Okay, a little background. In one of my university modules I was tasked with writing an essay. At the time I frowned upon the idiots around me who couldn't tell gamification from Grand Theft Auto if one of them bettered the school system and the other riled up controversy for the murder of prostitutes. So I opted for copyright law, the one I at the time had more knowledge and experience with. Since then, I have watched so much Game Maker's Toolkit, Extra Credits, PBS Idea videos, read papers on Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics, played a whole lot more videogames and realised that I could write the ever loving shit out of the gamification essay, so that's what I'm going to do, except for the fun of it. Now, I could actually go write this in a super academic sense with citations and everything BUUUUTTT THAAAT'S REAALY BOOORING so I'ma just wing it, this is a personal blog and I'm just here for a good time. This might be a little long winded but you know what, I got a lot of shit to say and no word limits or goals.
Anyway so let me start by what I mean by Gamification and a little bit more of a focus on what the topic is. I'm going to be talking about Gamification in regards specifically to a school and university environment, how it can be applied to studying. I'll be using a lot of more out there game design theory, and the field is relatively new so any terminology I use could be outdated already since it is being advance literally every second I write this piece. However, most of it should still be relevant.
Anyway, let's dive right in.
The first thing I'll say that education isn't a game. If it were, it'd be the ET on the Atari 2600 of modern games. It fucking sucks. Universities, most highschools, prep schools, middle schools, they're all still using *really* outdated teaching methods and honestly this shit might have worked 20 years ago, but we're at that new age point where we're preparing students for jobs that don't exist yet. It's an incredible time to be alive and the fields of study are progressing so the way we study them should progress as well. In this very formal blog post (puts on monocle and sips tea) I'll be approaching schooling as if I were designing it like the game I've always wanted to play.
The first issue I'll tackle is iteration time.
Iteration time is basically the time it takes to get from a fail state, to a state where you can try again. A lot of older videogames took a whole bunch of pride in murdering your ass. There'd be a big Game Over screen and then you'd be taken back to the title screen and then you'd have to reload a save and URRRGH it's frustrating. Thankfully the practice is more f a remnant of a bygone era now. These days you'll die in some World War 2 based shooter, time will rewind and you'll be put moments before you got killed. Bioshock especially doesn't even respawn the enemies you killed. Prince of Persia will literally rewind time to right before you messed up the jump. So what's the iteration time of schooling right now? Well, if you fail a test, you can't retake it. If you fail a subject, you have to wait 365 days to retake that subject. Imagine if you failed a level in a videogame and it said, no no no, come back in a year when you've gotten good, scrub. Fucking learn some pro strats before you walk up to me with that weak ass shit again.
I'd say, fuck this game, I'm going to go play some Super Meat Boy, Why bring up Super Meat Boy? Well I'm glad I asked so you didn't have to! I'll link to Mark Brown's episode of Game Maker's Toolkit on
redesigning death, which is my primary inspiration for this part of the essay. Okay, here's a link to a
Let's Play of Super Meat Boy, specifically around 3:33, Jacksepticeye dies. But pay attention. Notice, he died, the screen fades for about a second, and he's immediately at the start of the level.
The iteration time is half a second long.
Now, iteration time in games can be used to control the flow and pace of a game. Sometimes it's used to evoke a certain feeling. Dark Souls especially likes to evoke the feeling of existential dread and insignificance, and likes to remind you, in BIG BOLD RED LETTERING that you, have in fact, died.
That's no fun, is it? Imagine after every botched test the world went dark and in bold red lettering it spelled out YOU FAILED. At least Super Meat Boy doesn't taunt you, it doesn't make a huge fuss, you died, try again.
Now imagine you're taking a math test, and let's say it's electronic and multiple choice. You've just answered say six out of ten questions incorrectly, which is a fail.
However, instead of just grading you and failing you, what if the screen faded to black, put you at question one and said try again?
This is a concept known as motivational punishment, and I'll let Snowman Gaming tell you all about it
in his video. The point is to reset the game from a fail state as quickly as possible in order to make sure the player is not discouraged by their death but motivated to try again as the opportunity is quickly and readily available. Why wait 365 days to retake the test that cost you passing the semester when right after you fail, you could take the test again, and again, and again, right until you got the grade you needed. While someone could probably find a better solution to the problem, I'm here mostly to point out flaws and create a starting point. Currently, in the game of educatin' yo'self, you have to wait a pretty long fuckin time to play again after you "die". So the iteration time needs to be lessened dramatically. Also, it'd be nice not to put anxiety fuel messages on out student portals like "Did not qualify for exam entrance". That shit is just hard to look at man, it hurts deep.
Anyway but say we've cut down the iteration time. What else seems to be plaguing our game? It's nowhere near that IGN 10/10 so what else can we do?
Let's talk about Game Feel.
While Dark Souls is still fresh in our minds, what feeling is the game trying to evoke? In other words, how does it feel to play Dark Souls? Now this is an inexact science, I'll readily admit that. For the most part, it's pretty hard to nail Game Feel. But what it comes down to is a dumbed down formula of control plus atmosphere. So, how does it feel to learn in the modern schooling system?
If
this website is to be believed, Suicide is the second leading cause of death for kids ages 10-24. That's pretty fucked up. Every day I hear at least one person out of my fellow Computer Science students make a joke about jumping off the Humanities building. Let's face it, it's fucking stressful. Worse, it's needlessly stressful. We can do so much better! Let's start with the problem that for some reason we think our classes need to be these strict learning environments that are prim and proper.
In highschool, I remember my math class having a board at the back with Demotivational Posters. They were huge back when the internet was new but it always managed to make me laugh. There. That's Game Feel. The environment was made less oppressive and stressful by a couple funny posters. Now, I will hold back no blows, I fucking hate math. I'm bad at it, it never feels intellectually stimulating, it's been one field of study I've never had any interest in. Unlike logic puzzles or memorization puzzles, is none of those. It's simple enough when you understand the rules and common solutions, *but is unsolvable if you know neither*. That's how it always felt to me, anyway. However, I'd been doing really poorly at the start of grade 11. But the point my grades picked up was pretty significant. I was sitting next to my best friend in class, and something amazing happened.
I started singing a Panic At The Disco song.
It was just stuck in my head, and we had worksheet in front of us, and I couldn't give a particular fuck on that particular day so I was jamming to this Panic song while doin' mah math. But my mate was also particularly into Panic At The Disco. So he sung along.
And that is how the math class jam sessions were born.
My grades immediately picked up because while doing our work, my best friend and I were just humming our favourite jams. It was crazy. But the learning environment had changed. My math class was no longer this dreaded place of failure, it was where my best friend and I went to have a good time. There. Game Feel. It felt rewarding to do math because it didn't feel like a chore anymore. By simply adding music. Ta da. The power of the arts everyone. Get that art degree, make fine art, change the world. We need artists as much as scientists.
The important takeaway here is that music can change how you feel in any situation. It can change how you feel about about doing a certain task. And that's the takeaway. You can change Game Feel by simply changing the music. And you can change how learning feels by adding some sweet tunes.
Now, Game Feel also comes down to how it feels to control your character. It feels super fun and bouncy to jump around as Mario, but Ezio has a decidedly harder time trying his best to reach for ledges and making these stressful perfect jumps where one misstep could lead to bone breaking painful death. The avatar you control also plays a huge role. For example, when my mate was playing Saint's Row IV, I looked at the game and thought meh. It's okay. Doesn't look great but oh well, I might try it if it's on sale. And then it was, and lo and behold, do you know what a difference it made to play with my own President? The thing is, when you play with an an avatar you yourself designed, when you get to make a fashion statement, or just run around in comfy clothes, it changes game feel. You feel more comfortable with something familiar to you than you do with the moldy testicle that you play as in Dark Souls (until you reverse hollowing but with the amount of death in that game, get used to seeing your desiccating wrinkled ass running around)
This is why I personally vouch for abolishing uniform. Now this applies more to Private Colleges and Private Schools but you can't exactly feel comfortable in uniform. You can't pick out a cute outfit or dress up as a naked obese clown. And honestly, I feel very comfy when dressed as a naked obese clown.
The long and short of it is that how it feels to be in a learning environment should feel fun. It should feel like playing a Mario game. Just
look at Super Mario 3D World. It just looks fun to play and
feels good. It has good game feel. And as a caffiene dependent vegetable, I can tell you straight that uni has garbage game feel. But here's
a video from Cagey on the subject of Game Feel (watch both parts, it's really good).
Lastly, a lot of game feel also comes down to how the game responds to your input. Like the sound it makes when your fist connects with some punk's jaw in Streets Of Rage or the vibration in your controller when you're firing a gun while playing Call Of Duty. It should feel good to succeed at Uni and School. So instead of this pitting us against each other crap with top student and trophies, I'd just love it if every time I learned something new and useful, that little Zelda jingle played. You know the one.
Now that we've talked about Game Feel, and now that I've mentioned Mario, you know what Universities and Schools could use a little more of?
Dat sweet, sweet invisible tutorial;
In the original Super Mario Brothers, the first level teaches you so much about the game. It gives you a lot of space to figure out the controls, the first Goomba moves slowly and gives you plenty of time to react, and overall it's so iconic that it's stuck around and is used as an example of good game design to this very day. Here's another Mark Brown
video on the subject (his voice soothes my soul). Snowman also does a video on the subject, which he titles
Teaching Without Teaching (by the way, Shovel Knight is just fucking fantastic. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend you do). This is just a concept that could be littered EVERYWHERE in schooling. From applications in the design of the campus, to introducing new themes in a specific subject, the invisible tutorial is a powerful tool.
All that's really required to make it work are a safe space in which a concept is introduced, control is never taken away from the student and they can learn it at their own pace, everything should be introduced one step at a time to keep the student from being overwhelmed and the environment should be designed in such a way that the student reaches the conclusions they need to naturally. This is a little harder for me to try give an example of how to implement since I'm not good enough at any of the things I'm studying to set up such nuanced learning experiences, but I'll tell you about a dissection I did in the ninth grade for Biology.
So, I'd never worked with a dead animal before, I was pretty much clueless and really, I wasn't even good at Bio. But my teacher was genuinely some kind of genius because the way she managed to teach us was pretty brilliant. So we were put into groups and each group had a sheep's head and we were each told to remove a part. First, she did a small demonstration, with safety procedures and all. From observation, I learned how to hold most of the equipment we'd be using. Next, we all got a turn to remove a piece. I was on his eye, and it was pretty tricky to remove. But there was also all these posters on the walls with anatomic diagrams and helpful tips. So when I was stuck, all I had to do was look around and the answers were right there in front of me. At the end, we had to do a small report and I remember feeling really great that from that little practical experiment, I had learned a whole bunch of new body parts, the names of different pieces of equipment, how to use them, the safety procedures and all that. It felt good to learn that day. And I wasn't treated like an idiot either. I was given all the tools I needed to succeed and the knowledge was a byproduct of just a little experimentation in a carefully controlled experience.
I didn't even know I had just went through an invisible tutorial. It wasn't an hour long lecture on how safety and then on body parts. It was hands on, and practical. I could see what I was suppose to learn and I had to apply it. A concept was introduced, I had a safe space to play around with it, and then the knowledge I gained from the experience was tested. Bam.
There's a certain feeling you get from it. Like the game itself wants you to beat it. The game isn't indifferent to your presence, it wants to be played and it wants to challenge you and it wants you to overcome its challenges to it can present you with more complex ones. And I just don't think schools ever try really instill that feeling into students. You're a student number, they say. You pass or fail by your own hands. You have to be here. You have to do this amount of work to pass. Study at least this amount of hours per week. Some of the greatest videogames of all time would never even have been given a second thought if they locked all the fun behind studying their mechanics for six hours a week.
So we've talked about Iteration Time, Game Feel, Invisible Tutorial. What else? I mean, this is just the tip of the ice berg. I want to talk about the two golden accomplishments of gaming, Speedrunning and 100% completionism.
So for those who don't know, videogames have built up quite a culture around running through games as fast as possible. There's a real mastery shown in players who can take a six to seven hour experience and cut it down to about 24 minutes. Games Done Quick is a convention where gamers stream their speedruns and the money raised goes towards charity. It's great fun and some of the things gamers do at these events are honestly just ridiculous. My favourite is a three hour speed run of Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero mission
using the same input. It's insane, a game that took me hours upon hours to finish due to all the deaths, someone can finish in three hours WHILE FINISHING ANOTHER GAME AT THE SAME TIME. It's these feats that stand out and really make the community stronger, and what's great about them is that they can be replicated.
So, why not let us speedrun subjects? If I can learn first semester psychology in three weeks, should I not be allowed to do so? You always hear about those wizkids who finished two years of highschool in one, but honestly, if we were allowed to learn and then write off certain subjects, I think a whole lot of people could do it. Now, speedruns also have certain conditions, there are any percent speedruns which just means anything goes as long as you can get the credit sequence to trigger as fast as possible, then there are 100% runs, which means you must complete any and all objectives in the most timely fashion for the run to count. This is the more useful method as anyone can barely pass four tests and an exam in four weeks. But like winter school, where you devote several hours a day to a subject and try get it all in at once, then write an exam afterwards, we should allow students to go through different courses at different paces. We owe it to them to respect their intellegence as such. Some games even offer little rewards for doing this. Although I don't think we need to show kids a naked Samus Aran for running through geography as fast as they can (that is a dated reference, friends).
As for completionism, this bounces off what I said about iteration time. What if you could get 100% for a subject? Sounds great, right? If you got 99% on a test, what if you could retake it right afterwards and then try again and again until you got 100%? Kind of like getting all the achievements in a videogame. Welcome to Completionism. Guys like Jirard have built carreers upon playing games until they see that sweet 100% on their save files. Check out anything he's done, I'll link
his channel here. Imagine you could do this with school subjects, especially ones you really enjoy? Imagine taking all the tests back to back until you get a passing grade, then spending the rest of the semester gradually retaking those tests until you know all the answers and can get 100% for them and 100% complete the subject? That sounds like so much fun. I love it when games reward you for this. Additional content, secret endings, bonus levels, tougher dungeons... It's just feels great when you put in the extra effort for playing all there is to play of a game, it gives you a little something for your troubles. This'd be a great thing for studies. Recommendations for jobs on your permanent record, scholarships, anything of the nature. Everyone has that one game they're willing to sit through all the tedious side quests and shitty missions to complete 100% just because they love it so damn much, so why can't we do it with university subjects? (time constraints for starters) But I just feel like every student could benefit from gamification to this extent.
*EDIT: My friend Joshua reminded me of a really important part, and that's the motivation to play any videogame. Which is also about the motivation to finish studying. In his words:
"
A big change needs to be made with how teaching is done at all levels and how we motivate kids and students to get them to really succeed, as a fear of failure is not enough to motivate people to do so. If the motivation you're using for subjects in highschool or varsity is "if I pass it gets me closer to never having to do this subject again" then there is a problem."
So there are about eight or so core aesthetics of play and most games build themselves around two or three of those (the best generally fulfilling about five or six games, and go home and test this with each of your favourite games, it really does work). Ideally a game should encompass all of them, but realistically people play different games for different reasons. They could include a mode in Banjo Kazooie that appeals to the hardcore WW2 era FPS crowd that puts you in first person mode but most designers know to rather do really well with one aesthetic than to half ass three. To name them, it's Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery, Expression and Submission. There's an Extra Credits episode that can explain it way better than I can (Linked here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uepAJ-rqJKA)
So to get a student to be motivated for any particular subject, you'll probably have to design it around one of those aesthetics. Let's take History for example. We can start with Submission which is Game as Past Time. It's incredibly easy to just sit down in front of the History Channel or Extra History, tune out after a long day and just watch that kind of thing for the fun of it. It's really fun to listen to the story of Hannibal Barca trek through the alps to fuck with Romans. It's an incredible story. You can watch Historic films or such. You can turn a subject like History into something as easy to do as playing Candy Crush or Angry Birds. History can also fulfill the aesthetic of Discovery, which is Game as Uncharted Territory. For example, let's say you have a huge list of significant events in history you have to learn about. Each time you learn about an event, it gets ticked off. So kind of like filling in a map in Diablo by walking to an area in it, you can "fill in" this timeline of significant events in History by learning about it. History also by default fulfills Narrative, Game as Drama. It literally writes itself. You want to know what happens next in a great story, and we as a species have literally created so many just by doing what we do, which is living. I refer again to Hannibal trekking through the alps on the backs of Elephants to fuck with Romans. It's an incredible story and as long as it's told well, you wanna hear more of it.
With motivation, it does come down to whether or not the student is into what aesthetic a subject can fill, but if we treat subjects like game genres, there's also no reason any student can't have a great time learning any subject. I don't like First Person Shooters but I love Borderlands and Portal and Dr Brain and Mirror's Edge. A lot of people don't like Zelda, but they loved the hell out of Darksiders (which is a Zelda clone in every sense of the word). I'm not a fan of Grand Theft Auto-esque sandboxy games, but I put in a stupid amount of hours into Saints Row IV.
With enough work, any subject can attract any student, it just needs to fulfill *one* of the aesthetics that student is drawn to and boom! Motivation to learn.
I love games. Hell, everyone loves games. If I could use my love for games to broaden my horizons and increase my knowledge I sure as hell would. And while not every idea in contemporary game design is particularly useful, gamification of education could educate generations of kids who would otherwise be left behind in the modern school system because it simply doesn't account for them. There are dozens more ideas I have and honestly, I'm just a little sick of writing this essay and you're sick of reading it so I think, maybs, let's call it a day here. But Gamification could do so much for us.
Perhaps its time we really start consider using it to change the way we learn.
I still wanna go to campus as a naked obese clown though, just saying.
