The attractiveness of the Strategy game

Various game genres have been continuously mixed and newly derived throughout a long history. It no longer makes much sense to talk about recently released games in terms of genre. There are so many and they merge and mingle. Now, it’s the time for the fusion and expansion of platforms such as PC, console, mobile, virtual reality, metaverse, etc. Gamers also don’t talk much about game genres anymore. The single game genre is ‘Fun’.

Although the border between genre and platform has gradually decreased, there are some games that have focused on only one kind of experience. Strategy games have remained consistently popular with gamers for decades.

There are notable strategy simulation games like the “System Soft ‘Daisenryaku’ series”, “Sid Meier’s Civilization series”, “Heroes of Might and Magic series, HoMM”, “BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. Super Robot Wars series”, “KOEI TECMO GAMES CO., LTD. Romance of The Three Kingdoms series”, and these are recognized as representative of the work of the companies that produced them. Although many games have been changed over time, these games haven’t changed much at all, and tend towards tradition rather than the change. Why are people so consistently and continuously attracted to these strategy simulation games?

Push and Pull

‘Push and Pull’ is important between lovers. It’s the same in strategy simulation games. ‘Push and Pull’ is required between the game and the player(s). The reason why this genre has been attractive is that at its core there is considerable ‘Push and Pull’.

The key to the strategy simulation game is to figure out and analyze given information. Gamers gain satisfaction from their efforts to make the best choices. The game continuously asks ‘Are you sure about your choice or decision?  What are you supposed to do in the specified case?’. The game player quickly gets bored in case of easily expected situations.

These are the three key characteristics in the strategy simulation game. These are just the basics; there are much more complex game mechanisms in real games.

 1. Small, but (sometimes) many

The strategy simulation game sets the limit on the information which gamers can use. Gamers must make decisions with limited information. Unclear information means that game players do not always decide well. In the early stages, a dim fog appears. The player experiences uncertainty, including the apprehension that he or she doesn’t know what will pop up in the fog.

If it pulls, it pushes. Sometimes, there is a lot of information provided. This makes it hard to categorize the information. Or sometimes the information includes a mix of meaningless, false or useless signals – ‘red herrings’. This also introduces doubt or even makes the player think ‘Why does the game treat me like this?’.

Throughout the process, players are continuously thinking about their best choices or wrong ones.

2. The best choices starts from doubt.

The strategy simulation pushes the player towards doubt and deep thought. Players unwittingly get immersed in this process. They gain experience and knowledge regardless of the outcomes. Feedback from this process provides the basis to make choices in the future.

The results of choices cannot be always right, or enjoyable. So, almost all strategy simulation games allow a lot of opportunities for saving and reloading. There are various reasons why the strategy fails. Players didn’t look at the information carefully, or didn’t understand the overall context, or they didn’t have much ability to handle it well, or there can even be a element of luck involved. The strategy simulation game continuously delivers positive or negative experiences to the player.

3. There aren’t any definite correct answers.

Except the traditional tabletop games such Chess or Baduk (Go), almost all strategy simulations contain story and quest. Despite several failures by players, the overall process continuously flows.

The core of strategy simulation games is that the choice can be the best right now, but it can be either the best or worst later. The wrong choice can be fixed, and a good choice can lead to bad results at any time.

This is why gamers love this genre for a long time. Players overcome the worst choice, and try to make efforts for the best results. They want to prove that their strategy is correct in this process. They feel more fun in harder and more difficult situations. They gain experience through failure in many situations, but they are building their ‘big picture’ by overcoming these.

It looks like a failure, but it can be a foundation of success later. In addition, it seems to be a success, but can contain the seeds of later failure. The strategy simulation game pulls and pushes the players without stopping.

Strategy simulation is everywhere

The challenge that the organization or team encounter is like a game quest. The characteristics of strategy simulation games can be found in the real world. Processes such as information collection & categorization, expectation about possible variables, planning solutions, and gaining knowledge through failure applies similarly in the game world and the real world.

In other words, corporate work can be approached as a sort of strategy simulation or from a game perspective. Through the fun in the strategy simulation game, participants can actively participate in, get motivation, and enhance their ability to work.

Games with titles like ‘Factory’, ‘Management’, ‘Tycoon’ can be hardly considered as work from players’ perspective. The reason why these games are attractive is that realistic work is changed into various game mechanisms.

The attempt to transform the ‘strategic’ approach to work into a game is done in various ways. For example, narrative themes such as handling customers’ complaints, human resource allocation and utilization by management, or figuring out possible variables related to changes in advance are continuously occurring.

The strategy simulation game is often a single-player experience, but various opinions can be collected by gamification. If the organizational ‘Strategists’ can share their opinions with each other, they can get a higher probability to make better choices than being alone.

Gamification doesn’t just focus on simple ‘fun’ and ‘performance’ alone. The purpose of the game can be a quest or stage of a project, but the purpose of the gamification is performance enhancement and improvement. Therefore, through the process of endless push and pull, and choices, strategy simulation games provide a good model for ability enhancement.

One usual meaning of ‘Strategy’ is planning for the future, through a process of analyzing past results and learning from them. The process of deriving individual or organizational strategies is similar in both the game and real world. Understanding overall organizational structure and capacity, and getting the strategy to work are not a simple accomplishment of purpose, but a process of continuous maintenance. Organizations which clearly understand their capacities, which gain experience from failures and develop strategies to handle them are not affected by small failures. They have the power to fix wrong choices. It’s like strategy simulation games with long traditions. Perhaps, readers might have experience similar characteristics of this genre without knowing. Shall we find this?

The post The Push and Pull of Strategy Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Fail to Learn by Scott Provence is a book based on a syllogism. In fact, each of its three parts is based on one part of the syllogism: People learn the most from failure, People fail the most playing games and Therefore, games are the best way for people to learn.

Games-based learning (GBL) professionals and other interested parties make many claims for the efficacy of games in learning. For example, that they engender greater engagement, that they allow the creation of learning situations which would take much longer, or be more dangerous, in a non-game setting, or that play and learning are, in fact, the same thing. And there are many books in which you will find all these and more addressed in some detail.

An In-depth Exploration of Failure

One of this book’s greatest strengths, is that it focuses on just one aspect of play in learning, and thus, not only emphasises the importance of that aspect, but gives space and time to be really thorough in exploring it. While I, like many other GBL professionals have often cited ‘safe failure’ as a reason to use games in learning situations, I have never read something, which, in its depth, made me think about all of the implications of that in such detail.

This book is subtitled ‘A Manifesto for Training Gamification’, and the author goes on to explain his liking for the audacity and actionable nature of manifestos. There is much here that is actionable – and aspect of such books that I particularly like. Indeed, the entire third part of the book is dedicated to finding ways (many of them very quick and easy) to put into practice what you have learned about failure during the first two parts

An Audacious Manifesto

It is also true that many will find this book audacious, and for some educators, maybe too much so. As Scott notes throughout the book, we have been socialised to have a deep aversion to failure, and this is common in the field of learning and education as elsewhere. In this book, you will find compelling arguments as to why this is a problem we should, and indeed must, tackle, if we are to create learning as it should be, not only effective, but joyful.

While this subtitle implies a focus on workplace learning, the ideas within are universally applicable, from early education to adult learning. Creators of learning games often find that they have to justify why they are proposing learning techniques which many believe should be ‘just for children’. I hope that sceptics who read this book will find plenty of food for thought in the examples of research from learners of all ages.

People Learn the Most from Failure

In the first part of the book, People Learn the Most from Failure, the reader is invited to explore the current basis of many learning and education systems, based as they are on the ideas of Behaviourists such as B.F. Skinner. Although most teachers would dislike the idea that they treat the children in their care like pigeons in cages, or cats in electrified boxes, it is undeniable that we still ‘punish’ learners, of all ages, for failure, by making that failure ‘costly’ (if you fail the exam you must retake the whole course) and stigmatising the act of failure, as well as relying heavily on extrinsic motivators to incentivise people in all sorts of ways.

And yet, as Scott shows through references to many studies and through compelling anecdotes (the entire book is peppered with these, to great effect), those who are allowed to fail, benefit from that process by learning better – and the more they fail, the greater that beneficial effect becomes.
We often hear quotes from inventors and entrepreneurs about the wisdom of ‘failing fast and cheap’. This part of the book asks us to reflect on what failing fast and cheap might look in education.

People Fail the Most Playing Games

With the benefits of failure now well-established, we move to the second part of the book, People Fail the Most Playing Games. The first chapter of this section appears as an article in Ludogogy, so if you want to get a taste of this book you can do so there.

The section explains in detail what games are, and their relationship to failure, how they make it a low-cost activity, and the benefits of creating similar low-stakes failure opportunities in our learning experiences. Without ‘obstacles’, which bring with them the potential to stumble and fail, games are not games at all. When we apply this idea to learning, we discover, counterintuitively, that making learning more difficult, and thus more likely to cause failure, we facilitate learning rather than hindering it.

Therefore Games are the Best Way for People to Learn

The third part of the book, Therefore Games are the Best Way for People to Learn, draws together all that has come before, giving us actionable ways to implement constructive failure in our learning designs. But these are spread throughout the book too. Many chapters end with a pop quiz, which not only consolidate material covered in the preceding text, but, progressively, incorporate actionable failure features, providing practical examples of implementation and allowing us the experience of constructive failure in the learning of the book.

An example of the kind of simply actionable ‘hack’ that we could apply to learning designs, to utilise failure as a benefit, is to add ‘confidence’ scores to learner assessments. Learners answer a question and then simply give a score of 1 – 10 of how confident they are in their answer. This adds little design overhead, and, as it doesn’t need marking, adds nothing to the educator’s work after the fact. However, it is shown to increase correct recall of the material being tested, especially, again counterintuitively, if we are confident in an answer which is actually wrong.

Templates for You to Use

The final section of the book also provides a complete model incorporating the ideas in the book and templates and other resources to support your use of the model for your own learning designs are offered at Scott Provence’s site.

This review just scratches the surface of what you will learn by reading this book, and the inspiration you will take away for your own learning designs. Scott Provence has done a masterful job of exploring failure in its many forms and presenting us with simple applications, which in turn will inspire further exploration.

The aversion to both failure, and, it seems, fun, which characterises many of the education and learning experiences which many of us have borne in the past, and continue to have to bear, do not just make learning unpleasant, but they make it less likely to stick or benefit us longer term.
If you want to do your bit to make learning better, then embrace the fun and benefit of failure, and you could definitely do worse than to use this book as your guide in your exploration of Failing (in order) to Learn.

Honourable mention also has to go to Will Burrows, who did the illustrations for the book, which complement the text wonderfully.

Check out Scott Provence’s TEDx talk on Failing to Learn.

Fail to Learn is available on Amazon

(Ludogogy Affiliate policy: Ludogogy did receive a review copy of this product, but only publishes reviews of products that we would be willing to recommend and buy ourselves. If we don’t like something, we don’t write a review, ‘cos ain’t nobody got time for reading about something that’s no good)

The post Review – A Book About How We Learn From Failure first appeared on Ludogogy.

James Carse talks about this in his book: Finite and Infinite Games. He says: Finite games usually end with a victory or loss. While infinite games don’t end. They are focused on progress and continuation of play. So how do you go about designing game ecosystems in which winning isn’t the goal? When the goal is learning or just simply continuation of play.

Finite and Infinite Games is available on Amazon 

I build games for learning in which learning must happen irrespective of a win/lose state for players. There are a few things I’ve learnt over the years which have helped me to focus on the learning outcomes as opposed to winning and losing in a game ecosystem. Here are some of them.

Reorient the player learning narrative

Most players enter a game ecosystem for the following reasons:

• To have fun
• To learn
• To get better
• To win
• To take down the bad guy
• To conquer an epic quest
• To pass time

And on and on…

As you can see, for a player, winning isn’t the only objective (while it may be important) it isn’t the only one. So when I design game ecosystems in which winning isn’t the goal, I dispel the idea that we’re here to win. Instead, I make it abundantly clear from the very beginning that we’re here to learn, to play, to revisit something we knew but weren’t sure about or to discover something entirely new. Doing this changes the narrative of the player and makes them think about why they’re here. It reorients them to start to see things from another perspective.

Design for reflection

When you bake into your design the opportunity to reflect from the learning, the learners are less likely to focus on absolute outcomes like win/lose. This requires you to start by reorienting the players’ narrative and then identifying the important reflection areas to direct the players’ attention to after the game-play.

Focus on progress and activity instead of “Victory”

While I can’t imagine a finite game that does not have an end goal, one of the things I’ve been able to do is make the end goal less obvious by increasing focus on real-time activities that the player must do to eventually get to the end goal. If done right, the activities themselves are so engaging that most players will feel busy and content with staying there. I’ll encourage you to read about core and dual loops to learn more about that. When players focus on the activities at hand and gain progress (and have fun) through that, they are likely to care less about the end outcome. Needless to say, this isn’t a blanket statement as we know there are all kinds of players out there. Ones who play to play and ones who play to win.

Why dampen the effects of win/lose states in learning games

In most games, this shouldn’t matter as much. But in games that are designed for learning, this element plays a significant role. Think about how you feel when you win a game. Now about how you feel when you lose. A stark difference right? No matter how balanced and zen-like you are, you feel a sense of elation when you win and little pinch when you don’t.

As I designed and ran learning games for various corporate teams across the world, I began to realize that when teams won the game, they would bask in their glory of how incredible they were. While when they lost, they would often sulk so much that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the game. Some went as far as blaming my games to be “rigged”.

Over time I realized as I shifted the focus from winning or losing to playing and learning, I was able to keep the players balanced through the game. If they won, there was something to learn from the experience just as much as if they lost. Through the years as I ran tests with the three parameters, I learned that the cases in which the learners did not focus on winning/losing were the cases in which players took away the most learning from the game irrespective of whether they won or lost in the game.

The post The Effects of Win/Loss States on Learning first appeared on Ludogogy.

Fail to Learn: A Manifesto for Training Gamification is available from Amazon

“Press the green button to pick up the gun.”

“No, the green button.”

“Green button.”

I had never played a first-person shooter before. In fact, it was quickly becoming clear that I’d barely picked up a video game controller. My younger brother Collin, on the other hand, was a gaming pro. So I sat and listened carefully to his patient instructions over the phone. We were about to head into battle, and it was his job to help me survive.

But I was still the older brother, and I hated looking dumb in front of Collin. So I insisted the first game we play be something he’d never tried before either.

The game started, and our avatars were suddenly in the virtual wilds of Northwestern America. It was a fitting location since the two of us were separated by the actual wilds of Northwestern America. Say what you will about technology, but it’s certainly made online cooperative gaming a breeze.

Yet, despite this high-tech platform, I still couldn’t figure out how to make my avatar pick up his stupid gun.

“Someone’s coming.” Collin’s voice came through my earpiece, as I caught the blur of movement on my screen.

I gave up on the gun and steered my avatar behind a large crate. I’d seen the previews for this game. I knew it was going to get bloody.

“Are they out there?” I realized a second too late that I was whispering into my headset, as if the bots in the game could hear me.

“Dunno. Hang on a minute.”

I watched Collin’s character glide past me. He conjured up a ridiculously large rifle out of thin air, then he ducked out the door.

BANG!

“Yup,” Collin said, unfazed after experiencing what I could only imagine was a quick and gruesome death. “There’s an ambush waiting for us out front.”

I froze, both onscreen and in real life. This game actually pumped in heartbeat sounds over the audio track. As if it wasn’t enough to feel my own heart in my throat.

All of a sudden, I saw Collin run past me again.

“Wait, I thought you just died,” I said.

“Instant respawn, man. Hang on a minute.”

He poked his head out the door again.

BANG!

“Dang it. Okay, going left might not be an option.”

I thought I saw a bullet flash above my crate. I tried to make my avatar crouch down even lower. Meanwhile, Collin breezed by me for a third time.

BANG!

“Yeah. Definitely don’t go left.”

“How many lives do we get?”

“Lives? Infinite.” Collin said, as if confused by the question. He raced by me once more. He was moving faster this time, already getting familiar with the game’s controls.

“What should I do?” I asked, spinning my crouched character in a desperate circle.

BANG!

“Come join me this time. No? Well then I’ll just—”

BANG!

“Oh, I see what they’re doing now. Maybe we should try—”

BANG!

I risked a glance over the top of my crate. Collin was already out front for a seventh time, guns blazing. His avatar looked close to death (again), but he also looked like he’d gotten even farther away from our starting point.

BANG!

This time a bullet hit me. My screen flashed. “Am I dead?” I shouted. “Where are you going? You’re supposed to help me survive!”

By the time I finally poked my head out the door, all the bad guys were gone and Collin’s character was waving to me from the top of the hill.

“Here’s a survival tip,” he said. “Try dying.”

DEATH AND PERMADEATH

In 2014, the “Golden Joystick” award for Best Game of the Year went to an action role-player called Dark Souls II. In addition to the sweeping journey Dark Souls II took players on, it also gave some great behind-the-scenes data. We got to see how often players of Dark Souls II died.

Adding up just the Dark Souls console gamers (e.g., people who played on PlayStation, Xbox, etc.), people were dying in this game a whopping 150,443 times per hour, which equates to 42 deaths every second.

That means, in 2014, the death rate in Dark Souls II was 23 times higher than the actual death rate in the real world.

In order to beat Dark Souls II on PlayStation 3, a player died 860 times on average.¹ That’s a failure-to-success ratio most of us would be comfortable with in the “real world.”

I’d say I have a healthy fear of death. It keeps me from base-jumping and lion-taming, but it also apparently keeps me from developing any skills as a game-player.

Death is one of the most common learning mechanisms in games. From the classic chess board to the zombie hordes of Resident Evil, games help us learn by killing us over and over again. Your average gamer expects to die in nearly everything they play. To them, death and rebirth is just a dressed-up version of trial and error.

It’s usually only the very experienced gamers who seek challenges without a “respawn” option. In these rare environments, if you die, you’re done. No do-overs. No refresh from the last save-point. In the gaming world, it’s known as “permadeath.”

Even for experienced video gamers “permadeath” can be an agonizing thing to experience. Just ask Phil Watson, who holds the world record for longest survival time in “Hardcore” mode of the video game Minecraft. This mode combines all of the most difficult game settings, along with a permadeath state, meaning if you die, you lose the entire world you’ve built.

Some of the best Minecraft Hardcore players are able to survive for a few weeks. Phil Watson lived in his Minecraft world for five years.

It made his character’s demise all the more tragic. A video of Watson’s last fateful seconds (which occurred in April 2019) has over a million views online. In it, you can hear the anguished cries that lie at the heart of any permadeath scenario:

“Noooo!! Really?! That’s how I die?”²

KILL THE MONKEY

When it comes to dealing with death, I’m somewhere between my little brother and Phil. To be honest, I’m probably closer to Phil, in the sense that I felt like screaming and pulling my hair every time I messed up in a game. The same applies to all the times I failed in the classroom.

Games are helping me change that perspective, and become a better learner (and facilitator) because of it.

One of the things games do to help me (and the millions of other loss-averse people out there) is to actually make failing an enjoyable, even funny experience.

Picture this: You’re a monkey trapped inside a glass ball. You need to get from one side of a platform to the other. You pedal desperately through different speeds and slopes, and more often than not, you roll off the platform into the dark abyss below. You scream your high-pitched monkey scream all the way down.

This is the general premise of the game Super Monkey Ball 2. Like all games, you’d assume players would be most interested in beating levels and completing the game.

You’d be wrong.

Psychologists in Finland had a group of people play Super Monkey Ball 2 while hooked up to biosensors. They wanted to see at which point in the game people experienced the biggest spikes in physiological activity.

When players achieved the set objectives of each level, their pleasure increased. When they missed an objective, their frustration increased. No surprises so far.

But then the researchers noticed something weird happening. When players deliberately tried to fail—when they purposefully sent the poor monkey spinning off into space—they registered not frustration or boredom, but pleasure. “Although the event in question represents a clear failure, several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment.”³

I’ll admit, there’s something innately pleasurable about sending a tiny cartoon monkey screaming into the void. The researchers concluded that negative events in a game can still elicit positive emotional responses. Ultimately, they found that attaining the game’s original objectives actually decreased a player’s level of interest overall.⁴

Sometimes, it’s just more fun to kill the monkey.

EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE

Let’s face it: most of us have pretty fragile egos when it comes to learning something new. No one likes being the unskilled novice. Making a mistake doesn’t often feel good. In fact, some of the studies that show the benefits of error-driven learning are quick to point out that it only works “if students have the emotional resilience to respond to mistakes adaptively and flexibly.”⁵

In other words, learners have to feel secure enough and brave enough to lose. So what is the best way to create a flexible, emotional resilience to making mistakes?

Play a game.

“Despite the societal taboo against failure,” one educator writes, “there is one place where it is expected and embraced – games. In particular, video games are built on the premise that progress happens through a process of experimentation, failure, and adaptation.”⁶

Studies conducted by everyone from the American Psychological Association to Columbia University found the same thing.⁷ Those who played games tend to be more emotionally resilient than those who do not. Some studies even found that video game players showed “significantly higher intellectual functioning, higher academic achievement, better peer relationships, and fewer mental health difficulties.”⁸

A lot of this emotional resilience can be traced back to the fact that game-players can build up a bigger-picture perspective about failure. They get used to telling themselves “it’s all just a game.” And slowly, those fragile egos become tempered through the process of playing, until they have the steely resolve to sustain just about any error in real-life.

Games give us “a kind of lightness and freedom,” educator and designer Jesper Juul explains. The reason we’re okay with failing so often in games is because “we have the option of denying that game failure matters.”⁹ And the more we play, the more we can bring this perspective to all other parts of our life.

Fail to Learn: A Manifesto for Training Gamification is available from Amazon

Read Scott’s other article for Ludogogy where he explores the idea that not all failure is created equal.

The post Die Trying – Learning through Failure in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

A couple of days ago I said that Castle Dice was my absolute favourite game in the whole world.  When I said this I may have been overlooking another game slightly.  The other game is 2048.  For those of you who don’t know 2048 – it’s a simple puzzle game in which the player slides numbered blocks around a 4×4 grid.  When two blocks containing the same number collide they merge to form a block containing twice that number.  The object of the game is to create a block containing the number 2048.  Just search in Google for 2048, but please don’t blame me if you fall into a timesink.

Last night I cracked it.  I made 2048, and this morning I feel free. This may go some way to explaining why I cited Castle Dice and not 2048 as my favourite game.   Castle Dice feels like a ‘proper’ game, whereas 2048 feels like a bit of a guilty pleasure – an itch that needs scratching.  When I’ve finished playing Castle Dice, I feel happy about time well spent with friends and family. After a long session of 2048, I often feel disappointed that I have not yet reached the goal.  Often this feeling is also tinged with the tiniest bit of self-loathing that I have yet again spent x amount of time playing 2048 instead of ironing / working on my own game / cleaning up the mess in the house / filing tax return (delete as applicable).  I feel a little like a reformed smoker who has suddenly found herself begging a cig and lighting up at a party.

With respect to the business learning game I am creating, I definitely don’t want the participants finishing with the feeling that they could have been doing something better with their time, but I do want to capture some of the compulsion to continue which I feel when playing 2048.  One of the things I find particularly interesting is how my intention to play for ‘just 5 minutes’ is swept aside.  Failure to achieve the goal, instead of prompting me to give up, merely drives me to have ‘just one more go’, until I realise that it’s stupid o’clock and I really need to go to bed.

I have witnessed the powerful demotivational effect of failure in some games designed for learning – in particular in a competitive team situation, and I have also personally experienced how I have been demotivated in both game and real-life situations by my own failures.  So what is it about the way failure is dealt with in this game that makes it such a spur to continue, and how can I adapt and apply that to my game setting?

I have spent a little time trawling around the available literature on failure in games and motivation.  I can recommend this.  It’s fascinating, and there are some very well written Psychology, Education and Serious Games papers out there, but I will try to distil from them the parts which I find most relevant to my job in hand.

Experimentation and perseverance – games allow for repeated experimentation and perseverance in the face of failure.  Perseverance is a form of achievement which allows the player to feel rewarded by failure – the ‘I’m not going to let this beat me’ feeling

Problem- solving strategies – on its own perseverance might fail to motivate for a long period in the face of continued failure, but failure also allows an opportunity to try again in a different way – to experiment with different strategies.  And before you ask, yes, you can come up with a winning strategy for a puzzle with the simple rule set like 2048 – I came up with it two nights ago and it was only a matter of time then before I managed to successfully apply it.  I won’t publish a spoiler here, but you can email me if you like sarah@ludogogy.co.uk.  I’ll also give you my system for halving Sudoku solving time if you want. Problem-solving and coming up with strategies reward because they engender feeling of competence, creativity and choice – all of which are components of meaningful play.

Rapid feedback – 2048 gives constant and rapid feedback.  The two ‘formal ‘measures of your success or failure are the magnitude of the highest number block you have managed to create and your ‘high score’ – a points based score which relates to the number of tiles you have managed to merge.  There are other less formalised measures of your progress or lack that can be perceived as you play.  Most notably, your current game finishes and you fail if:

1. You have failed to create the 2048 block AND
2. There are no blocks with the same numbers adjacent to each other which can be merged AND
3. There are no gaps not filled by numbered blocks in your grid.

So, the gradual filling of the grid by blocks indicates you are close to failure.  The distance between blocks of the same number indicate the degree of difficulty you are in.  Taken together, these pieces of feedback build a picture of how well you are playing, regardless of your current score or the highest tile.  All of these feedback mechanisms will help to feed to desire to persevere in the following ways:

• To achieve the next highest numbered block for the first time
• To achieve a higher numbered block next go
• To improve upon one’s high score
• To play better next time

Rewarding effort not mastery – Mastery of this game is by achievement of the ultimate goal – the 2048 block.  However, the high-score mechanism allows a feeling of progress towards this as does the act of achieving a higher numbered block for the first time.

In theory – I mastered the game yesterday and that being the case, I now feel I don’t need to play again – errrr…. except for one thing.  Very stupidly, in hindsight, I downloaded a version of the game which allows me to play in ‘infinite’ mode.  This means I could theoretically play the game without an ultimate end goal (see Tetris) with no possibility of mastery – just the reward of bettering my own performance.  I fear I may return after the current hiatus.

Stakes – the penalties of failure are low.  Nothing horrible is going to happen to me because I haven’t made the 2048 block.  This makes many games unlike real life, where the consequences of failure at, say, rock climbing, are potentially disastrous.  This makes games a safe place to experiment and allows resilience and perseverance in the face of failure.

Simplicity of trying again – When I fail in 2048, it is very easy to try again.  The actual actions I need to carry out to play could not be simpler to do.  I slide my finger across a screen.  Also the first thing that pops up when I do fail is a button which I can click ‘Try Again’ which clears the screen and starts me off, which is actually easier than putting the thing down!

Contrast this with failure in some real life situations and in some games where a large amount of preparation or re-doing is required to make another attempt.  Discovering you do not have enough oxygen when halfway up Everest (in real life or in an realistic Everest climbing sim game) will require you to climb back down, reorganise (and refinance) another expedition and climb halfway back up again before you are even back in the same position – this is part of the ‘low stakes’ element.

All well and good – but what about the self-loathing thing?  Where does that come from and how can I avoid it in the game I am creating.  Without getting too involved or pretending to have in-depth knowledge of Psychology (and Sociology) which I don’t, I think I will look to brain chemistry to explain why I continue to play and Socialisation to explain why I feel bad about it.  I have expectations of myself as wage-earner, mother, household member and member of society which I feel I am failing to live up to if I spend time doing something as trivial as playing a game, when I could be doing something ‘useful’.  But, my reptile brain doesn’t care about any of that so long as it keeps getting the dopamine shots.

I need to balance the two in my activity.  I will, after all, be expecting people to dedicate both money and time to my game.  Succeed or fail, my participants must feel their time is well spent as well as compelling and fun.  When I am designing for the elements above, I must constantly have in my mind the question ‘But what does that help my players to learn, and how?’

Blimey – who would have thought there was so much in it?  For a game based on such a simple premise, there’s a lot of stuff going on.  The lessons I am taking forward to my own design are:

• Give the participants scope to try different strategies
• Include lots of opportunities to solve problems
• Give participants autonomy in their choices
• Make it easy to return from a point of failure without too much recapping
• Build in formal and informal progress indicators which will encourage perseverance
• Feedback should be timely and frequent
• Include inter-team competition only if it is relevant to the goal / learning objective
• Ensure that game goals consider participants’ ‘socialised’ view of themselves and their objectives as well as the dopamine shots

The post 2048 – Making Failure Motivating first appeared on Ludogogy.

I had a simple premise for a book:

1. People learn the most when they fail
2. People fail the most when they play games
3. Therefore, games are the best way for people to learn

There was plenty of research to back this up. But even better than case studies, I had quotes—everyone from Einstein to Edison who all confirmed that failure was the greatest teacher. One such quote came from the late Randy Pausch, who said:

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

Pausch’s quote seemed especially fitting when discussing failure as a core mechanic of game-based learning. My audience of trainers, teachers, and instructional designers were often building games that literally had players jumping over walls. What better way to summarize the opportunities that failure provides?

I called my book Fail to Learn. But I failed my readers by treating trial-and-error like an impartial design tool. I ignored the fact that real-world failure is disproportionately weighted to punish and oppress people different than me.

THE LOSING TEAM

Here’s a case study that didn’t make it into the book:

Researchers from Utah State University explored the hiring patterns of Men’s Basketball coaches in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Using data from over a 30-year period, they found that minority coaches were much more likely than white coaches to be hired on to teams with losing records. The researchers found a similar discrepancy in the hiring practices of struggling Fortune 500 companies. Companies experiencing hardship were much more likely to hire women and minority CEOs (Cook and Glass, 2013).

I couldn’t find a way to add this to my book on game-based learning, but the story stuck with me. Why would a struggling organization or sports team suddenly be more likely to promote women and minorities?

Some people suggested that white men simply had more privilege and power to decline “risky” offers like these. Others wondered if failing organizations were consciously or subconsciously trying to signal a change in direction by bringing on a “nontraditional” (read: non-white, non-male) leader.

Regardless, these problematic practices gave rise to a new term: the “glass cliff.”

Whereas the “glass ceiling” describes a barrier that keeps oppressed groups from reaching the top of an organization, the glass cliff is the precarious spot those groups can find themselves in when they are given top positions, but only when there is increased risk and likelihood of failure.

The coaches from this study face an impossible, “double jeopardy” situation, as one researcher describes. “Not only are they more likely to be placed in struggling teams, but they’re not given enough time to prove themselves, so in some ways that risks confirmation bias that black coaches aren’t as good” (Munson, 2013).

But that’s not where the bias stops.

THE DISPARITY OF FAILURE

“We are all failures—at least the best of us are,” said J.M. Barrie.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly,” said Robert Kennedy.

“The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure,” said John C. Maxwell.

All successful individuals. All white men.

There’s a problem with how our society views failure, and it’s a problem in which I, too, am complicit. When we treat failure as an impartial tool, as I did in my research, we ignore the disproportionate consequences even the smallest failure can bring to oppressed groups. When we tell people to “fail fast and cheap,” we cheapen their lived experiences, and we further the misconception that everyone who makes the same mistake will suffer the same amount.

Yes, failure can be a great teacher. But in order for that to be true for everyone, we must do more than regurgitate the aphorisms of famous white men. Game environments and learning environments can be amazing places where students may experience leveled playing fields the likes of which will never exist in the real world. But we let down our learners and ourselves if we don’t recognize the uneven terrain of reality each student is returning to.

There are many action steps we can and must take from here, but perhaps the most fundamental is to think more critically the next time we see a famous “learn from failure” quote. From now on, when we talk about climbing over the walls that are “there to stop the other people,” let’s make sure we aren’t adding more bricks to the top.

Fail to Learn: A Manifesto for Training Gamification is available from Amazon

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