Patrick Dunn's absolutely right, one of the barriers to game-based learning is the perceived difficulty of playing games. But it's not just a perception.
One of my favourite games of recent months (a Role-Playing Game and, I think, an interesting model for delivering a spiral curriculum to learners) is Echo Bazaar. I've recommend this game to a few people and most of them found it incredibly frustrating ("I was in this prison thing, and I didn't know what to do..."). I've even sat with a couple of people and watched them flounder at the unfamiliarity of the setting.
Here's some (unofficial, from a fansite) instructions from MMORPG Info for Echo Bazaar:
Above all, Echo Bazaar is a game for exploration. There’s no need to know every detail and no rulebook you have to flick through. If you make the wrong decision, then at worst, you’ve wasted actions and you’ll always get more of those.For exploration, read 'confusion', it seems. Is this bad design?
Another couple of examples. Poptropica is one of the biggest Massively Multiplayer Online games out there, and it's for kids. Have a go at signing up (it'll only take a minute or so, erm, probably). Did you make it? My mum didn't when I roped her in for an impromptu experiment. If you think that was too easy, try and sign up for the wonderful Improbable Island. The difficulty here is part of the fun, isn't it?
. . . imagine a player that didn’t realize that you need to push the button on the joystick in order to do something.1 Such an example may seem ludicrous, but it is one faced by many non-gamers whenever they are faced with a freakishly complex modern controller. Many game designs automatically assume the ability to navigate a 3D space using two fiddly little analog sticks and a plethora of obscure buttons. Users without this skill give up in frustration without ever seeing the vast majority of the content. . .
It is very important to realize that such users aren’t stupid. They merely have a different initial skill set. One of our jobs as designers is to ensure that the people who play our game are able to master the game’s early skill atoms. Ultimately this means making an accurate list of pre-existing skills for the target demographic . . .
The Chemistry of Game Design2
It's one of the basics of Learning Design that you don't overload learners with extraneous cognitive load ie annoy your users. But, games are, well, different. When Nintendo put in a new help feature it was described as contraversial. In fact, gamers consider the whole instructions thing to be a bit of a joke, as you can see if you play the heavily ironic You Have to Burn the Rope. (As an experiment, if you're not much of a gamer, play the game. The whole point of the joke is that it's supposed to be ridiculously easy - but I bet some of you have trouble. If you do play games, play anyway because the 'reward' for finishing is aces.) Something is going on here.
Look at the instructions for another really good game, The Company of Myself - they're all embedded in the narrative of the game. But try and click the 'Help Me' button for more help and you get a message basically telling you to try harder - this is a puzzle game, being stuck is part of the fun.
Okay, here's the thing: if I was going to use a dice in the classroom, I'd expect everybody to be able to use it. Same for a mouse, I'd expect them to be able to point and click. Is it unreasonable of me to expect them to be able to, say, sign up for Echo Bazaar? Should a good learning designer make their materials accessible for the dysludic?
The thing is, making things easy for learners isn't necessarily in learners' best interests. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade - and life does give us lemons, curveballs and wicked problems all the time. On the other hand, if learning designers give you 7-up, you'll merely get fat.
Kornell and Bjork write on the Stability Bias [PDF] or the common tendency for people to overestimate the power of their memory and underestimate how much they'll (a) forget and (b) gain from conscious learning activities:
An inaccurate mental model of how learning works will lead to counterproductive study decisions, and students whose model incorporates a stability bias—that is, an underestimation of their potential to learn and an overemphasis their current memory state—become susceptible not only to studying too little and giving up too quickly, but also to lowering, and/or failing to realize, their aspirations.And, I'd argue, it's not just learners who suffer from Stability Bias. Learning Designers who seek to remove the gristle from learning and focus only on providing an interface that requires little or no "learning overhead" are short-sighted. As Findability expert Peter Morville points out, the most poweful route to a Teachable Moment is: Break a pat tern.3
Games have a simple message about difficulty. Give the Platform game a go, to see what I mean. Dysludia isn't an inability to sign in to Poptropica or navigate a 3D space using fiddly analogue sticks; it's the inability to learn through trial and error, risk-taking, non-linear navigation and working up a brain-sweat.
Dying to hear what you think about all this. Especially about games and spiral curricula. The next few posts are going to be about Games Based Learning 2010, which was wonderful.
Next: what can teachers and learning designers take from game design?
1Here's Charlie Brooker saying something similar:
From their perspective, even the joypad is daunting. To you it's as warm and familiar as a third hand. To them it's the control panel for an alien helicopter.
But you persevere, press the pad into their unenthusiastic hands, and offer to talk them through a few minutes of play. And almost immediately you have to bite your tongue to avoid screaming. They run into walls or hit pause by mistake. They swing the camera around until they can see nothing but their own feet, then forward-roll under a lorry. They try to put the controller down, complaining that they're "no good at this". You force them to have another go, but within minutes you're behaving like a bad backseat driver.2The Chemistry of Game Design is a great read for anybody interested in games and learning. There are striking parallels between games and Instructional Design.
3This doesn't mean providing a crappy UX or a badly-designed UI. Here's an example of an incredibly rich and, yes, initially confusing UI in the game Caesary described by Mark Oehlert.
