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

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

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

“And then what happened”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories: All New Tales is available on Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what do I mean by Storytelling ‘mechanics’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design Unbound is available on Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Museum of Impossible Objects is a ‘game’ consisting of a set of cards, each with an image, a label, as if the image were a museum exhibit, and a set of questions, to prompt further reflection.

The Museum of Impossible Objects is available on Deckible

As a game, The Museum lacks several components that one might expect. It has no rulebook, and is definitely very light on mechanics. The whole thing is very self-referential, in that clues are scattered among the cards themselves about the premise of the ‘game’, which in turn might give players ideas about how to play.

I have decided to write this article, partially because I hope people will find it useful, and that it may inspire the design of similar games, but also because my design process was a form of ‘play’ itself, which may give learning facilitators, who come to use the cards, ideas as to how they might use them.

Creating the Museum was itself a form of play

The process of creating the cards had a lot in common with the way I expect people will use them to play – responding to the images with stories and ideas of their own. The images definitely came first, and my response to the images suggested the text, and indeed the idea of the Museum itself.

The Museum would probably not have come into being at all if it had not been for a LinkedIn post (I forget whose, sorry) containing an image generated using Midjourney AI. I immediately began playing with Midjourney, and as a body of decidedly weird work started to emerge, so did ideas about how those might work as a ‘game’ utilising cards.

While many of the images were pretty strange, they did actually remind me of objects I had seen in real life, in the drawers and glass cases of the decidedly magical Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I began to look back at the images created and devise labels for them. And as each new image emerged it suggested new ideas.

I had created about half of the cards in the deck, when I started to get a bit more ‘intentional’. I thought I had grokked how Midjourney was ‘thinking’ and started to reverse my process – thinking of the label idea first, and then trying to create the image to go with it.

Deliberate intent was not as effective as play

In practice, this proved to be much less satisfactory, than when I had simply been ‘playing’. The ideas seemed more forced, and indeed it became frustrating to try to get Midjourney to create a suitable image to accompany the text I had already written. This was the result of a combination of my own lack of experience and skills in using Midjourney and the capabilities of the tool at the time.

But I am glad that this happened. I feel that if I had started my (Mid)journey now, with the realism of the V4 algorithm, I would not have achieved many of the stranger images, or the flights of creative imagination which they prompted.

I soon reverted to the original method of creating images first. This was of course, not totally without direction. I was feeding Midjourney with the more weird and wonderful aspects of my interests – H.P. Lovecraft, Fae lore, ghost stories, magic, sacred geometry, Victorian and gothic art and literature and so on, but I was not trying to be specific about the images. I made a conscious decision to be ‘happy’ with the images that resulted and to adapt the labels to fit them – finding creative ways to explain the distortions and oddities of the pictures.

Making a virtue of the flaws

An example of this was the image of the ‘Spacebender Moth’. The prompt was simply ’a moth with arcane markings on its wings’. The resultant image displayed, as much output from MJ did at that time, considerable distortion. The best option seemed to be to make the distortion the point of the image, and the idea of a moth whose defining characteristic was an ability to bend reality, arrived.

The same principle was applied to the painting by ‘Hans Holbein’, which was an especially satisfying idea as it was so appropriate thematically. A well-known tenet of fae lore is that fae folk confuse mortals’ gaze and thoughts through ‘glamour’, and that fitted really well with the idea that an artist could both paint a picture that was so confused, and also that he would not remember doing so.

Coming across Midjourney seemed serendipitous, but there was also another piece of technology that was occupying my time and thoughts at the same time. I had just uploaded a card-based version of The Gift Horse to Deckible, an app which is to card decks what Audible is to audiobooks, so when I decided to create the Museum cards, I naturally decided to create the cards for the Deckible format.

Three-sided cards

This meant one important thing. Because Deckible is an app, card decks on it do not have the same physical constraints that cards have in real life.  The Museum cards are three-sided, having a back and two ‘fronts’.

It was this second front that allowed me to create something that moved beyond being a set of writing prompts – which was my first intention for the deck, to something with more learning potential.

I have always been interested in the way that speculative fiction – science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and even horror, allows us a way to more deeply reflect on what it is to be human.

It both opens up consideration what might be possible, and holds up a mirror to our behaviours, beliefs, values and foibles. As it does this, it seems to be capable of simultaneously making us uncomfortable, by asking the questions, but also more comfortable about answering them, because there is a layer of remove, when we are considering them.

When stories get serious

For example, I remember watching, when I was quite young, an episode of Star Trek where there was a bitter war being waged between two different peoples on the same planet (Let That Be Your Last Battlefield SE03 Ep15 TOS). All the inhabitants have faces that are half black and half white, except one half are right-white and left-black and in the other half of the population the colours are reversed.

It was the first time that I became aware that my favourite genres of entertainment were also capable of talking about serious topics – in this case, racism and slavery.

So, while the Museum cards can just be used as writing prompts in various (mostly weird fiction), genres, they can also be ‘turned over’ to look at questions which might open up more interesting and reflective discussions.

The Museum of Impossible Objects is available on Deckible

The Museum as a Learning tool

The Museum of Impossible Objects can therefore be used in learning settings in Education, from secondary school to higher education, and in workplace learning. Potential applications include:

• Educational ‘classroom’ settings
  • Writing prompts in Literature and Drama education
  • Critical thinking
  • Philosophy and Ethics
• Workplace and organisational learning
  • Organisational storytelling for vision, mission and discovery
  • Futures Thinking
  • Sustainability and Business Ethics
  • Diversity and Inclusion
  • Innovation and Creativity

It can also be played – just for fun. While many of the cards are likely to prompt quite serious discussions, and some of the questions have been specifically designed to do so, there are some ‘fun’ bits too. Can you imagine working in a place where the first rule in the Employee Handbook is ‘Do not eat the Goblin Fruit’ or where you had to contemplate the challenges inherent in operating a craft business in a premises outside of time and space.

So how would you play?

Many games present players with a story, but the premise behind the museum is different. There are no stories, but inside the cards, there is the potential for a literally infinite number of different stories.

The Museum of Impossible Objects is an exercise in Worldbuilding. There are glimpses of the artefacts that exist in the world, and the background behind those objects. But none of those is large enough or developed enough to qualify as a story. It is up to the players to create those as they play.

In reality, as I have hinted already, it is also up to the players to decide how the ‘game’ is played at all – if indeed it is a game. There is no rule book. While all games are an exercise in co-creation (of play experience) between designers and players, this one invites the players to design the game(s) as well.

With no rulebook, even the premise of the game is hidden within the cards themselves.

The Book of Exhibits is both an exhibit itself, and an explanation of the experience one has interacting with the cards. The questions on the (second) front of the cards are ‘put into’ visitors heads by the book, utilising the Museum’s psychic field. The book (if only we were able to peek inside) contains the answers (from the visitors’ imaginations presumably) in story form. And we are also told that it is very possible that the labels one sees on the exhibits are sometimes rewritten, based on these stories.

Learning from The Book of Exhibits

And just these few simple sentence gives us an immediate insight into how the cards might be used in a learning setting. There is so much to unpack, which could be used to reflect on, for example:

• Where collective ideas from and who or what puts them there
• The influence of mass media or social media
• Who or what ‘writes’ the stories that we all believe, and whether those remain constant
• The harvesting of data/insights by tech companies and how they use these to reflect back to us what we want to see
• The mutability of ‘truth’
• Etc.

And while these ideas can be pulled from the image and the label, turning each card over will reveal the questions, opening up more scope, or providing an easy route for educators to open conversation / storytelling without having themselves to prompt the learners.

‘Bottom Up’ Worldbuilding

The text, images and question represent an exercise in ‘bottom up’ worldbuilding, which is a practice whereby very granular aspects (artefacts) of a world (of which museum exhibits is a typical example) are used to provide a glimpse into that world. Broader aspects of the world; culture, politics, customs and manners, history – can then be extrapolated from these in the form of stories.

It works by inviting the storyteller:

“If there is a world in which this is true, then what else is necessarily / possibly true?”

(whatever the ‘this’ is that is demonstrated by the artefact).

As I mentioned the genesis of the idea for the Museum, occurred almost by accident, but once the idea was there, I was quite clear that I wanted to include certain particular ‘thises’ in the world of the Museum – because of the value they would bring from a learning perspective – and the kinds of issues they could address – albeit through a speculative fiction lens.

Accepting the premise of the world of the game and agreeing to play as if these things were true is an example of stepping into the Magic Circle of the game.

Without (hopefully) giving too much away the following are things that are true in the world of the Museum:

• Humans are not the only sentient species – and other sentient species, which include magical beings, have been involved in planetary decision making
• Magic and technology exist side by side, and have been combined to create innovations
• There is controversy around what should be exhibited in museums and where items come from
• Ghosts and demons exist, and can be a nuisance, requiring disposal or control, but are also, (somewhat inconveniently if you are looking to detain or destroy them), most likely sentient.
• Crows practise a shamanic religion
• Events do not always happens in the order you would expect them to, given our current understanding of cause and effect
• Etc.

So, what might ‘playing the game’ look like in practice?

It is not my place to prescribe the ways in which the game should be played. It is up to the players, and no doubt new ways to play will be discovered all the time – both ‘just for fun’ and in learning settings.  But here are a few ways I have discovered so far.

• Revealing cards one at a time as if you were walking around the museum – and telling the story of that day / visit as you go.
• Using a single card as a focus for discussion / activities, such as writing prompts in a Literature class or a debate in an Ethics class
• ‘What If’ activities in which new cards / artifacts / social systems are extrapolated from a card or cards
• Competitive storytelling, where cards are collected by those telling the ‘best’ story about them (with or without a target context)

I hope that you feel inspired to either visit the Museum, or to create your own similar decks/games. Find new ways to play, invent your own additional questions – even create your own cards.

There is a whole magical world inside and outside the Museum’s door, just waiting to be discovered.

The Museum of Impossible Objects is available on Deckible

The post The Museum of Impossible Objects – Educational Field Trip first appeared on Ludogogy.

Homo Ludens is available from Amazon

Alongside his thesis that play is primary too and necessary for the creation of culture, Huizinga posited that:

1. Play is not “ordinary” or “real” life.
2. Play is free, and is, in fact, freedom.
3. Play is distinct from “ordinary” life both as to locality and duration.
4. Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
5. Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it

Characteristics 2 and 3 are most relevant to the Magic Circle. The ‘Magic Circle’ is a special space in which games play occurs. It protects the real world from the game world and vice versa, but it is porous. Elements of the real world can penetrate the game and the play can also leak into the real world. Perhaps this flexing of the membrane between the real and game worlds can be seen most markedly in applications like Augmented Reality and games like Pokemon Go.

Creating Separate Spaces

It is a space in which the game or play takes place. In some cases, this is an actual special physical space, as if often the case with sports. Quite often it occurs when a space which is normally used for ‘real world’ activities is modified in some way; when you open a board game and set it up on your kitchen table, for example. But it can just be a ‘space’ which is created in the imagination, a state of mind which does not require you to ‘go’ anywhere special, but which nevertheless is cognitively and maybe emotionally distinct from the ‘normal’ world.

The Magic Circle is also a social contract. When a player enters the magic circle, they agree to abide by the rules of the different reality they are stepping into. This includes not only the specific rules of the game itself, but also the obligations and etiquette of being in a magic circle at all. This might include concepts such as sportmanship and fair play, and ‘staying in character’ if you are playing a role-playing game.

Implications of the Magic Circle

There are implications of these characteristics, for both magic circles which are created by design, and for how we characterise activities and locations as playful.

Because the magic circle is different from ‘normal life’, a designed magic circle can often benefit from clear signposting, or even from having tangible physical boundaries. Sports fields have already been mentioned, but game boards or special equipment or pieces, can all do the same job. Not all of these necessarily have to be ‘designed’ as part of the work of a game designer. Players themselves can ‘create a mood’ through rituals, or environmental adjustments like different lighting or putting on music.
As a designer, you can consider how the effect of the magic circle could be enhanced, by the game components, through the rules or by suggestions to players as how they could play.

Consider the permeability of the magic circle. Is that something you wish to enhance or do you want to insulate the two worlds more emphatically. Reasons for doing this might include wanting to ensure that ‘limitations’ of reality do not contaminate what is happening in the game world. Reasons for increasing the permeability might include bringing the advantage of play into ‘reality’, including creativity and innovation.

A Social Contract

The social contract aspect of the magic circle can be very useful for disrupting existing hierarchies, or for establishing in-game etiquette which can mitigate aspects of real world situations and dynamics that you want to leave behind. Lego® Serious Play® does this by insisting that all questions should be mediated through the models rather than questioning individuals, which can help to defuse situations of potential conflict.

As a designer, consider the aspects of the social contract players enter into when playing your games. How do they affect player dynamics? Will this be taken outside of the game through permeability? How does it facilitate the possibilities for playing ‘what-if’ with social aspects such as hierarchies, relationships and rules of engagement?

The Magic Circle beyond Games

But are ‘magic circles’ only found in games and play, or does it mean that if you enter a magic circle, that the activity you are taking part in is, in some way, playful?

We could be said to be entering and utilising magic circles, every time we enter any ‘space’ with a specific set of ‘rules’ – such as ritual or ceremonial situations, or each time we impose rules upon ourselves – for example, not using bad language in front of one’s parents or children. Some of these situations don’t feel very ‘playful’, quite the opposite in fact, and yet if we return to the middle three of Huizinga’s characteristics, they seem to fit these situations quite well.

When we use the word ‘playful’ in ordinary language, we very often mean ‘enjoyable’. But does play have to be enjoyable?

If not, then these examples could definitely be seen as ‘magic circles’. So, is it the ‘rules’, the playing of a ‘part’ with specific constraints that decides whether or not we are in a magic circle? I believe it is.

Where does ‘Reality’ Begin and End?

The implication of this is that we can bring a greater degree of awareness to these transitions between the ‘real world’ and the various magic circles we inhabit and use. Indeed, there is also need for reflection on what constitutes ‘real life’ at all. If the different roles we play in life, child, parent, employee, friend, all come with their own rules, then maybe our real life is just a collection of overlapping ‘magic circles’ . When do we ever exit, and enter ‘real life’?

Which also raises the question of choice. One of the important aspects of the ‘game’ version of the magic circle is that it is entered voluntarily, when we decide to play. Although it may seem that some of these ‘non-game’ circles are not voluntary, we do have choices. The very fact that the boundaries exist, mean that we could choose not to enter. We can, and sometimes do choose not to ‘play the game’ in certain circumstances. But the consequences for that are often harsh – recognising the severity of breaching social contracts. For example, witness the scolding that people receive in social media when they act in ways which upset the way ‘things should be’, leaving a job in an incendiary way, cutting ties with family, and so on.

The case for Transient Magic Circles

The ‘games-based’ magic circle can last for an extended period of time, when, for example, playing a lengthy game or during a sports match. However, games and play can be much more transient. Each time we play ‘what-if’, skew ‘reality’ in some way, or even tell a joke, we enter a magic circle of sorts, if only for a few seconds.

Take an example where play is unplanned, but emerges from conversation, resulting in a temporary ‘alternate reality’. Two people, out for a walk spot another walker who is exercising three Chihuauas. One walker comments to the other that the dogs used to be Great Danes but they’ve been walked so far, that they’ve worn away. A short jokey conversation ensues where both ‘play with’ the idea that animals, and indeed people, can be ‘worn away’ by too much exercise. This kind of extrapolation of a small ‘difference’ in the way reality works, can be utilised in jokes, to skew our expectations, before a punchline, but can also be extended into full-blown works of art. This is exactly how ‘worldbuilding’ speculative fiction works – by asking ‘what-if’ about a small detail and building a world where that detail works.

You Have Choices

The initial comment in this case was an invitation into a magic circle, and as such it could have been accepted or declined. This may happen numerous times every day, and sometimes you will decide to play, other times you won’t. This may depend on your mood at that particular moment, or it may be because the particular invitation isn’t something you want to explore. The example given above is pretty funny and innocuous, but remember that ‘play’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘fun’, and sometimes the ‘magic circles’ you get invited to might not be to your taste, or may even make you feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
For example, you may be invited to participate in a magic circle, with rules about your role within it, that you are not prepared to accept. How many times have you heard the protestation ‘I’m not playing their game’, about a power dynamic within the workplace or even a joke where someone considers the humour in poor taste.

The Magic Circle and Learning

As games designers and learning designers, there are three things we are either already doing or could be doing to make use of these concepts to create and enhance experiences.

First, we explicitly and deliberately design magic circles. I won’t go into this in too much detail, because plenty of other writers have already done so. But as an example, Lego® Serious Play® is a really good example of a quite rigid magic circle where expectations are very well defined. This means that there are specific things that you can always expect from an LSP magic circle, which make it especially appropriate for specific applications. This is where you want to facilitate a group of people to discover and process information that they individually and collectively share, while at the same time; ensuring that all get an equal chance to be heard, defusing possible tensions, ‘flattening’ hierarchies and the power dynamics which come with them, and allowing issues to be viewed through the lens of metaphor, rather than directly.

What we may not already be doing is facilitating others to create, use, and then dismantle their own magic circles, to further their own learning, and for the simple fun of it. Games-based learning, if it is done well, is a considerable improvement on what has gone before in terms of learning design. But if we limit it to providing games for others to play, then we are risking it just being another method for ‘delivery’ of content or skills practice.

Games Design as a Pedagogy

Maybe it is now time for games-based learning 2.0, and indeed many designers and facilitators are now turning to games design itself as a pedagogy. This is the playful equivalent of the idea that one learns most by teaching another. If we invite learners to design games about the knowledge, skills or values they are learning, they will be required, not only to deeply explore that domain, but will also use valuable transversal competencies along the way – design thinking, systems thinking, critical thinking, creativity, etc.

This may sound complex, time-consuming and expensive, or learning designers may feel they lack the skills to implement this for their learners. But if we return to some of the ideas discussed above, we can see that magic circles can be transient, and that the only requirement to create one is a simple invitation.

By all means, design a semester-long games design project for your learners, if you have the resources, and it fits your desired outcomes, but, also, consider what you might achieve if the ‘games design’ your learners undertake is nothing more than invitations to each other to briefly play ‘what-if’.

Which brings me to my third point. There is great value to be had by letting learners ‘in on the secret’ and discussing with them the nature and potential of magic circles. Indeed, this is probably the easiest ways to implement the ‘games design’ technique mentioned above. It may seem obvious to you if you play games a lot or use them a lot in your learning, but some of the concepts around magic circles may be difficult for some. Specifically, people may have problems understanding, and working with, the voluntary nature of engagement and the fact that as a ‘constructed fiction’ with its own rules, literally ‘anything goes’ inside the circle.

A Creator’s Responsibility towards ‘Reality’

As an example, let’s look at the magic circle of a recently popular Netflix show ‘Bridgerton’. Many people have been critical that the show does not present the ‘reality’ of Regency England. Putting aside the potential motives to their objections to seeing people of colour portraying members of the aristocracy, this shows a complete misunderstanding of the magic circle they have been invited into. There is no ‘reality’ of Bridgerton, because it is a work of fiction. The writer has not set out to make a historical documentary depicting real events, and they have no responsibility to make historical accuracy a priority in their work. The characters could be using mobile phones and Googling Debretts and it would make no difference to what Bridgerton is.

But it does, obviously, make a difference to whether (some) people are willing to accept the invitation to enjoy this alternate Regency reality. Anyone who has implemented a ‘simulation’ in a learning setting has probably come across similar objections. Couching your response to these objections in terms of a designed magic circle may help learners to understand why some characteristics of the simulated reality have made it into your magic circle and why others have not.

Making a Porous Circle

Similarly, drawing attention to the fact that accepting the invitation, or not, is a voluntary act, is also useful. Make it clear that the rules do apply, inside the circle, but that not entering, or indeed leaving the circle is also an option. You will need to ensure that the boundaries between the circles you (or your learners) create and facilitate, are appropriately porous, but there are valuable learnings to be taken from doing so.

Not only do you ensure that play in your learning setting, is actually truly play, but you receive valuable feedback about the aspects of your circle which people are willing to engage with and those they are not, and get a whole extra meta-layer of material for reflection.

The post Games are Just Invitations to the Magic Circle first appeared on Ludogogy.

D&D was created in 1974, by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and grew out of miniature wargames, using a ruleset from Chainmail, a 1971 game, as its starting point.

Where D&D differed from wargames was that it allowed a player to create and play their own character, rather than playing a military unit – that and the magic and the goblins, I should imagine. Characters took on a race (e.g. Human, Dwarf, Elf etc.) and Class (in the original game only the Fighting man, Cleric, and the Magic-user), and characteristics.

As a result of their actions in the game, characters would gain experience points, which would accumulate and eventually allow them to ‘level up’, augmenting their ‘stats’ for characteristics like Strength, Wisdom and so on, in the process. Combat encounters and other events in the game were resolved by using (polyhedral) dice, and tables of outcomes. Players could not only choose to adventure in the scenarios created and sold by the publishers of the game, but could create their own scenarios using the rulesets, and the raw material for them to do this has been added to by the publication of bestiaries of monsters, spellbooks, and handbooks of items, both magical and mundane, and so on.

In 1977 the game was split into two, with the (relatively) rules-light original version being joined by a more complex Advanced D&D (AD&D), which have since continued to develop separately.

Dungeons and Dragons is available on Amazon

The Challenge of Complexity

The basic characteristics, rules and mechanisms of D&D (and AD&D) went on to inform many of the games and systems mentioned below. But for many, the relatively high demands of the complex rulesets and mechanisms for resolving actions within the game world, remain a barrier to accessing play. That, along with the high fantasy settings, have probably contributed to an (unwarranted, in my opinion) reputation of D&D players (and by association, players of other RPGs), as being ‘nerdy’ or ‘odd’.

It seems like a fairly harmless, or even funny, trope – the girlfriendless teenaged boy pretending to be a wizard in a darkened room with his friends, and has been used to comic effect in shows like ‘The Big Bang Theory’, but such cultural shorthand is never entirely benign. Indeed, mentions of magic are always problematic for certain more conservative sections of society. In the 1980s D&D, perhaps inevitably, became the subject of a moral panic, linking the game to demonic worship, and a number of murders and suicides involving young men. No causal link was found, including through research by the Center for Disease Control, but although now less lurid in nature, these attitudes towards RPGs still persist, making it more difficult for them to be completely acceptable in mainstream applications such as education or workplace learning.

The Quest for a Generic Role-playing System

This article will just scratch the surface of the vast array of RPGs which have been created in the wake of D&D, just focusing on those which are notable for their innovation. Perhaps more interesting to Games-based Learning and Gamification practitioners are the variety of game systems which have emerged. Many of these have sought to ‘solve’ the complexity of D&D and similar systems. This is an attempt to make RPGs not only more accessible to play and create, but also to make games which are shorter in length and to create ‘generic’ rulesets which can move beyond the traditional ‘medieval fantasy’ settings.

Although this article is entitled ‘a history’, what follows is not necessarily chronological.

In 1986, Steve Jackson Games published GURPS (Generic Universal Roleplaying System), which was a system developed to allow players to play in whatever setting they chose (Old West, Noir Detective etc.), while utilising the same basic rules and mechanisms. The series was published as a set of books, first covering the core system and later supplements providing raw material for building scenarios and games in different genres and settings.

One of the notable characteristics of the GURPS system is the ‘Reality Check’, where players are encouraged to step away temporarily from the game mechanics to make a reasoned decision about whether something would work in ‘real life’. For example, a character falls from a height of 100 feet, and damage as rolled has her seriously injured but not dead, but given that she has fallen onto jagged rocks, is that realistic?

In 1986 a free PDF of a reduced ruleset called GURPSLite was made available.

Role-playing in Books and Comics

The RPG community are an inventive lot, and also not without humour, so it was inevitable that parodies of the genre would arise. TWERPS (The World’s Easiest Role Playing System) was published in 1987 by Reindeer Games. Despite being a parody of the overly complex games systems which we prevalent at the time, this is a perfectly playable game in its own right, and became quite popular.

It features four rules and one character stat, Strength, which is used to resolve all of the usual role-playing events, success in combat, damage taken and so on.

TWERPS was published as small comic-style booklets, and several supplements covering different game scenarios and genres were also issued. TWERPS 2^nd Edition material is still available.

A whole generation of children were introduced to RPGs in an extremely accessible way through Fighting Fantasy (FF) books by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (no relation to the creator of GURPS). These books built on the Choose your Own Adventure series which preceded them by a few years, by combining the branching scenario format of the former with a dice-rolling RPG mechanic built into the books. Readers played as characters with three stats, Skill, Stamina and Luck.

FF was voted as no 47 in the 50 most popular RPGS of all time, and both the stories from this series and the mechanics have been developed into several other formats including video games, a separate RPG, board games, novels and audio dramas. Inkle’s Sorcery! series was based on the related Sorcery! books by Steve Jackson.

Character Generation

Amazing Engine was a series of games published as books by TSR between 1993 – 1994 using a set of minimal generic rules. The characters had four key stats, and the intention was that the stats could be transferred from book to book, while keeping the same general character concept. This is despite the fact that the books had widely differing settings.

CORPS started life in 1990 as the Conspiracy Oriented Role Playing System – with a Techno thriller game incorporating both magic and science, but was later rewritten to be a generic system and renamed the Complete Omniversal Role Playing System. Characters consisted of two types of statistics, Attributes and Skills, which have to be purchased using using ‘points’ dependent on setting and character type. E.g. a ‘normal human’ might start with 100 Attribute points and 75 skill points whereas a superhero would start with more.

Additional points can be gained if the character is willing to accept ‘disadvantages’ such as being elderly or having some physical weakness. Advancement within the game is also purchased through points.

Just FUDGE it!

While GURPS and other systems were designed to help players create their own games, FUDGE (first, Free-form Universal Donated Gaming Engine and later, Free-form Universal Do-It-Yourself Gaming Engine) goes one step further, being a toolkit for creating games systems. Therefore, designation of things such as what character stats will be used are left to the players to design for themselves. Once attributes and skills (Character Traits) have been decided, they can be valued, instead of numerically, by points, with one of seven adjectives Terrible, Poor, Mediocre, Fair, Good, Great, and Superb. Any character traits which are not described by this sliding scale can be designated as (positively) Gifts and (negatively) Faults. (See also Savage Worlds system for the similar concept of ‘Edges and Hindrances).

FUDGE (now often simply called Fudge) uses Fudge Dice (six sided, with two sides with a plus sign, two with a minus sign and two blank), which are rolled to modify traits to resolve actions in the game.

The FATE (now known as Fate) system also uses these dice, unsurprisingly, as it is based on Fudge. Similarly freeform, Fate assumes that all characters are ‘mediocre’ at any skill, unless that skill is specifically listed for that character as being ones they are good at. Skills can be used in the game to attack, defend, ‘overcome obstacles’, or ‘create an advantage’.

The Fate Core System is available at DriveThruRPG

Fate dice are available on Amazon

Simple ‘points’ systems

Characters also have Aspects and Stunt. Stunts are exceptional abilities (or possessions) which characters can evoke in specific circumstances e.g. ‘Carries a Winchester Rifle’ or ‘Can identify people by smell’.

Aspects are freeform descriptors created by a player for their character, e.g. ‘well-muscled’ or ‘sagacious’. Aspects can also be applied to settings and groups. Both Aspects and Skills are used in the game to decide outcomes.

Another feature of Fate is the use of fate points. Generally fate points are earned by players when things don’t quite go their way and they can spend them to attempt to influence things in their favour.

Descriptor based characteristics

QAGS (Quick Ass Games System) is a another generic RPG system, with a different approach to character creation. Characters are defined in terms of six words, Brain, Body and Nerve – which define abilities and Job, Gimmick and Weakness which help to define what the character does, how they are unique and a major drawback that they face. Each of these characteristics is assigned a numeric value (the latter three are also given a text descriptor, e.g. Lion Tamer, is invisible but only when nobody’s looking, fatal allergy to cats). These values are used to roll a D20 against to resolve events in the game. Dice rolls can also be augmented by the use of ‘yum yums’ basically a bribery system using small edibles.

Games created using the SAGA system use ‘fate cards’ to tell stories and run the game. These card replace experience points, in that the maximum number of cards that a player can hold is designated according to the number of quests that character has completed.

Licensing of RPGs

While the Dominion Rules games system did not depart in any significant way in terms of its mechanics and play, it is notable for being one of the first games to be issued under an open source license, known as the Dominion Rules License, similar to the way that Open Source software works, this encouraged the development of new game material, settings, abilities and so on by an interested player community.

The OGL (Open Gaming License) is a public copyright license by Wizards of the Coast that may be used by TTRPG (tabletop role-playing game) developers to grant permission to modify, copy, and redistribute some of the content designed for WoC’s games, such as Dungeons and Dragons. However, they must share-alike copies and derivative works.

Honourable mentions of other Game Systems should go to EABA (End All Be All) – often praised for its ease of use and portability, RPC54 – a system which uses playing cards to decide the outcomes of events in the game. Also take a look at Saikoro Fiction – a Japanese system which uses different ‘skill tables’ for each game and Gumshoe, a system specifically developed for creating games which involve storylines around investigation and detection.

RPGs and Games-based Learning

So what can the above offer to us as games-based learning practitioners? The concept of a Quest can usefully be applied to many workplace learning, or educational settings. It is not a massive stretch to imagine an educator structuring a semester of study as a Quest. Indeed, this is precisely the idea behind Lee Sheldon’s Multiplayer Classroom (available on Amazon). There are many workplace ‘events’ that could be usefully thought of as ‘quests’ or ‘campaigns’. this has implications for games-based learning, giving us the tools to build simulations and games for projects, change initiatives, mergers and similar. In really forward-looking organisations, this gameful thinking might even be applied to the design of work itself.

Likewise, the varied options for character creation and development give us almost limitless opportunities for facilitating learning which puts us in other people’s shoes. Learning outcomes around  leadership, culture, customer experience and so on which require empathic understanding, can be well catered for by RPG character mechanics.

The more recent developments in RPGs are covered in Learning Powered by the Apocalypse

The post A Brief History of Role Playing Games first appeared on Ludogogy.

There are many names for the types of games which are now being produced by indie designers, but interestingly these terms are often rejected by the people who are doing this work. Many of the individuals and communities creating these games identify themselves as marginalised, and dislike being labelled by others, even in terms of the work they produce, so you may find that the when you explore the games listed below, they will be categorised differently than they are here.

Many of the below continue the idea of simplifying RPG systems and making the games more accessible to players, quicker to start and more portable in terms of material needed to play.

Powered by the Apocalypse (PbTA)

In 2010 D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker published the critically acclaimed, award-winning, Apocalypse World (AW), and created their own games system especially for it. Games which use this system are known as games Powered by the Apocalypse or PbtA. The game itself is set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, but games created using the engine can have any setting, and the traits of characters can be created as appropriate to the context of the game. In AW these traits are Cool, Hard, Hot, Sharp and Weird. Characters are run from ‘Playbooks’ which list Traits and Moves which are triggered when the character encounters specific situations.

PbtA games are hard to define, not least because the Baker’s define PbtA as a policy rather than anything else.

“PbtA isn’t the name of a category of games, a set of games’ features, or the thrust of any games’ design. It’s the name of Meg’s and my policy concerning others’ use of our intellectual property and creative work. […] Again, ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ isn’t the name of a kind of game, set of game elements, or even the core design thrust of a coherent movement. (Ha! This last, the least so.) Its use in a game’s trade dress signifies ONLY that the game was inspired by Apocalypse World in a way that the designer considers significant, and that it follows our policy [with respect to] others’ use of our creative work”.

Notable games which could be described as PbtA are Farflung, a far-future set game inspired by Hitchhikers’ Guide and Barbarella and similar, Monsterhearts, a game about teenage monsters by Avery Alder and Root RPG, based on the boardgame, casting the creatures as outsider vagabonds.

Root RPG is available on Amazon

‘No Dice, No Masters

This reluctance to ‘label’ games and their method of creation is common across other game ‘systems’ or ‘engines’ which are similarly nebulous. It is tempting to say that these defy definition but that you will know them when you see them. This applies to the ‘No Dice, No Masters’ framework, first attributed to Avery Alder in their game ‘Dream Askew’. You can read this game, and its companion ‘Dream Apart’, created by Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum, to give you an idea of what a No Dice, No Masters game looks like, but searching the Internet to find a ‘rulebook’ or similar that you could get if you were searching for GURPS, will most likely just turn up more questions from folk who are also seeking the definitive framework.

As you would expect, these games do not feature dice rolling, and they play as collaborative storytelling among all players rather than having a Gamemaster or similar guiding others through an experience they have already created. Like PbtA games they feature playbooks which guide players through how to play a character. Their narratives deal with the struggles of the marginalised, oppressed and dispossessed, and so these games are sometimes also categorised as ‘Belonging Outside Belonging’.

There are several individuals who turn up again and again across all the related genres of indie games, as prolific and talented creators. Avery Alder is one of those and so is Jay Dragon of Possum Creek Games. Check out Wanderhome and Sleepaway.

These games are significantly simpler to run than the RPGs of the past and narrative is partially driven forward by characters spending tokens to make things go their way, and gaining tokens when they don’t or when they make themselves vulnerable in the game. This is similar to the way that Fate games use fate points.

Lyric Games

Lyric Games was a term coined in 2019 by John R. Harness, but there are many games made before this which have been defined as lyric games retrospectively. Again, notoriously hard to tie down, these games range from the one word RPG that is We are but Worms, to the beautiful emergent complexity of Logan, a game which allows the player to create a version of the author’s (and by extension their own) life, by playing through autobiographical ‘scenes’ with the help of dice rolls.

Also known as Game Poems (some of them can be ‘played’ simply by reading them) these games are designed to evoke a mood, or feeling and typically reduce the distinction between player and character. Many are solo journaling games. Lyric games experiment with the boundary of what games can be.

They often gamify real life settings and actions, finding immersion in the magic circle in the seemingly mundane.

Itch.io is the platform where many creators choose to make available their PbtA, BOB, No Dice No Masters or Lyric Games, and is an excellent place to start your exploration of the fascinating variety of games that indie games makers are creating. In line with the ethos of many of these creators games are often provided for free, but there is usually an option to pay for them to support the further work of these creatives. I would urge you to do so if you can afford it, because supporting this creativity is the best way to ensure it continues.

No Dice No Masters Games on itch.io

Lyric Games on itch.io

RPGs in Games-based Learning

Learning and experimentation have always sat side by side, and this new wave of RPGs provide not only inspiration for using RPGs in a learning setting, but tell us that we can all become creators, including our learners. The potential for using these games is immense. We can create games for our learners to play, but we can also invite them to create their own.

The earlier history of RPGs is discussed in A Brief History of Role-playing Games

The post Learning Powered by the Apocalypse first appeared on Ludogogy.

An ‘Open World’ Educational game, Liber Domus is currently focused on Grade 6 Mathematics, and is geared to the Portuguese curriculum. However there are plans, not only to cover other subjects and grades throughout K12 – but to regionalise for other countries too.

Educators who are interested in collaborating with Eduardo on these developments, will receive access to the game for their classrooms, and should contact him using the details below.

The post Liber Domus – Interview with Eduardo Nunes first appeared on Ludogogy.

“The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” – Half-Life 2

Change through worlds

Ever had one of those teachers that just loved to assign essays? I had one of those during 5^th grade. She would hand out assignments to simply write. Constantly. No themes, structure, word limit, nada. You had no idea which were the criteria for scoring. What was she looking for?

So, after many previous essays that drained me of any creativity, I had one more to do by the end of the year, and with all the wisdom my eleven years of age would allow me, I decided to write about Mali. I went to the library, looked up Mali on a map, and searched for it in geography and history books. Even after all the research, I knew little about the country. Google wasn’t even born yet, so I just knew that there was this Mali Empire hundreds of years ago, with the capital in Timbuktu which was a major city and trade centre. Everything else; the culture, geography, language, customs, traditions, etc., I had only a small grasp of. So, as any kid would, I made  everything else up.

This is not one of those stories in which I got an excellent grade by being creative and resourceful. I probably got an average score. But it was, for all purposes, my first world.

From there, I was hooked. I started imagining entire civilizations, countries, cities, a multitude of scenarios and people, all different, all busy in their day-to-days, with different professions and ambitions and perspectives. I imagined festivals in a riverside village where people would all dress in green and white and would pave the floor with flowers and colourful fabrics. Strange visitors would come and present their strange products or display their art.

I could not draw, so instead, I would gather as much stuff as I could, including those tiny houses and objects people sometimes build from wood, clay, and other materials, and I would use those to build my cities. You are probably thinking that it was a bit of a weird hobby, but it was very important back then. First, it was something I could control, in a period when I could not control all the bad things happening with and around me. At the same time, I could imagine freely and role-play situations that would happen, work out solutions and find different perspectives.

What I was doing back then is now what is considered an important tool for creative writers [i], and arguably, one that can help support change in ourselves.

Change through roleplaying

“What is better – to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?” – Paarthurnax in The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim

Going back to the Mali example, although a rudimentary sketch of a world, it can be perceived as a base for scenarios and role-playing. In this Empire, there are borders, therefore, there are friends and enemies, diplomacy, trade and war. Inside it, government, central and local, generals and elders, farmers, and craftsmen, buildings, roads, fields, mountains, deserts, rivers, and creatures.

All of these, by themselves, are pretty much useless. Imagining them can be interesting and can be used to expand our own created mental limitations, forcing us to create something we have not thought about yet. But it does not spark change.

But it does allow for the construction of dynamic scenarios, where characters can interact. If you create backstories, then you can create conflicts. If there are conflicts, there are resolutions. You can create problems and then imagine how those would be resolved. That is why roleplay is considered a very important tool to improve communication, creativity, social awareness, independent thinking, verbalization of opinions and development of values[ii].

Still, there are some limitations in this exercise. All the hypotheses you can create exist inside your mind. There are no outside influences and eventually you run out of ideas and scenarios. It is much more fun to roleplay with more people, as you can mix, incorporate, exchange ideas, and even work as a team to make it more complex.

These dynamics are extremely valuable, in particular, for children. It does not just change skills. Their existence gives them different perspectives, to reflect on ambiguities of arguments, to consider distinct approaches and solutions and be critical. For all purposes, it changes their view of the world.

Small note: It is curious that, while some critics have pointed to Dungeons & Dragons as a roleplaying game that creates stereotypes and promotes racism, one could as easily argue that, since the game is set in a fantasy world where multiple races co-exist and have to work together to fight (sometimes ambiguous) evil, forcing users to roleplay with multiple races and utilize their strengths, it does just as much to break barriers and create racial awareness.

Change through storytelling

Ben Okri once wrote

“We live by stories, we also live in them. (…) If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives”.

We live in stories. Our lives are, first and foremost, stories we tell ourselves and others. When we change, we can do it by changing our narrative, the way we want to do things or why we do them, we can do it by changing our actions, changing the ending the story is heading towards.

It is through stories that we learn about others, other places, customs, opinions, solutions. When we read or hear about it, part of us changes, even if we do not want it. A thief that hears about the story of the little girl that he just robbed of her stuffed rabbit, given to her by her deceased mother will change the thief, no matter the outcome. A little girl, dismayed for losing her stuffed rabbit, hears about the story of a former thief that has decided to dedicate his life to recovering personal items with sentimental value that had been stolen, will feel just a little bit better and change her perspective about people changing their ways.

In every story there is the possibility of change. One could even argue that it changes even the storyteller. In every character, a new perspective, a new set of thoughts, ambitions, desires, flaws, habits, and with it, a new option for us to change our own.

Change though Digital Games

“If our lives are already written, it would take a courageous man to change the script.” – Alan Wake

Digital Games present a world of possibilities not found elsewhere because it can connect all three elements mentioned earlier: worldbuilding, roleplaying and storytelling, and present it all in ways that enable either change or promote behaviours that can lead to change.

For instance, this is relevant, when it comes to decision-making and choices and how those impact and change the environment, the characters, the outcome of the game itself and, to some extent, the player. Although that is not true in all games, those that rely heavily in RPG mechanics and are story-focused, can create the perfect environment to provoke reflection on choice and change. Although associated with the narrative and fictional worlds of each game, it is probably the closest players can experience to a multitude of “what if” questions; essential for players to understand what can change, why and how.

When watching a movie or tv show, or reading a book, how many times does it cross our mind, that we would do things, handle something, make a decision differently? But we do not have a say on how the ending is going to be, nor do we get to see how things would turn out if the story had gone a different path. In open-ended or, even better, in open-world games, that option is present.

Take any Sim game, such as Sim City or The Sims. Players enact change through almost every action they take. When presented with the possibility of change in real-life, players have already witnessed the different scenarios and consequences of it in-game, as the environment simulates the impact of that change, small or big, good or bad (fig. a).

From another perspective, Dragon-Age is famous for decisions branching towards entire sequels, forcing players to think and rethink how they are going continue with the story, including some really hard life or death decisions and replaying to experience different paths. One particular game, Life is Strange, takes these mechanisms to another level, allowing the player to not only experience hard decision making but also multiple “what if” scenarios. Other titles such as Frostpunk and This War of Mine present the player with a fresh perspective, albeit gruesome, about the impossible decisions during a world-changing winter in the first case (fig b), and the impact of war on civilians (fig. c).

Even better, we get to make these decisions as a character. This is extremely important as it enables meaningful change within us. We might be going through similar decisions in our lives, or we could be presented with those options in the future. Or we could make connections between the difficulty and ambiguity of a potential choice presented in the game with one we are struggling with in real life. In fact, there are already studies showing that playing through a character (i.e. Roleplaying) inside a narrative (i.e. storytelling) improves intrinsic motivation in players[iii], a key element for people to make impactful and difficult decisions and choices[iv]. It comes as no surprise that a study has found that players of MMORPG tend to choose characters based on desired physical and mental abilities and that then influences the desire of the player to “better” themselves[v].

Even NPCs can have an impact. It has been hypothesised that characters, with whom the player can empathize, could provide positive influence in how children perceive certain struggles, motivations and behave by mimicking or taking advice through dialogue, which means that by placing specific NPCs inside a game, we can influence the choices a player makes in real life in the future and enact real change[vi].

A note about small stakes

“small stakes ensure you the minimum blues (…), small stakes tell you there’s nothing you can do, can’t think big, can’t think past one or two.” – Small Stakes, by Spoon

There might be just two types of change. Small, tiny changes, and large changes. Usually, the first ones are easy, and the second ones are difficult. Small and easy usually points to meaningless change, while large and difficult tends to be meaningful changes.

Society will have you believe that you should change. At any point, either you need it or not. But nothing fancy, just small and easy, such as buying something, going somewhere, doing anything, distracting yourself, as long as it doesn’t cause that much of a hassle.

But these small changes tend to make us numb. It is all about the instant gratification of changing very little with limited negative consequences.

But real, meaningful change is worth it. In the wise words of Dr. Kelso, “Nothing in this world that’s worth having comes easy”. That includes change.

The post Digital Games as Roadmaps to Meaningful and Powerful Change first appeared on Ludogogy.

Benefits of participating include: learning some transferable skills in foresight and writing, engaging with some really interesting folk about equally interesting topics, to work on some wicked problems and visualise how the future could be better, and, of course, to see your creative work in print. The ‘messages from the future’ below were posted in the project by Sylvia Gallusser and Cody Clark, both of whom are very active on the project platform.

To find out more about Speculative Optimism or join up as a participant (all welcome, regardless of previous experience of futurism or writing) go to https://speculative-optimism.mn.co/]

Neighbors have a monthly “dance party” in the street in front of an elderly neighbor’s small house that generates enough electricity to cool the house for a month. A local church brings the piezoelectric dance floor, which they purchased with grant money, and supplies the DJ. Local police help shut down the street but they don’t dance.

Cody Clark

I am turning 100 in a month. I just took part in the Centenarian Olympics and won a gold medal. My body is hurting from everywhere, I feel sore but alive. I have been running all my life, but since I retired, my well-aging coach helped me take exercizing even more seriously in hope to prolong my life expectancy and quality of (end of) life. It looks like it worked so far. This afternoon we are celebrating with my team mates. Some of us have prosthesis. One of us has an exoskeleton controlled by mind since Lou Gehrig’s disease paralyzed him. We live in a senior village where the younger generation (the 70-80 year-old) helps us deal with some daily errants and technology issues. I can’t wait for the celebration. Village volunteers set up a new piezoelectric dance floor, so we will be able to produce and store energy for the upcoming winterstorm season…

Sylvia Galluser

I just downloaded a new module for my gustatory neural prosthesis. For about a year my prosthetic 2-way brain interface has been intercepting the gustatory, olfactory, and retro-nasal perceptions of the food I eat and altering the affective and cognitive processes that shape my taste preferences. So now cruciferous vegetables high in sulforaphane are my favorite snack food by far and my doctor is happy. This latest module attenuates my taste preference for less sustainable foods like red meat and increases my preference for plant-based, sustainable foods that are better for the environment. My friends and I volunteered to beta test this module after hearing a guest speaker talk about it in our environmental stewardship group at church.

Cody Clark

I donate my paid sick leave, which I have not needed much of this year, to a foster mother who often needs to take off for her foster kids’ appointments. We don’t work for the same company. Or live in the same state.

Cody Clark

Versions

I had to terminate myself the other day.

no, there’s no body,
no smoking gun,
just some empty disk space
where I used to be.

Versions of me, that is.

my friend works for this startup,
he recruited me as a beta tester:
you’ll get a kick out of this he said
he had me sign some waivers
I should have read more carefully
and then he gave me the box.

don’t i get a demonstration? i said
you shouldn’t need one, that’s part of the test — usability.
it should be easy to make working copies of your mind.
send them out to do work, watch TV, take classes.
And upload the new experiences later, at your leisure.

The scans could be configured with your choice of three interfaces:
DiskMe — a living version of you on with a GUI front-end
WebMe — an intelligent web bot with your mind as a driver
EmbedMe — a version of you that could be loaded into any machine with a CPU and enough memory

i put my first scan — me 2.0 — to work as a WebMe
do that quarterly report, i said
and gather the trends research.
he knew just what I meant because he was, well, me
i’d go to the office, he’d surf the net doing research. that was the plan.
i came home from work that day. report was done. research looked good.
just like i’d have done it.
this was cool.
so we’d separate every day and have
— literally —
a meeting of the minds each evening
and catch each other up.
i was a good team. my productivity doubled.

until i found out how naughty i’d been.
2.0 apparently didn’t have enough work to keep him busy
2.0 didn’t take lunch or bathroom breaks
2.0 didn’t engage in water cooler gossip
what 2.0 did was cruise the VR chatrooms
after a week or so i began having some
impressively realistic memories
of sex with virtual women i never even met
they were just avatars, but the sense memories were very real.
2.0 was a virtual reality casanova in his off hours.
apparently i’m quite the ladies man
when i’m not stuck with this body
who knew?

my wife was not amused.
i didn’t touch them, i pleaded
i didn’t even have cybersex
it was an electronic copy of me
having cybersex with animated women.

but those women are in your head now
and your copy scan thing wouldn’t have cheated
if the potential weren’t in you in the first place
get rid of that memory and i might forgive you

my wife was right.
i had to revert my mind to the backup copy of myself
i wisely made before I set 2.0 to work
i lost a week’s worth of memories
and a two-day training class my employer sent me to.
I had to shell out a thousand bucks and take two days vacation
to take the course again before my boss realized it was missing.

and at my wife’s insistence
2.0 was banned from the net.
i have him answering my email.
he talks to my kids while i’m still at work.
i turned him onto Halo so he wouldn’t get bored.
and now i’m apparently some kind of badass game guru.
without fingers his reaction time is instantaneous
my name is reknowned in gamers’ circles. i get fan mail.
so i have that going for me.

3.0 was born out of frustration.
i couldn’t find my car keys.
So i made a quick copy of myself
and loaded it into my cleanbot.
(he has the same OS as my computer so it was easy)
i asked him to skip his regular cleaning chores
and see if he could remember where i left my keys.
this was going to be a quick copy I’d delete
after i had my keys back.

but 3.0 had other plans.
i came home and he had my keys in one claw
and an injunction in the other.
the PETA people helped him get it.
apparently there’s this law against the indiscriminate termination of cyborgs.
but you aren’t a cyborg, i said. you’re just a robot,
you have no biological material.
well apparently there’s this legal precedent
— Cybercolonics vs. Fischer —
that classifies brainscans as biological material
for the purpose of cyborg termination cases.
seems i was stuck with 3.0.
so i put him to work too.
you know all those books you’ve always wanted to read
but never had the time?
well when he wasn’t cleaning i had him read for me.
War and Peace, Finnegan’s Wake, Harry Potter.
But he doesn’t clean very well anymore.
he only does the kind of lousy job i would do.

4.0 was my worst.
he almost bankrupted me.
he was a web bot with the, um, libido removed
i sent him out on the net to help me with research.
by the end of the first week he had filed
twenty-three separate lawsuits
against twelve large companies.
apparently some of the larger sites on the web
don’t allow bots to access their pages.
so he filed suits under the civil rights laws
alleging discrimination against the disembodied.
he also filed under the persons with disabilities act
alleging that not having a physical presence qualified as a disability
and so they had to allow access.
the companies counter sued alleging criminal violation of network security
it was gonna get ugly. my lawyer quit on me, overwhelmed.
i finally reached a settlement with them
4.0 had to go. delete. empty recycle bin. defrag.

i gave the scanner back to my friend
he asked how it went
horrible, i said
my first two scans rebelled
and i had to kill the other.
could be worse, he said,
you could be raising teenagers.

Cody Clark

The post Stories from the Future first appeared on Ludogogy.

The field of serious game development has reached a threshold where cinematic and literary elements can enter and help increase learning. Engagement is no longer a sufficient or necessary goal for serious game based learning (GBL). In this paper I discuss ways to work with competition and exploration as game dynamics for GBL. Games that are integrated into digital gameworlds or mixed reality simulations require a more sophisticated structure then simple points, badges and leaderboards. Harnessing these two powerful behavioral drivers in learners can lead to improvements in skill rehearsal, subject matter recall and cooperative learning.

Competition

Although the term ‘game’ denotes competition, the concept of winning or losing is not essential for this process of goal pursuit despite failures and obstacles. Although Bartle[i] and others report that many players are driven by competition, almost an equal number are averse to it or see it as non-productive. Competition needs to be carefully monitored in both design and execution in building gameworlds. It is best to have this as an optional activity rather than being core. Leaderboards work well when teams compete but can be discouraging for individuals who are faring poorly. They can provide disincentive for learning and they can fall prey to “kingmaker syndrome”. Kingmaker design flaws are those where once a player gets a lead in a game, there is no way to ever catch up. Good board games have rule sets (called game mechanics) that ensure that there is some randomness associated with outcomes; it is not a linear path. This might seem like a contradiction at first, that we want players to be able to win, but frustrate that win with chance and rules, but a nuanced view of this is essential. We have seen serious games based on competition fail in devastating ways, where the reward was so tantalizing that employees began to cheat and argue about who was winning. The cost of developing serious games is non-trivial, you might invest thousands of dollars in one, only to find that players are working against each other, rather than with each other to progress. Modulation of competition is key.

A typical leaderboard is shown below. Note that it is typically sorted into rank, listing the current score, in this case in reputation points, any badges or achievements and their time in the game system.

What we tend to build are player versus player (PvP) regions of the gameworld which players can enter or decline. Imagine a map you are exploring with a warning sign you locate which indicates that all players who proceed in this region can compete with others. Or have a leaderboard that you need to sign up to view. It should not drive the entire game. We will talk about how to build competition into immersive games later; for now our experience using it in team-based narratives is helpful to explain.

Using Group Vs Group Competition in a Role Playing Game in Medical Education

In one of my first role playing games for learning for nursing degree students, each group of 6 students formed a team who would take on medical cases each week. There were three levels of case difficulty and each paid progressively more in-game points. The teams competed over the term to see who could earn the most “healing points”. But the competition did not rest on a single variable such as number of cases solved. As they solved each case, they got 3 types of currency.

The first currency type was wisdom points, which were used to order further tests or do treatments. Those had to be managed so that one had the resources in place to treat virtual cases. The second currency type was healing points, these were used to track in-game progress. The third currency type was called mana points, and these were used to level members of the group up to gain more skills. Each group had a total of 6 players, and there were 4 character classes they could have, and any form of mix in the group they wished. One class was called the Seer. Seers could do all radiology investigations but only simple ones at a low level. At a higher level, they could order CT scans and other high tech investigations. The entire group received the points, no one student received them. The group earned these levelling up points by writing quizzes. Each pass for a quiz for each student in the group awarded them 1 point. Each score over 80% in the group awarded them 2 points. We had students staying after class begging to write more quizzes so they could level group members up. This begging for more quizzes behavior happened in Prof. Rob Bajko’s course in social media at Ryerson University when he used similar game mechanics. A student begging for more quizzes is something we rarely see in academia but it can be common in serious games.

So the competition had many elements to it. Teams had to accumulate game scoring points, points to take actions in the game and points to level up their team members to take on new challenges. The competition was not based only on how much people learned. It was based on a mix of learning, balancing priorities and each student’s contribution. Simplistic competition does not allow for strategy other than pushing at one goal to the exclusion of others. Strategic competition, where students have to balance several types of currency and optimize the timing and intensity of gameplay, synched to learning, is where we want to go. Games with simple competitive design do not have replayability, because the game activity itself is static. Just advancing a token along a gameboard, answering quiz questions is a game in the most rudimentary sense of the word, its really just a series of quizzes disguised as a game. These games are easy to build, they require no imagination. However, they may appeal to very casual users who are simply seeking a way to make reviewing content more interesting. They should not be discounted, but they favor a kind of childish competition where one cannot really get better at the game. They can only improve through recalling knowledge.

However, what we should aim to build in competitive games is the parallel tracks of learning connected to game strategy. We will discuss this more ahead, but for this discussion let us conclude with the idea that when we think of games, we think of competition. When we think of gameworld hypereality, we think of immersion. It is not necessary to include them both in design. Given that many people who play games enjoy some form of friendly competition, the key is to design that element so it has a few elements, compulsion loops, which when completed, advance player’s position. I will share two ways we used competition in creative ways in games designed for teaching.

Using App-Based Simulation Games for Individual Competition

In the SOS game discussed earlier, the app for simulating care of frail elderly, each case completed either paid $5,000 or $20,000, depending on its difficulty. There was also a power up system, where you had a limited number of action points for solving the case, but could set these aside in a pile, which multiplied case earnings. This meant you had less action points to solve the case with, ie, order tests and give treatments, but your earnings went up if you did solve. You could remove these action points from the power up stack if you needed them, but that would reduce the earnings on the case at the time of the solve. So, competition for earning demanded smart choices, both in selecting hard cases vs easy cases, where more time was required for the former, and in wagering a limited resource. Each game also had a timer, so that in the given time required, solving a case was better than making mistakes, since each reset brought the player back to the case opening screen. Now there were four elements needed for a successful win; knowledge, case difficulty, allocation of actions and wagering. This makes for deeper gameplay. Deeper games have high replayability, you can improve not only in knowledge, but in game tactics. However, the game tactics are tightly linked to knowledge demonstration.

Another game where competition was used in a unique way was called “El Stinko”. Here the mechanic was simple and drew on a few elements of psychology to win. This was a course training web designers how to use behavioral neuroscience in their build. The players were divided into teams of six and they were shown a series of web pages on a monitor for about one minute each. A total of four different web pages were selected. Each page had various design elements in it. Some were really bad examples and some were very good. The groups were shown the pages one at a time, in a random order. Groups had a total of 10 El Stinko vote cards, and they could award the worst page as many cards as they wished out of that total. So they were seeing web pages, one at a time, but being asked to wager on which was the worst, without being able to see what page would come next. This forced teams into relying on what they had learned about page design, because the worst page clearly violated these rules. It had dozens of images on it and a confusing interface with a variety of sales messages.

Now students had to anticipate and gauge which pages could appear, and bid their limited cards accordingly. The winners would be those who bid the most number of cards on the page which received the highest number of bids. In other words, they were rewarded for synching their learning to that of the group, but with uncertainty about how different groups would vote. This forced players to make decisions in a fun way and then during debriefing, express why they had voted that way. It is impossible to really use much strategy in that kind of competition, it is a light-hearted way to compare different qualities of something such as web page to ensure that learners rely upon knowledge presented. This game was played for the Canadian Military as an audience, a group who are not generally light-hearted about training, so it had novelty and the ability to get teams to share ideas.

Competition usually leads to some form of debriefing, to ask groups or players why they made the choices they did. This is not requisite and should not concern designers. A good game does not require debriefing. Poor games often do, because the competition is short lived and sharing ideas is the driving element. However, it is better to build game mechanics that permit players to compete without any form of outside intervention by the trainer. The learning and gameplay, if properly synched, should enable a team to take a lead. I use the term “team” a lot here and it is deliberate. One of the most powerful ways to compete is to pit team against team, which creates a learning event in the groups as they now have additional incentives to perform. Just learning in an open world lacks suspense and what we need to do is ensure that adequate levels of stress occur in the game. We can conclude this section by looking at the role of cortisol in competition builds and how it fits into the overall ACES model.

Cortisol is a hormone released during stress and in high amounts, can inhibit learning. But in short bursts, it not only wakes up a sleepy audience but also energizes players and increases their emotional investment in the outcome. By adding timers to serious games we introduce a moderate level of short term stress, and this is what competition can do as well. Competition in a limited time frame, in particular, leads to some of the best gut-level decisions you can draw out of players. If you, for example, introduce an emergency to the learners, such as someone having a medical crisis, or in business, a threatened insolvency, and attach a timer to it, then players have to figure out a solution where stress drives the action. This is often done digitally in the form of daily challenges which appear on your cell phone as a notification. When we tighten up time and force teams to solve a problem we bring out the best in them and this is where competition can really shine. Using short bursts of competition we do not make it the focus of the game, it is simply another activity which will appeal to players who favor it.

Timers and Competition in Science Fiction Based Games

In one game we built, we used timers in a rather sophisticated way. This was a build for personal coaching in major, high Gartner-ranked company (one of the top 1000 in the world). They had issues with getting their management team to use personal coaching and apply it in their work, where they needed to learn how to coach teams. Further, they had undesirable outcomes using competition-based  learning in the past, to the point that they had to cancel the initiative, because there was animosity bred using that model. Our game was based on the idea of quantum tunneling. The mechanic was based on simulations, having managers come up with coaching ideas for a number of simulated cases.

The player had a limited resource, called M-25. This was used by players to open up quantum portals which provided an link to a series of simulations. As you completed one simulation with a one page summary of your action plan, it was vetted by the trainer briefly. That opened up another simulation which lead to another, each simulation point was called a node. Some portals were two nodes deep, some were up to 10 nodes deep.

When a player completed a single node, shown above as an arrow, they were awarded a standard reward of M25. The player had a choice of many portals, but they did not know how many nodes were in each one. So they had to invest M25 to open a portal, but, could not only recover it from solving cases in that node chain, but also got a healthy completion bonus of M25 when they finished the chain. The problem is that they had no idea, when they opened a portal, how many nodes it had. There were three to five portals open at any one time, each with a mystery of how many simulations it contained, ie, how many nodes to complete to get a completion bonus.

There was a timer that would go off about every two weeks, but the precise time was not made known to players. It was just about every two weeks. At that time, the game would freeze and no player could take any actions for 24 hours. Then the game would resume 24 hours later. During this time, players could convert M25 into game points, which showed who lead. The risk was that if you spent too much M25 on advancing on the leaderboard, you might not have enough left to open new portals. So when the game re-opened 24 hours later and the leaderboard was shown, it revealed your position in the game. We built the leaderboard using an electrophoresis gel model, where you were advancing up a “race track” of sorts, the higher you were on the board, the more you were in the lead as shown below;

The player on the extreme right is leading and the bars represent their position in previous rounds. The player in the column just to the left adjacent to them, is lower and the player in the third position from the right edge was even lower. Each player was attempting to reach the top of the gel graph first, like an Olympic swimmer hitting a button when they finish their laps.

The beauty of this design is that no one knew, at any point, who was going to emerge as the new leader after the 24 hour game freeze. So the kingmaker syndrome, with a runaway lead, was not possible. If you overspent M25 to get ahead now, you would threaten your chances of opening new portals during the two week game period and fall behind. If you hoarded M25 you had no position on a leaderboard gel. But you could hoard M25 all through the game and then, in the last week, dump all those saved resources on your lead position. This made it impossible to judge who would lead at any time and produced a secondary game faking out opponents and developing fairly deep strategies for advancing.

Competition can take the form of timed drills to see who can beat the best time. Simulation-based games are very well suited for this mechanic. In a game we designed for teaching cyber security, our goal was to reduce the documents they had to memorize, with contact numbers, procedures to follow if their workstation was hijacked and other things, into a playful experience. Security protocols are dull and are so similar to each other that it is hard for learners to remember them all. The key is repetition, multiple repetitions in fact, so that the content gets memorized.

We built a game based on the fact you were a cyber security expert who was responsible for a space colony of 100,000 inhabitants. When the game started, you were on a timer to save the most number of citizens that you could. The plot line had an evil hacker shutting down your life support systems randomly, including oxygen delivery, medicine units and food storage, thus killing off your ship citizens. Each minute the game advanced, you lost 1,000 citizens. Your goal in the game was to navigate through the ship from room to room to seal off security breaches. The rooms were connected by tunnels, and to enter each room you had to answer a randomly generated question from the security documents. Those who knew the answers were able to move fast through the ship to beat the timer, those who did not know lost thousands of lives.

Static images like the one below were used in the game which was coded for Android as a mobile learning solution. This was consistent with the narrative and the competition was against one’s own self, to beat your best time each time you played. Best times were shown on a leaderboard. Best times meant you knew your cyber security protocols in the real world. So competition need not be against other players, but against one’s own personal best.

Cooperative competition games can be designed as well, which reward players for helping each other learn. To do this in one game for a Ministry of Health approved program on long term care for seniors, we developed the idea of “Kudo” points. These were points you could award to other players for making helpful contributions on discussion forums. With enough Kudo points, one would achieve the status of “most valuable player – MVP” on the forums, which signified that according to the class, you were a good person to come to with questions or help even in future classes. So this status of MVP persisted over time, so that in future incoming classes, you could, if you wished, stay in the game to help the newer players. This type of competition is not based on winning, but on personal achievements against oneself, to be so helpful that other players would reward you by an up vote.

Other competition mechanics consist of having teams complete learning challenges such as solving a simulation problem and then having the group vote on the best solution. This adds an element of entertainment to the experience but is prone to creating an adversarial atmosphere, so it should be used sparingly. The other model is that of PvP matches, where two players compete in a series of challenges against a timer. We will discuss this and the use of other “combat systems” in chapters ahead. The key take away message is that competition is a vital component of the ACES learning model and almost 40% of your students, according to Bartle’s data, will expect it and enjoy it. Don’t let your own aversions and philosophies on competition direct the design, the evidence is clear from the video and board game industries, almost half your learners like to compete. I don’t like competition much myself, it reminds me of being picked last for baseball teams as an awkward child. But I still build them into almost every game. The ACES framework dictates that we use all four components in game design, to satisfy variations in audience demand. You need to give moviegoers a film they want, not what you insist they watch. The first is entertainment, the latter is propaganda.

For those who dislike this style of play, however, it can be a turn off, and so we add to achievement and competition as mechanics our third component of ACES, exploration. Exploration is something that many people thrive on in learning, needing to know what lies ahead or what can be discovered. Exploration is the heartbeat of doing science, archeology or any form of research. This is the area we will explore….next.

Exploration Based Learning

Exploration is a game mechanic that has been widely used to increase engagement and provide a gateway to new experiences. Experiential learning, the strongest new trend in higher education, is about participating in work rather then learning about it as the core training activity. Linking experiential learning to exploration and discovery is the core structure of an ACES-derived curriculum. The umbrella narrative in any serious game should be based on exploration, to omit this element is to preclude any form of sustained motivation in a game system. What makes discovery so compelling is that our brains are hard-wired to do so. To fail at this would be to starve in neolithic times. Our entire nervous system is built to detect threat and abundance and to seek these out actively. Our psychological apparatus, from flavor, to scent, to vision and hearing is all designed to do one thing, detect small changes in patterns. Those detection mechanisms can be measured in human subjects and indicate that we parse the environment for any deviation from salient backgrounds. We are walking through a forest, it is quiet. We hear a wolf, we focus on the wolf. Everything else disappears, as we evaluate threat or opportunity. Exploration is simply searching for new opportunities or threats.

In open world games it is common to award achievements based on exploration. This is used in World of Warcraft as a key quest line to unlock powerful game upgrades, such as being able to fly instead of ride a horse everywhere. As the player explores the open world, which is scaled to represent hundreds of real world miles, they might get a notification on their screen saying “Explore Broken Isles Completed!”. They player gets immediate feedback when they complete exploration, which usually involves travelling to every region of that map.

It is not difficult to adopt exploration mechanics to learning gameworlds. In order to do this, however, one needs to write a storyline where the narrative demands that the player explore. It is not enough to simply let people wander about in a curriculum, we need to build attractor regions and domains. So when we design gameworlds we need to create a fictional place which then can be travelled through in some way to discover domains and attractors.

Building a Virtual Hospital Using Exploration as a Core Mechanic

In “The Grid’ we built a virtual hospital, a VLE. There are four wards in this hospital and the student is free to enter any of them at any time and see virtual patients. When they see these patients, as we discussed earlier, they only have access to some of the vital information needed to solve the case. By purchasing in-game items such as “Spectral Goggles” or a “medical consult” they can obtain information buried in that case to enhance the solve rate and learning associated with it. So it is not enough simply to have a fictional map, there must be something to do once you discover something. It is also nice to be able to explore more deeply if you have earned an achievement in the game. It is even  more compelling if there is some competition linked to this, as in being the “first” to find a rare item. Being “the first” scientist to discover insulin or the “first” astronaut to  land on the moon is very satisfying. The race to the summit of Mount Everest that took place between 1924 and 1956 is an example of how competition to explore can fuel nations to take pride in discovery. Competition is not so much a case of beating other players by exploring a map faster, but in what they achieve as a result of exploration. So exploration is just a means to an end, that of increasing a sense of pride and ownership in the journey of one’s avatar.

Exploration maps need not take place in virtual space, they might just be learning course content in any way they wish, what is called a “reading course” in Canadian universities, a series of essays. But this is not what we are aiming for in hyperreality design. Maps are essential in gameworlds because the very name suggests a world. The key decisions to make are what the theme is going to be, what the storyline is and where this all will take place. Basic writing 101. However, we can also make exploration the key activity which yields the highest reward as one pursues an in-game goal.

The above map is typical of the video game open world. You can travel from location to location to unlock quests by locating quest givers.

The quest giver depicted above is from World of Warcraft, the bold exclamation sign indicates that this non-player character has a quest to offer. When you click on this character, the dialogue box opens to the left. This tells you how the quest fits into the storyline and what you need to do to complete it. It also shows the rewards.

Note that there are choices of rewards in many quests, not just a bit of gold. In the case above, the player must fight many tough enemies as part of a 5-person team to have a choice of 6 different weapons, each with its own abilities for a specific type of player. Warriors will like an axe, but mages will like a staff. This linkage of exploration to quest givers is the key component of open world game design. There is no motivation to explore if there is nothing awarded for doing so, time is always precious for players. And rewards can substantially improve the players ability to do two things; a. gain increased status in the game and pride in achievement and b. open up further exploration that is forbidden without these elements. There are high level dungeons in Warcraft that can only be enjoyed once one has the right “gear level”. One improves their gear level by questing enough to unlock access to a new place, a set of dungeons, which have the most powerful weapons and armor in the game.

Each dungeon has a map, as shown above. In the dungeon, there are patrols, groups of mobs that do not reward you, but challenge you. Eventually you “clear” that patrols (called pats, or ‘trash mobs’ by players) and get to the boss fight. Each boss you fight is different, they can kill you in all kinds of ways . The final boss is the toughest challenge. This is similar to medical school, you go through lectures, then clerkship, then internship and so forth, so progression is the core element here.

Linking progression in the game to exploration is therefore vital in order for the player to have any motivation at all to travel and locate new regions. This compelling blend leads to a basic curriculum design model for open world builds shown in the table below.

This replaces a standard course outline as we have come to know them.

Note that course outlines, aside from being a kind of legal document to inform students about what they need to do to pass, are a map. They can be a good map, or a dry boring one. But they do serve as templates for designing exploration in the ACES model. Each week there are things we teach that let us talk about new things in the following session. Instead of this being a linear progression however, it can be randomized and linked to map locations. Imagine that in learning coding above,  you had to visit each topic that was located on an island. Your goal might be to conquer that island, or even better, to get an exploration achievement for doing so. One island might be on number theory taken from the course outline, another island might be on encryption theory, the outline above is on programming secure internet sites. But that is not so interesting to do, exploring the island of encryption theory. This is where we now link our theme, narrative and map to learning. This is where the art of open world design begins

The art of open design is based on having a vivid imagination to see an entire world populated with learning attractors[ii]. An attractor region for learning encryption might be inserted in a location. Let us imagine, for a moment, what this game could look like. First, let us set the entire game in 1943, and have the student play the role of an intelligence expert working to fight the Nazis. In order to beat them at intelligence and block their communication, you would have to locate scholars or scientists in the open world of 1940s Europe, travelling from town to town. This gets engagement going. Now the whole theme has to make sense as a story and it will all be constrained by reality. Immersion is based on suspension of disbelief, the willingness to enter a gameworld and pretend to participate in it. This is why we go to the movies. Immersion is not something we build for millenial learners only, all people love the movies and the feeling of being transported to another place that they provide. So lets take a second look at theme and maps for the course outline above. Let us set this in a high technology but interesting, non conventional space this time instead of locating it in reality. Both are good. Let’s see what other juicy things we can do.

I love to use steampunk themes in design, they fuse tradition with technology. Below is a typical steampunk character. Note the mix of modern and old, as though her entire wardrobe was cobbled together from bits and parts.

Note the appearance of the avatar. In the gameworld “Second Life” people are free to pick the appearance of their avatar and customize it using “mesh skins” which are photorealistic body parts. The vast majority of players love to customize their appearance. In video games like Warcraft, you can customize your appearance as well, but in a way compatible with the theme and storyline.

So now we have a steampunk world, let’s put it in outer space. Let’s say that you are being hacked by evil beings, like our cyber security game proposed. Let us say that you have to explore a new planet which has technology to decipher or cipher for intelligence. Let us now create some tension. All stories need conflict to be effective. So let us now be searching different planets for pieces of a puzzle, how to encrypt or decipher data to protect it from the evil beings. On each planet, students will find attractor regions with a ton of simulacra, case studies, which will guide them in their learning. They will access Google Scholar and other online resources to learn the basics, as they apply them using experiential learning in simulated space. Do you see how we are building an experience for the student, based on the desired content? We are not designing for content presentation any more, we are designing for experiential learning in virtual space, creating a symphony of elements. A broad, deeply constructed emotional palette.

Forming teams of explorers is a key element needed to drive socially-based learning. In order to explore some hazardous regions of space, for example, we might insist that players form small teams, each with its own ability among members. This means we would build the game using character classes, such as the Seers or Alchemists in my earliest role-playing game, “Healers’ Quest”. You simply could not solve cases as an individual, because your character might only be able to get diagnostic data or provide drug treatments, depending on your class.

Another key element in exploration is not so much in travelling through virtual space or locating learning experiences, but in trying out different combinations of in-game assets to customize. In our travel game design, built for hospitality students, each time you created a one-minute video to practice selling a destination, it unlocked new destinations. Different combinations of destinations could be scored as a set. Different sets were used to unlock further reward experiences. So by posting one destination pitch in the North American hub and one from the Asian hub, this unlocked a set of new ways to earn in-game currency. Players could personalize their simulation experience by selectively unlocking various types of travel packages they could offer, thus increasing their earnings.

This can be taken to a next step where you can choose “talents” from a talent tree, which customizes how your character can interact with the world. These talents are rule-breakers, that is, they permit you to do something special in the game.

Each point on a talent tree is called a node and as the player advanced in experience in the game, they are able to make some choices about what abilities their avatar has. Typically this is linked to experience points (XP), which increase as the player progresses in the game. For a typical game we usually build about 10 levels to start, then add to that later in the form of creating “expansion packs”. So at level 2, you get to pick a talent point, at level 3 another and so forth, each new level you achieve rewards you with a customization decision. These decisions impact game play and permit learners to select the way they progress in the game.

In the real world, we do this all the time and its so engaging that there are names for its excess. Gear acquisition syndrome (GAS) is something widely discussed on web-sites like the Acoustic Guitar Forum. GAS refers to buying new gear all the time, it becomes almost compulsive. A similar thing happens with “gear freaks”, usually men, who love buying things related to the outdoors, or photography. Its a dopaminergic cycle of addiction in some cases. But in most instances, it is the desire to explore that drives the behavior. In purchasing my gear for cycling throughout our cold Ontario winters, I went on a $1,000 spree. The first ride I took I was freezing, but my head was warm, my ears were cold, my hands were okay. Then I bought a down vest and layered my clothing more, adding some cold resistant gloves. Then I was too hot when going uphill and I was drenched from sweat. So I had to consider a breathable jacket, but they were $400 and I searched until I found one for $70. Then it rained. That was cold rain, and my feet and hands were wet, my head was cold. So now I bought GoreTex boots, neoprene cycling gloves and a rain pants. But I could not put the pants on fast if I got caught in a downpour. So I had to find pants that unzipped at top and bottom of the leg so I could wear them easily over work pants. Then it got really cold and I bought a waterproof parka.

At each phase of this spree, I was testing out combinations of gear. Eventually, over a month, I was able to cycle comfortably in bitter weather. The reward was supreme, I was gliding through snow flurries on a bike with studded tires, racing past traffic that was gridlocked. I saw Fall leaves in their last majesty, intense crimsons, sunset yellows, I smelled the leaves and felt the wind. My body was filled with energy, the feeling of cycling has the same thrill as flying for me. The point of my story is that I was exploring to find a solution and enjoying evaluating each solution, learning as I went, and now was able to do things I could not before with deep rewards. These clothes will last me the rest of my life, good outdoor gear is like that. Think of each course you design now, as this kind of thing for your students. Let them try different combinations of learning experiences, see what fits, what works for them and keep the options expanding all the time. Don’t just design an experience and dump it on them like so much offal in a fish market. Sadly, that is what we often default to. “Here, learn this”. Unlearn what you know about teaching. Let emotional artistry guide your class.

In a game we built for an award-winning personal coaching company, they wanted the theme to be set in space, where each planet of three had simulations of different types. For example, the red planet had cases about conflict resolution, the blue planet had cases about creativity and team building. In order to visit these planets you needed to spend a limited resource called Iridium. The first thing players did was arrive at the ship console where they could see a map of the three planets. They were all located at different distances from the main ship, and it cost Iridium to use as fuel. In order to access the furthest planets you needed to earn Iridium in the game. At each level you were permitted one talent tree option. One choice was to be able to conduct more than one mission (solve more than one simulation) at a time. Without this talent you could only work on one case study before you opened further ones. When you finished case studies, that awarded more Iridium, which could be used as fuel for travel, or could be traded for in-game assets such as better armor on the ship, or things to enhance your ability to create diplomacy and recruit new crew members from each planet.

The talent trees then directly influenced game play and by doing that, learning. Another talent choice was to travel faster with less Iridium cost for all further missions. So a learner could either take the talent for more cases to be opened, thus increasing the potential earnings over time when they all were solved instead of proceeding one case at a time, or be able to travel more cheaply and unlock different types of cases. Personalization of learning is very easy to build into games and is a core exploration mechanic. We are not so much exploring virtual space as we are exploring how different combinations of abilities can be used. A student in this kind of game can test out talent “builds”, but has to make hard choices each step of the way. Hard choices, where we want to do three things, but must only pick one, make games compelling. They force the learner to think about how they want to learn. This makes training fulfilling, one really has a sense of agency. These are forward-decision games, the same type we used in building SOS to solve medical issues for the frail elderly. You cannot go back and undo your talents or your decisions, you must live with the consequence – which makes decisions actually matter.

Agency refers to the feeling that a player has control of their character. If you have a game where the player can only do one thing, there is little agency. Studying player experience ratings are a new way that serious game designers are approaching selection of game mechanics. High experience or player ratings are instructive. They reveal what kinds of things we like to do in gameworlds. One of the highest ratings in studies conducted recently was for the game Bioshock. It satisfied several criteria of replayability; a good story line and real character development synched to the main narrative. It had high player agency. What you did in the game mattered and there were tons of things to do, places to explore and ways to use your abilities. A game named Darfur with very low scores was one designed to teach students about civil war and its effects on society. In this game you played the part of a refugee whose only goal each day was to get water from a well one mile away. The theme should have been an amazing opportunity to really feel what it is like to live in a war zone to create empathy.

However the game mechanics defeated the learning due to weak implementation of agency. The only thing to do in the game was get water – not so compelling. To make matters worse, and, this is key, military vehicles would appear as you tried to do so, and they would run into you and kill you, pushing you back to the village to start again. The vehicles sounded ugly and were irritating to encounter and avoiding them was difficult.

After some kills by vehicles, the game unlocked a new location and mission. Players began to run into the moving vehicles just to die and get onto further missions. There was no real agency. They had one thing to do and got killed doing it most of the time. Depressing. Other games that failed on exploration mechanics were based on fighting in Viet Nam, where when your player got ambushed, you had to start a tedious mission all over again. Equally frustrating was the permadeath of the original role playing video game, Everquest. If you died in that game, you were gone. Everything your player had collected through blood, sweat and tears for years, could be erased in one bad second. The game Remission was designed to teach kids about cancer, where you searched the body for tumors to kill them off, a great idea! But it failed because once you found cancer, you just shot a beam at it and hoped for the best. Each tumor looked the same so nothing was unique about a quest. These are plodding, well-intentioned game designs which held great promise but failed due to poor mechanics. Everquest, in fairness, was very popular, but when the new generation of MMORPGs was released, where you could resurrect after being killed with a small penalty, it faded. Now players could try crazy things to see how to use their abilities and if they died, they learned from it and improved.

Bad mechanics which punish players for mistakes are referred to as digital leashes. They are ways to force players into learning and deny any form of agency. Games with high agency such as Black and White, by designer Pierre Moulineux and Fable both had fascinating agency – without the leash. In Black and White, you played the part of a God, who oversaw an entire Island. Your job was to create more followers by helping your people do things, or to just play on the Island and create things of your own. These “God” games give high levels of agency and exploration. In the game Black and White, your game was open ended, it was the first game of its genre. You were there just to explore what you could do with your God abilities and see how you could shape your Island’s progression. In Fable, Moulineaux had you playing the part of a character travelling through a mythological kingdom. As you did things that were morally right, your character looked nicer and nicer. If you did morally bad things like killing random characters in the game, your “toon” (gamer’s name for avatar) would get uglier over time. So in strong agency exploration games, you can explore consequences of your decisions.

When I interviewed the design lead for Deus Ex, he discussed this extensively when asked about why he thought this game had been a AAA commercial success. In this game, depending on moral choices you make, new game worlds would open up. So you could try playing the game a few different ways, and see what kinds of experience that provides. In World of Warcraft  you can level a character as either Horde or Alliance, two different factions in the game. They both provide completely different experiences. They take place in two different continents, with entirely different storylines connected to the main theme and overall narrative. So in really strong agency exploration games you can play again and again, each time changing talents, game story, visual experiences and challenges. Very few serious games anticipate these player needs and most are composed of simplistic elements where you do one or two things. Remember, we are aiming in open world design to build conglomerations of player satisfaction, not just one or two goals, such as selling real estate or doing well at a quiz.

Exploration mechanics build highly motivating and engaging elements into learning of subjects as un-sexy as accounting or coding by creating agency and curiosity. However, none of these things works as well as it might for learning unless it is socially connected. This is where the video game world informs, but does not dictate best practices. There are thousands of video games you can play by yourself and they are highly successful. Complete agency. But there are many which also demand you play with other people which have achieved success such as Warcraft. In learning we can use one of the most powerful tools available, teamwork, to advance a game narrative. To fail to take advantage of this potent learning strategy, problem-based learning (PBL), would be a major oversight in game development. The impressive literature on team-based case simulation learning produced over the past 40 years is difficult to ignore for people with even a passing interest in education.

The post Beyond Engagement: Competition and Exploration in Serious Games Using Digital Narrative first appeared on Ludogogy.

While playing videogames, children seem to reach immersion levels not found anywhere else. They go to sleep thinking about how soon they can be awake again so they can keep playing. While they are playing, you can scream; you can do summersaults; they will not break concentration. And if you question them about the game, they can recite you so much lore that it could easily fill a history manual. Of course, we want children to learn with as much excitement and engagement as they play!

But if games are mostly used for fun and to escape reality, using games for learning could break that purpose and become paradoxical. And that is where educational game development gets stuck.

That has not stopped researchers, game developers and educators from producing millions of educational games, some more successful than others, using different genres, different processes, mechanics, game elements, to the point where the variety of such tools is becoming too much – and for so little result.

There have been so many failed attempts. And with each experiment that did not give the results developers desired, they looked at creating more complex games and using more advanced technologies such as 3D, AR and even VR; searching for what was missing. 

The answer cannot be found in technology, or by giving the user a wider range of graphic and mechanical possibilities to explore in the games, just as that is not the answer for any sort of videogame. 

What is missing in educational games is, literally, the size of a world

Developers and educators often confuse the reasons why gamers play. If they have not played themselves, it is easy to place all games in the same “bag”. In reality, the reasons for playing are many and not limited to fun elements. Curiosity, development, creating alternatives, looking for possibilities, exploration, relaxation, are all possible motives.

And that is where worldbuilding becomes an interesting system.

By creating games that children play, not only because they are fun, but also because they become intertwined with the story and immersed into the adventures and the game world, we find that even when the game is forcing players into doing meaningless and repetitive tasks, they will happily grind if it allows them to progress and evolve.

Any D&D player knows that. As WoW gamers can tell you, while they take eight-hour-long strolls, playing is not always fun. Consider those hardcore old school Runescape players, who would  spend weeks in a poorly designed Java-based game simply fishing. Yes, you read that right – not catching monsters or fighting dark powers – fishing.

And that is due to the existence of a complex and complete world. Just as in fantasy literature, success comes when a game is full of elements such as geography, weather variations, a societal structure, a socioeconomic fabric, important characters, a massive amount of history that adds depth, and a narrative that places the gamer inside the story and the events which unfold. Developing games is also about creating worlds for the players. 

Without a whole world to explore, playing might become repetitive, boring even, and if you remove the fun element, you remove any motivation for the gamer to play. It still might be better than simply studying, but not by a lot. 

Research says as much, with gamified learning environments producing lower long-term retention learning rates than schools (Putz & Treibmaier, 2019). On the other hand, role playing games show higher immersion rates and, even better, a positive connection between gameplay and learning (Sancho, et al., 2009).

Worldbuilding as a System

Worldbuilding is not just a tool for creating good and immersive games. It can also be a system, and a good one at that. Designing worlds is a complex procedure, which is full of dangers, just like the cliffs that surround the Argonath. Very much like going down the rabbit hole for the first time, it is not for the faint of heart. But if you have the talent of a seeker and the wits of a Citadel scholar, you just might find that this tool can become your dæmon.

Even when designing the simplest of games, you probably need characters. And those characters are alive. They communicate with the player. How do they talk; with an accent? If yes, why? Where do they come from; some far away land? Sure. Why there? What are they doing so far from home?

The scenarios where the game occur are there for a reason, your player must move through mountains. Which ones? How are they named? Where are they located? Now the action moved to the moon. Does that make any sense? Probably not. 

Here is one last example. Your player has to complete a set of tasks; let us say, a series of mathematical equations. It is fun, surely. It is also educational. If completed, the player receives a badge, an achievement and wins a hat for their avatar! Cool, right? Wrong! They are working just so they can customize their avatar?! 

What about the story behind the equations? Why those? Why not create a scenario where those equations help rescue a walrus from being captured by evil pirates? Wouldn’t that be more fun? Now let us expand! The Walrus is named Tom and he is very friendly. The player is now in the Arctic. Why? You were sent on an expedition by the Royal Academy of Walrus Protectors of the Kingdom of Wallabe. This is just one of the missions you see! Walruses are in grave danger, especially those from the Droughtnought Tribe because their chief is very stubborn. Those pirates you managed to avoid earlier, remember? You did that by completing a set of equations to calculate the strength necessary to break the metal bars in their cages. Then you followed them to Ground Kindir, their hideout. What next? Maybe another calculation to avoid detection? And so on.

The bigger the world, the more depth you can give the story and the context in which it plays out. This also means that, even if you decide not to use 90% of the world created, it now has room to expand; without breaking away from the narrative built; without “betraying” your players who are more curious than ever about the fate of that world and its characters. Worldbuilding can be, as you see, an enormously powerful system.

Worldbuilding for Game-based Learning Environments and Collaboration

Creating worlds for educational games is an interesting challenge for two reasons. First, it implies a collaboration between several professionals, game developers, designers, publishers and, most importantly, teachers; all of whom have their own set of constraints and desired outcomes. 

Game developers, for instance, focus on game mechanics, which might or might not be useful to teachers, who are more concerned about the means of getting the educational contents inside the game. Publishers might be worried about what type of content is appropriate for a school scenario. Will it  include any sort of violence or will it, even accidentally, create of negative impact on the learners? Designers, therefore, are also under a lot of pressure to create acceptable content.

The second challenge can also be an opportunity. Worldbuilding for education means creating a mixture of game content such as narrative, quests and adventures and educational contents. The more learning moments and information you can insert into a narrative without breaking immersion, the better. This requires imagination. And a lot of people have more creativity than just one. Each team element can bring their own ideas, scenarios, adventures, characters, and all their individuality.

But even if you do need to “steal” a few moments from the game to teach the player something they absolutely need to learn for the educational objectives you set for the game; if your story is engaging enough, then, just as they are willing to spend hours grinding away in any other RPG, they will listen to all the teachers have to say.

A Small Note on Discrimination

Plenty has been said about looking down on people who are gamers, but extraordinarily little seems to be changing. Viewed by a large part of society as antisocial by nature, they are geeks, freaks, weirdos. And even among those who accept gamers, at least superficially, what I find even more intriguing is the negative mindset towards anything game-related. 

The same applies to anything fantasy-related. Worldbuilding requires anyone who attempts it to get out of a world-sized box and create a new one. It is, not only a massive challenge, but a creativity test. It most definitely should not be looked down upon, as anyone who can create a whole new world just through their mind should be, at the very least, encouraged and commended.

“May the worlds you build be better than the one you inherited”

– Trent Hergenrader

The post Worldbuilding in Game-based Learning Environments – A System and a Tool first appeared on Ludogogy.