I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games.  If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.

~

Nothing has been more important to my development as a game designer than getting acquainted with the independent game scene in my area, namely Chicago.  Learning about the ethos and the culture behind the wider indie game scene has only fall in love with it more.  The tenets of indie game culture are many, but there’s something I want to try to explore in connection with the specific genre I’m engaged with at the moment: ‘Make Something Original.’

‘Make Something Original’ is, I think, the most valuable thing that Indies can offer.  While big-budget games can have original elements, I think it’s safe to say that AAA game developers are unwilling to risk wholly original games.  In contrast, independent game developers are willing and eager to create whole new genres, some of which stretch the entire definition of games.

Running parallel to Independent games is a new renaissance in educational games, lead by academic institutions like Games*Learning*Society and the Center for Games and Impact , medium-sized game studios like Filament Games and E-Line Media and non-profits like the Institute of Play.  These groups are proving the efficacy of games for learning every day.

One of my favorite Filament games

Why Learning Games and Indies are Such a Good Match

As I grow to appreciate more and more, games for learning require a flexible approach to game design.  There is room for games at three stages of the learning process:

1. Need to Know.  This is the stage where a student is motivated to learn something.  For example, having students play a few rounds of Cannons (or Worms, or Angry Birds) might motivate them to learn ballistics formulas.
2. Content or Skills.  This is what most people think of when they think of learning.  All modern well-designed games teach the player the skills and knowledge necessary to play as part of the initial play experience.  A few make this play experience about something with real-world analogs, and thus teach real-world skills or content as a side-effect of play.  For example, this game about running a constitutional law firm.
3. Assessment. Most educational games are actually in this category (though they may claim to be in category 2).  Examples are Math Blaster and Mandarin Madness.

At their best, learning games are capable of covering all of these phases simultaneously, but that requires an openness to letting the subject matter and game mechanics influence and inform one another.  As Scot Osterweil once put it to me (I paraphrase), ‘the designer must find within the topic what is playful and let that be the kernel the game is built around.’

When risk-averse organizations attempt to design games for learning, what results is often a proven game mechanic (such as Mario-style platforming) paired arbitrarily with a learning goal (like diabetes management – this is a real game).  When indies experiment with educational game design, the results are not always polished, but are usually at least cohesive.

There is already a lot of crossover, in terms of personnel.  Some of the most innovative independent designers have already dipped their toes in the water of educational games, perhaps recognizing the usefulness of the independent design philosophy to pedagogy.

• On the top of the list is Eric Zimmerman, a games educator as well as maker of educational games.  The studio he founded, Gamelab (no longer operating, but still influential), worked on several educational games for Lego, and, with Katie Salen‘s leadership, eventually spun off both the Institute of Play and Gamestar Mechanic, a game that teaches game design.
• Jesse Schell, who wrote the touchstone book “The Art of Game Design,” has been known to create educational games.  Most of his company’s work is for-hire, but Schell Games has developed a name for itself when it comes to creating learning experiences, especially for children.  As a former Disney Imagineer, Schell seems to have a gift for inspiring childlike wonder.
• Robin Hunicke, famous for Sims 2 and the dearly departed Glitch, recently started a new studio, in part to create transformative games: Funomena.
• Steve Swink, who you may know from his current project SCALE, was lead designer of Atlantis Remixed (a literacy game for high school kids at Arizona State University).
• John Murphy is 1/8th of the team behind Octodad.  He also has another job, as game designer at Chicago Quest, a middle school with a mission to implement game-like learning throughout their curriculum.
• There was also a familiar name announced as a nominee for Most Significant Impact at the Games for Change festival.  Lucas Pope who has recently gained notoriety for the game ‘Papers, Please’ was nominated for an earlier game ‘Republica Times,’ which is about the ethics of journalism.

If only digital bison were as plentiful now as they were in the 1990s. Sigh.

What’s Holding Indies Back from creating Educational Games?

First, a small criticism of the indie scene I love so dearly: there is a significant slice of our community who create games primarily in order to recapture the glory of the games of their childhood.  That is to say, they want to be the triple-A developers of the early 90s.  This is fine on its own, but it’s not the most fertile ground for potential crossover between indies and eddies (as I hereby dub educational game developers).

This brings up the topic of history.  Educational games had a golden age in the early 90s with games like Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, and Sim City (all of which have become ongoing franchises).  Shortly after, there was an explosion of content in the category called ‘Edutainment.’  Edutainment was, by and large, a series of ineffective, boring tarted-up flash-card systems which have given educational technology a stigma that we are only now starting to overcome.  It is partly the fear of returning to this state that led me to write this rant on Gamasutra.  It is this fear that may be holding back other indies from designing games for education.

The idea that pedagogical theory is a rigorous and difficult discipline might be another barrier.  There is some truth to this supposition — there is a body of knowledge about effective teaching which would benefit any prospective eddie.  This should not scare us away.  Firstly, there are so many experts in teaching around (namely teachers), it’s not hard to find yourself a consultant or partner.  In addition, it’s a field where there is little definitive knowledge, and what there is is largely intuitive.  It’s intuitive not because it is trivial, but because it has become part of the culture.  Ideas like Learning Styles and Bloom’s Taxonomy infuse themselves quickly in the zeitgeist through every small-town schoolteacher.

Finally, there is a genuine obstacle to becoming an eddie, which is that learning games are hard.  Like, super hard.  Making a game that entertains people is easy compared to making an engaging and effective educational game (I.M.H.O).  Still, I think it’s worth trying.

To be read in the style of Shirley Bassey.

What I’m Doing

As you may already know, I formed an independent educational game studio called Important Little Games where I’m engaged in making a learning game called Codemancer.

I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games.  If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.

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I’m working on a game that involves magic and magical epistemology.  Consequently, I’ve been doing a lot of research about magical systems.  I’d like to describe a few here, for those of you interested in incorporating magic into your games.  One of the things I think games is best suited to, is to give a person the feeling of being able to do something impossible.  What could be more impossible, or more satisfying, than the ability to use magic?  I hope that this post will inspire you to create interactive systems of magic that are amusingly unique and uniquely amusing.

Harry Potter & The Lord of the Rings (& Naruto)

I love Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings series both, but they share a sloppy dismissive view of magic.  If I were going to try to attempt to answer questions about how magic works in the universes these works of fiction take place, I’d be hard pressed for a place to start.  There seem to be spells for all kinds of things available in various arcane languages, but with very little discernible pattern as to how the spells are constructed.  Magical items, too, might answer to any description, and can have arbitrary powers.

J.R.R. Tolkien, J.K. Rowing and Masashi Kishimoto are great writers, so they don’t use spells or items as deus-ex-machina.  Every spell or item is well introduced to the reader before it can have an impact on the plot.  Nonetheless, the lack of a coherent mythology which explains the workings of magic invites this kind of abuse of narrative form, and less skilled writers who try to emulate these authors or who work in a similar milieu have trouble pulling out a previously unheard-of magical trick when it is convenient for the story.

In a way, it is unfortunate that J.R.R. Tolkien was so influential to Gary Gygax, and that Gary Gygax has had such a huge impact on video games.  This kind of disordered free-for-all view of magic makes the enjoyment of many games (such as WoW) dependent upon memorization (or constant reference), in some measure, for their full enjoyment.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

In this novel, magic was an art lost to time, except for a few obscure references scattered across a few hundred rare and otherwise un-entertaining books, so it would be excusable for the magic to be just as chaotic as in LOTR, since the characters only have a small piece of an established body of knowledge.  In fact, it does seem this way for most of the novel’s length.

Near the end, however, a bit of coherence is added when Mr. Strange is granted nearly limitless power.  He merely speaks to the objects in nature in their own language, and they obey.  This is an element of magical fiction I like to call the “Language of Nature.”  While not being a perfect explanation for how magic is allowed to influence the world within the fiction, it at least provides a distinct path to mastery — to learn magic, you must learn this language.  This also implies that the elements of nature have a a degree of consciousness; at least enough to understand a (presumably unconstructed, aka natural) language, and obey.

This also helps one of the important narrative conundrum in any fictional universe that includes magic: ‘why can’t everyone use magic all the time?’  In this case, the answer is that the language is largely forgotten, or (even better) it is extraordinarily difficult to master.

This brings to mind the general principle, shared by many conceptions of magic, that symbols can have a direct influence on the world (other than via the human mind).  In truth, it seems that the ‘language of nature’ seems to be Mathematics, but it’s a language nature only speaks but doesn’t understand.  This must have frustrated even the earliest people making systematic observations of nature.  While numeracy and symbols have so much explanatory power, they have no power whatsoever to influence the things they describe.  But what if…

click the image for artist’s page

A Wizard of Earthsea

‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ and its follow-up novels have a similar conceit.  In order to command the forces of nature, one must know the true name of the thing one is trying to command.  That name, such as the name referring to the wind, can also change regionally, so a wind over the Pacific might have a different name than the winds over the Atlantic.  Simply knowing the name seems to be enough to summon a thing, like summoning a hawk out of the sky, one of the earliest bits of magic the main character, Ged, is able to accomplish.

The Name of the Wind

This book, as the title suggests, also includes the concept of the power of names.  It also includes descriptions of a lesser form of magic known as Sympathy.

In sympathy, the magic user must form the firm belief that two entities are linked, and then they become so.  This is another theme quite common in magical mythology: mind over matter.  One’s state of mind is an important component of many magical practices, whether it be perfectly calm, fiercely effortful, or, in this case, utterly credulous.

Once linked, entities may have a sort of positional entanglement, or may be able to transfer heat at a distance, or change heat from one into kinetic energy in the other, etc.  Sympathy also introduces the idea that a sympathetic link’s efficiency depends on the similarity and provenance of the two linked entities.  For example, two apparently identical coins will be easier to link than two coins of different denominations.  Personally, I think this is a very clever concept, which puts firm limitations on the performance of this kind of magic, while still allowing miraculous things.

Sympathy has its own explanations for why magic is uncommon.  Here, creating this unshakable belief of a known falsehood is a near-impossible mental exercise.  In addition, performing most useful magic involves a Rube Goldberg-esque set of complex interconnections between various things.

Sympathy also preserves quite a lot of laws of nature, including conservation of energy.  For instance, a character might light a candle by linking the wick to her own body, drawing heat from herself, but this will make her very cold very fast.

Fullmetal Alchemist

This manga and anime series also preserves quite a lot of laws of nature – notably conservation of mass.  This is known in the lore of this series as the “Law of Equivalent Exchange.”  It also states that you can’t transmute something from one material to another.  However, alchemists who know the proper runes and transmutation circles are able to alter the form of physical matter however they see fit.

There is also an exception to the Law of Equivalent Exchange.  If an alchemist is in physical contact with a crystalline material known as a Philosopher’s Stone (which can only be crafted using the blood of thousands of dead people), their transmutations need not obey Equivalent Exchange.  This makes Philosopher’s Stones so valuable that people are routinely willing to commit mass murder to obtain them.

Here is another concept common to many ideas of magic: physical contact.  In real-world physics, physical contact has no real definition.  At the scale of fundamental particles, messenger particles are being exchanged in order to repel clouds of electrons from one another.  The same is true for every set of two materials, and even within materials – there is little difference in the process of atoms nearing one another.  The idea of a discrete ‘object’ or of ‘touching’ that object are telltale signs of a pre-20th century model of nature.  Nonetheless, from a commonsense perspective, the idea of losing or gaining some ability while touching or holding a special object still has rhetorical power.

Mistborn

Brandon Sanderson’s novels introduce a fascinating form of magic.  In his universe, there exist three forms of magic, but the one I’ll describe here is the most ingeniously crafted, and clearly the basis for the rest.  Allomancy is the rare genetic ability to ‘burn’ metals in order to gain specific powers.  Most allomancers can only burn one kind of metal, granting them one supernatural power.  A few, called Mistborn, can burn all the allomantic metals.  An appendix in the back of each of the books explain the workings of each of the metals:

Twelve of the 16 metals.

 This power comes with a lot of limitations (assuming you possess it at all).  You must ingest the correct metal, which means you have a finite supply.  Someone burning bronze can locate other allomancers, unless they or someone nearby is burning copper.

The whole system is very balanced and rational, which is part of what makes this series so thrilling.  Grasping the full extent of the powers available takes very little time, so it becomes a game of how to use and combine these skills in novel ways.

The Last Airbender

In the Nickelodeon cartoon series “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” magic is a unique skill which is randomly granted to a small percentage of the population.  Furthermore, the world is ethnically and geopolitically divided into four parts: Earth, Air, Water and Fire.  Likewise, the magical system is divided: Earthbending, Airbending, Waterbending and Firebending.  People from the Fire Nation, for instance, are only granted the ability to Firebend, if any.

All these types of ‘bending’ require a source of the material in question, so waterbenders are powerless in the desert (unless they bring their own water, which would be wise).  And manipulation of the material is done through special gestures, as well as a little mind over matter.  This introduces the new concept of body motions as magical symbols.

In this lore, only one person in the world can do more than one kind of bending — the Avatar, who must master all four.

Sabriel

In the Abhorsen trilogy, there are a few kinds of magic.  The most common is Charter magic, which involves bringing your conciousness into another plane with runes that flow like a river through it.  Practitioners of charter magic, called ‘charter mages’ must pluck these runes from the flow and bring them into the material world, where they assemble spells like recipes.  This brings up the interesting notion of symbols taking physical form.  This is common in many supernatural anime, such as Fairy Tail and Strait Jacket.

There is also free magic, which has a sort of wildness and unpredictability to it.  Necromancers command one form of free magic which has its own schema involving seven bells.  The bells can be used in life, but are most effective when traveling into the seven precincts of death – a process which, from the outside, looks like someone voluntarily going into a coma or trance.  Here, sounds are symbols, and even sometimes have a rough equivalency to charter runes.

Codemancer

Codemancer is a fantasy video game I’m working on in which magic is code.  Players write ‘spells’ (programs) and then ‘cast’ (run) them.  This is a variation on the “Language of Nature” with a hint of mind over matter.  In this case, the language of nature is so specifically defined that it doesn’t require a human-level of intelligence to understand it, just a simple computer-level intelligence.

You can see a bit about how the magic works in this youtube video.

As game developers, my opinion is: the more logical the magical systems in our games, the better.  A logical magical system drastically decreases the learning curve of the game, and may decrease development time as well.  I’ve found that it’s especially satisfying if players can stack or combine a few abilities in novel ways, and to master these combinations, before new ones are introduced.  If enemies abilities fall within the same logical system, then so much the better.  Enemies who must act within the same constraints (even if given more power to work with) increases our sense of fair play, which is a fragile thing.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this first round of magical systems.  Stay tuned for part 2!

It’s never been trendier to have an extensive collection of board games (at least in the circles I run in).  In the parlor of any given alpha-nerd, you might find ‘Settlers of Catan,’ ‘Dominion,’ ‘Munchkin,’ ‘Zombies!!,’ ‘Ticket To Ride,’ ‘Cards Against Humanity,’ or any number of kickass tabletop games.  What I bet you won’t find, however, is Battleship.  We all had a set as kids, but for some reason, they all got left behind at Mom &/or Dad’s.

This could probably do with an update.

I think we can all name reasons why Battleship might not be worth pulling out of the family game closet.  Chief among them is the fact that there is a dominant strategy: essentially, the winner (on average) is the person who performs a binary search of the space, punctuated by seeking out the un-bombed portions of the ship you have found.  Once both players understand this, most games will be suspensefully close, but not require a lot of planning or skill.

Recently, I was re-reading ‘Cryptonomicon‘ by Neal Stephenson, and it occurred to me that the true problems of WWII-era codebreakers, upon which the book is partially based, suggest an incredible expansion to this WWI-era game.  I call it the Enigma Expansion, because it involves mild codebreaking and information theory, and also because it has wheels.

What you need:

1.  A commercial battleship set or one piece of graph paper per player.  Each player may also wish to have a pad and pencil so as to record previous guesses and positions.

2. Two sets of code wheels and a key that looks like this:

I made it so the tri-fold would fit over the commercial Hasbro battleship set.

The outer wheel positions (outer blue wheel and outer red wheel) represent the player’s own codes.  The inner wheels are tools for the player to figure out their opponent’s codes.  You’ll also notice that the Carrier is the only ship on the field.  In the Enigma expansion, the Carrier is the only ship in play.  It’s also important to note the symbols around the outsides of the code wheels, which each correspond to a carrier location shown in the center.

How to play:

Before the game starts, each player must turn her outer code wheels to a random position.  These code wheels won’t move for the rest of the game.  Each player then puts their Carrier anywhere on the grid that they like.

Each player has TWO rounds per turn.  Each round, the player can choose to either…

a) Fire on her opponent by calling out a letter and number defining a position on the board.  As in the normal version of Battleship, her opponent must then tell their opponent whether the shot was a hit or a miss, and place a red peg in that location on the ship.  If a spot on the Carrier is hit twice, it has to be called out as a “hit,” but no additional peg needs to be placed.

or

b) Move her carrier to a new position.  It must be one of the positions listed on the key in the center.  Once the ship has moved, she must call out a coded  representation of the new position.  She can either call out the Blue Code or the Red Code for this location.  Players can determine what code to call out by.. 1. Choose a position from among the choices on the center key. 2. Note which symbol is written in the middle of that position. 3. Decide whether you want to use your red code or blue code. 4. Find the symbol from the key around the outside of the correct code wheel. 5. Call out the color, as well as the number on the outside of the code wheel which points to the symbol – for example “Red 33!”

There is one special position on the top of each code wheel which is marked by a red fish.  This is the ‘red herring.’ If you want to make your opponent think that you’ve moved, without actually moving, you can use the code corresponding to that position.

Those are the only rules, but there gets to be a fair amount of strategy.  Guessing where to fire becomes as much about psychology as search (would they move far away, or close by?).  Figuring out when and where to move in order to give your opponent as little information about your code wheel as possible.  You can also narrow down the position of your opponent’s code wheels by noting when they’re forced to move, but you obviously shouldn’t let your opponent know how much you know about their codes.

PR guy Ryan Olsen sizing up his next move in an earlier version of the game.

This is where the historical parallels come in.  For one thing, codebreaking is a lot easier when you have context clues about what the message contains – like approximately where your opponent was.  Also, one of the most important and often-overlooked parts of codebreaking is not letting the other parties know that their code is compromised (because obviously they’ll then stop using that code).  That’s why there are two codes, red and blue.  If you think your opponent knows one of your codes (for example, if you’ve been hit just after using a code), you can just abandon it and use the other.

This expansion has gone through quite a lot of iterations, focusing on different parts of the process, but this one is by far the simplest and truest to the spirit of the original game, while adding enough complexity to keep it engaging.

I’ve attached the image files for the setup here: Enigma Expansion, and I hope you’ll give it a try.

What’s next for this expansion?  I have no idea.  I’m not really even savvy enough to know where to post this on the web so that other board game enthusiasts can try it.  If you have suggestions regarding what I should do next, please let me know in the comments!

Many Thanks to Ryan Olsen, Gerald Kelley and Kevin Zuhn for playtesting with me.  I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games and I’m working on a game that teaches programming called Codemancer.  If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.

It all started with LOGO.  If you don’t remember making this little turtle crawl around and draw stuff, then your childhood wasn’t complete.  In fact, you should probably go back and do it now.

Seymour Papert, a researcher at MIT, reasoned that children could learn programming more easily if they were given a fun programming environment to play around in.  This was so successful in the case studies he observed that he was forced to develop an explanation.  He called his theory of learning ‘constructionism’ (because the student can construct their own knowledge by experiment).  This spawned a genre of software toys designed to teach programming (all after my time, unfortunately).  Toys like Alice, Greenfoot, RoboMind, GameStar Mechanic (my favorite), and Scratch (the most popular).  Even Lego’s robotics platform, Lego Mindstorms is an extension of the ideas Papert outlines in his books ‘Mindstorms‘ and ‘The Children’s Machine‘ and is perhaps the most faithful to them.

These efforts have engaged millions of students in learning about technology, and has given them great early exposure to the field.  In my own first grade class, we had a teacher (I think his name was Mr. Costa) who took care of the computer lab and taught computer class.  We were taught the basics of LOGO, and then asked to produce a project of our choosing.  My partner and I worked diligently to put together an animated scene of an F1 racetrack, complete with cheering fans and cars circling the track.

We were very proud to present what we’d done to the class, but when the time came we found out that we were the only group out of 10 or 12 who had actually done anything substantial.  A few pointy spirals.  A few rounded spirographs. Disappointing.  The next year Mr. Costa was replaced, and our ‘computer class’ was about typing and learning to use Microsoft Word.

Maybe I was just the right kind of kid to get hooked on programming early, but for most of the first-graders in my class, the motivation just wasn’t there.  That’s what I see as a lack inherent in these toys built with constructionism in mind: motivation.  Why am I exploring this educational environment?  What am I supposed to do here?  When some students are told “you can do anything,” what they hear is “there’s nothing to do.”

In my case, I was motivated by curiosity.  For many people, motivation is more extrinsic.  Code.org lists resources for motivated adults to learn how to code, usually for career-oriented reasons.  Kids in the third world, and everyone in the eighties, when Papert was doing his work, are at least somewhat motivated by the novelty of interacting with the machine itself.

Today, getting to interact with a computer is not such a treat.  For many school-age children in the US, it’s the default state of being.  The software has to have a better ‘why’ built into it.  That’s where games come in.

Many authors have written (more eloquently than I ever could) why games are such a perfect learning environment.  Central to those arguments is the concept of intrinsic motivation.  Winning a game is gratifying for its own sake (there’s evolutionary hard-wiring there).  Games, ideally, keep players always at the edge of their capabilities, wanting to get better to accomplish the next task and unlock the next bit of power-up or narrative or whatever digital carrots the game designer decides to add.  Games also offer a kind of social capital that creative tools cannot;  creative work cannot be compared quantitatively in the way that a score or level can.

Until recently, there haven’t been many efforts to create an actual Game that teaches programming.  Let’s go over a few.

Light Bot

This is going to stand in for a whole bunch of what are essentially puzzle games, like Daisy the Dinosaur and Robozzle.  I’ve got nothing against puzzle games, and I think any game that adequately introduces the mechanics of programming has to have a puzzle component.  That said, puzzle games are the genre of game most like homework.  These games in particular don’t introduce any kind of stakes – no reason to complete the puzzles.  Also, one of the principles of responsive games is to decrease, as much as possible, the (user input)/(in game consequences) ratio.  By their nature, these kinds of puzzles require a lot of player input for very little onscreen action.

I titled this section after Light Bot because it’s actually the best I’ve seen in this category, but most entries in the category are characterized by very little professionalism.  It’s easy to speculate on the creator’s thought process. “I’ve never made a game before, but I’m a programmer, so how hard could it be to make a game about programming?”

Code Hero (unfinished)

There’s been a lot of hubbub about Code Hero recently, but the concept is still an exciting one.  It uses the concept of the action-puzzle game, popularized by games like Portal and Quantum Conundrum.  It also gives the player a first-person perspective, so they can feel situated in this world where code is so important.  It reminds me of something Papert says in ‘The Children’s Machine’: “What would happen if children who can’t do math grew up in Mathland, a place that is to math what France is to French?”  In Code Hero, you grow up in Codeland.  I am anxious for the Primer Labs team to continue development.

The one criticism I have is that this game (and Portal) feel a bit contrived.  I’m in some kind of laboratory environment where I have to complete spatial reasoning puzzles…because…things?  In Portal they call it like it is — “tests.”  A robot is testing you, to see how clever you are.  That narrative conceit (which was always a cop-out) can only be used once.

Code Spells (unfinished)

Code Spells has all the situated-learning benefits of Code Hero, but also addresses my criticisms by placing the player in a fantasy world where she must help little gnomes to complete tasks.  Meanwhile, there is a monster roaming around.  The idea of code-as-magic is one that I love.  It explains why magic is so often botched and broken, why it takes a lot of concentration and diligence, and why it is best practiced by ancient masters.

All my criticisms of this game are a consequence of it simply not being finished.  I can’t wait to see what the team at ThoughtStem adds next.

Codemancer (unfinished)

I independently decided to use the magical-programming metaphor for a game I’m developing called ‘Codemancer’ which I’m not ready to talk about in detail, but which I hope will be an example of how to do this genre right.  The main difference in my game is that it has a less specific focus.  I thought it would be better to develop my own visual programming language (which has a lot in common with LOGO), so I could make the basics as accessible as possible.  I hope you’ll follow along in its development by following me on twitter here.

I’m not proposing that constructionist learning environments be eliminated.  Whether a student responds to an exploratory style depends on the individual student, and indeed many students respond well.  There are, I believe, a lot of learners who are underserved by making exploration the only means of discovery.  I’m excited for the time, approaching soon, when these learners will have the option of a more narrative, guided, fun-motivated way to learn programming.

PS – If you have a game about programming you’d like to see mentioned, please add it as a comment to this post and I’ll try to play it and add my thoughts.