Flow is a really sought after experience in game design. It’s really engaging and enthralling because players lose a sense of time and space when they are in the flow state. They become lost and completely enveloped in the game world.

But designing a game to engage players’ flow states is not an easy feat to accomplish. So, just how do you design games to that take advantage of this flow state?

This article outlines and describes the flow state in the player experience. It’ll also explain the most important and influential reasons for designing for flow. Flow state is comprised of a balance of goals and feedback and how both are reflected and influenced by perceptual control. So, this article will examine how these disparate elements work together to help players engage in that state.

Difficulty modulation is an important aspect to flow state in players. Games can’t be so easy so that players just fly by on autopilot. Likewise, they can’t be so hard that they become discouraged and lose the motivation to play them. Therefore, balancing the difficulty of a game is a critical part of designing for the flow state.

However, competitive orthogames introduce another factor in designing for the flow state: other players’ actions and abilities. Therefore, this article will examine how pre-developed knowledge from players influences how they play, act, and interact with other players in these competitive orthogames.

Finally, this article closes on the applied flow state in its use in games as well as the most critical considerations for game design and the application of games-based learning.

Flow Described

So what exactly is the flow state? It’s often a very beguiling and seductive experience. Flow state often occurs in game play when the player’s attention is a completely captured by the game and they lose all sense of time and space. However, the flow state is not just limited to games. Instead, creatives such as artists, musicians, and writers often experience the flow state when they are completely engrossed with their work.

In addition, talented athletes also experience the flow state when they are tasked with performing at the peak of their abilities.  Students can also experience the flow state when they are studying or pursuing subjects that they are naturally interested in and are intrinsically motivated to pursue.

While flow state can occur for many different people through many different activities; the effect remains the same. Someone in the flow state is completely absorbed in the task and are wholly focused on the activity. They are not distracted by music, conversation, or even digital notifications.

So flow state can occur in individuals others than gamers. But gaming is one of the most common elements that engages players so wholly and fully in this feeling. That’s because really great, challenging, and engaging games require players to think and concentrate on a task or activity. Such is the critical elements for the flow state and why it’s such as sought after outcome for game designers.

Why Design for Flow?

So what would even be the purpose of designing a game for the flow state if it’s something that’s only achieved on the player’s end? It’s because, as the designer,  it’s your responsibility to provide a structure for interaction so that players can more easily enter a flow state.

In addition, players who enter the flow state demonstrate a higher level of game performance that also translates over to increased academic performance. As a result, players undertake more challenges as well as become more immersed in the interactivity of games: both of which result in more positive outcomes with games-based learning.

This immersion that is a byproduct of flow state is also closely tied with the development of a playful learning experience. Especially one that provides players agency in determining how they want to play, interact, and learn.

Of course, player agency is an integral part of successful games. But how exactly do other formal game elements influence and affect players’ development of flow state in games?

Goals, Feedback, and Flow

One of the main formal elements of helping players enter a state of flow is to design and structure clear goals for players. These goals should be clear as well as convey relevant meaning to players when they appear in the game. Sometimes these goals are dependent on one another: such as attaining a specific sword for a player in an RPG in order to slay a specific creature. In this way, the sword represents a clear goal in a linear path towards achieving the goal (slaying the creature).

Players should also be provided feedback in their pursuit of these goals. This feedback should be immediate and appropriate for players in order to help them more easily enter the flow state. This is especially relevant for digital games as even a minuscule amount of lag between player actions and results could break a player’s sense of immersion.

This represents an area where serious games, learning games, and educational games can close the gap with commercially available entertainment games. By providing an individual feedback that is related (but not completely connected to learning outcomes); players can more easily enter the flow state that supports their continued engagement. Such continued play should then link other formal game elements such as game mechanics and dynamics to the ultimate learning outcome for players.

Likewise, the game doesn’t need to be the only vehicle for feedback. Getting feedback from other learners and players provides yet another dimension for individuals to learn and adjust. This feedback can come from competitive play with other players; cooperative collaboration; or through comparison of individual results. In addition, instructors and facilitators can also change game settings, rules, and structures in order to better accommodate players’ performance and overall activity within the game.

Perceptual Control

One of the most critical parts of developing a flow state for players is making sure that they have both the agency and the ability to control the outcome of their circumstances via the formal elements of the game. This perceptual control refers to the actual systems that players use to affect these outcomes. This form of control is what makes games much different from watching a movie, reading a book, or other forms of narratives. Perpetual control gives players the ability to affect and change outcomes.

However, this control is not monolithic. Instead, designers should set elements and structures through which players can exact that control in the game. This makes it so that while players may attain “mastery” of the controls in the game, it may not always indicate mastery of the game. An example of this are games may have very rudimentary controls (i.e. Guitar Hero). But the use of those controls, and how they are combined with other game dynamics, make it so that there exists an opportunity for players to enter a flow state through the use of more challenging formats to augment those controls though more difficult songs, challenges, and changing rhythms.

The development of player controls is perhaps the most difficult and critical for designers for helping players enter a flow state. That’s because really intuitive controls can make it so that the players become more easily engrossed in the game versus ineffective control schemes which cause players to lose interest in the game.

Player interest can be increased even more when player’s decisions cause different outcomes and impacts in the game based on their selections. As such, the game becomes more repayable as specific outcomes based on specific player controls are not guaranteed. This can come about through game design (i.e. rougelike games with procedurally generated levels) or it can come about through competitive games such as playing against opponents whose actions may not be as predicable.

Difficulty Modulation

Opposing players actions and reactions to others in the game represents one facet of difficulty modulation. This is because not all players have the same level of skills and interest in the game and therefore react differently according to game conditions. For designers this means creating games that have a “sweet spot” in its difficulty that doesn’t make the game too hard (or too easy) to master. Such pinpointing is part of designing games for players to more easily enter the flow state.

This represents a main challenge for designers of single player digital games. That’s because these games must change dynamically accordingly to the player in order to keep them engaged in this “sweet spot” of difficulty modulation. The same can be said for games-based learning as games that are too easy also don’t represent an adequate challenge for the player. They therefore risk falling into boredom. Likewise, games that are too hard make it so that they may stop playing the game out of frustration.

This doesn’t mean that players enter games at the sweet spot of difficulty modulation. On the contrary, players must start out at a level that is easy for them to adapt to the mechanics and dynamics of the game and then ease into more difficult challenges that further engage them in play. Specifically in instructor lead games-based learning; individuals can dynamically change the difficulty of a game in order to provide a negative feedback loop where the experience will adjust according to the performance of the learner.

Pre-Developed Knowledge and Flow

Sometimes players pre-developed or pre-achieved knowledge will be useful or important for determining if they enter a flow state when playing a game. While subjective experience with other games or other experiences can be helpful, knowing how one’s actions affect and influence the outcome of game play is also important to know.

This can be particularly impactful for games that require a high degree of coordination and difficult learning curve to perform well. These occur frequently in MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arena) which is a type of video game where two teams compete against one another to achieve in-game objectives. Games like DOTA require a significant amount of foreknowledge in order for participants to play and compete effectively. This high requirement can often be a barrier to players from entering the flow state; but can produce an experience of flow akin to what high performance athletes experience when they are performing at the top of their abilities.

The amount of foreknowledge can change considerably based on the application of games. For educational, learning, and serious games, this amount of pre-development knowledge should only minimally affect game play as learning the mechanics and dynamics of the game often go hand in hand with the learning outcomes of its design. However, care should be taken that if a when a flow state is entered by students in serious game design; that it serve the greater purpose and learning outcomes intended by instructors.

Competitive Experience and Flow

While games like DOTA and other MOBAs often require a high degree of pre-developed knowledge; the same cannot be said for other directly competitive games. Some specific abstract games require only knowledge of the game’s formal structures; while others require this as well as some advanced knowledge on tactics and strategy in order to be successful.

Perhaps the most important thing to consider when applying competitive games for teaching and learning is to pair players together of equal or similar skill level. Doing so ensures that players are provided with the correct degree of difficulty and are augmenting the game so that it is not too easy nor is it too difficult for players. The result of which is structure in which the flow state can be more easily entered for individuals.

This ranking and matchmaking should ideally change and increase to provide more competitive and able players more difficult opponents and challenges to attempt. This makes it so that the difficulty is increased relative to players abilities and the abilities of their competitors.

Unlike single player or campaign games, competitive games rely on the experience and interaction with a player with like or similar skill levels. This also relates and is connected to the social nature of games and how play provides a structure of interaction with other students, learners, and gamers.

Applied Flow

The use and value of flow in games was previously covered. But, how is flow applied in game design? The formal elements of games include mechanics, dynamics, components, aesthetics, and to some extent story and technology. Flow as a result is an outcome gained by players based on a careful construction of these formal elements that provides excellent feedback through difficulty modulation and goals through player control.

Flow is an important process to design and uphold in games, because it can often mean the difference between a widely successful commercial game and a mildly successful one. Ultimately, flow state is in the hands of players. They can achieve this through thoughtful game design and is something that is sought after by players: even though they may not be that explicit about it.

Likewise, more hobbyist and enthusiastic gamers may embark on their own mission to achieve flow state. This can come about through their review and study of games, game elements, and game situations. Professional poker players and others who make their living playing and competing with games often necessitate this.  However, the individual student and learner may not be prepared to make this kind of commitment.

Despite this, serious game designers can merge the applicable and relatively addictive nature of commercial games with the learning outcomes and educational achievements that serious games have to offer.

Flow Design Considerations

Ultimately games-based learning is about using games as a medium for teaching and learning. Games-based learning is based on experiential learning which focuses on learning as the transformation of experience into knowledge. The purpose of designing for flow is to give a player a good gaming experience: specifically one that they can use to meet an expected educational outcome.

Therefore, when designing for flow, designers should consider how potential changes to game components, mechanics, and formal structures may or may not take a player out of a state of flow. This balanced approach to game design also includes providing a wide variety of activities and difficulties for players to engage and experience the game. These don’t have to be unique opportunities; as common game mechanics and structures can be used regularly and applied in different contexts to provide unique game dynamics to players.

Therefore, when designing for flow, creators target three levels of player patterns: feeling the aesthetics for the game; examining and discerning the game’s dynamics; and finally mastering the game’s mechanics and dynamics. Following this, the best designed games also augment and adjust their tolerances for players’ interactions in order to make the game relatively challenging for the individual.

Games-Based Learning and Flow

Flow is an outcome from the most successful and addictive commercial games. It’s something that can also be designed for with educational, learning, and serious games. When using games-based learning, flow can be utilized as a way for learners to become deeply engaged in the learning process. Likewise, flow can also be accomplished in other mediums such as traditional college and university classes when examining curriculum from a game designer’s perspective.

Instructors, teachers, and professors educating in a more orthodox environment will highly prize the state of flow engaged by students as they become more deeply engaged with the learning material and the intended outcomes. However, like games designers, flow is achieved from two different perspectives: from players and learners engagement in the game and designers and instructors preparation of the game and learning materials.

Part of the way that educators can approach teaching and learning like a game designer is to focus on the experience of learning and game play. Specifically, they should focus on applications of learning outcomes outside of the classroom and game: thus providing learners with a wider perspective of what and how they can apply their newfound knowledge.

This is often best accomplished with serious games that are designed from the ground up with a learning outcome in mind. The closer that educators and designers can get to connecting cognitive activities in the game with both intended learning outcomes and practical applications; the better they can more wholly educate students while also emphasizing a prioritization of flow in game play.

Takeaways

This article covered how to design games for the flow state. Flow was described and defined in relation to game design. Specific reasons were offered for designing games for players’ flow states. The formal elements of games were identified: specifically goals, feedback, and perceptual player control as it relates to the development of the flow state.

Perceptual control was related to difficulty modulations and how changing challenges that adjust to player competency and efficacy help continue to engage players in the game and maintain their flow state. This was further complicated by games that require some kind of pre-developed knowledge in order to play more advanced games. Those advanced games also included competitive games where prior game knowledge is often necessary to compete and play at a higher level.

Finally, this article ended on applied flow for games as well as design considerations for integrating flow into game play. Lastly, the flow state in games-based learning was addressed in applications for educators and instructors.

This article was about designing games for flow state.   To learn more about gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

If you have enjoyed this article – consider getting yourself lifetime access to Dave’s Games-Based Learning Digital Library containing all of the content from the past two Games-Based Learning Virtual Conferences; past webinars and courses he’s created; as well as his complete back catalogue of articles; podcast episodes; and videos. And more content is being added all the time.

Readers of Ludogogy can get a $50 discount on this valuable resource by using this link.

The post How do you Design Games for Flow State first appeared on Ludogogy.

O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.

A pile of random game-making materials. Two hour time slot. “Go! Make a game!”

For some, this is oxygen to their designer’s brain, feeding the spark that generates interesting games, but for other game designers like me, this type of game design jam doesn’t work. It’s akin to the blinking cursor on a document when it’s time to write a big paper for school. You know so much about your subject, and you’ve been working so hard to research and compile your ideas, but when it comes to actually starting the work–you blank. You have so many ideas, but which to pick and where to start?

There’s something about the temporary momentousness that can arise in game design jams–the time to design is NOW, with these materials, so procrastination and inaction cannot be entertained.  Game design jams are, in the words of Adrienne Ezell, graphic and game designer, “a great way to spark ideation and fast iteration.” Tim Blank, designer, says, “Game jams force us to use a different side of our creative brains that we don’t often use much as designers. We often do a lot of thinking when we iterate on a game, but game jams don’t give us the time to do that. They force us to design by trial and error, which is at the heart of experience design. They also require us to listen to what the game wants to be, as opposed to using our pre-set parameters for it.” Sen-Foong Lim, designer, says, “I thrive under pressure and work well with constraints, so jams are my… jam. I find the pressure cooker of a game jam so refreshing. My brain needs the strict deadline to force it to work on things.” Game design jams, just by existing, can launch designers from ideation to prototyping quickly.

Game design jams shove designers into the heart of the design process, but outcomes are not guaranteed.

Game design jams can have the opposite effect of sparking ideas; they can confound or even stymie them. The pressure of producing a working game in that time frame, whether it’s an hour or eight, coupled with the performative aspect of designing in front of strangers, is productive for some designers, not for others. Elizabeth Hargrave, designer, says, “My personal experience at the one game jam I have participated in was that it confirmed that I hate being forced to be creative in front of people, with time pressure. I’m glad other people enjoy them, am happy to watch, but my brain freezes and nothing comes out.” So how to create a design jam where designers can be successful?

When I was invited to present at Tabletop Network in 2019, I decided to run a game jam, a very specific kind of game jam. I had taught game design to middle school students for 17 years at that point, so I had a good sense of what worked to help others design games. As a teacher and designer, I had undertaken transformative professional development experiences that informed my thinking. The two guiding ideas that shaped my jam were “Bias Towards Action,” and “Fast and Cheap” from the productivity triangle. First, the design mindset “Bias Towards Action,” from the Stanford d.school method of design thinking, means that if you have a choice between thinking and doing, start doing, because you’ll be thinking as you do the work, and you will progress much faster. The second key idea is to avoid preciousness in design by iterating extraordinarily rapidly. Out of Good, Fast, and Cheap, designers can only choose two, and this jam embraces the concept of Fast and Cheap. In such a short amount of time, games won’t be Good, so designers don’t have to worry about that. They just have to make something testable, in any small part, so that they can work towards it being good later. When we spend a lot of time on ideas, they become precious, and often we don’t want to throw out an idea that has had a lot of investment, even with a low amount of payoff. When we develop the ability to toss out non-functional ideas, we get better at developing the ideas that have actual promise. With these ideas in mind, time became the determining factor in shaping the jam.

In a 45 minute session, designers were presented with three game design challenges, ten minutes each. They were provided the specific materials to use for each challenge, and could choose to collaborate or not with other designers. I presented the challenge, distributed resources, and set them off; and then I did it again, and again. I announced the time several times during each challenge to help with pacing throughout. There was no sharing of results afterwards, unless designers chose to do so outside of the session with me or others. I called this event “A Lightning Multi-Game Design Jam.”

Several key decisions guided my design process for the LMGDJ.

1. Design and material constraints remove some decision-making from the process to allow focus on other specific aspects of design.
2. Ten minutes is not enough time to design a full game, but it can spark an idea that could turn into a full game later.
3. If a designer hates any of the challenges or the format itself, at least it’s quick.

Design and material constraints remove some decision-making from the process to allow focus on other specific aspects of design. The first challenge was called, “This Race Game Is in the Bag.” Designers were given a paper bag with sets of bits inside. They could only use the paper bag itself and the bits. Limiting the resources is obvious; I removed choices about what to use, so they could focus just on what was given, not what was possible for components. The race game concept is one of the best I’ve found for helping anyone to design a game for the first time. First, most of the common kid and family games (Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, etc) are race games in some way (moving around a track controlled by a randomizer) so it’s familiar structure. Second, race games have the same objective and victory condition–be the first player to cross the line. In providing the objective and victory condition, designers needed only to start with HOW players would move their pieces. By providing specific components and game outcome, designers can focus on the key aspects of the design challenge to iterate quickly workable ideas.

Ten minutes is not enough time to design a full game, but it can spark an idea that could turn into a full game later. The ten minute limitation is the most divisive choice in the design of this event, but in a sneaky way, it also serves to help people succeed. The reality of a game design jam, even for much longer jams, is that creating a full, working game is very difficult to do; and when you don’t create a full workable game in that time, it can really feel like failure.  Success in ten minutes isn’t a full game, but is the start of what could be a full game. Success is creating something that might be worthwhile to keep pursuing. Jay Bell, designer, says, “It blows my mind that 10 months after a game jam prompt, I’ve created a solid game outside of my normal genre. Sometimes jams can produce fantastic nuggets, diamonds even.” If designers came away with one really cool idea from each challenge, or even from one challenge, that can be enough to call it successful.

If a designer hates any of the challenges or the format itself, at least it’s quick. If you hate what you are doing in a longer game design jam, you have to spend much longer with that game idea than you might if you were working on something at home on your own terms. The ten-minute limitation allows you a very short tunnel before the light appears to free you from a non-functional challenge. The ten-minute constraint did not work for designer Cat Drayer, who says, “The very short game jams don’t work for me at all, because my brain isn’t ready. If I am inspired in the wild, I can kick out a game idea in seconds, and have done so over and over with loose prompts, but with very tight time pressure, nothing happens.” Cat continues, “A game jam is meant to make you uncomfortable in some way. It should push you out of your normal design zone to try new things. The challenge for me personally is to find how far outside my space I can operate, and the go/no go is currently time. If I haven’t got enough time to digest the prompt, nothing happens.” The time constraint can simply limit designers too much, based on their personal preferences and style.

Designers make choices, and in the Lightning Multi-Game Design Jam, I made specific choices that impacted designers differently. At best, the jam has sparked ideas that became published games; at worst, its format has been too limiting for some designers to generate meaningful game ideas. This format was chosen with very specific goals and outcomes in mind, and certainly there are many other possibilities for design jam spaces. If you are considering designing and running a game jam, the lessons learned from this style of jam can help you to see how employing different ways to use time, resources, and specific design constraints will impact the outcomes for designers.

May the muse of fire ascend your game inventions (and design jams) ever higher.

Appendix:

Since 2019, I have run the LMGDJ online during covid and in person close to ten times, and I’ve adapted the different challenges each time for each audience and setting, while usually keeping the race game challenge as the first. Here is an incomplete list of design challenges that I have used.

Design Challenges

The Race Game is in the Bag

As described above; this challenge was about focusing on HOW a race could be won using provided materials.

The IP Challenge

A real company’s set of characters was to be the basis of a buzzworthy, social-media-friendly game. Designers were given two pieces of cardstock that were the entirety of resources for a flatpack giveaway, so space for rules meant less space for components, and each designer was given a two page dossier on the IP characters for them to use.

The Player Experience Challenge

Designers called out emotions and I picked “Rage.” Using paper and additional components, designers had to create a game that elicited rage from their players.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Make a two-player game based on Valentine’s Day using pennies and index cards. Two player games  have great potential for complete interaction between players, and Valentine’s Day can generate a wide range of narratives for games.

Push It!

Designers had to come up with their “entrance song” if they were a professional wrestler or other sports player, and had to design a press your luck game using dice and other components to make a game based on that song. Since entrance songs can generate strong feelings, the idea is to match that feeling to a game that elicits the same, or to draw some other inspiration.

Pick a Direction

Using dice, toothpicks, and meeples, create a game where “Direction” is the driving theme. This was used at an academic conference with a wide variety of audiences from education to corporate, so the theme “Direction” was intentionally chosen to allow a wide range of interpretations, and the components were specifically limited to facilitate quick design ideas.

Think Outside the Box

Using game components and an empty game box, create a game where players must integrate the box into the design itself.  I just think game boxes are an underutilized resource.

The post Lightning Multi-Game Design Jams first appeared on Ludogogy.

Rulebooks are one of the first things that players turn to after they’ve decided to play your game.  Players turn to this as the guide; the rules; and the structure that will shape their experience.

Often designers think about rulebooks at the very end of their design process. However the ability to write clear, concise, and actionable rules is more challenging than you may think.

This article will review game rulebooks in depth. It will cover the purpose of your rulebook; striking a balance in your structure; and the process of writing and revising the rulebook. The structure of the rulebook will be covered from different sections including statistical information, components, theme, overview, setup, core loop, and game end.

The way that you organize the contents of this rulebook is important for shaping the player experience. Your voice in how you write your rulebook is as important as testing it out with your players. Finally, edge cases; applications of rule books in games based learning; and action steps for writing your rulebook will be covered in detail.

Purpose of the rulebook

Rulebooks are where your players begin. Someone has decided to play your game. So they turn to your rulebook as their starting point.  It’s important to remember that your player wants to play your game; they are not interested in reading your rulebook.  The rulebook is just a necessary step in order for them to achieve their end goal.

Unfortunately, this means that often your rulebook has to serve different purposes. For new players it has to explain everything about your game and how to begin playing it. For advanced players it needs to remind them how to play your game or at least how your game plays similar to others in its genre.

Game designers can be notorious for writing less than stellar rulebooks; particularly if when they get completely engrossed in the project. This means that they can no longer look at the game objectively as the project that has changed and evolved over time.

However, the rulebook is important. It’s perhaps the most important in getting players over the hurdle of playing their first game.  A badly written; incorrectly worded; or poorly organized rulebook might force some players to put the game right back on the shelf.

This is all the more important when a game hasn’t even been published yet. Your rulebook should walk even the most seasoned gamer through the steps necessary to setup and begin playing your game. This is especially critical when pitching your game to publishers. That’s because your rulebook represents how your game works in your absence.

Balance in the rulebook

Creating a great rulebook is a true balancing act. You have to provide all of the information that is necessary for a player to pickup and begin playing your game. Yet, you also can’t throw everything about the game in any order.

This is the point where designers will often get caught up. They are unsure when or if to provide information in a particular order for the player. Usually valuable time is spent nitpicking the details of just a few examples in the rulebook. Instead, designers should spend their time addressing larger systemic issues regarding the rulebook contents and organization.

Designers must also approach the rulebook as a work in progress – even after it has been published. Getting feedback from consumers, players, publishers, and other designers is critical. This feedback helps you re-write and recreate the structure of the rulebook to best serve the end user: the players.

While your rulebook may already be in the hands of players, it’s still possible to publish digital addendums, edits, and updates that originate from your gaming community.

Writing and revising the rulebook

Writing a rulebook is hard. You’ll never get it right the first time. Because of that, it’s important that you keep writing, changing, revising, and re-organizing your rulebook throughout your design process.

A good starting point is assuming the player knows nothing about your game. However, it is good to assume that players have played OTHER games before; just not necessarily your game.

This reinforces the fact that your players will need to be able to easily pickup and begin setting up and playing your game. Your rules therefore need to be understandable and organized. However, you don’t want your rulebook to be too long as it could provide the player with too much information without the correct context. Likewise, you also want to avoid a rulebook that is too short and doesn’t address the most common player questions.

Writing the rulebook also means organizing as you go. This requires you to chunk and compartmentalize information for players when they need to know it – and in the recommended dose.  For instance, it’s good to have a section in a rulebook for different actions a player can take during a turn. A sub-section could address movement and then the types of movement that a player can perform.

Additionally, you want to include consistent and defined language throughout your rulebook. If you identify goods as commodities in the game; don’t call them “products” later on. Developing a vocabulary for game terms is important for rulebooks because each time you pick one up it’s like learning a language for the first time. You may already know the difference between nouns and verbs from another language; but you need to learn how to recognize nouns and verbs in THIS language.

Rulebook Structure Overview

Rulebooks are important for conveying the most relevant information to your player in the correct order, quantity, and context. In order to do this the following areas of rulebook organization are presented in the order in which they should be provided to players: statistical information, components, theme, brief overview, setup, core loop, and game end.

These individual sections will be provided in order with descriptions for what should be included.

Structure – Statistical Information

Statistical information is some of the most basic but often missing information from the first few pages of a rulebook.  Sure, the information is often printed on the side of the box. However, it’s best to also list this info on the inside of the rulebook as some of the first information that a player will see.

The most important information to list here are the title, designer, number of players, suggest age, and average length of a game. It’s important to list this information here, because players may review a rulebook without the rest of the game components present. So, it’s useful to provide information redundancy here.

In addition, potential publishers may request a review of your rulebook prior to seeing your game. Providing this statistical information here is important in that context.

Structure – Components

Components are the physical assets included in table top games. They can include decks of cards, tokens, pawns, boards, and dice. Components should be listed next, ideally with pictures of what the finished components look like in the game as well as the quantity provided in the box.

This list is important for setting the vocabulary and terms for your game. If you call a piece a “meeple” in the rulebook but the game calls them “soldiers” then you already have a disconnect between the components the players see and how they will be referenced later on.

One my favorite games that makes mention of all of this and more at the very beginning is Montana.

Structure – Theme

Next you should dive very briefly into the theme of your game. Are we medieval knights? Are we pirates of the Caribbean? Are we searching for lost treasures under the ocean or perhaps exploring planets in outer space? Answering these questions provides very brief insight into what the game is about and who the players are from a thematic standpoint.

While not known for its theme, Azul does provide some insight in the very first paragraph of the rulebook. This informs players who they are and what they are accomplishing through game play.

Azul is available on Amazon

Structure – Brief Overview

The rulebook should then include a brief overview of what the game play is and what players do to succeed and win. This could be different if you are playing a competitive orthogame versus a cooperative idiogame. Regardless of the type of game, this section provides great insight and connection between the theme and the setup for the game.

For competitive games: the designer should identify what is necessary to end the game and win. This could be the first to reach a certain number of points, the first to finish a specific track, being the last player left standing, or having the most number of resources after a set amount of time. No Thanks is a game that provides this information right at the beginning.

No Thanks is available on Amazon

For cooperative games: the designer should identify what players need to do in order to succeed against the game. Whether that is to achieve a specific objective in a set amount of time, reduce the hit points of a non-player character (NPC) to zero, or resolve a scenario. Pandemic provides this information in its’ brief overview.

Pandemic is available on Amazon

Structure – Setup

The setup of the game should be covered next in the rulebook. This includes identifying which components need to come out first and in what order. Many rulebooks already include identifying the game board and placing it in the center of the table so that all players can see it.

It’s also important to note which components need to go where and in which order. Specific resources that aren’t used later in the game can be left until later. Other, components (like money or player pieces) should be identified first if they will be used throughout the duration of the game.

Ideally designers should include a visual reminder and layout of the setup of the game with references to specific steps and text in your description. Doing this provides an overall complete picture of what a setup game should look like for players. It also provides a quick visual reference that everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be.

Gùgōng provides an excellent example of this visual setup process and accounting of common and player components throughout the setup.

Structure – Core Loop

The core loop of the game is what gives provides players feedback during game play. The core loop is what players will do repeatedly and concurrently as they play your game.

These are the different actions that players can do or take each turn, round, phase, or stage of your game. The core loop is the main formal structure of your game and what players do at each one of those stages.

It’s helpful to demonstrate and show players how these structures are formatted. For example, many games include a “turn” structure in which each player take turns in clockwise order. Once all players have taken their turn a new “round” begins. Once three rounds have been completed then a stage is over. Once you have played two stages one phase is over. Once you have completed two phases then the game is over and you score everyone’s points.

Assuming that your players will understand how these structures work is a simple mistake that can be avoided by explaining how these are nested and formatted in your game.

Endeavor: Age of Sail does a great job at describing and breaking down what players do on each one of their turns and identifies what happens at the completion of a phase.

Structure – Game End

All games must come to an end. This is the section that includes how your game ends. This could be after a set number of turns, rounds, stages, or phases. It could also end with one player left alive. It could be a race to a certain number of points. Games could also end when one or several players achieve a particular objective.

Identifying HOW your game ends is one part of this section. Another part is identifying how players score or tally their points, objectives, money, resources etc… at the end. Explaining how different achievements translate into points is important for determining a winner of the game.

Kingdomino takes this scoring into account at the appropriate section of its rulebook.

In addition, explaining how particular scenarios are decided is important. The most common scenario is how ties are broken and resolved. Make sure those procedures are outlined in this section.

Kingdomino is available on Amazon

Organizing your rulebook’s contents

Rulebooks must serve many different purposes. In addition, they must be accessible, searchable, and readable by players. That’s why it’s important to organize, divide, and categorize your content accordingly. This will help your players better understand and play your game.

This can be most easily achieved with the table of contents. A table of contents provides a quick overview of the game and keeps the most important content organized for easy reference.

Additionally, it is important to bold and identify key terms and phrases within your rulebook. If this game identifies “money” as gold then you should indicate that in the section when you talk about game resources. If your game’s scoring rubric exchanges money at a 1:1 ratio at the end of the game for victory points, then you should identify that information as well.

Providing these insightful reminders throughout your rulebook in “callout” boxes helps to highlight specific information for your players. This is particularly important for returning players who need a quick reference for the game in order to remember how to play.

In the Year of the Dragon does this well by providing a quick summaries through each stage of the rules explanation.

In the Year of the Dragon is available on Amazon

This is also important for cross-referencing information about your game. If players’ movement around the board is influenced by how much money or victory points they currently have, then it’s important to point players towards the information on “Player Movement” when talking about money or victory points.

Finally, new games are beginning to part out sections of the rulebook for players in order to get them playing quickly.  Root does a great job at this by including a “quick start” guide in addition to their full rulebook for the game. The quick start guide includes basic information in order to begin playing the game immediately. Whereas rules questions for specific cases with more robust descriptions are left to the full rulebook.

Root is available on Amazon

Player experience

Ultimately a rulebook is supposed to serve as an agent of the player experience. Players will come to your game to play it. Not to read the rules. Of course there are a subset of players that will come to games and happily dive into rulebooks for their description and structure.

However, most players will pick up the rulebook to learn how to play the game and nothing more. Whereas other players will skim the rulebook for reminders and refreshers if a significant amount of time has passed since their last session.

The goal as the designer is to find a style that works for the majority of your players and stick to that style. This is mostly informed by the type of game that you have. Is it a light party game? You want your rulebook to be clean, simple, and straight forward. Heavy euro? Then you can afford to dive into the nuances of the player roles, abilities, and actions. Many games will find a home in between those two extremes.  Because of this, it helps to know that there are generally three “player” types who will read your rules.

First time players may be first time board gamers or first time players of your game. In either case you want your rules to be thorough, clean, and approachable. These players need to learn from the ground up how to play your game (even if they may not have played other games like it before).

The intermediate player on the other hand wants to read your rules as a reference point for how your game plays and operates. These are players who may have already played your game (or others like it) before and need a summary for how your game is similar and how it is different from what they remember or expect.

Lastly, there are the expert players. These are players with a very diversified pallet of games. They have read and played a wide swath of different games and may even be designers themselves. These players will carefully review the rulebook looking for typos, loopholes, or otherwise edge cases that the previous two kinds of players may have missed.

Voice when writing the rulebook

Regardless of the type of player you are writing for; it’s helpful to always write your rules in the most simple, clear, and concise way you can. You can always expand on certain rules and specific cases in other parts of your rulebook. However, remember that ultimately your rules are there to serve the player.

To do this it helps to write with simple descriptions in active voice. This method conveys information easily and quickly. For example, instead saying “the player takes the board out of the box” say “take the board out of the box.”

In addition, write in short sentences with straightforward language. This especially helps if the instructions are read aloud to a group of players. It is also useful to define how terms are used within your rulebook.

“May” and “must” have different meanings in rules compared to everyday language. “May” provides the option for players to take an action whereas “must” requires players to do something. Innocent words can have different interpretations depending on your readers. Likewise phrase like “either or” should be more properly defined in order to avoid confusion. One of the easiest ways to do this is to state “player MUST take only ONE of the following two actions.” This is a more straightforward way of conveying an “either or statement” using simpler language.

Following these steps provides you with a rulebook that is easy to use for new players while answering the questions decisively for intermediate and advanced players.

Testing your rulebook

Just like your game, your rulebook should be tested. Often this is done at the latest stages of playtesting when players are given rulebooks and allowed to teach and play the game without any help from the designer.

In addition, you may also ask someone else to read your rules and explain them back to you in order to confirm that the correct outcome has been achieved.  Observing how other readers and players interpret and take action based on your words is irreplaceable. The more input that you can get from others the better.

Ideally your players should be able to play your game right after reading the rulebook. A quick and clean start from the end of the rules demonstrates that players were able to interpret and act on your instructions.

Edge cases in the rulebook

The rulebook is supposed to serve the widest possible audience. A consequence of that means that you’ll often have to overlook certain “edge cases” that may not come about too often through game play.

A common mistake with taking into account these edge cases is “bikeshedding” or spending an inordinate amount of time to wrestle with small details that won’t affect the majority of players’ game play.

This doesn’t mean that you should ignore edge cases. Rather, these should be collected in the appendix or other area at the end of your rulebook for reference if they are needed. Taking game testing notes accommodates for these edge cases that might come up during game play.

For example, a rulebook could include information on how players can move their player pieces in your game. There could be many ways that a player can LEGALLY move their piece. As such, you should spend time explaining how that can be done and leave other “edge cases” or infrequent occurrences to your appendix.

Some game designers try to create rules with the minimal amount of these edge cases or scenarios. This is a challenging design practice. However, many game rules are often written in tension. This means that they may contradict each other or require a specific state in the game in order for those rules to apply.

If these rules come up often, then it’s okay to include them in your basic rulebook. However, if there are only certain situations that arise on a regular basis, then you should list these in the appendix of your rules.

In the occurrence that a rule is so specific to an uncommon scenario that it requires its own dedicated section then consider getting rid of it. The requirement of dedicating so much of your precious rulebook space to accommodating this very infrequent scenario means that eliminating the circumstances in which it may arise may be the best move to make.

Games-based learning and rulebooks

We often think of rulebooks for just table top games. But, rulebooks also serve a wider purpose of educating our players for how to play our game to the best of their abilities.

Games-based learning is using existing games to help students achieve their educational goals.  Rulebooks have the educational goal of bringing players up to speed on how to play the game as quickly, easily, and painlessly as possible.

Because of this, it’s best to turn to other educators, teachers, instructors, and professors for the best way to lay out your rulebook content. They often have incisive advice on how to provide information with the right context, brevity, and scope to help your readers.

Remember: rule books are instructional materials first and foremost. They are there to serve and instruct your players. Do them service by using your rulebook as a gateway to learning.

Action steps

Here are some specific action steps that you can take in order to make sure that your rulebook is the best it can be to serve your players.

Use board game specific terminology whenever possible. This includes commonly understood phrases like “boards” and “cards.” You can also include more industry specific terms like “meeples” or “chits.” However, when identifying these terms, make sure that you clearly associate the component with what they look like in the game.

Avoid using unspecific pronouns when referring to players. Past rulebooks commonly referred to players in the masculine third person (i.e. he/him/his). Rulebooks should strive to use more inclusive pronouns as well as more gender neutral pronouns. It’s best to use the terms (they/them) when identifying players in the game in order to satisfy the widest possible audience.

Make sure that you adhere to appropriate tone during your rules explanation. Third person active voice is the best form to use. This means that you should use explanations that begin with “Each player takes their individual player boards.” Instead of: “The starting player will take one player board for all players playing the game. The starting player will then distribute all player boards to all players.”

Make sure that your rulebook is formatted consistently. Using appropriate headings sizes, fonts, bold, italics, underline, and color goes a long way towards making a block of text more easily readable.

For quality assurance make sure that you print out your rulebook and read it aloud. I’ve spent years writing and often think that I can complete all of my edits on my computer screen. However, nothing really beats a final edit on printed paper being read aloud. Typos, voice, and punctuation mistakes often come to light when reviewing your work this way. For a more sustainable approach to editing, consider formatting your document as a PDF and using an app like Goodnotes to review your rulebook on a tablet to replicate that paper feel.

Its best practice to list critical information redundantly throughout your rulebook. If your game has phases or stages that are broken down even further with individual turns, then identify the phase names, stage names throughout your rules explanation. This is especially important if scenarios in your game have to be resolved in a particular order.

Finally, take into account the reader’s experience reviewing you rulebook. Paragraphs in the middle of your rules are more likely to be skimmed over compared to paragraphs’ at the beginning or end. That means that the most critical information should be stated at the beginning and end of your rules. Striving to get the most vital rules into these locations is the practice.

Takeaways

This article reviewed game rulebooks in depth. It covered the purpose of your rulebook; striking a balance; and the process of writing and revising. The structure of the rulebook was covered from different sections including statistical information, components, theme, overview, setup, core loop, and game end.

Remember: the way that you organize the contents of your rulebook is important for informing the player experience. Your voice in how you write your rulebook is as important as testing it out with your players. Finally, edge cases; applications of rule books for games-based learning; and action steps for writing your rulebook were covered in detail.

I hope that you found this article helpful. If you’d like a sample template for your rulebook in addition to information on how to explain theme; glossary of terms; and an anatomy of game components then click here.

This article was about what makes a great rulebook.  To learn more about gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

If you have enjoyed this article – consider getting yourself lifetime access to Dave’s Games-Based Learning Digital Library containing all of the content from the past two Games-Based Learning Virtual Conferences; past webinars and courses he’s created; as well as his complete back catalogue of articles; podcast episodes; and videos. And more content is being added all the time.

Readers of Ludogogy can get a $50 discount on this valuable resource by using this link.

The post What Makes a Good Rulebook? first appeared on Ludogogy.

Most people know games as vehicles for fun, entertainment and socialization. Elements of games – through :gamification – can also be used to augment, change, and influence individuals behaviors. Those behaviors can affect the way that they interact, shop, and travel.

Games-based learning is the use and adaptation of games as a medium for learning. As such, educators are often called upon to adapt existing games as vehicles for teaching and learning.

But how do educators start with games? How can they approach the adaptation of games for teaching and learning?

This article will address the steps necessary for adapting games for learning. It’ll cover why educators should first adapt games for games-based learning. Challenges that educators often face with adaptation will be addressed as well as how a strategy can be outlined for game adaptation.

There are specific considerations to take into account prior to adapting a game for learning. Those will be outlined as well as how different approaches can be undertaken in order to smooth out challenges in the process.  Examples of game adaptations will be discussed as well as well as how learning can be supported in game adaptation through the use of assessments.

Why Adapt Games for Games-Based Learning?

Many games are fun. It’s the primary reason why people play them. Educators can use and capitalize on that fun through the adoption of games-based learning. Games can be used as an experiential framework in order to help learners achieve multiple different outcomes including the promotion of teamwork and the application of new concepts in practice.

Therefore, it is important to note that games-based learning often begins with a game adaptation as a medium for teaching and learning. Specifically, games are not meant as temporary adoptions; but rather as part of a more holistic pedagogical approach to teaching and learning.

This pedagogical approach in games-based learning is focused on learning through experience or experiential learning. Though game play, learners can apply concepts to practice in an environment where failure can be tolerated, scaffolded, and corrected. Likewise, this is done in an environment where, engagement, play, and interaction are achieved in a way that makes the activity intrinsically motivating and fun.

In addition, games can be applied in multiple different formats. Those include a solo approach to games that often includes puzzles and scenarios. Games can be also be applied in a socialized environment with other learners and/or the instructor. Such group efforts can be undertaken as either a cooperative or a competitive format in which the interaction with others can help reinforce learning outcomes or demonstrate difficult concepts.

Challenges with Adaptation

Any educator who is interested in adapting games for teaching and learning through games-based learning will run into challenges with the adaptation process. One of which is qualifying the game selected to make sure that it aligns with the desired learning outcome. Such a process can be difficult when examining games that are appropriate for specific learners as well as considering the time commitment and modality of the educational environment.

An additional challenge is managing and meeting pre-conceived notions of applied games. Learners may come to expect something from a game dependent on their backgrounds and experiences despite the fact that educators are not prepared to deliver.  Likewise; educators can also be challenged by their expectations of games-based learning that doesn’t meet the outcomes achieved by peers and other colleagues.

Often the case for adaptation of existing games is such that it’s easier and more focused to create a new game from scratch that better meets the needs of the educator and learners. However, this process can be expensive, time consuming, and involved.  Despite those shortcomings; often that route is more preferable than adapting an existing game for educational purposes due to the limitations included with commercially available games.

These challenges can be further exacerbated by teachers in the elementary, intermediate, and secondary schools as logistical problems ranging from limited classroom lectures, facility access, and overall lack of time pose real and present challenges to adapting existing games for teaching and learning. This is further compounded by the additional role that educators must play in supervising and monitoring play: activities that they may not be comfortable implementing and adhering to in addition to other educational responsibilities.

Finally, one of the most challenging aspects due to games adaptation is the requirement that both educators and learners remain flexible throughout the process. Games are not linear tools for teaching and education. Rather, games provide an open ended process through which students create meaning through interaction, experimentation, and engagement. As such, flexibility could be required from all parties at times when patience or resources are in short supply.

Strategy for Adaptation

Despite these challenges, there remain some viable strategies for adapting games for games-based learning. One of which is to curate and select games that are appropriate from a mechanical and emotional standpoint for the learners served.  This has more to do with the individual educator who can best interpret and judge the needs and capabilities of their students and select games that serve, and don’t undermine or exceed their means or capabilities.

Likewise, educators can also use games as means to augment traditional forms of instruction and to break up and punctuate existing lesson plans. Primary and intermediate school educators may choose to use more physical, visual, or kinesthetic games that better impact and serve younger learners. This is compared to those learning and development professionals working in adult learning environments where application of abstract and theoretical concepts to practice are much more welcome and  relevant use of applied games.

Furthermore, educators can adapt and apply games in concert with different pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. Exploratory learning focuses on learning where individuals learns by exploring environments. These can be physical as well as virtual environments that are experienced with peers as either a competitive or cooperative activity. Many massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) fulfill this type of approach. However, certain and specific table top game such as role-playing games can be applied to meet this end.

Additionally, specific game dynamics such as competition and cooperation can provide an engaging classroom experience that changes and augments the relationships between learners, the content, and instructor. Such change could be jarring for some learners who are used to and have only experienced orthodox approaches to teaching and learning.  However, this can be mitigated through low-stakes activities which explore the modality of games-based learning in greater depth prior to attempting more challenging activities.

Educators can better integrate their application of games for their learning environments through the use of story and narrative which links game activities to learning outcomes and course structure. Such an approach provides a different – albeit familiar – aspect of communication and education through allegory.

No matter how educators adapt games for teaching and learning, they should continually rely on the malleability of games for their purposes. Games used in this respect do not need to necessarily entertain individuals. Rather, different forms and aspects of applied games can be used in concert with more traditional teaching practices that best meets the outcomes of learners. Such adaptation of games for these purposes ensures that the outcomes of play align with the learning outcomes defined by the educator.

Adaptation Considerations

There are certain factors to take into consideration when examining games for learning. One of the most important things to note is that games alone cannot completely replace traditional learning. Of course, there are some outcomes in which games are used to augment more orthodox approaches for learning. However, games by themselves (without structural learning support and scaffolding) are poor replacements for entire learning programs.

Furthermore, the use of games doesn’t necessarily entail better outcomes for learners. This is particularly true if learner populations aren’t ready or don’t see the use and benefit of applied games for learning.  Fun, enjoyment, and entertainment are positive benefits for using games for learner interaction – but alone they do not constitute a learning program.

Additionally, educators should consider the drawbacks of poor game adaptation. Specifically negative impacts could be encountered if adaptation activities for different educational outcomes, linguistic considerations, language, cultural, and societal aspects aren’t taken into account.

Furthermore, educators can often overextend themselves with their adaptation procedures. Often, a common mistake made is adapting the entirely of a class, course, or program to games-based learning. A more approachable strategy would be to start small and incrementally convert learning content, structure, and materials to games-based learning.

These small steps for adaptation should first consider how games, game elements, game :dynamics, and game mechanics can serve as complementary aspects to different learns and learning models.  Such an approach prioritizes the learner’s experience as part of the holistic outcome of their education and engagement.

Learner engagement should take a priority in this process as examining how individuals receive, interpret, and act within a games-based learning environment could provide insightful advice on how an educator should proceed with an adaptation initiative. An example of this is how primary, intermediate, and secondary school educators can use games as means of breaking up a static lesson plan with different games and activities which require involvement through different modalities. Some of which can involve physical movement while others require more cognitive applications.

Adaptation Approaches

Game adaptations are often undertaken from an educator’s standpoint. That individual could be someone who has both much game playing and teaching experience whereas others could be attempting an adaptation for the first time. Despite this, individual educators should note that players require a reflective period in concert with game play in order to gain the most from the experience.

This reflection period serves two purposes. The first is to reinforce and promote metacognitive behaviors in experiential and games-based learning. The second one is for the educator to evaluate the scale, scope, and impact of the games-based learning application and determine how it be changed, augmented, or adjusted to better fit their outcomes and goals.

This is perhaps an area were games-based learning has an advantage over digitally applied and experienced gamification. Such gamified applications can be inflexible with their use and application for learner populations. Conversely, analog applications and adaptations of table top games and other non-digital games provide the educator with agency, malleability, and the ability to personalize the experience to fit the needs of their learners.

While gamification alone relies on the implementation of individual elements of games in non-game settings; games-based learning and applied games utilize the entirety of the game for the purposes of teaching and learning. In this vein, educators can more wholly apply games for their long term educational outcomes rather than short term entertainment and engagement of learners.

Examples of Adaptations

The number of games that educators can adapt for teaching and learning are only limited by the number of games that are published and available. Despite this, it’s often easiest to approach games-based learning adaptation through familiar game :mechanics that players might already know. For early childhood education using games with familiar themes such as  Go Fish and memory components can be easiest to adapt.

Likewise, most players can identify with the visceral and excitement involved with randomization and rolling dice. Therefore, games that include some sort of entropy with physical components such as dice and cubes could serve as attractive components for learners.  In this vein, digital games such as Minecraft capitalize on the sourcing and building aspect of games that empower players to construct n various environments.

Game adaptation often revolves around familiarity with game structures, components and aesthetics. This can make adaptation for complicated, lengthy, or complex games more difficult compared to simpler ones. Therefore, common components such as playing cards can be introduced to learners as an application of both a game component and a :mechanic. This is because they can serve as both components to store information as well as serve as a means to randomize it.

However, not all games require components for implementation. Argumentation, debate, or negotiation games can be implemented in the classroom with minimal investment into physical components. Such applications of games with structures like FunEmployed, Taboo, and Bohnanza, capitalize on these mechanics with a minimum number of physical components.

FunEmployed is available on Amazon

Taboo is available on Amazon

Bohnanza is available on Amazon

Following this, reenactments, role-playing, and other forms of situational narratives could be used with minimal components in order to better connect learning content with students’ own interoperations and applications. These can be further developed into other learning activities such as reflection exercises or writing prompts such as StorySlam which give students a means for further exploring content more viscerally.

Word games such as Boggle and Scrabble embody some of the most well known properties in gaming. As such, word games make students’ inclusion, adaptation, and utilization of letters, words, and vocabularies more engaging. Put out the Fire is such a game where teams of students work with each other to name something within different categories based on the same letter.

While many of the games discussed here can only be implemented in a traditional and physical classroom environment due to their component limitations; there often exists digital adaptations of them that can be used in a distributed and online environment.  Such applications of games like Just One, Codenames, and Wordle make it so that these games can transcend the digital boundaries included by hosting classes via web conferencing.

JustOne is available on Amazon

Codenames is available on Amazon

Lastly, there also exist specific platforms aimed at digital student engagement both online and in person via different devices. Kahoot!, Quizizz, Quizlet Live, Gimkit, and Blooket, exist to provide educators with different gamified applications of quizzing and assessment that can be applied in different modalities.

Supporting Learning in Game Adaptations

An emphasis always has to be placed on learning, no matter what games educators choose to use and adapt for their students. This support can come in multiple different formats. The most common of which is the use of debriefing and reflection of learning activities. Games don’t need to be the only activity in which metacognition is emphasized; but they are a very powerful medium for examining the “learning of learning.”

Additionally, the use and application of simulations for teaching and learning have the added benefit of utilizing theme to connect learning content to specific learning outcomes. The Model United Nations makes it so that students embody the politics, motivations, goals, and collective needs of the planet in a microcosm of the actual organization. As such, learners can more viscerally empathize with nation states as they act and interact with classmates who serve as their counterparts.

Finally, educators can best support learners engaging in games-based learning by helping utilize and apply their agency within the game in their pursuit of different actions and strategies. Such options don’t necessarily exist with more traditional forms of learning through orthodox means.  Therefore it’s most useful for educators to prioritize and emphasize the unique approach that games offer.

Incorporating Assessment into Game Adaptations

Possibly one of the most important and critical things to incorporate into the application and adaptation of games for games-based learning are assessments. These assessments can be summative or formative. No matter what the educator chooses to use, it’s critical to make sure that the game is applied to ensure that learners are meeting the desired outcomes.

Such assessments should be implemented in order to meet the needs of both the educator and learners. Some assessments are easier to implement compared to others. This includes smaller more traditional ones such as test and quizzes which challenges learners to apply their learned skills in practice. Other content areas may require students to pass “quests” or “challenges” that are in line with the game’s theme that require learners to apply their new knowledge. No matter how these assessments are implemented, educators should examine how learners are making cognitive sense of their new learner behaviors. This metacognition (learning about learning) helps individuals  shift their own behaviors and adapt to change from games-based learning.

Games-based learning is more challenging to implement assessments because the educator must usually adapt a commercially available game for teaching and learning. Games are usually excellent at challenging players throughout play with different objectives, missions, and “boss fights” which demand players to put their skills to the test. However, educators using games-based learning must take appropriate and incisive measures in order to relate game content to their own learning objectives.

Educator intervention is especially important when it comes to supporting learners’ overall engagement and progression. That’s because it can very easy (especially for younger learners) to become despondent and demoralized from difficult game progression – especially as it relates to their own realization of self-determination and competency. This could be realized when a player gets “stuck” at a certain point in the game and is unsure how to progress or how the activity relates to a particular outcome.

Instructors can make use of these teachable moments in order to connect game content and activities with the specific learning outcomes from the material. Ideally, such connections encourage the player to apply different approaches with the objective of learning from their own shortcomings and failures. Such behavioral changes stem from the experiential learning cycle applied in games-based learning and the effect that active experimentation has on developing new approaches and strategies.

Lastly, the future of serious games and educational learning game development centers on the dynamic adaptation and change of the game to meet the learners’ needs and shortcomings. This is most likely achieved through the use of digital games-based learning which can detect and adapt to players’ behaviors and match their skill level with appropriate challenges to that helps them maximize learning while also assessing their outcomes.

Takeaways

This article covered the adaptation of games for games-based learning. It began with determining the reasoning behind the adaptation of games. Challenges with game adaptation were discussed as well as strategies that educators can undertake in order to help them with their process.

Specific game adaptation considerations were explained as well as some strategies that could be adopted when selecting and adapting games for teaching and learning. Special considerations for adaptations were covered as well as how educators can approach the game adaptation process. Finally, this article closed with examples of game adaptations as well how the adaptive practice can be accomplished in ways that best support student learning and assessment.

This article was about how to adapt games for learning.  To learn more about

gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

If you have enjoyed this article – consider getting yourself lifetime access to Dave’s Games-Based Learning Digital Library containing all of the content from the past two Games-Based Learning Virtual Conferences; past webinars and courses he’s created; as well as his complete back catalogue of articles; podcast episodes; and videos. And more content is being added all the time.

Readers of Ludogogy can get a $50 discount on this valuable resource by using this link.

The post How do I Adapt Games for Learning? first appeared on Ludogogy.

The key to designing board games is to set the core mechanism which will provide the fun in the game,  and then connect the sub-mechanisms to make various interesting interactions.

When we design a board game, the core mechanisms, and paper prototypes are the key to continuously providing feedback and improving the game, and to ensuring that the experience of play will be fun.

I will explain what the core mechanism and paper prototype are, and provide a way to structure the core mechanism, and the checklist of the paper prototype.

Core mechanism

In board game design, the core mechanism is the most simple and yet most complex one which the designer will have to think deeply about. This will be the part of the game they will consider most, even when, and probably especially, when several mechanisms are applied.

The core mechanism is what the player recognizes as the most notable feature among the structured systems in the board game, and the most frequent driver of behavior from the start to the end of the game. This is the heart of the game, and all players will get the opportunity to continue the play as new information becomes available to them through the game narrative.

The core mechanism is a model for implementing the major behaviors and progress activities in the game, as well as providing the fun. We can see this is in the core mechanic diagram model which Charmie Kim published in Gamasutra, which is a useful guide to design. In the early stages of board game design, this diagram is useful for communicating the key ideas of the game to others, and for defining the interaction and complexity in the play mechanisms.

The center of this model is the core mechanism which is the key of the game. There is a layer of secondary mechanics, and then progression around the core, and the narrative is outside of that. This comprises the system through which the core mechanism interacts with the game. So, we can easily understand how players can communicate with the game through the interaction.

• The core mechanism is the key to the game and the system through which players interact most frequently in an intentional way. It’s an expression of the game theme or genre. Also, it should be selected to be effective in achieving the game objectives.
• Sub-mechanisms are optional or infrequent interactions. They need to be selected and designed to support the core mechanism.
• The progress system is the source of change in the game. This could be achieved by using events or hidden information.
• Narrative must be designed to be consistent with every other internal layer and to provide a way of eliciting emotion from the player.

Paper prototype

A paper prototype is a tool to use at the early stages of game design to test ideas and check that the experience is fun. It’s necessary for developing board games.

And not only in board games, but in digital game development, the paper prototype is very useful in the early stages of game design to ensure the success of the project and minimize losses through development cost and wasted time. Paper prototype has become very popular in many companies because the many variables in development projects can be immediately analysed, redesigned, and iteratively modified. Also, there are many other positive aspects of the paper prototype.

• Flexibility – Expression of interaction can be quickly confirmed and modified.
• Quickness – Ideas and fun are quickly tested.
• Economical – Development cost is low because only paper and pen are required.
• Accessibility – Everybody can make the prototype because purchasing the materials and developing are easy.
• Scalability – Ideas are freely modified and developed.
• Mobility – It can be implemented anytime and anywhere.

The board game designer has to select the core mechanism for the fun of play and connect the sub-mechanisms for various interactions in game design.

Questions to ask when using paper prototypes

When using paper prototypes to test game concepts, checking whether the game components function well together to create fun experiences is very important.

1. Who is the player? Is this a playable game from that player’s perspective?
2. Are the rules clear? Are they understandable and how easy is it to arbitrarily change and break them?
3. To what extent is the prototype complete? Can others play the prototype?
4. What kind of fun can this game provide? Does this fun have the power to attract people?
5. Is play duration appropriate? Is it too long or short?
6. What games are similar to this one? Are those too rare or similar?
7. Does the player need to prepare a lot for playing the game? Can player easily participate without difficult preparation?
8. What meaning does this game provide to individuals, organizations, or society? What is the balance of Fun and Meaning?

Everybody wants to make a fun board game, but many people fail to do this because they ignore the importance of appropriate mechanism design, and the prototyping and testing to ensure these work well.

To make a good game, we have to experience various games, analyze the original games, and correctly select the ideas and mechanisms that work for our game idea. In addition, making a prototype and getting external feedback through play tests is most important. So, repeating this is the most important task.

The post Core Game Mechanisms and the Paper Prototype first appeared on Ludogogy.

The number of tools available is growing at an amazing rate, but this article will focus on real-life prompt examples in two popular tools – ChatGPT for text output and Midjourney for image creation.  These prompt examples should provide you with some ideas for using AI at every stage of game design and production, but the only real limit in how you can prompt these tools is your own imagination.

The below also assumes, for the most part, that we are looking at designing and creating an analogue, tabletop game. A broader overview of tools and capabilities will follow soon, as well as details about how AI can be used in digital games.

AI for Developing Game Concepts

During the concept phase, AI can help designers generate new ideas by analysing existing games and user preferences, and by rapidly trying out different tweaks to prompts.

Existing games – ChatGPT is very ‘well-read’, so you will probably discover that it ’knows’ about well-known games. If you want to draw on an existing game you could simply prompt “Create a description for a game, based on Terraforming Mars, but with a theme of building a new town”

But prompts like this are generally less likely to achieve what you want, because they have little guidance from you.  The result is really just a description of Terraforming Mars with the word ‘Town’ substituted.

:Click here for Terraforming Mars prompt – click again to close

Successful prompts are generally longer, and contain carefully chosen detail. Create a description of what it is you want to bring from ’Terraforming Mars’ (and omit what you don’t). Add your own needs and ideas. Be very specific.

:Click here for better prompt

Take advantage of ChatGPT’s ‘memory’ for what has gone before in the Chat to build on ideas, or ask for more detail on a specific piece of output. Here I have asked for new ideas on the game, based on who will be playing it. I have prompted with Bartle’s Player Types, but could have just as well in put job titles, demographic information such as age or location.

:Click here for Player Types prompt

It’s never too early to start working on game visuals, and if you get compelling images from Midjourney, they may well inspire your text prompts too. Try creating some concept art. Two useful prompts here are ‘character design sheet’ and ‘multiple item sprite sheet’.  Although these two things are usually generated for digital games, they are also great for producing small images to be used on things like counters and tiles.

For larger, more ‘complete’ images, if you want to be able to (potentially) separate them from their backgrounds later, make sure to include ‘concept art’ and ‘plain white background’ (or whatever colour is appropriate) in your prompts – the ‘character design sheet’ and ‘spritesheet’ prompts do this as a matter of course.

The prompts for these were

• “character design sheet, woman in her forties, short grey hair, jeans, long sleeved teeshirt, slim, different poses and expressions, full colour, flat colour, childrens book illustration style, –no text –v 5”
• ” multiple item spritesheet, household and office items, full colour, flat colour, childrens book illustration style, –no text –v 5″
• “multiple items sprite sheet, isometric view, tiles for a game, landscape, trees, flowers, grass –v 5”

From scratch – although I recommend being lengthy and specific with prompts to get anything really useful, if you just want to do some low-level brainstorming (at very early concept stage) feel free to play with shorter prompts to get ChatGPT to produce large numbers of ideas around single concepts.

Such prompts will inevitably produce generic and derivative responses, but they can form the basis for further explorations.

:Click here for generic prompt

One very useful technique is to take one suggestion, and ask ChatGPT to elaborate.  It is a good idea to give it more input in the form of your own ideas. This approach can be iterated as many times as you like until you get useful responses.

:Click here for extended German Games prompt

In a similar way you could try out different styles for the same idea in Midjourney. This might also be a good time to experiment with what prompts give you and refine your prompting so that when you come to the design stage you have a good idea of how to prompt to get the images you need.

Generic prompts will get generic output, and it is best to be specific about what the image should look like rather than what it represents conceptually. Midjourney will get less out of the idea of ‘Settlers of Diversity’ than it will out of a clear description of the desired image.

Using AI in Game Design

During the design phase, AI can help designers generate new game content, such as levels, puzzles, and characters. Remember that if you are developing the same concept from the concept stage into the design stage, it is a good idea to remain in the same chat, to take advantage of what ChatGPT will ’remember’ of what has gone before.

You can prompt using well known game mechanisms and components, confident that ChatGPT will ‘know’ about them.

:Click here for Terraforming Card prompt

ChatGPT can also use well-known ‘content’, although you should always check carefully that what it produces is correct, as Large Language Models (LLMs) can be prone to ’hallucination’. The following was a follow-on prompt after ChatGTP had ideated a set-collection game called ‘Dickensian Tales’.

:Click here for Dickensian Tales Locations prompt

It is highly recommended that you create and use ‘templates’ to get the output you want from ChatGPT. This is done by creating prompts which have ‘placeholders’ for content that will be populated by ChatGPT. Such prompts are usually quite generic, and you instruct ChatGPT to process them with specific content or subject requests. For example, here is what it produced when given part of a template for ‘Wretched and Alone’ games

(This work is based on The Wretched, product of Chris Bissette and Loot The Room, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)

It was given the description of how cards work in Wretched and Alone games, having been asked to populate the Hearts suit, in a game about being a shelf stacker in a supermarket.

:Click here for ‘Wretched and Alone’ prompt

Prototyping using AI

During the prototyping phase, AI can rapidly try out widely, or narrowly, differing ideas for games, and producing new content and materials based on those models.

As well as refining ChatGPT’s output, by further prompting and feeding it additional ideas, or asking it to amend or delete aspects of its responses, it is also useful to feed its own input back in.

:Click here for Sustainable Towns Cards prompt

Once you have working ‘templates’ of a game, for example, card formats, it is pretty simple to generate new versions for different entities in the game and / or indeed, different subject matter to create as similar game on a different topic. Here it was prompted create part ofa ‘Orwell’ version of the Dickensian Tales game.

:Click here for 1984 prompt

In Midjourney, a really useful feature to create new images with the same characteristics but with some differing topic, focus or style is the Remix functionality, which can be turned on in Settings. This means that prompts can be edited when using the Variation buttons.

The greatest power that AI has as these stages of design, is the ability to ‘try out’ many different concepts or different versions of materials. This is a way of working that previously would not have been feasible without a great deal of time and a large team of people. Now this capability is available to small teams and individuals, and many of the tasks involved in ideation, design and prototyping can be carried out in a fraction of the time it took previously.

If you are interested in exploring how the above can be used for you to achieve a functional design for a learning game in under two hours – please sign up for my course – and don’t forget to use the code GPT10 for a 10% discount if booking before 19^th April.

The post Create Games Faster and Smarter with Generative AI first appeared on Ludogogy.

So, with those ideas in mind, I launched and experiment in February 2023 to create and play a game, using LinkedIn as the game platform.

From a recruitment perspective this has obvious advantages, as I was able to use the game platform itself to invite participants, and I did so using a LinkedIn Poll. Many of the people who answered the poll were already 1^st degree connections, but as one of the main mechanisms for running the game was the group chat facility, I then asked those who were not currently connections to connect with me, being careful to stress that disconnection is possible, and that this was not a ’fishing’ exercise.

By the time the game began, three days after the original poll was launched, 25 people were on board and had been added to a group chat, entitled simply ‘The Game’, so as not to give the game away before it started.

The idea behind the game

There were a number of intentions behind the game. The first was to act as an experiment – to see how well this subversion of a non-game platform would work, to get feedback from participants, and to act as a springboard for potential future game / learning applications.

It was also intended to be a learning game, and I spent some time deciding on appropriate learning outcomes. While this is by no means the only option, I eventually decided that an appropriate outcome for this first experiment would be for participants to learn about the platform itself. So the game was designed to  introduce the different ways of posting on LinkedIn and ideas about how to garner engagement.

Using LinkedIn as the platform inevitably meant that there would be a social element to the play. The group chat meant that a group of players was convened, but even if the players had been playing singly in some way, the game was ’about’ using LinkedIn, so another outcome was networking, either through the chat, or by sharing posts, and commenting.

Finally, I decided to get players to reveal something of their own interests, which was achieved through the ‘topics’ of the game, see below, so the hope was that there would also be subsidiary learning around things that members of the group found interesting, but which others might not have come across before.

Mechanisms used in the game

The overarching mechanism of the game was a simple overlay of a narrative ‘alternate reality’. In the group chat a message was sent to all participants to start the game. It informed them that they were part of a Resistance movement, which was opposing the actions of a totalitarian organisation ‘The Council of Erudition Purge’, which was attempting to destroy all repositories of human knowledge, and that LinkedIn posts and articles were under threat.

Inspiration for this idea was taken from such real-life events as The Cultural Revolution in China, and  continuing policies of supressing access to information and opinion, which happen across the world, and from one of my favourite novels ‘Farenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury.

Farenheit 451 is available on Amazon

They were also told that they had the opportunity to find posts or articles, and to pitch for their preservation. Because the resources of the ‘Purge Resistance’ were limited however, not all items pitched could be ’saved’, so only those which got the most public approval (measured via ‘likes and comments’), would make it into the safety of the Resistance archives at the end of each ‘mission’.

At the start of the game the only facilities available to Resistance members were the group chat, referred to during the game as ‘Resistance HQ’; and the ability to comment on a ‘Mission Post’ (an ordinary post with a single image)  – which you could imagine as being a kind of ‘noticeboard’ where the comments contained the pitches of the Resistance members for the articles and posts each one of them wanted to ’save’.

The initial briefing (posted at ‘HQ’) also hinted that it would be possible to gain more facilities throughout the game. This is actually the fundamental mechanism of ‘progress’ in the learning aspect of the game. In each ‘mission’ a new feature of LinkedIn will be introduced, which players will be encouraged to use to ‘improve’ how they present their pitches, or to attract more engagement.

The first ‘mission’ post asked players to go off and find posts on related to ‘Happiness’ and to pitch them in the comments. After three days the ‘mission debriefing’, containing details of the ‘saved’ posts and anything else of interest that had happened in the first mission was written up in an article, which I intended to add to, after each mission to maintain a full log of missions.

Mission Two – Coolhunting

Mission 2 asked players to go Cool Hunting. They were tasked with going of and finding articles and posts they perceived as ‘Cool’.

A very important part of the second mission post was that it introduced the idea of ‘R&D’ – and that instead of going and finding articles they wanted to save, players could dedicate their time to working towards increasing the capability of the Resistance by ‘inventing’ new ways of using LinkedIn.

This increase in capability had already happened between the first and second missions, without the need for players to do anything, and the ‘new technology’ which had been discovered was images with clickable links. The mission post itself used an image with a clickable link, and the link took players to a YouTube video page explaining how to create a post with an image with a clickable link.

The decision was made to not explicitly mention ‘R & D’ until Mission Two, so that the instructions to play the game were scaffolded in a similar way to the ‘learning content’, only introducing one or two ideas at a time.

So, in the second missions, players could find and pitch ‘cool’ content or spend their time in R&D. In order to take the R&D option, players would post information about the ‘research’ topic in the HQ group chat. In the case of the second mission, R & D were tasked with developing video capability – in other words, finding and sharing info, best practice and ‘how tos’ about using video on LinkedIn. Under game rules it was necessary that three people should do this, so that the development be successful.

Extended capability now meant that players had the choice to pitch as they had done before, using comments in the mission post, or they could use the new technology to create their own posts (complete with clickable image links),and reference those in the mission post comments. It was made clear that if they took this route then ALL engagement (on their own posts and on their comments on the mission) would go towards the adjudication of their success – a good strategy to potentially double their points for the mission.

Once this mission was completed. The mission debrief for mission two (scroll further down in the article) also introduced something new – medals. And the Resistance was able to award medals not only for successfully saving articles and posts, and for contributing to successful R&D development of video capability, but also recruitment! The fact that players would want to / be able to bring others on board after the game had started, was not something I had considered in the game design.

Mission Three – Problem solving

Having developed video capability, the second mission debrief was also delivered as suitably revolutionary address, which I link here for the sake of completeness but with some embarrassment, having made a bit of a hash of it. This, of course also meant that players were now able to deploy video posts as well.

If this had been a full-blown, fully tested, actual implementation of a learning game rather than a somewhat impulsive experiment, it would have run to around 15 missions, allowing time for R & D time to ’discover’ more types of LinkedIn posts and to explore things like searches, profile features and so on. It should be noted that I’m not a LinkedIn ‘expert’, so the intention was never to explore LinkedIn social marketing ‘strategy’ or similar, but simply technical reality.

The experiment needed to end at some point, not least so I could draw some conclusions and write this article. So, I decided to make Mission Three the last mission.

The Resistance were tasked with either pitching posts related to ’Problem Solving’, or working in R&D on Hashtags and Tagging Connections – to discover how those are best used to drive engagement.

What happened

The game was played over three rounds, and lasted just under two weeks.  Those that chose to get involved, got very involved, at least over the first two missions. Of those who were not so actively involved, some were still posting messages of encouragement, or other messages pertinent to the game’s narrative, indicating that they had decided to accept the alternate reality, ’the magic circle’ of the game, but not so much as to join in with active play. Others still chose to ‘lurk’, remaining in the chat, but not messaging or taking part in the missions. Some people left the chat during the game.

Mission three was a ’failure’, in that very little activity took place. But given that Mission Two was very active, I wonder if the announcement of the imminent end of the game went some way to dissuade people from playing further. I hope that sharing this article will encourage further feedback.

Intention vs reality

From the perspective of the game designer and gamemaster (both me), some aspects of the game ran as I had expected and achieved what I wanted them to, and some did not, but that is always to be expected from a very early prototype, which this was.

I expected / wanted there to be more discussion in the ‘HQ’ regarding strategy of play, sharing of existing knowledge of ‘how LI works’ and that ‘R & D’ activity in HQ would spark these kinds of interactions.

I further expected / wanted the outcomes / learning of HQ conversations to be reflected in the way that people addressed the core loop of the game.

This was because these two things represented the core ‘learning’  aspects of the game – peer learning through curation and practice of what has been curated. If this had been designed as a set of learning activities without a game overlay, the fundamental instruction would have been ‘Find out what you can about how LinkedIn features work, share it with a group of people in chat, and then use what you have found to make posts.’

So I believe that the simple action of overlaying a narrative did serve to keep people engaged for longer with this fundamentally not especially interesting instruction.

However, there is a price to pay for overlaying narrative, and that is clarity. To a greater or lesser degree, the narrative obfuscates the simple underlying instructions, and it is certainly true that some participants reported and/or displayed confusion about what they were supposed to be doing. But then again, it is unlikely that without the narrative there would been any engagement with the activities at all – so this needs to be balanced, to achieve clarity while still maintaining the integrity of the magic circle.

Time to Play?

Many participants reported lack of time as a reason for non-participation, or participation dropping off over time. In my mind, the tasks involved were not very time consuming, and were to a certain extent just asking people to do what they were already doing – finding and commenting on posts on LI. However, that is not strictly true. I was asking them to find specific kinds of posts – which would take time. Maybe this could be mitigated, by just asking them to pitch posts they have already found (interesting) recently. This in turn, would mean that there might need to be more attention paid to the narrative for each mission to make them sufficiently different from one another to maintain interest.

It should also be recognised that ‘R & D’ is potentially more time consuming, so maybe the rewards for that should be greater. In this first prototype, Gamification did not feature heavily – beyond the awarding of medals, so that would be something to consider for version 2.

Missions lasted three days in this experiment, mainly because my feeling was that longer timescales would dilute engagement and because one of the major mechanisms was ‘engagement’ which on LI, apparently requires lots of interaction with a post in the first hour, never mind three days. Many people feedback that they would have like longer for each mission. This means that for a game of LinkedIn, in particular,  I would have to think carefully about which ‘algorithmic’ aspects should have an impact and which shouldn’t, and that it would probably only be appropriate to include ‘engagement’, in terms of the viral type algorithmic ‘engine’, if a game were designed to be played and completed over an hour or two, rather than over an extended time, like this one.

Other potential barriers

Although I haven’t received explicit feedback to this effect, there is another potential barrier which has long been on my mind, which may have contributed to the falling off of activity in the game, or people not engaging at all.

Of necessity, ‘playing’ in LinkedIn, means you are playing in a public space, and not just any public space, but one where you may have created a very specific ‘professional’ persona. So there may have been a reluctance, once the reality of the game was revealed, for some people to expose themselves by joining in. I also, personally, have to face the potentially awful possibility, that, given that activity dropped off so markedly after mission two, that it was my disastrous attempt to give a competent video debriefing and /or the fact that I was wearing a revolutionary style red beret and ‘Free Ferris’ badge in said video, that some people found cringeworthy enough to disengage altogether.

Lessons Learned

A (non-exhaustive) list of reflections I will take away with me to consider possible new games in LI and other ‘non-gaming’ platforms will include:

• Complexity of instructions – how to make something ‘gameful’ without too much obfuscation?
• Time available to players – what can I expect and how can I introduce ‘play’ into actions already done – to add no time at all. Maybe in this case that could mean sharing posts they already noticed, or even promoting their own posts?
• Limitations of the platform – e.g. HQ was a great idea, but linear chronological chains of messages are hard to navigate.
• Perceptions of fairness – I bent/waived the rules because they didn’t impact the learning, but some players dislike that.
• Gamification – Rewards for play/learning, and how they can be implemented on the platform.

Do You Want to Try It?

I remain encouraged, despite a drop-off in play. For a first prototype, this game did pretty well. So, what hints do I have for somebody wanting to do the same? Indeed, maybe a more fundamental question is ‘Why would you want to do this?’

The 70:20:10 model (and indeed my own OLCM) tells us that only a fraction of learning goes on in ‘formal’ learning settings. We are learning all the time, from everything we do. If you accept this idea, then it makes sense to apply deliberate design to ‘everyday’ activities to ensure that the learning derived from them is optimised, and indeed that it has desirable learning outcomes.

If you further accept that play and games provide effective pedagogies, as well as a way to engender engagement in activities,* then gameful design is a great approach to choose.

*(you may not accept this, of course, in which case stop reading now. Bit late in the day for this warning, I know,  but you’ve probably saved yourself 40secs or so).

The potential for ’non-gaming’ platforms to have ’gameful design’ applied to them is probably limited by your imagination, but here are a few general principles to get you started.

• Consider the platforms available to you and then think about them in terms of the ‘experiences’ they offer rather than the ‘tasks’ they help people to carry out. For example, LI offers the experiences of ‘gathering together’ in groups and group chat, the experience of ‘social approval’ through likes and comments, and ‘creativity’ through all the different ways you can post.
• What do you want your (learning) outcomes to be? How does a platform potentially allow ‘delivery’ of learning through e.g. peer sharing of knowledge, through activities that could be constructed from the ‘experiences’, content sharing and delivery
• Do your learners already know how to use the platform, or is there an additional learning curve. One compelling reason to widely used platforms and resources to design playful learning, is because your learners DO already know how to use them, and in fact use them all the time – e.g you could use your company email platform to run an ‘alternate reality’ game where scenarios instructions are delivered through emails – with minimal instruction, because everyone already knows how to use the email client.
• Narrative overlay is the easiest place to start. It relatively easy to make something gameful, by a simple reframe. This ’invitation to the magic circle’ can be all that is needed to make an ordinary activity into a compelling game.

Thanks to All Involved

Although I won’t mention you by name here, just in case you don’t want me too, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to all those who were involved in this little experiment with me. I couldn’t have done it without you. You can ‘out’ yourselves in the comments on LI when I share this article, if you wish.

The post Resisting the Purge – LinkedIn as a Game Platform first appeared on Ludogogy.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in learning and gaming design has revolutionized the way content creators approach their craft. AI-powered tools provide game and learning designers with efficient and effective ways to produce high-quality content that engages learners and gamers alike. In this article, we will focus on two AI-powered tools – Midjourney and ChatGPT – that can be used to create game and learning content. We will also look at the burgeoning development of third-party apps and tools which utilise, in particular, the various GPT models, and which provided highly-focused resources.

Check out Ludogogy Learning’s offerings around AI for Learning and Games Design

Midjourney is an AI-powered image creation tool that can produce various types of visuals which can be used in game and learning materials. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is an AI text generation tool that can produce text-based content in a huge variety of formats and contexts. Both these tools are capable of creating high-quality content in less time and with less effort. This post will explore the features and applications of these two tools in detail and discuss how they can be used to create personalized and immersive games and learning experiences.

First – The Pictures – Midjourney

Midjourney is an AI-powered platform that can create high-quality images for games and learning materials. The platform employs machine learning algorithms that can generate images based on specific parameters. Midjourney’s algorithms go beyond mere image manipulation by creating new, original images in different styles and formats.

Like most of the well-known AI tools, Midjourney is moving fast, and is constantly being updated with new modes and capabilities. In the last few months, for example, we have seen the addition of version 4 of the image generation algorithm, which generates images without many of the problems (long necks, double faces, general distortion) of the previous algorithms.

And where particular styles of artwork have proved to be popular, Midjourney has sought to smooth the path to creating quality images in those styles. The new Niji mode, for example, is especially designed for creating images with a Manga feel.

There are some limitations on size; a Midjourney image currently has a maximum size of 2048 x 2048 pixels. You can change the aspect ratio to make something of a different shape but still subject to the same size limit. Different versions have different limitations on size and which aspect ratios will work properly. But once you have a grip on that, the only other limitations are your imagination and your skill in creating prompts.

Midjourney can be used create different background images, icons, characters, and more. These images can be used in a variety of applications, including games, educational videos, e-learning courses, and instructional materials. My own experience of using Midjourney in learning game design includes:

• Realistic photographic images of people of various ethnicities, genders and ages for a diversity and inclusion game.
• Creation of photorealistic but ‘impossible’ exhibits for ‘:The Museum of Impossible Objects’.
• A tarot style deck of cards with illustrations which look like they have all been created by the same artist
• Illustrations for a high-fantasy style RPG game
• Cartoon style illustrations of modern office life
• Creation of an :asemic ‘alien’ script

Particularly useful in the context of game and learning design are the following capabilities:

• Being able to apply a consistent aesthetic across a large number of images – ideal for creating card decks
• Create images based on existing images, such as using a photograph for the basis of a new image of the same subject with a different theme
• Merging two or more images together to create a new image containing elements of all of them.
• Creating variations on a preferred image – for example dressing a character in styles of dress from different historical eras.

Midjourney allows you to choose from a dazzling array of art styles, image subjects and even replicates photography down to the level of camera and lighting settings.

It takes some effort to learn to use it really well, but the savings in both time and money in sourcing appropriate images for your projects will be well worth it.

Then – the Words – GPT and ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI-powered tool that can generate pretty much any kind of text-based content you require. The platform is built on the GPT3 family of large language models, developed by OpenAI, and seeks to create human-like text output.

Like Midjourney, there is a requirement to get to know the platform, and spend some time  learning to create effective prompts if you are to use it well, but the potential returns in automating ideation and content creation are life-changing for people working in learning and game design.

GPT3 is not connected to the Internet (GPT4, underlying the Bing bot, is, but is outside the scope of this article), but nevertheless, its training datasets were massive, even though it ‘knows’ little about anything since 2021.

So you can, for example, be reasonably confident that it will have read most well-known books, which underlies this great set of tips on creating lesson plans for English Literature classes.

One thing you do need to do carefully, when asking ChatGPT to output material you are going to use with learners, is to check for errors. Because of the way that ChatGPT ,and the underlying models work, which is basically like a very sophisticated predictive text model, it simply decides what word to write next, one word at a time. It is an illusion that ChatGPT deals in anything larger than words. It certainly does not have ’facts’ at its disposal, and will frequently produce factually incorrect information.

For example, this is (part of) what it output about the year 1974 in British politics:

The year 1974 was also marked by tragedy. In the four and a half years leading up to the next general election, a total of 17 members of parliament died. This included some of the most prominent figures in British politics, such as former Prime Minister Edward Heath and Labour politician George Brown. The loss of these individuals had a significant impact on the political landscape, as it meant that new leaders had to step up and take their place.

Although most of the rest of the output was just what was required, it incorrectly claimed that Edward Heath and George Brown died during the years 1974-79.

GPT and Games Design

In games design, this ’hallucination’ is maybe less concerning, as we are frequently creating output which is fictional in nature. However, the hallucination aspect of this tool should always be borne in mind.

ChatGPT can be used in many parts of games design and production, right from initial ideation to playtesting, and there is pretty much no limit to the formats and types of output it will produce, from outlines, to finished prose, poetry, dialogue and stage direction, computer code, and even knitting patterns in both text and chart format.

One obvious application is to produce text-based components for games including:

• Narrative such as backstory and scenarios
• Character sheets and playbooks for RPGs
• Plot summaries
• Rulebooks
• Card rubric
• Etc

You can even play games directly in ChatGPT, such as text based adventure games, narrative games, including shared storytelling between the bot and a human, and even more complex games with dice throwing and tokens involved – if you get the prompt right.

ChatGPT’s ability to ’remember’ what has gone before in a chat means that played games can then be re-output in alternative forms, and I have done this previously, getting such output as a third person re-telling of a first person RPG, a screenplay with dialogue and even a report on how the player displayed leadership.

As the captain of the Star Explorer, the player has shown effective leadership throughout the game. They were quick to take action when the ship’s sensors detected a strange object, displaying a sense of curiosity and adventure. They also demonstrated effective decision-making skills when faced with the situation of the abandoned spaceship and the critical state of its reactor. The player immediately calls their second in command to discuss the situation and then ask their own ship’s AI to produce a risk assessment and to suggest appropriate personnel to send over if the risks were acceptable.

The player also displayed a sense of caution and safety when they decided to tow the ship back to the nearest space station instead of simply continuing the mission. This shows that the player is willing to prioritize the safety of their crew and the ship.

In terms of areas for improvement, the player could have been more proactive in communicating with other ships in the vicinity for assistance before attempting to repair the reactor. This could have been an opportunity to seek help from other ships and potentially prevent the high-pressure situation.

Overall, the player has displayed excellent leadership skills and judgement and has effectively navigated through the challenges faced during the mission.

…or code to play the game from a command line

…or code which can be copied and pasted into Twine to make a branching scenario game

Where ChatGPT really excels is being given templates to work with and then being asked to complete those based on a theme or particular content. Here is what it produced when given part of a template for ‘Wretched and Alone’ games (This work is based on The Wretched, product of Chris Bissette and Loot The Room, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)

And then given the prompt:

Using the following template can you write the ‘Who’ and ‘What’ sections of a Wretched and Alone game about working as a shelf-stacker in a supermarket:

This is what it output:

Who?

You are a shelf-stacker at a local supermarket, working long hours for minimum wage in order to make ends meet. You’re not sure how you ended up in this dead-end job, but you know you need to keep it in order to pay the bills. You have a few friends among your co-workers, but most of them are just as miserable as you are. The store is located in a rundown part of town, and you often deal with shoplifters, angry customers, and other hazards of working in a low-income area.

What?

This is a solo GM-less journaling game in which you will document your attempts to survive your job as a shelf-stacker at the supermarket. You will face a variety of challenges, from dealing with difficult customers to avoiding the wrath of your boss.

During the game, you will roll dice, draw cards from the deck and read their associated events, pull blocks from the jenga tower, place or remove tokens from cards, and write about your experiences in character.

Failure is the most likely outcome of this game. If the jenga tower falls, you’ll be fired from your job and will have to find another way to make ends meet. If you draw all four Kings, you’ll be caught stealing from the store and will be arrested; the last King you draw will tell you how.

To win, you must draw the Ace of Hearts and complete the task that it specifies by removing tokens from it over subsequent days. For a shorter, easier game, place the Ace of Hearts on the top of the deck after you’ve shuffled it, so it’s the first card you’ll draw. The task specified by the Ace of Hearts will give you a chance to improve your situation, whether that means getting a promotion at work, finding a new job, or escaping the grind of retail life altogether.

What’s Next – Third Party Integrations

The use of AI in game and learning design has many benefits. For one, it allows for personalized and immersive experiences, enhancing the overall learning or gaming experience. Midjourney and ChatGPT both play important roles in this process.

Because of the speed of production and the ease with which many slightly differing versions of something can be made, this really opens up the options for creating differentiated learning – which was well demonstrated in the video at the beginning of the article.

This personalization can lead to increased engagement and motivation, ultimately leading to better retention of information.

One of the most frequent criticisms levelled at the use of AI in creative work is that what is produced is derivative and not very creative – lacking the human ‘spark’. While this is true to a certain extent, it is also true that AI has the potential to increase creativity. The actual production of text-based content may be the least creative part of the learning or game design and creation process, and if that can be automated and speeded up, it frees human designers to focus on the experiences they want to create, and indeed in coming up with yet more creative ways of using the tools to come out with innovative output

And nowhere has this creativity been seen more than in the 300+ third party applications which have integrated with the GPT API to produce targeted tools which further enhance capability in very specific tasks. A sample of these which might be of particular interest to learning and games designers are:

• GPT for Sheets and Docs  an extension for Google Sheets and Docs which allows you pull input directly from GPT into your spreadsheets and documents.
• AI Dungeon – Play in AI-enabled worlds-now enhanced with Stable Diffusion images.
• Charisma – Storytelling powered by artifical intelligence
• AIChannels – a social network platform which allows collaboration with AI agents
• Debuild – Generative AI to build wep apps

Takeaways and Next Steps

Midjourney and ChatGPT are powerful AI tools that have the potential to revolutionise both the game and learning design process. This article has necessarily just scratched the surface of what is possible. If you want to know more, and attend some short course that are specifically targeted on AI for learning and game design, then check out Ludogogy Learning’s selection of upcoming courses which include all new material on using Midjourney and ChatGPT in your design process.

The post The Bots Are Coming – Let’s Have Some Fun! first appeared on Ludogogy.

This paper can be read in full at https://research.tudelft.nl/files/105030829/3474663.pdf

An archive of all currently available infographics can be found in the Research Infographics page.

The post Game Mechanics in Serious Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

Game Mechanics and why they are employed (2018) can be read in full at ResearchGate

An archive of all currently available infographics can be found in the Research Infographics page.

The post Learning Online through Gamification first appeared on Ludogogy.