepwalk into one of these approaches by default when it’s not the best framing for your game’s learning objectives.

So before you settle on one of these, consider what other set-ups might do for your game, and the way players approach things. I’ve divided other approaches to victory into six broad sections. A detailed analysis of how each game works is beyond the scope of this article, but I hope to provide inspiration and expand your horizons around alternatives. To understand each game’s approach better, I encourage you to look at the games themselves, or better yet, play them.

Ask your players to co-operate

In the most obvious alternative, the players succeed or fail together. The boardgame Pandemic has become a well-known example of this. Players have individual turns and autonomy, but common goals. The result feels very different to more competitive games, and promotes joint problem-solving and co-operation.

A learning game that leverages this dynamic is Colourblind, a communication game originally developed to train Air Traffic Controllers in precise communication. Blindfolded players must communicate information about physical game pieces that they hold, and players succeed when their communication is good enough to correctly match pieces.

The online learning game Evivve does something similar, but emphasises strategizing how each player will contribute their effort towards the common goal. This promotes group discussion and inclusion.

(Terry Wrote a review of Evivve for Ludogogy)

Even if co-operation is not total, allowing for the option of joint wins can create a dynamic where competition can be put aside. The boardgame Cosmic Encounters allows for two or more players to achieve the win condition in the same action, and with it a joint victory. Between Two Cities is another boardgame that makes every action contribute to either a joint effort between the player and their left-hand neighbour, or one with their right-hand neighbour. Any pair can win, but individuals cannot.

Don’t have a set goal at all

Some games have no goals: the goal is to play. Or you can set your own goals. Minecraft is a great example of this. There is no ultimate goal or victory condition. Many people set themselves a goal, to create something, or create their own games within the system. Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are also a kind of sandbox limited only by your desires and imagination, as are open-ended computer games like Crusader Kings III. (Also see Terry’s other article about Crusader Kings III)

The ‘life game’ SuperBetter, by Jane McGonigal asks players to nominate things in their real life as ‘allies’, ‘quests’ and ‘power-ups’; goals are set entirely by the player. SuperBetter has been immensely successful in helping people around the world build their personal resilience. Players can set goals that are appropriate to their personal journey and challenges.

Make victory conditions secret or individual

There are many Asymmetric boardgames, such as War of the Ring, based on The Lord of the Rings, where, much like the book and films, one side has to destroy the ring, the other to use it. Their options and resources are built to help them achieve their goal. In the card game Android: Netrunner, one side has to defend a computer system, the other side has to hack it. Each side has cards designed to help them achieve that goal.

The boardgame Argent: The Consortium has ten hidden cards that determine how points are earned at the end. Players must deduce or discover what’s on the cards as part of gameplay. And in the boardgame Ankh-Morpork, players each have a secret victory condition, and other players must figure it out to stop them. The boardgame Dune has a very interesting mechanic, where one player (playing the mystical Bene Gesserit faction) writes down a player and a turn at the start. If that player wins on that turn, the Bene Gesserit player wins instead, which can lead to all kinds of strategic manoeuvring and thoughtful play.

Such arrangements make for more strategic games, with players spending time working out what they should prioritise. This can reflect some real-life situations and skills development, where working out which ladder to climb can be more important than efficient ladder-climbing.

Use more innovative victory conditions

Sometimes changing the dynamic can be as simple as changing the idea of ‘most’ or ‘first’. In the boardgames Ingenious and Tigris & Euphrates, there are a number of different ‘tracks’ that players chart scores on. The winner is the player who, at the end, can say that their lowest-scoring track is higher than anyone else’s lowest-scoring. This promotes broad play that covers many bases, rather than optimising for one thing.

Some games (e.g. the card game Black Maria) just ask you not to lose. Others give two options for a win, such as the card game Seven Wonders: Duel, which allows you to go for a victory based on scientific achievement or one based on military might. Others (e.g. the card game Fluxx, the computer game Baba is You) allow gameplay to change the victory conditions, so that players can’t ever be sure that the route they’re taking will lead to victory, or can change the goalposts partway-through.

The exact effects of these options can vary depending on the set-up, but they all introduce new factors that complicate player decisions, and make them think carefully.

Focus on the margin of victory

In the American Football boardgame, Paydirt, players each select a real-life team, each of which has a rating to reflect their strength. When two teams are mismatched, the player with the stronger team must win by at least the difference in the teams’ ratings to claim a victory.

In Bridge, players in pairs must bid based on their hand strength, predicting how many tricks they will take. The pair with the highest bid has the opportunity to earn points for following through, but bid too high and fail to make the predicted number of tricks, and you end up losing points.

Some boardgames, like Churchill and The Fox in the Forest, award victory for whoever has the most points, unless they have more than a certain amount, in which case they lose. The in-game reason for this is around not rubbing your victory in the faces of those you need to live alongside.

All of these tricks encourage players to assess their strength and make a plan based on that, or aim more precisely at a goal instead of just trying to earn as many points as possible.

Stated goals are not the real victory conditions

Finally, some games pretend that the goal is to win via points, while having a separate, more important, hidden goal. This is quite common in learning games, particularly when you want the players to exhibit and potentially improve on problem behaviours.

A famous example is the Red/Blue Game, a variation on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two teams could each maximise their points by cooperating, but often compete by default, with both losing out. Similarly, in Culturallye, players are focused on winning chips, but the real point of the game is to show what happens when new people come into a group or culture, who don’t know all the rules of behaviour.

The original point of Monopoly was to highlight the dangers of unfettered capitalism. The hope of the author was that players would play and realise, to use a quote from the 1980s movie, WarGames, ‘the only winning move is not to play’. A lesson that the computer in that movie applies to Tic Tac Toe, as well as eventually learning about the more serious ‘game’ of global thermonuclear war.

Terry’s innovative learning design tool, The Transform Deck is available to buy from his shop.

The post How victory conditions frame play first appeared on Ludogogy.

I have often come across the idea that Monopoly can teach people about economics. If you want to teach the lesson the original creator intended—that gaining vast wealth at the expense of others is problematic—then you could argue that Monopoly does it well. But that’s more a philosophical position than a set of skills.

What many people mean when they say ‘teach economics’ is ‘teach people the skills to operate well in an economic system’. And this, Monopoly is not very good at. For a game to build skills that are useful in a real-life system, it needs to do two things:

• Give meaningful choices, where good decisions tend to good outcomes, to build the ability to make good decisions in the context
• Provide a reasonable analogue to key elements of the real-life system where these skills are to be used

In Monopoly, you mainly choose to buy or not buy the properties you land on by the roll of the dice, which is neither a very meaningful choice nor very representative of real-life. Luck is part of real life economics, but our choices are rarely so constrained. A game that does a better job (although not specifically intended as a learning game) is Acquire.

In Acquire, players draw tiles, much as in Scrabble, and keep them on their own rack, choosing one to play on their turn. Instead of letters, each tile represents one square on the gameboard. The gameboard is simply a grid of empty squares, each marked with a number for the column and a letter for the row. So I have the tile ‘1-A’, I can place it in the top-left square, marked ‘1-A’.

As the board starts to fill with tiles, sooner or later a player will place a tile next to another. When they do this, they form a hotel chain—they can choose from seven named chains, some cheaper, some more expensive. The player gets one free stock in the chain, represented by a card. From that point on, at the end of a turn, players can buy up to three stocks from any hotel chain on the board.

If two hotel chains sit next to each other, a player could place a tile that links them together. When that happens, the smaller merges into the larger, shares in the now-defunct smaller chain earn a choice of compensation, and the biggest stockholders in the smaller chain get bonuses.

Why does this make for a good economics teacher? What should learning game designers do to emulate it (rather than Monopoly) if they want their game to build skills for real-life situations or challenges, whether economic or any other?

Present interesting choices that represent real-life choices

In Acquire, when you hold stocks in a chain that merges into another, you have three options—sell them, trade two-for-one for stocks of the bigger chain, or keep them in the hope that the merged chain will re-form anew. This can be a tough choice.

Maybe the two-for-one deal right now is a net loss, but it makes you into the majority stock owner in the larger chain, which could rise in value. Kept stocks lose the opportunity to profit now, but if the chain reforms, you’ll have a head start towards a majority holding. Selling the shares might let you buy some expensive and valuable shares you otherwise couldn’t afford.

Players are forced to balance short-term with long-term gains, to consider probabilities of various outcomes, and to calculate expected returns—all key skills for real-life economic systems. Learning game designers should look to build in choices that are not clear, and force the kind of problem-solving and decision-making that we want learners to take from the game into real life.

Allow players to determine priorities and goals

There are many things you could prioritise in Acquire. If you own a lot of stock, or a majority holding, in a chain, you may want to prioritise increasing its size. If you need ready cash, you may want to prioritise merging it into another chain. When buying stocks, you might choose to prioritise getting a majority stake in a chain, or you might look to spread your investments so that you profit from activity in many chains.

This goes beyond immediate choices—it’s not just ‘how do I achieve my goals?’, it’s ‘what even are my goals?’. Although there is a single win condition—be richest at game end—there are many paths and sub-goals. Again, this is reflective of the real-life system we’re considering here.

Learning game designers should look to give players control over the route they take and the sub-goals—or even the ultimate goals—they set. To go back to Monopoly, the only real choice of goal is which set to collect, but that’s strictly limited by which you land on. Acquire’s freer choice is more meaningful and skill-building for the player, and more reflective of real life. If games give this freedom in a way that mirrors a real-life situation, players can build skills to navigate that situation.

Build real-life considerations into game decisions

To help players learn to invest wisely, a game needs to make players consider risk versus reward. Monopoly’s risk versus reward consideration is mainly a simple one around the risk of buying/not buying a property, once you land on it. You can’t choose to take the risk of landing on another player’s hotel in hopes of a big reward, or assess the expected return on turning a chance card before deciding whether to turn it.

Acquire asks players to consider risk and reward in many ways. Should you start a new chain now, to get the free share, and risk having to split your buying between the new chain and an existing one you’re already competing for a majority stock holding in? Should you merge two chains now while you know you’re a majority stockholder, or take a risk and allow them to grow first, even though somebody else may overtake you?

Risk versus reward is a key factor in many good games, so game designers should consider the risk and reward in players’ decisions for any game. But here, it’s a key skill for the real-life situation in question. Learning game designers should look at the skills they’re trying to build in players, and ask: how can I make this a consideration in the decisions and actions that make up my game?

Set variables carefully to represent real-life challenges

In Acquire, there are 25 available stocks in each chain. Players get one stock for starting a chain, and can buy—if they have funds—three stocks each turn. These numbers are not accidental or random. 25 is an odd number, meaning that 13 stocks guarantees a majority holding. This can be achieved with the free stock for starting, plus four turns of buying only that stock (with your three permitted purchases per turn) and nothing else. So whoever starts the chain, can get majority holding if they can afford it and focus all their efforts on doing so.

But what if you have two races on at once? You may have to choose. Or, what if you’re a turn away from getting that majority, and somebody merges another chain into the chain, and trades in some stock in the acquired chain to overtake you? All these concerns, and the specific numbers that facilitate them, represent very well a simplified model of the dynamics and challenges of scarcity.

Set the stocks at 26 per chain, or allow players to buy as many stocks as they like per turn, and the dynamics change, as do the lessons and the skills. Learning game designers should consider and play with the variables in their games, with an eye to the challenges they put to the players, and the skills they build as a result.

Few elements, many possibilities

What Acquire doesn’t do is model real-life economic scenarios by including many complex elements that bring the intricacies of real-life stock trading and the hotel business into the game. The rules and components are fairly simple. I explained the core of the game in three paragraphs above, and the components are simply the grid board, the tiles, the 25 stock cards for each of the seven chains, and a reference card showing the costs and values of each chain. That’s it.

But from the interrelations of those elements emerges a set of complex—but not over-complicated—possibilities. The simple rules about how chains grow and merge give rise to options and possibilities around growing your chain or merging it into another. The way stocks are bought and majority bonuses are given gives rise to scarcity and tactical competition for control.

By limiting the number of elements, but making each interrelate to others in a number of carefully thought-out ways, Acquire models many important decisions and skill-building moments from real life, without confusing players or muddying the lessons. Learning game designers should resist the urge to represent real life by including every little element and agent separately, and try to represent them in spirit, simply, but in a way that brings into the game the important decisions or considerations.

Terry’s innovative learning design tool, The Transform Deck is available to buy from his shop.

The post Acquiring Real-Life Economics Skills from Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

For example, the ‘Apply in Stages’ card suggests that you break down your content into stages and ask learners to apply it one step at a time to a scenario. The ‘Branching Paths’ card suggests that you create a series of choices, each of which leads to more choices, for the learners to navigate.

Each card has more info about how, why and where you could do this, together with some useful extra tips including other cards it combines well with. There are also seven ‘guide’ cards that offer different techniques to use the deck to inspire your learning designs (including a game you can play with the cards).

I created the deck to distil my experience of designing interactive learning into a tool to inspire learning professionals with new ways to bring content to life. It’s not specifically about gamifying learning, just making it more engaging and effective. But you could call it a toy, or a playful learning tool, and it has many key features that mean that, when it came to transforming the Transform Deck from an initial draft to a market-ready product, I needed to prototype and playtest in much the same way I prototype and playtest learning games.

Jesse Schell is a vastly experienced game designer and author of the Art of Game Design. His six questions for playtesting—the why, who, when, where, what and how of playtesting—were invaluable to me in this process. I’d like to show you how.

Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design is available on Amazon

The Deck of Lenses (card deck version of the book) is also available

Why are you playtesting?

This is all about the questions your playtest should answer, and the risks you are looking to investigate and mitigate. Playtests without specific questions in mind get less useful information.

In this case, I wasn’t sure if people would understand how to use the cards. I wasn’t sure if people would be able to use them with content types I’m less familiar with. I didn’t know if I’d included the best selection of activities, or organised them perfectly. I didn’t know if the ways I thought the cards should be arranged and laid out included all of the best ways to inspire.

Each of these don’t-knows can be thought of as a risk. My playtests were designed to investigate and suggest mitigation for these risks, by posing them as questions:

• Do users understand how to use the cards?
• Do they work with different types of content?
• Are any activities less appropriate or useful?

Note that posing these as questions to be answered doesn’t necessarily mean asking the direct question to playtesters. Sometimes it’s better to observe what they do or how they do it. Ask yourself: who is best placed to answer this question, the person experiencing the experience, or me as observer and data gatherer?

By being clear on the questions I wanted answered, I gave myself a solid foundation to design playtests. And I got some great answers to these questions. I dropped, replaced, refocused and merged some cards. I changed the instructions multiple times. I found new ways to use the cards that worked better to inspire users.

Take the time to be clear on your aims in playtesting: the clearer you are, the clearer the useful information you’ll get.

Who should you playtest with?

There are pros and cons to various groups, often centred around convenient people (e.g. coworkers) versus relevant people (your likely audience) versus insightful people (experts).

In this case, in particular, the product is not very relevant to anybody not designing or running learning experiences, and I have convenient access to such people through my work. So, I was able to take advantage of this to observe the intended audience using the product, and glean some incredibly useful insight. I was also able to get insight from games-based learning experts that helped spark ideas to improve the product.

If you aren’t the beneficiary of such a happy accident, you may want to conduct multiple playtests to get different perspectives.

When should you playtest?

The key question here is really at what stage should you playtest, and the answer is often: at every stage. You can test a concept, a rough paper prototype, a ‘full’ prototype with placeholder art, and a fully working draft.

My first prototype was a spreadsheet of activities versus useful fields for each, divided into categories/suits. I discussed this with some sample users, and this helped me clarify the suit divisions, as well as weed out some less appropriate activities. Each stage after this—rough paper cards, cards with placeholder art, draft versions—helped me on the journey, including giving me insights I hadn’t expected. Earlier versions helped with card selection and which fields were more or less useful. Later versions helped with colour choices.

Most importantly, by playtesting early and ‘ugly’, I was able to change things before I became too attached to them.

Where should you playtest?

The key divisions here are effectively ‘your place or theirs’, as well as online versus offline. Again there are convenience considerations, but the more realistic you can make it to how the experience will be in practice, the better the feedback.

In practice, I developed much of this product during a pandemic, so most of my playtesting was online. But I noticed that one early playtest with a client designer team at their offices had a relaxed feel to it, and I was able to record some striking observations about how they reacted and how they used the cards. The richness of face-to-face communication means you can pick up on more subtle cues from playtesters. I probably got more useful info from that one face-to-face playtest than from twice as much time spent online testing.

What should you look for?

There is some overlap with the ‘why’ question here, but whereas that focuses on what you know you want answers for, this question in Jesse Schell’s sextet also cautions us to be on the lookout for the ‘unknowns’—things we weren’t expecting, but that help us.

By observing as keenly as possible during playtesting of my cards, I caught all kinds of unexpected reactions including a tendency to skip the instructions, misunderstandings about the card layouts and how people intuitively used the cards. In one case I saw one person lay out the cards in an interesting and innovative way, and adapted it as an ‘official’ method.

How should you conduct the playtest?

The answers to the other five questions set you well on the way to the sixth, but there are some further key considerations:

• To what extent should you be present?—you want to get great data, but real players won’t always have access to you, and your presence is a source of bias
• How should you introduce/explain things?—this can be a great proving ground for briefings and instructions, but again you want to minimise bias
• Where should you look?—while your instinct may be to observe the game itself, people’s faces can often offer more useful feedback
• What data should you collect?—as well as doing things qualitatively, should you count and time how long, how many, how much?
• Should you pause mid-game to review?—this can break the flow, but if you don’t, people will be subject to recency bias, and you may lose insight on early stages

In my case, I addressed these by, among other things:

• Being present, but hanging back and letting people play rather than getting too involved, and observing keenly as well as asking questions
• Letting them ‘unbox’ the cards themselves and explore before any explanations
• Looking at faces and what they did with the cards
• Noting what cards they used first, in what ways, and what went un-done
• Pausing after each ‘use’ to explore responses

As noted above, the results of this considered approach to prototyping and playtesting were far-reaching for the details of the Transform Deck.

Jesse Schell talks about the ‘rule of the loop’: “the more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be”. The Transform Deck went through four main iterations with several adjustments within each. I playtested these on a huge variety of groups over a long period of time, remaining open to changes and making them frequently.

The result is further away than I could have imagined from my initial prototype—visually, in terms of content, organisation, phrasing, and most noticeably in the user guide. But it’s closer than I could have hoped to the intent of my initial vision—an intuitive, delightful deck to inspire people to transform learning experiences.

Terry’s innovative learning design tool, The Transform Deck is available to buy from his shop.

The post Jesse Schell’s Six Questions for Playtesting first appeared on Ludogogy.

Focus on intrinsic over extrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation comes from reward, tangible or otherwise. Intrinsic motivation comes from interest in or enjoyment of the activity itself. When we award points and set people in competition, we’re focusing on extrinsic motivation. When we make something fun in its own right, we’re focusing on intrinsic motivation.

By definition, extrinsic motivation relies on the presence of triggers and incentives. When we remove the rewards, the behaviour can stop or fade. And extrinsic motivation can actually replace any intrinsic motivation that exists. In other words, when we start rewarding behaviour, we risk moving that person beyond enjoyment, and nudge them towards reliance on reward alone for motivation.

The big problem for learning designers is that extrinsic motivation is much easier to design into game experiences than intrinsic. It’s much more tangible. But by taking the easy option, we risk losing our chance at making behaviour change deep and lasting.

We can look to frameworks such as Yu-Kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework or Nicole Lazarro’s Four Types of Fun for inspiration to bring out intrinsic motivation, but the first step may be simply resisting the crutch of extrinsic motivators such as points, badges and competition.

Give learners freedom to try and fail, and feedback when they do

Karl Kapp identifies three interlinked ways to design behaviour change into learning games:

• Freedom for players to do what they want in an open environment
• Freedom to fail
• Rapid feedback for success or failure

And in fact, these three are the basis for most of the more profound, non-book learning we do in life. We live our lives. We make mistakes and have successes. The sharper the feedback, the more we tend to change our behaviour.

The Gamification of Learning by Karl Kapp is available on Amazon

This isn’t easy to design into games. It’s much easier to design a very specific, restricted path, or to focus on information to be learned, rewarding correct answers. But again, resisting the easy option is leaning into the effective one.

Boost ability, desire and triggers

BJ Fogg identifies three elements that need to be present to prompt behaviours:

• The person must be motivated — they must want to do it, for whatever reason
• The person must be able — they must find it within their power, or easy enough
• A timely trigger or prompt must coincide with in-the-moment ability and motivation.

A gamified system that will be at work over a period of time can control for these while it’s in effect. But changing behaviour in a way that outlasts a game-based intervention is more difficult. One answer is to design the experience to boost these three factors when they’re next relevant. For example:

• Focusing on upskilling somebody to make them more able
• Helping them internalise reasons to carry out the behaviour, and so motivating them for when the time comes
• Helping them recognise or create triggers in everyday life.

Games-based behaviour change in action

A good way to illustrate some of these principles is to look at some case studies of games or gamified experiences that have succeeded in creating behaviour change.

Zombies, Run!

Zombies, Run! encourages running, and specific running behaviours like intervals, by adding a ‘game layer’ to the running experience. A narration track tells runners via headphones about targets and instructions within the game world. The most basic of these is essentially: ‘zombies sighted, run fast now’, but further levels of subtlety and complexity immerse the player more deeply.

This works well with Fogg’s three principles. The runner is able to do what’s asked, and the game layer gives the motivation and a timely trigger. By making the story and game immersive and thoughtful, the experience focuses on intrinsic fun as well as in-game reward. And the game offers plenty of choices — demands are set from the player’s running goals — and provides feedback during and between runs.

There’s no doubt that Zombies, Run! structures runner behaviour. It could be argued that it does so only while in-game. But it has the potential to be a long-term or permanent running partner, so this may matter less. And if the app is used long enough to move the behaviour from occasional to habitual, removing it may well leave the habit intact.

Culturallye

Culturallye is a classroom game designed to make people change behaviours around cultures and cultural differences. It sets up separate ‘tables’, each of which play a dice-based game — in silence — with a number of rules. They don’t know that each table is playing by different rules. When some players are switched to a new table, awkwardness and challenge ensue when they don’t do things the same way as the table they’ve joined.

The game allows people to make their own mistakes, and solve them in their own way, just as Karl Kapp suggests. Instant feedback through people’s reactions, and freedom to resolve issues in a range of ways, make this a learning experience that translates well to navigating the rules of the real world. It doesn’t provide extrinsic rewards, but is a fun game in itself, that provokes thought and has moments of surprise and high engagement.

As a game designed to change longer-term behaviour, its relationship to Fogg’s ideas are more complex. But by helping people to recognise the complexities of the issue and how it can affect them personally, it helps:

• their ability to take more culturally sensitive actions
• their motivation to want to change the status quo
• the chance that they will recognise or create triggers for doing so.

Superbetter

Superbetter is a phenomenally successful game focused on resilience-friendly behaviour change. The prototype of the game helped its designer Jane McGonigal to make life-saving behaviour changes in her recovery from a serious brain injury, and the game has helped many people change resilience-based behaviours in everyday life.

Superbetter by Jane McGonigal is available on Amazon

It encourages players to set their own goals, challenges and other important factors, but within a game frame:

• Smaller and bigger desired steps and actions are quests and epic wins
• Your social network are allies
• Useful habits and resources are power-ups
• Challenges and obstacles are bad guys

This isn’t a simple game of ‘call something by another name’. McGonigal develops each of these elements in a way that draws on behavioural change research, while giving the player the freedom to map these concepts to their own goals and life however they see fit.

Superbetter’s success in changing behaviours could stem from how well it follows Kapps’ three points, by allowing so much freedom and instant feedback. Its structure also balances extrinsic reward with intrinsic fun, encouraging players to make the game enjoyable and find fun in challenges, self-set goals and helpful tools, as well as through a strong social element.

It may showcase Fogg’s three factors most strongly of all, though. The ‘game frame’ builds from smaller to tougher challenges, and builds player resources, and the journey gives players the ability to do more and more challenging things. The framing specifics have plenty of motivation hooks, playing on deeply resonant themes of bad guys and power-ups that spring from popular culture around games and films. And the structure of the game provides triggers for action in the way quests and tasks are time-linked, and in the social element via allies.

Change behaviours by using all three

These three ideas can be used as frameworks for design, as lenses for viewing design decisions, and as checks on the effectiveness of design:

• Focus on intrinsic over extrinsic motivation
• Give learners freedom to try and fail, and feedback when they do
• Enhance ability, desire and triggers.

The post Unlock Behaviour Change with Games-based Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

So it’s wonderful to come across a book that embodies those principles and asks: how can we design for play within our structures of work and study? Where and how can playful experiences be better experiences? Specifically, the book focuses on three areas where play can help: in design, in learning, and in innovation. So, this book is relevant to everyone from town planners to lecturers to product designers.

Research, Frameworks and Practical Examples

It’s bookended with an introduction and epilogue that help round out the principles (and give a great analogy of play design as a melting pot of various elements). But aside from these, the book is a collection of pieces from different authors, each focused on one perspective for play design. The common themes among them are research, frameworks, and practical examples. Most are based on solid research, well-organised. The frameworks I found most interesting: often-graphical representations of key concepts, ready to use. And the practical case studies and examples of application help bring it all to life.

The compilation nature is the thing I liked most and least about the book. The differing perspectives allow a picture to emerge that’s nuanced and complex, and there isn’t the sense that one agenda is being pushed: it’s a complex area with few points of universal agreement, and this reflects that. But the other side of this coin is that the differing authors mean there’s less coherence to this as a book than many, and when the focus for one author is less relevant or less well-written, your interest can wane.

A Taste of the Book

But that’s okay; this can be seen as a book to jump around in rather than read cover to cover, and if you focus on the chapters most relevant to you, there is some fantastic content. Some of my favourites include:

• Jesper Falke Legaard’s chapter on designing meaningful play experiences, which provides a play blueprint that really helps to pull apart, examine and improve any play design
• Jess Rahbeck’s chapter on playful tension, which unites ideas of tensions and paradoxes across theories from Piaget’s to Csikszentmihalyi’s, many of which I’d not come across, and gives some very practical scales against which to consider your own play designs
• Tilde Bekker, Ben Schouten and Landa Valk’s chapter on the lenses of play card tool, which resembles Jesse Schell’s game design lenses, but with a play rather than game design focus

Anybody who designs any kind of experience, consultation or process in which they want to enhance a sense of play and reap the rewards should find this a useful and practical guide. Some of it will almost certainly speak to you more than other parts, but as that will probably differ from reader to reader, that’s fine: a great approach with this book would be read and run with the parts that apply to your practice most.

Framing Play Design: A hands-on guide for designers, learners and Innovators is available on Amazon

The post Review of Framing Play Design first appeared on Ludogogy.

Thirty-odd years later, one particular day found me googling feudal succession laws, and that night, dreaming about taxation and vassals. It was, of course, a game that made the difference; a PC game, Crusader Kings III. In it, you play the head of a dynasty, ruling a kingdom (or sometimes a smaller or larger holding). When you die, you play your heir, and theirs in turn until (if you’re successful) the end of the game’s timespan (from either 867 AD or 1066 to 1453).

It grabbed my attention mainly by modelling complex systems incredibly well. At first glance it just appears to be a very complex game with lots of things going on; something similar to the more famous Civilisation series but with more detail and more focus on the people, including yourself. But look closer and the game is made of a number of interlocking systems that model medieval life.

By looking at how this commercial game does this so well, I’ve learned a lot that I think will help me in designing learning games.

The titles, succession and claims system

Modelled very closely on real life, the game presents the (‘old’) world as a jigsaw of empires and kingdoms, each broken down into duchies, baronetcies and holdings. Control of each of these is by title, and individuals can inherit or lay claim to titles. If you want to grow your kingdom, you need claims (even to wage war, you generally need a claim to justify it), and parts of this system model claimants joining your court, changing of succession law, disinheritance and many other associated factors.

All of which has often found me furiously searching for somebody in the game with a claim to the Duchy of Lancaster or the Kingdom of Aquitane – or else, manufacturing a claim. And the succession elements and the fact that you will play as your heir give you a real interest in your lineage and what your heir will inherit.

The lifestyle system

Different rulers in this time had different reputations; a good steward, a schemer, a pious scholar. The lifestyle system simulates this by giving you experience which you can spend towards ‘perks’ in one of five lifestyles: learning, stewardship, intrigue, diplomacy or martial. Choose a diplomacy lifestyle and you could persuade rulers to accept being your vassal without the need for war. Choose intrigue and you could murder your rivals without being exposed.

Once you’re invested in the perks for one of these lifestyles, it gets easier to gain more powerful perks in the same one, so the system channels you into specialising, but without it feeling like you’re being corralled. When my current character is a stewardly ruler, I delight in being able to build up to bonuses that allow me to build more castles and tax more efficiently.

The stress system

The modelling goes beyond laws, land realities and worldly concerns to human behaviour and emotions. Your character has traits (which also tend to dovetail with their chosen lifestyle). You may be greedy or generous, honest or deceitful, and a host of others. Throughout the game, events and developments give you choices: which way to take a conversation at a feasts, how to educate your children, how to navigate encounters on pilgrimages and hunts.

These choices can have material gains and losses, but your choices are also constrained by your traits: if your character is greedy, giving away money causes you stress. If they’re honest, even a white lie may raise your stress levels. This is systems modelling of cognitive dissonance. And there are health and effectiveness impacts to stress. The result is that you find yourself playing the character rather than the numbers.

Interlocking systems

There are many more systems in the game. A faith system models the dynamics of the crusades, indulgences, the shame of adultery and heresy, witch hunts and religious leaders. A culture system models the way cultures intermingle and develop, including technological advances. There’s a system around money, taxation and vassals, and another around types of holding such as cities and bishoprics, and the castles and other buildings you can have. A system around wars, and another around intrigue and schemes.

In many ways the drawing of lines around each of these systems is somewhat arbitrary, but that’s a little like real life systems modelling. The systems interlock, and what emerges is something lifelike; something imperfect, absolutely, but this is implicit in the definition of ‘model’; perhaps most importantly, something thoroughly engaging, with the capacity to make players think deeply about the system they’re engaging with, and learn about it.

Emergent properties

Because of the focus on modelling rather than offering paths to a specific goal, the game is very open-ended. There are some achievements, but the only ultimate win state is your dynasty surviving to the end, and even failing in that feels not so big a thing, if you had some great moments along the way. The game has more of a sandbox feel than many games that might be categorised with it, because — like life — you have to set your own objectives, find your own meaning, and experiment. This puts the player at the very heart of things, which is one of the most important reasons for using games in learning. In a way, the player is recruited as game designer to some degree, choosing the shape of the game. Choices become even more meaningful than usual, and wider. The level of engagement to be gained is of the order that sets one off googling on your own time, or dreaming about it.

With this level of engagement, learning about the real-life system being modelled is guaranteed. In the senses in which the model is perfect or near-perfect, I’ve learned directly from the game (certainly more about medieval history than from my history classes). But also where it’s not, I’ve been inspired to ponder, investigate and discuss more. Did the way land was apportioned after a successful crusade really work like that? What was really happening with the competing Kings of León?

Simpler learning games

I’d have learned a lot more in my history lesson if my homework assignments had revolved around Crusader Kings III. Any history teachers reading this, take note. And it’s not limited to history. I could have written this article about social systems and The Sims, or manufacturing and any one of the current craze for factory simulation games out there. But what if you don’t teach or train medieval history or something that’s been similarly modelled in a great commercial game?

Fortunately, I don’t think models need to be this complex to gain some of the benefits. Modelling can be of any system, and we can take lessons and inspiration from such well done examples even if ours are simpler and cruder. I’ve built learning games around how talent development and management works, how manufacturing works, or how project management works.

Take the idea of a traditional game about talent management, based around a win state and a simple mechanism like roll and move, with quiz questions and simple encounters. I’m sure it could be fun. But now contrast that with the idea of modelling the systems inside your organisation that impact on talent management; individual ambitions, career paths, mentoring schemes, salary structures, development options. Imagine building a model of each of the systems involved, and then thinking how they interact.

If it seems like that would be difficult, you could recruit your players in modelling the system in the first place. Either way, imagine the richness of allowing them to play with the system and decide their own goals; to debate how closely the system modelled life, and what would make it more realistic.

Breathing life into models of systems, by making them into games, by opening them to our players makes us let go of some control and structure. But our potential return is something special. In Crusader Kings III discussions online, players trade stories about rising and falling dynasties as if it was a writer’s forum discussing novel plotlines, and discuss the differences and similarities with real history. I think even a small portion of that engagement and learning is something to strive for with learning games.

In a way, it’s like when we read a fantastic book or watch a truly classic film. We love it because it says something to us about life, and it can only do that if it speaks to us in the language of the rich systems that make up life.

The post Engagement and Learning as Emergent Properties of Systems Modelling: What we can Learn from Crusader Kings III first appeared on Ludogogy.

Terry: I grew up playing games, I think I played my first game of Dungeons & Dragons at nine, and was playing bridge by 14. They were a big part of how I learned about the world. How big a part of your upbringing did games play?

Sam: I play games every day, and I grew up playing card and board games with my family. I always liked games that made me feel there was something to learn. Cards taught me strategy, planning and maths. I’m not such a fan of Monopoly, though – the dice made it too reliant on chance.

Terry: I totally agree. I’ve gotten in a few debates with people online about my pet hate for Monopoly. I remember feeling bored by having to play on after it was clear who was going to win. I think how games make you feel is really important.

Sam: Completely. I enjoy games with an element of showing what I’m good at, and of confidence boosting when I get things right or win something. And the feeling that I’m learning. As an autistic person growing up not knowing I was autistic, I look back and think I learned things over and above what the game intended, and that made me feel good. I learned how to take turns instead of grabbing centre stage. How to take not winning – my parents would never just let me win – and how to deal better with different human behaviours, like my brother cheating.

Terry: Yeah, I’m fairly sure my brother did, too. We’re already talking about how non-learning games helped you to learn. What about games where learning was at least part of the intention?

Sam: I really liked Dr Kawashima on the Nintendo DS – addictive, rewarding, competitive. It was really clearly explained, and the gradual increase in toughness of the levels kept me challenged and encouraged me every day to form new habits. I think it improved my IQ and mental arithmetic, and that’s stayed with me.

Terry: That’s great. I think that balance of new levels providing the right new level of challenge is one of the cornerstones of the power of games.

I’m really interested in how far you feel that your own experiences and preferences generalise to other Autistic people – I’ve heard it said that there can be more difference between one Autistic person and another than between a given Autistic person and a Neurotypical person.

Sam: Yeah, Autistic people are so different to each other – just like non-Autistic people. You get artistic leanings, or science geeks, or people who do both. One size will never fit all. I think – as far as you can generalise – there are some patterns. But the worst thing you can do is make assumptions and say, all Autistic people are like this, or will like this.

Terry: So how can learning game designers and similar folk account for this?

Sam: I think consultation with the audience is key. You potentially cut out one-third of your audience when you model things just for non-Autistic people.

Terry: Nothing for us, without us. And that’s good game and learning design practice, anyway. It’s going to help everything you do land well with your audience if you prototype and test with them.

Sam: Yes, I think that’s important to say – a lot of the things that are going to help Autistic people are going to help non-Autistic people too. Lots of non-Autistic people learn similarly to Autistic people. And of course there are a lot of undiagnosed Autistic people, too.

Another thing I’d like to see more of is people offering as many different options as possible for learning, whether it’s games or something else. Even though all Autistic people are different, what they often have in common is that they can find things that are designed just for Neurotypical people challenging. The specific things that are challenging may be different, but you can get round that to some extent by giving them choices. Different formats, more or less visual, more or less active, but also just different.

Like controls. Take Microsoft programs – there are several ways to do anything: menus, the ribbon, quick keys… the sense of choice is really helpful, the autonomy of being given choices.

Terry: Well, autonomy is a huge plank of intrinsic motivation for good game design. Like the choices in Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Sam: Or Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch! I loved that.

Terry: Me too! I followed through to most of the endings.

So okay, there are some good design principles that can also steer us well for considering the needs of Autistic people. But, if we preface everything in the next part of out conversation with ‘there are as many differences as similarities and we shouldn’t make assumptions’, are there any patterns that are, shall we say common, in how Autistic people interact with games, in your experience? Any that might be helpful to address?

Sam: There are some I see often, but yes, we need to make sure we don’t turn them into stereotypes. Abstract concepts can be tricky sometimes, or a lack of clarity about how to win. Also reliability. I want to know that a rule or technique I learned always works.

Interpreting what Neurotypical people say, and some of the non-verbalised messages in particular, is a common challenge for many Autistic people. So for instructions or for people facilitating learning games or experiences, to be clear, to mean what you say and say what you mean.

Also, I think Autistic minds are often looking for patterns, things they recognise – again that’s all minds, but maybe a tendency to do it more for many (but not all) Autistic minds. So, variations on an existing pattern of play as a game progresses in level is good.

Terry: Like with Dr Kawashima.

Sam: Exactly.

Terry: There’s a game that does that amazingly well; it’s not a learning game, but a puzzler called The Witness; I’ve seen a few articles written by Autistic people saying how well it worked for them[1], and the link with patterns building was very strong. I think that game could be a good inspiration point for people wanting to design well for many Autistic people.

Sam: I’ll have to check it out.

Terry: Anything else, in terms of patterns?

Sam: Maybe something around emotions; controlling and interpreting emotions in the self and others. Many Autistic people can find that a challenge. An over-reliance on emotional intelligence in a game where it’s not really necessary could be a problem. On the other hand, games can really help develop these skills in Autistic people. They helped me.

Terry: Yes; Jane McGonigal references a number of studies[2] in her book SuperBetter[3], where multiplayer videogames increase co-operation and social intelligence. She also talks about games helping develop a theory of mind, which is part of emotional intelligence. This was with children, though.

Sam: Right, but nothing about Autism stops at 16. Except maybe some of the support and recognition.  

Stress is also a common factor. High levels of stress. So games should really lower that stress, and should avoid too much pressure. Because stress levels may already be high, a challenge too far could make some Autistic people give up in frustration a little more easily than a Neurotypical person.

Terry: There’s some great stuff there. So long as we keep in mind that the golden rule is consult, not assume, right?

Sam: Right.

Terry: What about any learning or games designers who might be thinking, ‘I’d really like to design something to raise awareness around Autism, or to help Autistic people’? What would you say to them? Is there anything you’d really like to see?

Sam: Maybe something to improve facial expression recognition – roleplay scenarios where you have to guess what’s going on and you get rewarded for guessing correctly. Or emotional intelligence development: how to manage strong emotions for what’s acceptable in society, so you can enjoy holding down a job. Converting direct language into non-Autistic language, too.

But conversely, apps for non-Autistic people to understand Autistic people and their potential difficulty with emotional intelligence, facial recognition, sensory sensitivity, overload, meltdowns, language, etc.  It works both ways – it’s not just for Autistic people to do all the work.

Terry: That’s a great point. And is there something we should also consider about how this shouldn’t all be about just addressing the difficulties that Autistic people face, but harnessing their strengths to improve games and workplaces?

Sam: Absolutely. That’s a huge part of what I do. So, Autistic minds can often be great with problem solving, because they often see things very differently, and more perspectives bring more solutions. They can often also be great at concentrating, if left alone. Again, designing for difference is going to reap rewards.

Terry: I think that might end up as part of our title. Sam, it’s been really thought-provoking for me, and this conversation is definitely going to be rattling around in my mind in future when I’m designing. Thank you.

Sam: And for me. And fun, too.

Terry: Definitely. That’s a gamification maxim: don’t forget the fun[4].

The post Designing for Difference – Autism and Games-based Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.