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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several key decisions guided my design process for the LMGDJ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Appendix:

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

Design Challenges

The Race Game is in the Bag

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

The IP Challenge

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

The Player Experience Challenge

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

Happy Valentine’s Day

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

Push It!

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

Pick a Direction

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

Think Outside the Box

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

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Gamification is an innovative methodology to get people to participate and be motivated and help them achieve goals by applying game design elements and methods into a non-game environment. The library can provide an interesting experience to users by utilizing gamification, and gamification can make the library more fun and engaging.

Utilizing gamification in the library

• Educating library users: Gamification makes users feel entertained and engaged, and they learn about utilizing library resources. The library at North Carolina State University provided a gamified Scavenger Hunt, so students could learn how to use the library by interacting with librarians. Users can understand and utilize the library better through fun games.
• Participating in library resource management: To allow better access to large-scale library resources, users can actively participate in the work through gamification. In the National Library of Finland, the Digitalkoot service provided an interesting game to users. It asked players to edit the text errors input by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Digitalization work that was previously done manually, by crowdsourced volunteers, could be done by more general users. This could contribute to helping more people access the library resources.
• Experiencing personalized information service: Gamification can be utilized to effectively support solutions to individual information problems. For reading activities, especially, gamification elements such as challenges, rewards, and competition, can lead to consistent reading habits and make accessing necessary information more effective. Through gamified reading support service, users can personalize their reading history and interests. They will get information about future reading opportunities. In addition, they can the right level of challenges to enhance the power and motivation to continue to read. For example, Lemontree is a social game-based learning system at the University of Huddersfield, U.K., is a gamification case to effectively increase the learning performance of students by using library data. (Walsh 2014).
• Services to enhance social relationships: Interesting gamified library programs can attract more people to the library. Also, it can effectively provide the experience of making social relationships based on library resources. New York Public Library developed the augmented reality game ‘Find the Future at NYPL’ as part of the celebration of its Centenary. It’s about solving quests related to one hundred historical artifacts hidden in a library building. In the process of solving quests, 500 participants could write down personal stories based on their inspiration from the library collections. Through that process, a co-created book which included future stories was made.

Gamification to increase the public interest in library

Gamification enhances the role of the library as a social place in which everybody can participate and meet. Through gamified programs, users can access library resources more effectively. Gamification can stimulate lively interactions between librarians and users, leading to strengthened social relationships. According to Koivisto & Malik(2021) whose article includes a meta-study of gamified research papers for the aged population, gamification was proven to effectively utilize in-person communication and increase relationship numbers in elderly people. According to this research (Koivisto & Hamari 2019), recognizing the self-efficacy of old people and positively increasing social emotions such as motivation and loneliness are possible through the program of enhancing social relationships by gamification.

How to apply the gamification to the library

The most important thing that gamification must focus on, is effectively increasing access to library resources. Rather than providing unconditional fun and flow, the library should emphasize the original vision and the purpose of the program. The library can be an amazing information environment for users by coordinating its resources and services with adequate gamification. To effectively apply gamification to the library, the following should be considered.

1. Clearly defining the objective and results of the gamified program in accordance with the mission and vision of the library
2. Applying the interesting gamified elements and forms by recognizing the participants’ demands, interests, and preferences
3. Increasing the participants’ motivation by providing feedback, recognition, and rewards in program operation.
4. Ensuring the system evaluates and measures the effects of gamification for library employees and participants
5. Periodically monitoring and improving the operation of gamified programs based on evaluation

The world is changing, and the demand of users is changing along with it. In this changing landscape, gamification can play an important role in revolutionizing and reinventing the library for a new sustainable way of working. I expect that innovation in gamification methods will continue to bring new power to efforts to attract library users, into the future.

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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.

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.

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.

In early 2022, I was asked by various municipalities in Korea to advise on metaverse development. They wanted to make an impression by being at the forefront of the 4^th industrial revolution. Their main question to the advisory board was ‘What is most important to consider in building the metaverse?” My answer was very simple. It’s the establishment of the basic concept that, ‘The Metaverse is the Game’.

However, they wanted to promote ‘usefulness’ by utilizing the metaverse for educational content. They wanted citizens attending classes in virtual classrooms, as avatars, to get the benefits of social education, recruitment and hobby learning. But most educational facilities already provided online lectures during COVID-19 period. Providing educational services through the metaverse maybe shows a lack of understanding of how the metaverse works.

Also, they already provided various services on their webpages, but they expected a metaverse presence to behave like a virtual reception for citizens to visit and interact with, via their metaverse personas.

The elected mayor wanted to give the impression that he had a deep interest in high-tech and AI, and to reflect that in the administration of the municipality – all with an eye on the next election. In the year 2022, ‘high tech’ related to the 4^th industrial revolution, was all about blockchain-based NFT and the metaverse. As I think about the last year, business proposals just didn’t progress unless they mentioned NFT or the metaverse – in both the public or private sectors.

Gamification is essential to build the metaverse successfully 

The Metaverse should be pitched as providing an online gamified playground for users. I want to take an example of a city simulation game and relate it to the municipality use case. City simulation games are already available and well-known like the ‘SimCity’ series developed by Electronic Arts. In this game, players create and develop the city, through a high-level simulation. If the city doesn’t operate well, the (virtual) citizens raise complaints, and even riot, leading to the mayor being kicked out. If an administrator in the role of mayor doesn’t deal well, it’s game-over.

SimCity is a game, but its tasks needs to be managed well, including city administration, welfare, safety, job creation, and environmental issues. If that is done, the city will be eco-friendly and all will be well. The purpose of this game is to make a livable city, increase the population, and manage the balance between development and welfare based on budget, finally working your way up to a large metropolis. The game is deployed in virtual space, but it looks real.

If the municipality develops its own twin in the metaverse, people can participate in city simulation games, which they will find out about through public announcements. The well-developed virtual city has real citizens residing in it as avatars. In the virtual city, avatars can rent a shopping space like in the real world to make commercial transactions. In the cinema or theatre, people can enjoy content through videos. I think that this is the ideal way to use the metaverse. Municipalities can apply the best of the virtual city to the administration of the real city. It’s a positive synergy because citizens can directly participate in city administration.

Our advanced technologies were already experienced at Cyworld, one of the oldest social platforms, about 20 years ago. It’s just a difference of expression. Now the trial period is over, and it’s subject to a fee. In the past, almost all online contents were free. Now, we are gradually paying fees for everything. Billing in chat GPT is the beginning of online billing. And to drive the interest that will encourage users to pay, good gamification is going to be essential.  

The post The Metaverse is the Game first appeared on Ludogogy.

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

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

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

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

Purpose of the rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

Balance in the rulebook

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

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

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

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

Writing and revising the rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

Rulebook Structure Overview

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

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

Structure – Statistical Information

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

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

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

Structure – Components

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

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

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

Structure – Theme

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

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

Azul is available on Amazon

Structure – Brief Overview

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

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

No Thanks is available on Amazon

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

Pandemic is available on Amazon

Structure – Setup

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

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

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

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

Structure – Core Loop

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

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

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

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

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

Structure – Game End

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

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

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

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

Kingdomino is available on Amazon

Organizing your rulebook’s contents

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

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

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

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

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

In the Year of the Dragon is available on Amazon

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

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

Root is available on Amazon

Player experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voice when writing the rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

Testing your rulebook

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

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

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

Edge cases in the rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games-based learning and rulebooks

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

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

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

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

Action steps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Games are capable of helping students learn any number of different skills. Likewise, simulations can be used to help students from one discipline learning something more intuitively than they would from traditional classroom instruction.

One of the most general outcomes for games-based learning is the development of student’s soft skills. These are skills that can be used across a number of different areas, industries, and outlets.

So what soft skills can games be used for? How are games used for soft skills development?

This article will cover the different areas that games-based learning can be used for addressing soft skills development. This article will cover cognitive internal development; relational development; as well as how games can be used to develop students’ communication and creativity. This article will close with actionable items for using games-based learning to achieve these skill competencies.

Cognitive internal development

Digital games often don’t provide any wait time for players. Individuals take single actions and then are immediately awarded. This helps with the feedback loop of players in traditional game design. However, table top games offer a different perspective for players. They often require players take actions now that won’t produce any measurable effects until much further along in the game. In this way, table top games reward students’ patience for continued and engaging play.

Likewise, table top games also test students’ applications of logic and strategy. I recently spent this holiday playing a large and diverse array of table top games with family my same age as well as much younger cousins. Despite the age difference, I saw many applications of logic and strategy in games as simple as Doce and as complex as The Manhattan Project. Each one was challenging in their own right; but the amount of effort needed to excel at both was considerable.

The Manhattan Project is available on Amazon

Lastly, games also facilitate students’ critical thinking and problem solving by posing the most basic question in most scenarios: what moves can I make to help me win the game? These can be as simple as just continuing to survive in endless running games like Temple Run or in heavier games like FTL: Faster than Light. In both scenarios, players must problem solve on the fly and think critically about how decisions they take now will affect their player later on throughout the game.

Relational development

Games do not exclusively help students develop their own internal cognitive development. They can also facilitate their relational development: specifically how their actions affect the state of the game as well as their relationships with other players.

One of the most common types of relational development is through spatial reasoning:

the capacity to think about objects occupying a space and then draw conclusions about how those objects fit in relation to one another.  One of my all-time favorite games Blokus is the king of this genre as players are challenged to get all of their pieces on the board to score the most points. Though other games like Patchwork and Convert also test players’ spatial reasoning capacity.

Blokus is available on Amazon, as is Patchwork

In addition, games can test and reinforce players’ collaborative skills as they work with and for other players in order to achieve their goals.  One of the best table top examples of this is the Matt Leacock line of collaborative games like Pandemic, Forbidden Island, Forbidden Desert, and Forbidden Sky. Each one tests players’ abilities to collaborate and cooperate with one another in order to achieve a common goal. More serious players might consider games such as Mage Knight, Gloomhaven, and Spirit Island as options that further push the limits of what is possible from table top cooperating gaming.

Pandemic, Forbidden Island, and Forbidden Desert are all available on Amazon, as are Mage Knight, Gloomhaven and Spirit Island.

Lastly, games test players’ abilities to manage limited resources to achieve their game goals. This is most prominent in modern euro games where any number of player actions are disguised as different things that players can do that turn one thing into another thing which turns into victory points. While that description alone doesn’t sound that enticing, there are entire communities of players who are enthralled by it. Modern classics such as Agricola and Settlers of Catan rely heavily on resource management as a way for players to excel and win the game.

Agricola is available on Amazon, and so is Settlers of Catan.

Communication and creativity

Perhaps one of the most salient aspects of games-based learning supporting soft skills growth is in players’ development of communication and creativity. Both of which come through more highly social and creative games.

Returning to one of my old standby games Balderdash reminded me of the kind of creativity needed to not only think of definitions to obscure words; but to write them in a such a way where other players would vote for them. Likewise, new entrants to the field like Just One require that players take the simple action of selecting just one clue to reveal to a teammate. But the commonality and creativity of that clue is what helps set players apart from one another.

Balderdash is available on Amazon and so is Just One.

Creativity alone doesn’t have to be about creating made up definitions. Working in uncertain conditions where negotiation and interaction are prioritized definitely fall within the domain of games. A favorite large group game of mine Empires relies on the negotiation aspect in order to move play along. The Sheriff of Nottingham emphasizes this even more where interaction and negotiation form the hallmark of the game’s core loop.

Empires is available on Amazon and so is Sheriff of Nottingham.

Communication and creativity seem to be one of the most promoted ways of utilizing games-based learning as games are seen as a way to replace traditional media like lectures, audio, and video. This is particularly relevant when using something like roleplaying and simulations. Both of these represent real life scenarios where students will need to put their learned skills into practice.

While many games can be re-purposed for games-based learning; almost all table top games can be used in one fashion or another to promote communication skills between players. Effective communication is perhaps one of the most important soft skills to develop. And if you ever need a forum to practice it: try explaining 4-5 different board games a week to different players on a regular basis.

Actionable items

Games can be used to meet a great many learning outcomes for educators. The most salient of which is to address communication barriers between students and players. Playing games provides a structure from which educators can scaffold the interactions between players.  Games’ involved formal elements and structures already form the method where individual players can interact with one another.

In addition, educators can praise students’ agency, efficacy, and perseverance in a games-based learning environment. Of course players will want to win; but in most circumstances winning will not be the most important outcome. Therefore, equal focus on making sure that players continue to play and engage is just as important.

Takeaways

This article covered the different areas that games-based learning can be used to address soft skills development. The article covered cognitive internal development; relational development; as well as how games can be used to for students to develop better communication and creativity. This article was about using games for soft-skill development. To learn more about soft-skill development in gamification, check out the free course on Gamification Explained.

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