A presentation on the game Risk Horizon and its design influences, specifically the element of mystery and discovery and how learning games should embrace this philosophy. Game created by the Emerson Engagement Lab.
Introduce Trauma-Informed Design to Your Organization - CSUN ATC 2024
Tales from the Aloran insurance Salesman: Bridging the Gap Between Learning Games and indie Hits
1. Tales From the Aloran
Insurance Salesman:
Bridging The Gap Between
Learning Games and Indie Hits
Jordan Pailthorpe
Project Manager
Emerson Engagement Lab
www.engagementgamelab.org
@jpailthorpe
2. A real time strategy game that teaches how
and why risk management is important for
healthy development.
www.RiskHorizon.org
3. LEARNING FOR WITH GAMES!
Learningful Play!
Games to Learn with!
Learning as Games!
Educational gamelike experiences!
Tools for games with learning maybe?
Games?
9. Hard Questions
• How can we effectively push players to
discover the game verb and experiment
with the game’s functions?
• How do we entice players to talk with
each other on the forums in order to
share gameplay strategies or insight into
the correlation between the game and
the content?
• How do we make playing out a scene
from the World Development Report, a
394 page pdf, fun and accessible?
11. The only information displayed when the game begins
Candybox | http://candies.aniwey.net/
12. more actions open up as the game goes on
Candybox | http://candies.aniwey.net/
13. The game builds and builds out, eventually taking you on quests and into dungeons
Candybox | http://candies.aniwey.net/
14. “Candy Box is built on continually surprising players by
rewarding patience and curiosity. After a few minutes
of throwing candy or interacting with the merchant,
more things appear: A farm where you can plant the
lollipops you've bought, with the promise they'll
produce more lollipops. More items appear in the
Candy Merchant's menu, including a sword. And then
you earn buttons to view your inventory and to
undertake a quest, and then you're off.”
- Leigh Alexander
Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/191740/Why_Candy_Box_became_more_social_than_social_games.php
15. “[Candy Box is] so minimalistic that
it recalls a beloved earlier age of
games, when all of them were
opaque and mysterious, and the
only real way to progress was to
share playground lore.”
- Leigh Alexander
Play to discover, rather than play to master.
18. You could try to get those items, but you might get eaten by a Dragon.
19. “Dark Souls has many daunting labels
attached to its name; difficult, cruel,
torturous, brutal and intimidating. And
while these are accurate, it's the sense of
discovery in its strange, oppressive world
and the relief of surviving its trials that
make Dark Souls rewarding like few other
games are.”
- Matthew Reynolds
Source: http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/levelup/a529058/why-dark-souls-is-our-game-of-the-generation.html
21. Design Influences
• Very little onboarding/handholding
• Light and obscure narrative lore
• Difficult system with mechanical
simplicity
• Generating a discourse community
23. “I don’t understand why playing
computer games should count as a
result. Give me a case studies and ask
me questions afterwards but please, I
don’t want to spend hours and hours
playing computer games.”
24. “I do not agree that the Game teaches
Strategic Thinking for Better Community
Development. It is simply a Computer
Game. Like any other Computer Game,
the more skilled at Computer Games
you are, the higher the levels at which
you can be successful.”
25. “If you want serious solutions, it's
better user statistical data or Matrix
probabilities. not the game. this
game looks like Kids game.”
“You don't need gimmicks to
communicate. Just tell us what you
want to tell us in an organized
fashion.”
28. “I finally finished level 6 after many, many trys. Tips:
develop the community and then strategize. When I
began playing it, I was such a conservative player,
starting at only 2 or 3 Aloran pods. I realized I was so
scared of the shocks that I was almost paralyzed and
anxious as a community developer. After many try outs, I
then got the point: As an illuminator, the key is
community effort along with research, insurance and
protection.”
29. “I was impressed with the content and found it contributed
very constructively to my getting real sense on those issues
presented to the second week's lectures; I really enjoyed the
game and I was receptive to the experience; I confronted the
stressful situation of risks and challenged decisions under
constraints. I realized the importance of being fully aware
about the community's future incidents; keeping
simultaneously paces of its developing/ and or upgrading; I
also experienced the necessity of keeping balance among
research, protection and insurance.
30. “One strategy I've found really helpful: once I hit
my development goal for a level, I pour all my
resources into protection and don't start building
again until I'm bumped into the next level. This
makes good sense in real life, as well: no point
pouring money into development without
protecting the communities in which you've
invested time and resources! “
31. “After about ten attempts I have completed the
game. The dynamics are very interesting and, i
believe, resonate well with real life. Those of you
who are not keen on the game, it is a great real
time scenario, and equates experiential
learning.”
32. “It is not that difficult to get through to levels 5 or 6.
You just need to think what you would do in a real-life
situation, well if you consider that you can't
move away from Alora. The point is not to have a lot
of money in the bank, or having 75% insurance, or
having highest protection levels. Everything is about
balance. Sometimes you need to risk lower
insurance and keep some money for a severe
meteor/comet strike. Sometimes you need a lot of
insurance, because you have to build a lot”
33. “Overall very interesting game and
learning experience, mimicking the
reality very well - you feel so real
when you succeeded or failed: I still
remember the first time I
successfully handled a 10-degree
hit without any damage.”
34. in order to succeed you must learn,
you must pay attention, you must discover and explore.
35. we can create spaces where students make connections
through experimentation and discovery.
My name is Jordan Pailthorpe and I am a project manager / game designer at the Engagement Lab at Emerson College. We are an applied research lab focusing on the development and study of games, technology, and new media to enhance civic life.
My design team recently completed a project called Risk Horizon, a game created in partnership with the World Bank Institute to operate as an assessment within a MOOC on balancing risk management practices with healthy development.
Though I could get into some of the nuances of the implementation and assessment elements of Risk Horizon, I would really like to take this opportunity to more directly engage with the conversations already taking place at this conference and in the field around what makes a learning game a learning game and what can be learned from game designers who don’t frame their games AS learning games. I also want to show how we attempted to do just this, successfully or not, in order to bridge the gap between “learning games” and “indie hits” through the underlying design philosophy of Risk Horizon. That said, I did write a more formal post mortem that you can find on the engagement lab’s blog.
The MOOC’s focus taught general applications of risk management on a wide range of economic and social levels (household, community, policy, government, etc.). Though traditional tests and essays give instructors a good idea of how well participants read and understood the material in the course, our partners wanted to see if participants could synthesize the material and apply it.
Therefore, one of the major goals of this project was to create a space where players would take the subjective, case study driven data they were learning outside the game and attempt to apply the concepts in a contextualized metaphorical setting.
Because the content was trying to explain how risk management actions (such as putting protective measures in place in case of flooding, or investing money into an insurance plan) needed to be balanced with healthy development (a catch all phrase for any kind of economic, social, or tangible growth) in order to thrive, the game verb became balancing.
As a Real time Strategy Game, the player needed to expend resources to grow small pods, effectively increasing their development score. At the same time, to protect these pods from falling comets, they would need to use three distinct risk management actions (protection, insurance, and research) that either take away resources or valuable time.
The goal for the player was to figure out the main game verb themselves, to learn that the only way to effectively succeed is to assess threats and adjust the balance between risk management actions and development.
Now all we had to do was make this engaging to an audience consisting of people from all over the world with little to no videogame play experience within a 15-25 minute play window and have it ready for implementation in 6 weeks.
At the same time, like many game developers, we had to come up with answers to hard questions
How can we effectively push players to discover the game verb and experiment with the game’s functions?
How do we entice players to talk with each other on the forums in order to share gameplay strategies or insight into the correlation between the game and the content?
How do we make playing out a scene from the World Development Report, a 394 page pdf, fun and accessible?
In order to bring risk horizon to life , I turned to other games and thought about how they attempted to answer questions like these. Not necessarily within their mechanics or gameplay loops, but more so the aesthetic design choices or the “gamefeel” for lack of a better word. I wondered why their game became so popular with players even though it wouldn’t fit the generally accepted successful design stereotypes of major entertainment hits or successful learning games.
Though on the surface both games are radically different from both Risk horizon and from each other., these two games became big influences on our design process.
The first was a game called Candybox. How many people have heard of this game?
Candybox is a free minimalist ASCII based browser game about growing lollipops and going on quests and solving puzzles and eating all of the candies.
When you open the game for the first time you are presented with no instructions, no direction, and no understanding of why you are gaining candies.
After a minute or so you see this strange ASCII cowboy looking character known as the Candy Merchant who wants to sell you lolipops.
The game moves outwards from that point and soon enough you realize you aren’t just watching a candy counter, but playing a strange game that feels nonsensical and at the same time makes perfect sense. Leigh Alexander writes
“Candy Box is built on continually surprising players by rewarding patience and curiosity. After a few minutes of throwing candy or interacting with the merchant, more things appear: A farm where you can plant the lollipops you've bought, with the promise they'll produce more lollipops. More items appear in the Candy Merchant's menu, including a sword. And then you earn buttons to view your inventory and to undertake a quest, and then you're off.”
That element of surprise also applies to how Candybox was released: it just appeared one day on the internet with no marketing or hype. It gained most of its traction through word of mouth and left players with little to no help of what to expect around the next corner. This resulted in an almost viral playing where players would experiment themselves and then share those results with others on Twitter or through blog posts.
Leigh Alexander writes “ [Candy Box is] so minimalistic that it recalls a beloved earlier age of games, when all of them were opaque and mysterious, and the only real way to progress was to share playground lore.
Candybox, whether intentionally designed this way or not, created community driven dialogue around how the game’s system worked. It pushed its players to play to discover, rather than play to master.
This impulse to leave players in the dark is one of the biggest reasons why the game resonated so well with audiences and why the game had this mysterious, engaging nature.
Which is a great transition to the next game
Dark Souls is a AAA 3d action adventure role playing game that is known for its intense difficulty, though commentary on its difficulty is typically misunderstood and simplified. Dark Souls is difficult, but it is difficult because learning a new foreign system and navigating a strange world should be challenging.
Unlike most AAA console games, Dark Souls does not handhold the player through the experience and instead places the onus on you to discover solutions to challenges and even to figure what it is you need to do and why you are there.
For example, once the player beats the sparse tutorial (which is a challenge in in of itself) they are dropped in a crumbling ruin type area. There is a knight sitting next to a bonfire. He tells you to ring two bells, somewhere high and somewhere low, but gives you no further direction or advice. There is no map, no objective markers, and no direct path. The player must discover what they need to do to succeed and look for a path forward.
Dark Souls gives its players the tools they need to succeed, but asks them to figure out how to use them and encourages a balance between experimentation and evaluating risks.
Matthew Reynolds of Digital Spy sums this up best:
“Dark Souls has many daunting labels attached to its name; difficult, cruel, torturous, brutal and intimidating. And while these are accurate, it's the sense of discovery in its strange, oppressive world and the relief of surviving its trials that make Dark Souls rewarding like few other games are.”
So how do these two games, a small indie game entirely created in ASCII art and a AAA 3d action adventure role playing game for major consoles, relate to a real time strategy learning game?
We attempted to follow design impulses from both Candybox and Dark Souls in order to create an experience that was a little strange and confusing to players. We were influenced in the following ways:
Very little onboarding/handholding
Aside from a basic tutorial that helped players understand the function of interface and objectives, the deeper strategies of how to pass levels or even what to do to succeed was intentionally left obscure.
Light and obscure narrative lore
Like Dark Souls and Candybox, there is lore, but it is intentionally ambiguous and the play experience does not rely on the lore. Instead, we tried to use the lore as a way to make players wonder about the world they are helping and hope the same struggles would metaphorically translate to theirs.
Difficult system with mechanical simplicity
Combining the mechanical simplicity of Candybox with the challenging risk/reward nature of Dark Souls, we structured Risk Horizon so that failure was part of the learning process. There were no players who were able to complete the game on the first try. This difficulty boost was important because it made players pay close attention to the nuances of each action and the balance between them, but also rewarded players with a sense of accomplishment after figuring out how to complete a level, or applying the strategy someone outlined in the forums.
Generating a discourse community
Both Candybox and Dark Souls, through their mysterious nature, invoked players to communicate with each other in order to learn the systems and how to succeed. We wanted Risk Horizon to be difficult enough where players could feel rewarded for sharing gameplay strategies and secret tips (such as holding the mouse button down when creating connections in the protection minigame instead of clicking it) , but also discuss the connections between the content and the game itself.
That being said, not all players were excited about this approach to learning, though it is hard to tell if those who voiced negative concerns over the experience simply weren’t seeing the value of game experiences as tools for learning, if the design was much too complex and difficult for them to grasp, or a combination of both.
Sooo yeaaah. At this point it was early in the week about a day or two after the game went live. I was pretty nervous that because of the negative feedback, we weren’t meeting our goals.
But after 3-5 days of the game being played, comments began to turn around, indicating that the choice for hard difficulty and encouraging discovery in an intentionally obscure system produced interesting results. Here are some quotes from participants later in the week.
You can imagine how giddy I was to see these anonymous posts critically analyzing the gameplay mechanics and in turn seeing how the content knowledge applies to their game experience. It makes sense that more participants found the experience rewarding after spending more time with the game playing and experimenting rather than trying once and giving up.
on Thursday Sean Duncan and Mark Chen mentioned that thinking about games as learning or games with learning is not as efficient or as effective as thinking about games that encourage players to actually play with a system in order to find the boundaries and push against them.
It resonated with me, because it made me think less about how players “acquire” knowledge and more about how the game mechanics and implementation can help push players to discover meaning outside the experience, either on their own or through engaging in active discourse communities that emerge around game.
The concept of mystery/wonder that is inherent in the games listed above is something that I feel translates so well to game experiences that outside partners are clamoring for, because in order to succeed you must learn, you must pay attention, you must discover and explore. By not telling the player how to fail, or what to expect, or what to be wary of, or how to learn, games like Candybox and Dark Souls expect the player to discover the systems themselves. In order succeed the player must experiment and explore or turn to other players for help or understanding.
Applying some of these design philosophies into learning games can help them more engaging and inspire player centered experimentation and collaborative learning, which tends to mirror modern education theory and practice. Instead of telling students what they need to know and then testing them on it, we can create spaces where students use the resources available to make connections through experimentation and discovery.
Of course incorporating these elements does not always mean outright success, and in our case, alienated some of our targeted audience.
But I truly believe that Risk Horizon was better for it, because for every player who either quickly dismissed the experience or voiced concerns about not knowing how to win, another would speak up about the playfully mysterious way the game presented the material and how that delivery method was engaging and useful for them.
If we want learning games to engage players in a way that differentiates them from traditional formal classroom assignments, taking more risks with the medium itself by turning to contemporary indie and cult game titles could help cross that chasm while driving the experience closer to the type learning experiences we want to embody.