I know a lot about guns. I’ve never held a gun. I’ve seen guns only on store walls and on the hips of officers. I’m not interested in guns. Still, I know a lot about guns because guns play a big role in many of the videogames I love.
As a game designer specializing in educational games, I think a lot about how effective games are as teaching tools. Raph Koster’s book “A Theory of Fun” lays out the persuasive argument that ‘fun’ is the sensation our brain triggers as a reward for having learned something. It follows that all games teach the player…something. Sometimes they teach us how to manipulate systems that have no bearing outside the game itself. Sometimes games have a point of view to convey to the player, what game scholar Ian Bogost called ‘procedural rhetoric’. Sometimes they teach a mishmash of unexamined things, served up by designers whose only guiding principle was the ‘rule of cool’.
I am fascinated by the rare cases when a game without explicit learning goals manages to teach a segment of their players something which is true and meaningful in their lives.
I’ve heard lots of stories of language learning in games, simply because the game they were enchanted by wasn’t localized to their native language. I’ve heard people say they learned a lot about mathematics and economics by playing with the resources in games that engrossed them. Sometimes the setting and background details of a period game go a long way towards teaching history (or teaching history wrong when it’s inaccurate).
We live in a time of games with truly grand scale and ambition. Many such games include a diagetic game, like Poker in Red Dead Redemption, or Gwent in The Witcher 3. Some include a huge array of collectables—perhaps for their own sake, or perhaps useful to some other system of crafting or trade.
My argument is that AAA games should use these (often optional) sub-games to teach the player something real, and perhaps even something academic. I see three major benefits to this.
First, AAA games have a massive audience, so even if only the most committed players truly explore and master the educational systems embedded in the game, that is still an incredible number of people who will have been enriched not only by the sensation, the spectacle, the story, and the emotion of the game, but in an intellectual way as well. So, you could do it just because it’s a nice thing to do.
Second, you no longer need to make as much stuff up. Fleshing out your world with invented details is a lot of fun, especially when you need the setting to feel fantastical, but it also takes time and energy that might be better used at the core of your game. Why not use real stuff instead? Need a plant that has a medicinal effect on injuries caused by fire damage? How about aloe? Need an animal companion that can fly, fetch things, mimic sounds, and is smart enough to help solve puzzles? Instead of a fairie sprite, why not a crow? And if you need a world to feel unfamiliar and therefore explore-able, allow me to assure you there are plenty of phenomena in physics, biology, chemistry, linguistics, and social science that are weird, unintuitive, and alien. And as someone who has worked with many subject matter experts in the course of my career building learning games, let me tell you that subject matter experts would be thrilled to help you find the right examples. And they work cheap!
The last benefit is, I think, more salient to a AAA studio’s chief concern—the bottom line. Games, especially big-budget games, are still seen by many as a waste of time at best, and an active detriment to the player’s life at worst. That said, a little bit of learning content goes a long way. There are a fair number of parents who can justify their child’s hundreds of hours logged in Assassin’s Creed by the fact that they come away from the game talking about Renaissance Italy or the American Revolution.
Adding learning content can improve the reputation of the games medium in the long term, but also your game in particular in the short term. How many games can say they let their players learn and explore bee behavior, or superconductivity, or depression-era hobo sign? Very few. But yours could, and it could be the selling point that brings more players on board, and prompt the press to cover the game from a more flattering angle.
A screenshot of a made-up plant from Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is medicinal, beside the most similar-looking real-world plant, which is poisonous.
Let’s assume you’re sold. You’re cooking a big beautiful new game stew, and you want to add a pinch of learning to the mix. How would you go about doing it? I’m biased, but I think the best way could be to bring a designer who specializes in learning games onto the team (cough cough contact below cough). If that’s not an option for some reason, think about what kinds of learning goals might be idiomatic to the systems you’re already building. If you think your players will be crafting armor, for example, you could consider teaching more about metallurgy. Then reach out to a subject matter expert. Faculty websites often make their work emails public, and they are usually delighted to chat and to point out further resources, if not to sign on as an advisor. You might also want to seek out a pedagogy expert, aka a teacher, to help figure out your ‘scope and sequence’ (how much to introduce to the player and when).
The beauty of learning games design is: that’s really it. The process of tutorializing learning content is the same as tutorializing any other game system. The process of designing a clever educational puzzle is the same as for designing any other puzzle. The process of writing engaging NPC dialogue about a real-world topic is the same as writing engaging NPC dialogue about anything else.
I hope that, for those of you who work in AAA, this has been a persuasive post, and you’ll consider adding educational stuff to your game, or at least thinking a bit more deeply about what your game is already teaching.
Bobby Lockhart is a multi-award-winning designer of learning games based in Chicago.
Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbylox/