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.

Accessibility is a concept that is often talked about in game design. Specifically when it comes to making games more accessible to a wider audience. But what does accessibility mean and what does it entail when designing games for entertainment, learning, or personal development?

This article will address how accessibility affects the player experience. We’ll dive deeply into why accessibility challenges make them the “wrong” kind of difficulty for players. This article will address accessibility as design considerations for the widest and most diverse audience. We’ll first cover designing with accessibility in mind from the start and then cover types of accessibility changes made in game design. Those changes include accessibility addressing motor movement; cognition; vision; hearing; and economics. This article will close on how designers can use accessibility to continually improve their practice and design.

The “wrong” kind of difficult

So what do we mean by accessibility? Accessibility generally means making something easy for other to use; engage; or understand. That’s already a broad definition; so for this article as it relates to game design, let’s tackle accessibility as a means of making a game available and playable to the widest possible audience. Preventing this kind of accessibility makes games the “wrong” kind of difficult.

Often designers think this means making something color blind friendly or translating a rule book into other languages. But accessibility means more than just that. Accessibility also means making games that players can play who have slower motor functions from being older.  Or emphasize another sense than just relying on vision.

Really, accessibility boils down to making sure that agency remains in the hands of the person most important to game design: the player. Making sure that the player can access and engage with a game on all levels regardless of their background makes them as accessible as possible. When they are not accessible; players often have to rely on other players to act or make decisions for them. That reduces their agency – and their decision making capabilities.

The widest possible audience

Accessibility means making games available for the widest possible audience. Of course this affects some types of games more than others. Video games that require sensitive motor input (think of a game like Overwatch) is probably not that accessible to someone with poor motor controls. Conversely; board games can address this through house rules or other player made changes to the game. But often these may not reflect the direction of the designer and can detract from the experience.

To truly make a game available for others, a designer has to think as the player. They must avoid approaching design decisions with specific pre-conceived notions of who their players will be. Instead, they have to concentrate on who their players are and design with their needs in mind.

Of course a game’s player base can be really diverse. As consequence, that means that accessibility design options can be as equally diverse.

Diversity and accessibility

Sometimes designers get hung up on accessibility meaning diversity and vice versa. While they reflect one another they are often a function from one to the other. Meaning that accessible games have the power to draw more diverse audiences. Likewise, diverse audiences are drawn to more accessible games.

That means that diverse audiences could also include those with different play styles. This is particularly prevalent in current board game designs where modes are created for players in mind. They could include a typical competitive “orthogame” mode where players compete against each other; a cooperative mode where players team up against the game; or even a solo mode.

Likewise table top games can include functions or features that make the game harder or easier according to players’ desires. Doing so ensure that the game remains fun – but accessible – for novice and experience players alike. Hanabi does this well with the introduction of the ”rainbow” cards in the deck. These make the game more challenging  – but also more satisfying to play for more experienced players.

Hanabi is available on Amazon

Accessibility from the start

Accessibility is also often something that is tacked on at the very end of the core game design and development process. But it doesn’t have to be? A designer who is accessibility minded will always look at a game and a design form the player’s perspective. They are always asking themselves how players with these abilities or these backgrounds can access and play the game.

Starting with accessibility in mind from the start makes accessibility a core function – and a feature – of a game. Rather than just a last minute design consideration.

That means that when designers start with accessibility in mind from the beginning they can integrate it into other areas of the design process. This could include art development; art direction; core loop development; and even how playtesting is conducted.

Types of accessibility changes

With accessibility consideration comes accessibility changes that can be implemented and adapted for the game. These range from the very basic; to intermediate changes; to more advanced changes.

Basic changes are easy to implement and are wide reaching. They apply to almost all game mechanics.  These can often be implemented at the end of the design process. This is compared to intermediate changes which require some planning and effort to be considered. More often than not these principles of good game design. When designers center on these, they can make accessibility a core feature of their game.

Advanced changes are implemented for players that may have profound impairments or may require specific niche mechanics. These advanced changes could require designers to make larges and more significant changes to the entire design process.

Motor movement

We often don’t think about motor movement when thinking about table top games. But often, motor movement – specifically as we pick and manipulate pieces of a table top game – are fundamental aspects of why we play. That means that motor movement encompasses how users will interact and engage with the physical elements of the game.

This is also relevant rearranging board elements to be accessible and readable for players. Perhaps one of the most common concerns in table top design is the creation of the common board with text that can only be read for one angle. Compare this to more accessible table top games like Dead Man’s Cabal which has modular common board elements that can be re-arranged and moved around at will. 

Tactility also comes into play when addressing players’ motor movements.  You can see this with the modern chess set where each pieces feels unique to the touch. This makes easier to distinguish between a bishop and a knight.

These tactile sensations become even more important for vision impaired players. Particularly when dealing with paper money in games. While the number of modern board games that use paper money is now becoming fewer and far between; tactility could still remain a challenge. That can be addressed by using card board chits of different sizes that indicate different denominations.

The layout of cards also affects motor movement for those that may not be able to grasp or fan out a hand of cards. This is particularly relevant for card games that have important information on all different areas of a card. That means that a motor impaired player who cannot easily shuffle or manipulate cards makes the game harder and less accessible for these players.

Well designed cards on the other hand have all pertinent info near opposite corners of the card. This makes it easier for cards to be fanned and the content more accessible for players. Think about a standard deck of playing cards and where card information lies there.

Cognitive: thinking & perceiving

Cognition is another accessibility aspect that often gets overlooked but is incredibly important. Cognition is about how your players think and perceive your game through the functions that you’ve laid out for it. In table top games we are usually introduced to it via the printed rulebook – but this could be challenging to read for those who are dyslexic.

That means that both a game manual and a quick start guide could help make your game more accessible for players.  Quick start guides are becoming more present for games that often have many moving parts. Root is a good example of a game with both a rules manual for reference as a well as a guide for play. Both address issues that players with ADD or ADHD may have consuming large amounts of text.

Root is available on Amazon

Of course game rules and how to play videos are now becoming more prevalent. These address some of these challenges. Though for both video and printed media, it’s important to use simple and clear language to remain accessible. For manuals it is best to use simple and clear formatting for references and rules explanation to aid readability.  

To further aid readability, it’s also important to make sure that text is provided on a high contrast background – rather than on top of other illustrations where it might not be easily read. It’s also best to highlight important key words, phrases, or glossary items in your game that are referred to often.

It also helps for players to determine which elements of the game are interactive or variable based on different game conditions.  One of the games in my collection The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire does this well in indicating what spaces are available for players to place pieces given different player counts. This isn’t the only game that includes this but these types of indexes in design help to make the game more accessible.

The Godfather: Corleone’s Empire is available on Amazon

Other additional touches that help smooth the player experience is to ensure that player aids are inclusive of different components in a game. This is especially helpful for games that have asymmetric player starting abilities. A cheat sheet that summarizes others’ abilities is incredibly useful. You can even go one step further and use necessary game components like player screens in Roll for the Galaxy and Keyflower to double as these player aids.

Roll for the Galaxy is available on Amazon

Keyflower is available on Amazon

Vision and sight

Vision is perhaps one of the most talked about accessibility items by table top designers. Though, it’s important to note that vision isn’t totally binary. Someone could have poor or limited eye sight which limits their interaction. This could come from players with cataracts, glaucoma, or other issues affecting their sight.

Of course visually based games won’t be totally 100% compatible to the visually impaired. Though this limitation could be played with. Games like Nyctophobia play with this aspect of sight and how players engage with the game.

Nyctophobia is available on Amazon

Though for most games with visual elements it often is the best case to provide all relevant and critical information on cards and components in as large as font as possible.  This can often be combined with specific symbols that differentiate player elements that are not just based on color.

While sighted players don’t often think about color accessibility; it’s often best practice to concentrate on how other color blind players may see the game. Relying on color alone might be easier in the meantime. But making sure that there are considerations made for how players will visually perceive the game are necessary measures to take.

Hearing and speech

Hearing is one way that information is communicated to players. Mostly this makes sense in video and digital games. But has applications in table top gaming as well. Consider high player interaction games such as Cosmic Encounter and Empires where table talk, negotiation, and communication are important. How are considerations made for players who have hearing and speech difficulties. Is there another way for them to interact?

Cosmic Encounter is available on Amazon

In addition, hearing and speech can influence design choices the same way that Nyctophobia does with vision and sight. Perhaps game designs can take into account certain players must communicate via speech and others via writing to pass along information. These changes provides accessibility consideration for players as well as a wider choice on difficulty levels.

Empires is available on Amazon

Economic accessibility

Economic accessibility is one of those considerations that may not often be included in concerns. After all, some games don’t even have a large enough margin to make their publishers or designers much money. But there is a concern with over producing games with miniatures, metal coins, and neoprene mats that may address these economically accessible concerns.

For many, board gaming is a luxury hobby. Players treat their games as such. But when addressing economic accessibility; designers and publishers must also think about price as a discriminating factor. How does the pricing of their game and the production of their components affect the player experience and influence accessibility to a wider audience?

Continual improvement

Designing accessibility within games is a continuous and ever evolving dialogue. It’s something that doesn’t need to be addressed with just the designer; but can be brought up with players, publishers, graphic artists, and manufacturers as well.

Perhaps one of the most critical places to address player accessibility is with play testers. Here is where these main concerns can be brought up with actual consumers of the medium. It’s here where the designer and the player can have the most open dialogue in order to answer the most important accessibility question:  how can I play this game?

Takeaways

This article addressed how accessibility affects the player experience. We dove deeply into why accessibility challenges make some games the “wrong” kind of difficult for players. This article addressed accessibility as design considerations for the widest and most diverse audience. The article covered designing with accessibility in mind from the start as well as different types of accessibility changes made in game design. Those changes include accessibility addressing motor movement; cognition; vision; hearing; and economics. The article closed on how designers can use accessibility to continually improve their practice and design.

This article was about accesibility in games.  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 Accessibility in Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

[ Download “Design Thinking - One Card Game” DesignThinking.zip – Downloaded 860 times – 102.55 KB

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

Design Thinking is a game about taking, and responding to a brief from a clent, which only requires the single card – and a few commonly found resources for your ‘design team’ – pens, yarn or string, beads and counters. Play it with your learners to sharpen their active listening skills, and as an introduction to an important aspect of Design Thinking.

The post Design Thinking One-card Game Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

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

Meander is a game about Mindful Walking, which only requires the single card – and your imagination and willingness to play. You can play it in two modes. Question mode invites you to use the card and your walk to answer a question of significance for you, whereas Meander mode simply invites you to enjoy the experience of having your attention pulled from one thing to another as you walk.

The post Meander Download first appeared on Ludogogy.

Most people have played games at some point in their lives. They can be table top games, card games, board games, playground games, video games, console games, or computer games. Most people have likely played hard games, easy games, social games, or abstract games. Mostly we’ve played fun games. But we’ve probably also played lousy games.

Some of us may have played small games, micro games, or pocket games. But, what about big games? How about Megagames? Megagames are one of the most interesting types of games around. They are part role-playing, part simulation, and part social game.

This article will review megagames. It’ll define what megagames are as well as the history of megagames. The structure of megagames will be explained as well as how role-playing and engagement occurs within the game. Player hierarchies are an interesting component of megagame structure and will be explored in greater depth. Megagames are administered by a certain group of people called “control.” Their engagement greatly impacts the player experience. Design aspects of megagames will be covered as well as how megagames can be used for games-based learning.

What is a Megagame?

A megagame is an interesting combination of different game elements encountered in other places. They involve role-playing, simulation, and social interactions.

Megagames combine all of this and on a large scale and introduce aspects of economics and politics into play. This is often represented in megagame components such as maps, charts, interlocking games, and overarching stories that join together to create a larger narrative. Players often take a large role in shaping the megagame experience through live action role-playing. As such the structure of the game is similar from play to play. But each new group of players bring a new narrative.

A megagame is a large scale game that contains different elements found in other games. Those elements include (but are not limited to) role-playing, simulations, social interaction, economics, and politics, which are combined into an overarching narrative. This combination takes place through other, smaller, interlocking games that occur concurrently within the megagame.

History of Megagames

If you haven’t heard of megagames before, then you might think that they’re a relatively new trend. But they aren’t and have been around since the 1970’s. Megagames trace their roots back to the British designer Jim Wallman and his connection to war games.

The first such megagame implementation was to expand wargaming to a larger scale. It was called “Memphis Manger” a Vietnam war game played in April of 1982.  The game accommodated about 30 players including designer Paddy Griffith.

The megagame idea began to grow from that point and future designers began to draw inspiration from other games. Not just game mechanics and structure; but rather theory; mathematical concepts; psychology; and sociology of game play.

However, the earliest megagames relied heavily on the conventions of war gaming and included miniatures, maps, and components representing units. Despite this, the development and structure of megagames has since expanded from that point into a more robust and developed structure.

Megagame Structure

Megagames adapt some concepts and structures from other games. Some of those include decision space of players as well as areas of agency. In megagames these become “private play areas.” Players use them to interact with other players and the game in order to achieve their own goals. In addition, there are public areas used to coordinate between these private play areas. This is where these seemingly disparate spaces of the megagame connect with one another.

For example a megagame could have a “private play area” called the high table. Players there are engaged in a hidden role negotiation game. In this game, the players must all come to a consensus as to who the “traitor” is. If players can select the traitor within three turns then all players (except the traitor) earn 1,000 money.  If the traitor escapes without being detected after 3 turns then the traitor earn 5,000 money and everyone else earns nothing. All players receive “hints” as to who the traitor is from players at another table called the “map room.”

This “map room” is another separate private play area that focuses on players engaged in an area control game. This area is called the “map room.”  In this game, players take turns rolling dice in order to determine if “armies” from one section of the map are able to defeat armies in neighboring sections. Armies are lost every turn. The only way to buy more armies is to purchase them… using the money earned by the players at the high table.

These games are connected through two resources: money and hints.  This represents just one small connection between these two private play areas in megagames. Structures such as these are seen in many different games. Megagames utilize some of these structures and use them as a framework. Through this, players can see how their actions affect outcomes in both their private play area as well as through the megagame at large.

Megagames also usually require a large amount of space. That space can be setup in a number of different ways. This includes gathering in a large central room with many tables to several smaller rooms where walls divide player groups.

In addition to space, megagames require a larger time investment than other gaming activities. Some board games can take 1-2 hours to play. Whereas megagames take between a few hours to a whole day to explain, play, and complete.

Role-playing in Megagames

The structure of megagames alone doesn’t define them. The players do. Every megagame will result in different outcomes based on player experiences, behaviors, actions, and motivations. As such, megagame players often role-play through their game play.

This is most often compared to LARPS – or live action role playing. Role-playing exists in megagames as a way for players to interact; communicate; and collaborate with one another in the game within its theme.

A specific distinction between megagame role-playing and LARPS is that megagames can be considered orthogames in their ability to create separate and unequal outcomes for teams and players. This means that there can be clear and decisive winners in the megagame. Whereas LARPS are more about the emergent narrative rather than the game.

This makes megagames more abstracted compared to LARPS. The theme in megagames is connected to their structure as well as through player roles. Players in megagames take on specific roles that can range from national governments, corporate entities, journalists, politicians, and military personnel. In these roles players act as their respective group through their interactions with others.

Player Structure & Engagement

Many games focus on some kind and degree of player engagement throughout play. Megagames are no different. Here players have to do more than compete with one another. Teammates must also communicate with one another; share information; broker deals, and make challenging decisions. 

The amount and type of player engagement is highly dependent on players and what they want to get out of the experience. This is also dependent on the scenario and the game being played.

Like its name, megagames require a large number of players. Few megagames require less than 25 participants. Some games require 25-80 players for a full experience. However, other megagames can have participants running into the hundreds.

Player interaction is an integral part of the megagame experience. This means that there needs to be enough action, agency, and options for games with these high player counts. That means that opportunities are necessary to keep players engaged throughout with meaningful contributions to game play.

Player Hierarchies

This player experience builds off the hierarchy of player interaction throughout the game. Some games will consist of several factions playing against each other. In turn each faction has a team of players with different roles, responsibilities, and decision making abilities.

This model of hierarchy makes it so that there are optimal zones of player interaction and agency at each step of the way. Creating a game so that one player is responsible for too many areas can be cumbersome, bothersome, and un-fun. By creating a hierarchy of responsibilities on a team’s roster, these activities can be subdivided and delegated. Players are able to exercise agency within the game that has a broad impact through this method. At the same time, they can make meaningful contributions to their team: fueling the social connections that players create through megagame play.

“Control” and the Megagame

A megagame naturally has many moving parts. Most board games can get away without the need for an impartial third party. More complicated games require more human input to support its structure.  Of course casino games have dealers, pit bosses, and floor supervisors. Even the original Kriegspiel had umpires. Of course professional sports have referees. Debates have moderators. As a result, megagames have “control.”

Control is a team of game masters and moderators that control the flow, structure, and engagement of play for players. They are responsible for managing operations of the game which includes (but is not always limited to) explaining rules, addressing situations, monitoring the game, and (even) making up some rules on the fly.

Some of the first controllers for megagames are their own designers. These individuals spend countless hours designing and printing maps; creating cards; making counters; and assembling them at the megagame site.

Having a “controller” is critical to megagame success. However, due to the structure of megagames, it is often necessary to break apart “control” into different sub-teams that manage different and specific areas within the game.

The need for this structure; impartial third party; and overall game master is crucial for overall success; engagement; and managing “last turn madness” that often accompanies megagame play.

Megagame Player Experience

Megagames are huge. They are designed in such a way that much of the player experience hinges on the social relationships and networks formed between players. Social networking happens in every megagame – it’s inevitable. New relationships are formed throughout play. No matter if that play is with, for, and against other players.

Megagames bring people together. They give players the unique ability to role-play in a setting bigger than a table top RPG. It provides them with the opportunity to solve some puzzles; cooperate with other teammates; and create an experience like no other.

The social relationships formed with and among players are often replicated by control members. Most of the time players are not aware of the schemes and storylines that are created behind the scenes of the control team and how their actions will affect game play overall.

However, the very social nature of megagames can be a source of challenge. Sometimes, language barriers; players abilities; and other accessibility concerns hider players’ abilities to participate fully within the game.

Despite this, players continue to return to play megagames for the player experience as this is not something that can be easily replicated elsewhere. Megagames tend to become a “destination” gaming event where people go to have a great experience.

That’s because megagames ride a level of player energy that incorporates aspects of table top games; war games; simulations; live action role-playing; and escape rooms in a unique and interesting combination. All of this is implemented by a unique team of controllers who play a significant role in shaping and crafting the game’s overall narrative.

Designing Megagames

Designing megagames is a challenging experience. The biggest challenge is creating something bespoke and customized for the experience the designer wants the players to have. In addition, designers don’t want to “overdesign” the experience by creating elaborate rules that would result in complex administration of the game for the control team.

Additionally, taking structures and mechanics from existing games could be a promising path for developing a new megagame. However, the process of integrating all of it under one title can be daunting and time consuming.

That means that creating megagames from the ground up can be easier and more straightforward than adapting existing games for a megagame format.  Existing games that were never intended to be megagames can difficult to transition into a modality in which player experience is prized over everything else.

Megagames for Games-Based Learning

Megagames are ripe for application of games-based learning. Megagames are a unique experience that encompass many different applications of simulations; role-playing; and social connection. All of which are great applications of experiential learning using games.

We may not think about megagames as applications of games-based learning. But the prominent use of student organizations like the Model United Nations or the Model European Union are ripe with examples and applications often found in other megagames. These include role-playing as different countries with different motivations and priorities as well as simulating different experiences, events, and incidents. These in turn require the competition and the cooperation between individuals and teams.

Additionally, military academics have used historical simulations and war games as a way to train and educate officers and leaders. The application of which requires the use of military tactics as well as politics, negotiation, and cooperation in order to influence the outcome.

Takeaways

This article reviewed megagames. It defined megagames as well as elaborated on their history and development. The structure of megagames were explained as well as how role-playing and engagement occurs within the game. Player hierarchies serve an interesting component of megagame structure and were covered in depth.  The “control” team of megagames were detailed in addition to how the expectations of megagames influence the player experience. Finally, design aspects of megagames were discussed in addition to how megagames are used for games-based learning.

This article was about megagames.  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 are Megagames? first appeared on Ludogogy.

Since this umbrella category is defined not in terms of goals (e.g. special education) or subject (e.g. STEM education), but in terms of a tool, it includes several already recognized or emerging forms. Some of the main types, without being exhaustive, are:

• Simulations (including military exercises, mock trials, business or medical simulations, etc.)
• Dramatic methods originating from Jacob L. Moreno (in particular: sociodrama, bibliodrama, playback theatre)
• Applied drama/theater methods (e.g. Drama in Education, process drama, improv-based education, Rainbow of Desire, Rollenspielpädagogik, etc.)
• Various role-playing exercises in corporate training
• Various initiatives arising from hobby/leisure games (e.g. edularp, educational tabletop role-playing, some serious games, some gamified classroom, etc.)

The Rainbow of Desire by Auguste Boal is available on Amazon

The pedagogical benefits of role-playing can be summarised as the following: Role-playing persons are acting and learning as a more open, more persistent, more courageous, and more experimental version of themselves.

Role-playing sensitizes you!

One of the most researched psychological features of role-playing is its sensitizing effect. The phenomenon known as the “role-play effect” in psychology shows that role-playing can lead to a more significant attitude change than simply communicating information. Role-playing leads to a change of perspective: We take on a specific point of view and become more sensitive and empathetic as a result.

Related research has also shown that we are more likely to embrace opposing views if we act them out and then become informed about them than if we do the reverse. This is utilized mostly by placing a role-playing exercise in the middle of a longer learning activity, between the briefing and debriefing phases. Role-playing is an ideal tool for eliminating preconceptions, processing vaguely familiar but complex information, and laying the foundations for further reflection.

Role-play empowers you!

In studying the effect of self-distancing, researchers have found that children are more persistent in repetitive tasks when they think of themselves in the third person E/3 (“Is Matt working hard?”) rather than in the first person (“How am I doing?”), and even more so when they identify themselves with a role model in the third person. In other words, children were found to be more focused and efficient when they approached tasks like “What would Batman do in this situation?” – hence the term “the Batman effect”.

Other researchers have found that forty percent of those who were treated as real pilots and asked to fly a military aircraft simulator experienced vision improvement, while none of those who were asked to pretend to be pilots and act out the task had improved vision. Recent research therefore suggests that immersion in ideal and positive roles can greatly enhance an individual’s performance, in contrast with simple pretend play.

Role-play enriches you!

Role-playing provides a strong alibi for experimentation and to break old patterns. It makes leaving one’s comfort zone easier, as it protects the self from shame. Many role-players feel empowered to behave in radically different ways, by using roles as a kind of mask to conceal that it is they who actually behave differently.

It is worth pointing out that the goal of many role-playing activities is not winning or being successful. As a result, it is optimal to experience tense situations, ethical dilemmas, and despised or seemingly suboptimal strategies without any real disadvantages or repercussions. In role-playing, we are free to theorize about encountered situations and to test our assumptions by trying out new behaviors. Experimentation with roles expands our role repertoire and develops players’ agency, personal versatility, and resilience. Role-playing also provides a method to explore and understand social structures or dynamic systems in the first-person mode, as a personal experience.

This is not to say, of course,  that role-playing is a cure-all. Nor does it mean that it is the best education tool – if it were, hopefully, everyone would be using it by now. Some of its long-established educational forms, such as Drama in Education, are proven to be effective in developing several key Lisbon competencies*, while more recent ones, such as the increasingly popular edularp movement, are currently building up evidence on their validity and reliability.

It will be exciting to see what the future brings in this field.

*The Lisbon Competencies are a set of skills and knowledge areas identified as essential for lifelong learning and personal development. They include: communication, information literacy, problem-solving, critical thinking, and self-directed learning. These competencies are intended to help individuals adapt to an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world.

The post Role-play-based education first appeared on Ludogogy.

When we talk about ‘role play’ we generally refer to taking on an identity for a brief period:

1. We can role-play in a parlour game or board game where we adopt a persona in accordance with the rules.
2. We can role-play for the purposes of learning – you play a French shopkeeper so I can practice my French – or testing a scenario – I’ll be an investor while you pitch your business idea.
3. There is also ‘role play’ for the sake of acting out a sexual fantasy.

All three varieties of role play seem short-lived or in-the-moment activities, none to be taken too seriously.

‘Playing a role’, meanwhile, points at something more sustained. To ‘play the role of king’, for example, would extend for the length of a reign. That’s not a passing bit of role play. To ‘play the role of peacemaker’ might not last so long, but still suggests a greater and more serious investment of effort than ‘role play’ implies. The ‘peacemaker’ might also be the role that you default to in your family, for example, so that although the role never lasts long as an event, it is a position to which you often return.

Lying somewhere between ‘role play’ and ‘playing a role’ in life, is the idea of playing a role as an actor in a play. The play might be over in two or three hours, and yet the role is embraced with intent and commitment. To act in a play is to embark on something more serious than role-playing, but less serious than playing the role of peacemaker in your family on a recurring basis.

Despite the differences, however, there is something that unites role-play, playing a role, and acting in a play. They all require the self or the real person to stand aside, be suspended or become temporarily invisible. As with the wearing of a mask in some traditional drama, the true features are hidden while those of the character are put on display. The role comes to the fore; the self retreats or even disappears into the background.

The degree of disappearance varies. At one end of the spectrum, the true self is scarcely hidden at all. When a friend does an impression of a famous person – which is an everyday example of role-play – we don’t really lose sight of our friend in the process. We know it’s them even as their voice and mannerisms are momentarily altered. At the other end of the spectrum, there is method acting, whereby the actor becomes so consumed by their character that we might forget who the actor is. At the very extreme, we could cite cases in which an individual appears to be operated by forces beyond their control, as with speaking in tongues, diabolic possession, channeling, mediumship and automatic writing.

Even if the degree of reduction along that spectrum varies, the ‘self’ is always reduced when there is a role to take on. Philosophically speaking, this reducing of the self is notable because we tend to think of the self as the most essential thing about us. The self is the centre of who we are, the seat of our consciousness, the locus of all our experience, the sole entity to which each of us is identical. And so the fact that, during role play or the playing of a role, this essential and inalienable thing that we call the self can be fairly easily dimmed or switched off, suggests that the self might not be so essential or inalienable after all.

The point is that our ability to take on a role, however fleetingly, implies that the self is no more intrinsic to us than the role for which the self has made space. Perhaps the self is another kind of role. Our reliance on it, and its persistence, create the illusion of the self being inherent to us, but reliance and persistence are merely empirical qualities. Perhaps we ought to think of the self as a role with no self behind or beneath it.

The post A Philosopher’s Note on the Idea of Role Play first appeared on Ludogogy.

Serious games are games created from the ground up for teaching and learning. These also include games created for a social purpose outside of the traditional executions of games for entertainment.

Serious games can be incredible tools for teaching, learning, and education. They help players learn experientially though play in order to put concepts into use. Serious games provide learners with the opportunities to transform experience into knowledge.

So how should educators use serious games for teaching and learning? What are some serious games that exist now? How can educators integrate serious games into their curriculum, syllabi, and lesson plans?

This article will review and define serious games. A brief history of serious games will be shared along with some of the best reasons for using serious games in teaching and learning. The impact and ramifications of using serious games in the classroom will be discussed as well as the role that educators play in integrating serious games in their practice.

Several historical serious games will be discussed in detail and include war games and the Kriegsspiel; business simulations; and other aspects of gamification; games-based learning and applied games. Serious game play constitutes experiential learning. Therefore, active debriefing will be discussed in depth and a detailed approach will be shared for how educators can and should integrate these games into their teaching practice.

What are serious games?

Simply put serious games are games that are created for purposes other than entertainment. We may have first discovered gaming from the fun and excitement that we derive from it. Serious games take these outcomes and pairs it with learning outcomes in order to help the player and learner achieve a specific educational outcome. Therefore, serious games’ primary objective is not to entertain the player but rather to help them achieve a specific learning outcome.

In more granular terms, serious games are meant to promote some sort of behavior change from their learning outcomes. This change can come about through applications of learning that arise from play. Otherwise it could arise from players’ empathetic perspectives of others’ simulated through game play. In any case, serious games ultimately improve players, learners, and users through play.

Current applied serious games are used and implemented through an applied curricular methodology. This means that serious games aren’t played in a vacuum. Rather, serious games are used in tandem with play, review, discussion, and debriefing in order to help players achieve their learning outcomes.

How were serious games created?

Games have been around for thousands of years. Serious games came about from the development of using games as teaching and learning tools. Serious games go back hundreds of centuries prior to the more popular use of games-based learning for teaching, training, and education.

Some of the earliest games like chess were often relied upon in order to teach principles of warfare.  We see more contemporary applications of this with games like America’s Army which served as both an abstraction of infantry warfare as well as a marketing and recruitment tool.

But why were games first relied upon as tools for teaching and learning? It’s because games states are more easily provide an overview and abstraction of different simulations and scenarios. Reality possesses many details and fine distinctions that may be irrelevant to the situation at hand. However, the player experience of games provides a specific, detailed, and nuanced approach to teaching and learning through different activities, challenges, tasks, and assignments often under the guise of game terms like missions, scenes, and levels.

This specific approach – combined with a more accessible appeal of games – made them excellent tools for teaching and learning. Especially since games could be as an experiential form of education since knowledge is created from game play rather than shared didactically through lectures, seminars, or videos.

Why use serious games?

Games, game design, and game development have a storied and intertwined history with serious games. However, serious games also excel with catering to the player experience. That’s because these games are experienced at a pace and involvement at the discretion of the player.

All of this is due to player interaction, feedback, the feedback loop, and intrinsic motivation. The combination of these factors entice, empower, and enable students to continue playing, engaging, and experimenting with games in an experiential feedback loop. Such an engagement makes games an evolving and customizable tool for player learning.

Lastly, a serious game doesn’t always need to be played seriously. Serious games can still elicit fun and enjoyment from players. Doing so ensures that the player experience is a positive one, which supports and enables future play.

Serious games’ impact on learning

Additionally, serious games’ have a positive impact on learning, motivation, and learning motivation when applied by educators to learners.  They are able to more fully and immersively demonstrate concepts and applications in ways that traditional didactic education cannot.

This is often most realized in cognitive and affective learning outcomes. These are often most closely related to traditional educational learning outcomes that change attitudes, motivation, and values of students. However, serious games can also teach behavioral competencies. The results of which also change learners’ behaviors when using serious games for teaching and learning.

There are downsides to using serious games in the classroom. Often, students who are accustomed to playing many games for entertainment will focus more on game play and game elements rather than the outcomes that such game play provides.  However, educators can use player involvement as a way to continue to spur interest and intrinsic motivation for learners to engage and play.

Ultimately, serious games represent another tool for educators to use and adapt for the classroom. The results of which emphasize the development and more widespread use of gaming for teaching and learning.

Teaching with serious games

Often, one of the more salient aspects to teaching with serious games is that they break the traditional rigid teaching structure of didactic education.   This is where educators present information for students to consume and ultimately develop understanding.  We see this most frequently in a lecture based classroom.

Serious games approach teaching and learning outside of a didactic approach, and instead encourages learners and players to experiment and play. This results in a process where players develop the necessary skills in order to progress in the game and ultimately achieve the designer’s and educators’ outcomes.

Serious games achieve this by combining learning strategies, curricular structures, and formal game elements in order to teach specific skills for players to create their own knowledge. Here, serious games represent conceptual and mechanical relationships within a dynamic environment that can be changed and augmented by the player thorough their own agency. The results of which end when players achieve stated learning outcomes.

Serious games can and do incorporate a wide spectrum of abstraction versus fidelity. However, some of the most popular serious games rely heavily on content developed from realistic situations. This is due to the need for learners to more easily identify and apply outcomes to necessary applications.

Despite this, all great games and serious games encourage and influence the development of cognitive flow for learners. The creation of this flow state is a result of the observation and keen development of relational awareness between game elements and their outcomes. Those relationships can be highly representative of their real world counterparts. However, with serious games they never explicitly have to be.

Ultimately serious games are meant to elicit a change in learners’ perceptions, applications, and outcomes of their learning. Therefore, it’s important that serious games actively include and represent the learners themselves in an identifiable form (or avatar) so that the relationship between themselves and their expected outcomes and applications are more clearly defined.

Wargames and Kriegsspiel

One of the earliest and most widespread applications of serious games for teaching and learning was the Kriegspeil (or “wargame” in German). With a storied history, the Kriegsspiel was used to teach military leaders tactics and strategies by representing armies and military units in scaled miniature on a physical table top. Its military applications goes beyond what can be contained in this article; however its use of abstraction and simulation is what cemented its future use for teaching and learning.

It’s success was great enough that officer training often involved frequent use of the Kriegsspiel for teaching and learning military and combat doctrine in the 19th century. Despite this, the Kriegsspiel was not run the same way we think about other table top games and educational games that we know and use today. Rather, players’ actions were arbitrated by a referee, umpire, or judge who collected and collated player actions in order to resolve them within the game. This role is most similarly seen with the “dungeon master” of table top role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.

Fidelity was on the side of Kriegsspiel, as further iterations of the game took into account other actions and activities which could befall military leaders in actual live conflict. Those included surprise attacks, supporting lines, and point defense.

The Kriegsspiel has gone onto spur multiple successors for other table top war games such as Warhammer 40k, Star Wars Imperial Assault, and Star Trek Attack Wing to name a few. Likewise, the use of an impartial third party to moderate and referee games can be seen in many iterations of modern live role-playing games.

This war gaming simulation’s humble beginnings has indeed grown and evolved past its original intent for training military leaders for the conflicts they are yet to fight. However, the focus on simulation and fidelity is one that we see in other aspects of serious games such as business simulations.

Business simulations

Businesses often rely on simulations for teaching and learning because of its high fidelity to real world and application and problem solving. Simulations represent the closet possible thing to reality without the loss or risk of actually carrying out business actions.

Therefore, these business simulations exist within the realm of active and experiential learning like other forms of games-based learning. As such, participants in business simulations are both behaviorally and cognitively active as they play and experiment with the simulation in order to test and attempt to accomplish different outcomes.

Perhaps one of the most common business simulations is that of the Stock Market Game which many high school students participate in while learning about economics. The Stock Market Game makes it so that individual students can try their hand at investing in different publicly traded companies in order to determine if their predictions about future business success pan out.

As such, simulations such as these can be highly effective at engaging and motivating students due to their high touch and experiential approach. Here, students experience an active and closely tied feedback loop to their initial input and investments in order to see the ultimate effect on their portfolios.

Business simulations grow and evolve from the fidelity provided in the Kriegsspiel as a way for learners to experience different problems and scenarios in which they must apply decision making and problem solving methodology to overcome the challenge. The results of which encompass specified learning outcomes established by the instructor in order for students to achieve these goals.

Gamification, games-based learning, and applied games

While the Kriegsspiel represents one of earliest uses of simulation for teaching and training; and business simulations represent commercial applications of the same for business outcomes; the breadth and scope of games for learning is much wider than these two applications.

Games-based learning includes using established games for teaching and learning as well as the use; creation; and implementation of serious games for education and development. These applications don’t need to be narrowly applied such as with war games and business case studies. Rather, aspects of gamification and games-based learning can apply the use of these practices in other venues.

Such is the case with serious games that were created with outcomes other than entertainment in mind. There have been many cases of such games; but perhaps the most popular and successful of which include the following.

Darfur is Dying was first released in April 2006 and represented the journalistic spirit of exposing the truth behind the humanitarian crisis of the war in Darfur. The game provided a platform that reached over 800,000 players in five months and approaches social change through the medium of games.

Likewise the game World without Oil’s tagline: “Play it – before you live it” provided a simulation of how a future oil crisis might affect individuals by representing changes that may occur in their area. This was an alternate reality game (ARG) that lasted for 32 days between April and June 2007. It provided the very real social impact of helping individual players anticipate problems of a world without oil.

Lastly, the game Superbetter was the brainchild of Jane McGonigal. After suffering a concussion in 2009, she experienced the negative consequences of depression and suicidal thoughts. While recovering, McGonigal created the game “Jane the Concussion Slayer” which she designed to help treat her condition (as well as help keep her occupied). Building off of the success of this game she renamed it Superbetter and applied it to help other people achieve their own goals and overcome obstacles.

Active debriefing

Educators are free to choose how they use games, gamification, serious games, learning games, or games-based learning. However, the application of any of these approaches requires learning through experience or experiential learning. As such, educators should implement a practice of active debriefing no matter which method they choose to pursue. The results of active debriefing enables participants and players to connect activities and lessons they learned through game play with opportunities in the outside world.

Active debriefing is important because it requires individuals to focus on their own beliefs, assumptions, and values that arose from their experiences playing the game. It also requires individuals to manage how they may defensively react when re-examining and re-evaluating their own belief and value systems in order to make sense of these new experiences.

Ultimately the goal of instructor lead active debriefing is meant to ensure that learning is happening at an individual level. Specifically that experience is transformed into knowledge that can be shared and built upon. Therefore, active debriefing is best implemented at the end of an activity or experiences such as game play or games-based learning activities.

While more adult learners might be empowered to lead active debriefing sessions on their own; instructors may choose to rely on the following questions to help structure and guide their own active debriefing activities. Those sample questions include:

-What happened?

-Does what happened matter?

-How did you feel?

-Does this remind you of anything else you’ve experienced? If so, what and why?

-What have you learned?

-What will you do with what you’ve learned?

Takeaways

This article covered how to use serious games for teaching, learning, education, and development. It began with an overview of what serious games are as well as a short history of how they have been used in the past for teaching and learning.

The merits of using serious games for teaching were provided as well as the kind of impact that they can have on learners and instructors alike. Specific steps for teaching with serious games were discussed as well as some detailed historical examples. Those included war games and the Kriegsspiel, business simulations, and various applications of games-based learning and applied games.

This article closed on the process of active debriefing and how instructors should use it when paired with serious games for teaching and learning. Games-based learning is an experiential form of learning. Therefore, the active debriefing cycle is paramount in helping students make sense of their experience a well as connect specific game outcomes with targeted learning outcomes.

This article was about playing serious games.  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 Learning by Playing Serious Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

This quote from Salman Rushdie sums up really well why stories are so engaging to us, but more than that, there is a deeper idea that we tell story not just because they are fun, or because we like them, but because we need stories to explore who and what we are – in other words stories are tools for learning

Even bad stories grip us. How many times have you sat through a terrible film, just because you needed to know what happened in the end (I’m hoping the answer to that is ‘at least once’, otherwise I’m going to have to face the possibility that it’s only me who does this – and that I’m maybe the only person on the planet who knows what happens at the end of Thor: The Dark World.)

In this article I want to explore the Fantastic and Fabulous in Learning and Facilitation and by the end of this I’m hoping you will have the answer to the most important question of all

“And then what happened”

As well as being ‘the storytelling animal’ it’s also often claimed that humans are ‘Wired for God’ – that we are genetically and neurologically predisposed to spirituality

The jury is still out on this one, but it is certainly notable that the magical, religious and supernatural do seem to have a special place in the history of humanity’s attempts to understand, and explain the world, and explore our collective dreams and anxieties – from creation myths, to natural philosophy and alchemy, to the preponderance of UFO invasion movies in McCarthy era America, or radioactive monster movies in post-Hiroshima Japan.

While I was preparing for a recent session on this very topic, I was struggling a bit to find the right words to explain the power for learning that I have found in fairytales, sci-fi, fantasy and tales of the supernatural. And then I bought a book, in my local charity shop – a collection of short stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. When I got it home, I read Gaiman’s introduction to the book

“It seemed to us that the fantastic can be, can do, so much more than its detractors assume: it can illuminate the real, it can distort it, it can mask it, it can hide it. It can show you the world you know in a way that makes you realise that you’ve never looked at it, not looked at it. G. K. Chesterton compared fantastic fiction to going on holiday – that the importance of your holiday is the moment you return, and you see the place you live through fresh eyes.”

Finding this was perfect, not just because it gave me the words I wanted, but because the way this incident made me feel, makes, very well, the ‘wired for god’ argument.

I’ve read up on the neuroscience of coincidence. I know which cognitive biases are in play – but it still feels like magic when just the right thing turns up at just the right time.

Stories: All New Tales is available on Amazon

To our initial storytelling question, the fantastic and fabulous add a second – “What If..?”

Most of you are reading this article, in this magazine, I imagine, because you believe that games and play have something special to offer in the arena of human learning.

There are obvious links between games and narrative – pretty much every game, except the most abstract will have narrative elements.

I am here to argue that among the already ‘special’ characteristics of games and play, story stands as something even more special, and that furthermore, that the fantastic and fabulous deserves special attention even within that already noteworthy realm of story.

Both stories and games are engines for experience. They both require the participation of a human or humans in order to come into being. Although someone reading a book or listening to the telling of a tale, may outwardly look like a passive consumer – that is far from the truth – they are exercising their imagination, bringing previous experience to bear, and constructing cognitive artefacts for sensemaking – sounds a bit like learning, right?.

If you are involved in games-based learning, and particularly in the design of games and play  experiences, you are probably well used to analysing and implementing play in a mechanical way. That is, mapping the mechanics of games to experiences that will effect learning. I think we can view and use narrative (without or without a game structure), in the same way.

So what do I mean by Storytelling ‘mechanics’?

First of all there are Narrative structures – you may have heard, for example of  The Heros Journey, or the Touchstone.

Narrative structures drive us down well-worn paths – in learning terms we can use them to guide learners in the directions we want them to go – they create expectations – the ‘threeness’ of fairytales, the beginning middle and end, the alternation of high points and low points in a narrative. Even people who have never heard the term ‘narrative structure’ will be consciously or subconsciously aware of ‘where the story is going’ because they have have been repeatedly exposed to this structures, in books, in fims, in TV.

Then there are various building blocks of story experience which as learning designers, we can use to draw (or obscure) attention, create flow, encourage participation or decision making, elicit emotion and so on. Here are a few:

The McGuffin (the object that explains why the characters do what they do, even though it has no intrinsic plot value), the foreshadowing of Chekhov’s Gun, the happy or sad ending, the twist in the tale, the ghost in the machine, exposition or lack of it – there are 1000s of these mechanics we can employ.

And together they build experiences – obviously there are similarly 1000s of these, but with reference to the fantastic and fabulous – the following are very notable.

• Allegory (including satire)– stories which have more than one level of meaning, most often religious or political. A famous example of this is Animal Farm, which is very different experience when one reads it as a child
• Metaphor (and analogy) – Exploring one idea as if it were (or were like) something else – the Dementors in the Harry Potter books are famously a metaphorical exploration of J K Rowling’s own struggles with depression.
• Archetypes – simplified representations of concepts, often in the form of characters. Fairytales, again, are stuffed with these – the wicked stepmother, the wise woman, the benevolent (or cruel) master, the innocent, the wolf.

From a learning perspective,in the areas that I work, (systemic wicked problems, sustainability and regeneration, diversity and inequality), there are three characteristics of the fantastic and fabulous which I find consistently useful:

Using magic – inviting learners to act as if magic really exists, frees the imagination, gives permission to be really ‘out there’ and reduces the negative impact of reality or ‘what we do now’ on ideation

Asking learners to explore difficult question, particularly when it might ask them to discover truths about themselves they might not want to face – can be largely defused if the conversations can take place outside of reality. For example, a conversation about racism, privilege and unconscious bias is much safer if it takes place in the context of society’s issue with ghosts who have not passed over, rather than a real scenario.

The TARDIS works really well as a representation of the point of this article. Not only is a well-known symbol of the one of the genres I’m recommending for you to play with, but it has one very important characteristic.

Like stories themselves it is bigger on the inside. And I remember on at least one occasion, the Doctor admitting, that he (he was a he at the time), had never been able to fully explore it.

Stories invite their participants to expand their boundaries to their own needs; to colour in the details with their own experiences. But as learning designers we have an even more expansive tool at our disposal – one that provides learners with an effectively infinite playground.

It is often said that you can gauge how well a writer (or filmmaker) has conjured the world in which their stories exist, by looking at the quality of (at least the best of) the fan fiction. Middle Earth, for example, or the United Federation of Planets is so rich with the potential of stories not yet told, that people feel compelled to add their own.

Through Worldbuilding we can invite our learners to tell stories of their own, and like the TARDIS, we will find that we now have something which is far too large to ever be completely explored.

The mechanism I use most often is fantastic and fabulous bottom-up world building; providing small details of a larger world which invite speculation about the larger culture, history, and systems and so on – as relevant to whatever learning is desired. The alternative would be top-down world building – which is a somewhat more time-consuming approach. It’s what happens, for example, when writers on long-running TV series work with a Bible, to ensure they don’t err from the established truths of the fictional world.

If you want to know about Worldbuilding – and particularly top-down WB, there’s no better place to start than Chapter 13 in Volume 2 of Design Unbound by Anne Pendleton-Jones and John Seeley Brown. The story of the Worldbuilding that preceded the making of the film Minority Report is just astounding.

Design Unbound is available on Amazon

We now have a third question to ask our learners. I usually find that my games and gameful activities ask these questions in the reverse order that I have introduced them here.

Introducing learners to the world you have built for them to play in first asks “If this is true, then what else does that tell us?”
Framing the learning in the context of that world then asks “What if…”
And finally, the invitation to exercise their own imagination and creativity “And then what happened?”

I have developed two decks of cards recently which use many of the principles detailed above

These two decks are very much an invitation to tell stories rather than being narratives in themselves. The first – The Museum of Impossible Objects represents some of the exhibits in a mysterious museum. Each card has an image, a label explaining the object, and on the other side of the card, some questions about the object – although your own questions (and answers) are also encouraged. The museum exists in a world where magic exists, where humans are not the only sentient species, where ghosts are an everyday reality and human technology and Fae magic sit side by side, sometimes within single products.

The second is a deck which was allegedly discovered in an architectural dig near Area 51. As nothing is known about the either the images or the text the cards contain, there are several theories as to what the cards might represent and they thus seem to be very versatile in use. Often teams get together to test popular theories about how the cards might work

You are invited to explore these decks (very briefly) now. Please feel free to pause the video at whatever point suits you to try out these two sample activities of how the cards can be used in learning settings.

Activity One (uses 4 cards out of the 52 in the Museum of Impossible Objects deck)

You are the curator of exhibitions. These four exhibits represent your potential choices for a central exhibit for the room you are curating. Pick one. What are the other exhibits which would complement it (either pick from here or from your imagination). What is the story your curated exhibition tells?

Activity Two (uses 4 cards out of the 54 in the Mystery deck)

One popular current theory about these cards is that they represent some kind of tool for using intuition and systems thinking for innovation. A ‘Tarot for Design’ if you like.

As a team you have been tasked with exploring this theory. There are 54 of them – here are a few for you to start with.

Think about the characteristics of the cards (colours, sides, markings, dots etc.) and the possible ways that they could be used (position, orientation, number, connections, number, stacking, turning, instructions, inclusion or exclusion etc.)

Maybe other resources are needed to use them – dice, counters, a board

What ideas do you about how the cards might work in this context?

The post Learning with the Fantastic and Fabulous first appeared on Ludogogy.

Such learning is necessarily very loaded with content. If a master is to be able to pass down all they know and are able to do, and to ensure that pupils become upstanding citizens with no undesirable ideas or behaviours, then there need to be artefacts for them to teach from. This would certainly have been imparted verbally (lectures), or in writing, if the pupil could read; from examples of work, which should be copied to learn skills; and through commandments, and rewards and punishments.

What is content free learning?

Increasingly however, there has been a shift towards learning models and pedagogies which shift the focus away from the ‘Sage on the Stage’ and onto the role of the learner. Terms such as ‘learner-centred’ and ‘facilitative learning’, have come to the fore, and techniques such as problem-based learning, social learning and, of course, games-based learning are now widely used.

If we imagine that all learning experiences are on a continuum. At one end are highly passive experiences, where the educator is responsible for ‘filling up’ the empty vessel that is the learner. The learning has little or no agency, and there is little requirement for them to exercise creativity in what or how they learn. They need to simply apply themselves to absorbing and emulating the learning content that are presented with.

Most learning experiences today, fall somewhere in the middle, with a mix of instruction from a ‘Sage’ and a variety of activities where the learner is encouraged to exercise some creativity and autonomy, and to take a greater degree of responsibility towards their own learning. This is a more facilitative model, where the educator is there to guide but not ‘teach’, answer questions if they arise, and point them towards resources from which they can construct their own learning.

In the example above, while the learner is ‘set free’ to discover and construct learning, it is still likely that there will be content, related to the domain of learning, and potentially even more of that than if they had attended a lecture from a ‘sage’ – case studies, Internet scavenger hunts, simulation games, videos to watch etc. – all of which have originated, maybe not with the sage who is in the room with them, but with some sage somewhere.

At the other extreme of the continuum, there is what I like to think of as ‘content-free’ learning. The learner will be given access to resources or process, but these may be generic, and have no relationship to the knowledge, skill or attitude that the learner is accessing. In this case, the learning is entirely constructed from the interaction of the individual or group with the activities and reflection which these resources facilitate.

Content-free learning – pros and cons…

There is no assumption that any point on the continuum is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other point, simply that educators and learners are able to access the appropriate level of learner creativity and autonomy for whatever learning needs to take place. It would be inappropriate, for example, for learners to ‘discover’ for themselves the proper safety procedures and checklists for parachute jumping, just as would be inappropriate for a facilitator to ‘instruct’ a learner about the learner’s own lived experience, in a session exploring mental health issues.

‘Content-free’ learning is therefore most suited to situations where the learners are the ‘experts’.  Coaching is a good example of this. A coach does not tell a coachee what to do or think, but simply facilitates the drawing out of knowledge, wisdom (new insights constructed from existing knowledge) and ideas for action, from the coachee.

Another excellent use-case for content-free learning is facilitative group work, where it is assumed that the group contains wisdom (and collective skills) that is greater than the sum of the individual wisdom contained within it.

In both these cases, there is no need for an educator to bring any ‘content’ to the situation. So, what do they bring? What does content-free learning look like?

At the heart it is about process, so a skilled facilitator may be needed to set that process in motion and to ensure that it stays on track. Some content-free learning is nothing but process, while in other cases there may, in fact be content. This might seem contradictory, but usually this content will be unrelated to the intended learning. It is intended as stimulus, which will be used a lens through which the learner can approach the question in hand.

…And some examples

A well-known and archetypal example of content-free learning, that is all about process is Lego® Serious Play®.  The bricks on the table have no meaning attached to them at all until the process of putting them together in response to a stimulus begins. The stimulus is a question, and all the meaning, the ‘content’, is entirely derived from the minds of the individual model builders, and later from the interactions of the rest of the group with their own and each other’s models. Layers of process, each building on the one before can be applied, if appropriate, to facilitate everything from simple individual insights, to the extrapolation of strategic guiding principles for large complex organisations.

The greater the reliance on pure process, the greater the need for skilled facilitation. Content-free tools which are richer in stimuli can often be used with or without a facilitator. Because these tools do not need to transfer large quantities of knowledge or demonstrate skills, they are often very compact and portable. Cards are a popular choice of format, and pretty much any ‘facilitation deck’ you can think of will fall into this category, with images and questions often being the go-to stimuli.

Two of my own decks demonstrate different approaches, and show that slight differences in process or stimulus can make for very different applications.

The Gift Horse is available either as a PDF or a card deck on Deckible. It was inspired by Brave Sparrow, The Kiss of Walt Whitman, Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’, and Street Wisdom (mentioned below). It is quite introspective in nature, and is designed to bring about (either guided by a facilitator or individually) reflection on an individual’s questions. The player navigates the question(s) with the help of an animal, which has attached itself to them. It can be used a part of a finite game session or as a daily practice. For example, an individual faced with a dilemma might as themselves ‘What would my octopus do?’ or ‘What special abilities does my animal have to help me through this?’. This approach is designed to encourage divergent thinking by viewing questions through a different lens than one’s own everyday experience.

The Museum of Impossible Objects, on the other hand, is more outward looking. It consists of a set of cards, each of which shows an image and exhibit label for an item which is held in a strange museum. Many of the objects are supernatural, or in some way extraordinary. On the backs of the cards are open-ended questions about the exhibits, supposedly placed in the museum visitors’ minds by the museum itself, which has a strong psychic field.

The Museum of Impossible Objects is available on Deckible

The Museum cards can be used simple writing prompts, (probably in the weird fiction genre) but can also be used to start discussion around fundamental questions of ethics, politics and so on, and could be used in Philosophy, Critical Thinking and Personal and Social Development classrooms, among others. Speculative fiction, such as fantasy or sci-fi has always done an excellent job of allowing us to ask ourselves these difficult questions, with that one step of ‘remove’ which makes the discourse ‘safer’. For example, the Ghost Jar exhibit is a device which is used to trap ghosts carrying out ‘malicious hauntings’. It is displayed, complete with an occupant, in the museum. The questions on the reverse of the card ask visitors to think about who it is that decides that a haunting is ‘malicious’, and what rights, if any, should be accorded to the ‘sentient dead’.

Although the cards point learners towards certain topics, they don’t contain any ‘content’ on those topics, as such. While the questions and stimulus might lead to very deep discussions on crime and punishment; who makes the rules; the treatment of ‘the other’, including refugees, people with disabilities, or even other species; and the ethics of displaying the remains of living beings; the cards don’t provide the content on these questions. All of that must be sourced elsewhere.

Street Wisdom, is another highly process-driven form of learning, where the stimulus is a personal question of concern, and the surroundings experienced on a mindful walk. First the walker goes through a series of simple exercises to tune into their surroundings. Then holding the question in mind, they walk with heightened awareness of what they can see, hear, smell and touch around them, until some particular element presents itself as a complete or partial answer.

This has quite a lot in common with the Gift Horse, or indeed other tools of intuition such as the Tarot. While a road-sign (Street Wisdom), the fact that an octopus has three hearts (Gift Horse), or the High Priestess card (Tarot), do have inherent attached meanings, it is not those meanings, but the individual interpretations of them, fuelled by intuition, or previous experience or feelings of coincidence, which bring the learning.

Can learning be truly ‘content-free’

I have recently been experimenting with the idea of removing as much meaning as possible from the tools (in this case, again, cards) I am making for content-free learning. The idea behind this is to create tools that give the greatest autonomy and potential for creativity to the learner, when constructing their own meaning, and from that, their own learning.

Clean Language is a facilitation technique designed to remove the facilitators ‘content’ input when posing questions. It does this by using a fixed structure of questions in which the only ‘content’ is the respondent’s words mirrored back to them. In this technique, metaphor is seen as important in creating meaning, so the clean language technique seeks to strip out any of the facilitator’s meanings and suggested metaphors, to enable the respondent to discover their own without contamination. To contrast the use of non-clean questioning, with clean questioning, a non-clean follow up question to a respondent’s statement of ‘I feel odd’, might be ‘Do you think you have Covid?’ or more metaphorically ‘Are you under the weather?’. A clean question might be ‘And where do you feel odd?’, or ‘And what kind of odd?’

Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds is available on Amazon

Deliberately Meaningless

The primary purpose of most presented images and text is to convey meaning, so trying to use those to create stimulus, while conveying the bare minimum of meaning, calls for some level of obfuscation and manipulation. Asemic text uses different character sets, and may change the text orientation, from that usually used by the person writing the text. Asemic text is different from a code, however, as it deliberately has no meaning, and cannot be decoded or translated into something which has meaning.

Some artificial languages are ‘codes’, in that they have meanings and can therefore be translated. Klingon, for example, can be learned on Duolingo, and poems written in Tolkein’s Quenya can also be read and enjoyed in other languages.  Other constructed languages, are, or may be, completely asemic, like the writing in the Codex Seraphinianus or the Voynich Manuscript. In the case of the latter, we simply don’t know if it is translatable or not, and it is this ambiguity which makes asemic text so good for content-free learning.

The Codex Seraphinianus is available on Amazon

The Voynich Manuscript is available on Amazon

The deck I currently have in development uses asemic text, and deliberately ‘strange’ images, to encourage learners to construct their own meanings when they interact with them. I also want to make the nature and purpose of the deck as a whole as ambiguous as possible. Is it a game, a method of divination, a set of index cards containing a knowledge base, a holy text – or something else entirely.

It is this aspect of design that has been most challenging, because we recognise and associate specific formats and layouts with specific purposes. A card taken from a game looks like a card taken from a game, but I am hopeful that I can achieve an acceptable level of ambiguity.

But why would something without meaning be useful in learning?

It is precisely because human always seek meaning, even and perhaps especially, when there is none, that such ‘asemic’ tools are useful. We are pattern detecting creatures, and particularly when those patterns are important to us. This is seen most markedly in the phenomenon of ‘face pareidolia’ – seeing faces, which are not really there, in everyday objects.

The human need to find meaning in the seemingly meaningless has given us religious beliefs, creation myths and the scientific method, among many other staggering instances of creative imagination.

When faced with something which is without meaning, a creative impulse is sparked, and that is the intention of these cards. With no more information or instruction than ‘What are these? How do they work? You have x hours. Go!’, you free a team of people to ideate and create, to find meaning, and innovate in ways that are important and relevant to their needs and goals, without the burden of externally imposed ‘content’.

The post Unlocking Creativity through Learning without ‘Content’ first appeared on Ludogogy.