You can’t declare it’s a game, your learners will tell you if it is or not.
I found a game for my iPad that I really liked. A casual gamer, so that while it has a story, I can play it without having to get too crazy about learning timing issues or complicated commands.
I played it through, and several different times again with different characters, and eagerly awaited the sequel. Which finally occurred and I was again progressing through the game. Er, until the end, and that’s where this story begins.
When I got to the last boss, suddenly I couldn’t finish. I couldn’t beat the boss! Instead of happily progressing, suddenly I was grinding to get my character to level up, and trying again, while looking for more special equipment. It was suddenly frustrating, not fun.
Now, I’d pretty well just bashed my way through: no finesse in movement. But that had worked. So if I was supposed to pick up more nuanced movements and commands, there had been no incentive. Well, I finally beat the boss after numerous attempts, and then the game was over, but I hadn’t really found out what I’d done that worked.
Again, I started with a different character, and again it was fun. Up until the end, and again I was faced with the unbeatable boss. Again I ground, and again I finally succeeded, but it was still an anti-climax after so much fun prior to that point.
The point here is not to complain about this particular game, but to point out that getting the experience right matters. When I run my game design lectures and/or workshops, I point out that as Will Wright once told me, tuning is 9/10ths of the work. And it’s got to go all the way through, with the right audience. It may be that they didn’t test the end with a casual gamer like me, but it was a jarring ending to what had been.
Now, in most of the formal learning situations we design for, we have sticks as well as carrots, so we aren’t expecting our learners to pay for the privilege of completing our learning experience, but it’s important to understand what learner experience we think would be reasonable and shoot for achieving that. It’s subjective, so asking them is just fine, but you want to set metrics for the user experience (tested for after you ensure usability isn’t a barrier and you are achieving your learning outcomes) and then tune until you get them. Or, of course, until you find out you won’t on your current budget and adjust your expectations, but doing so consciously.
As I say, you don’t turn a scenario into a game, you tune it into a game. And even when you are not shooting for a game, this applies to learning experience design as well. Emotions and subjective experience matters, so do consider testing and tuning until you achieve the experience you need.
Its amazing the number of games that get that tuning of the last bit exactly wrong. I wonder if maybe they do all of their testing progressively; so that by the time any of their testers plays the last scene, they’ve played the rest of it for 40x longer than they expect any of their actual customers to. But there seems to be a particular tendency to introduce a slightly different mechanic right at the end – presumably with the intention of making the final boss(es) seem more unique, but meaning that all of your training up til now is useless. Perfect example was the original Assassin’s Creed game, which rewarded you all along for sneaking around all the knights or running away from them instead of fighting them. Then, right towards the end (I’m not certain how close to the end, because I walked away from the game in disgust at this point) they lock you in a tiny open space with a dozen enemy knights, and surround you with an invisible forcefield that they don’t even bother to explain so you can’t run away. They’ve trained me in a set of skills, then suddenly dropped me in a forced situation where everything I’ve done so far is useless, and the only useful survival skills are some they’ve actually punished me for practicing at earlier stages. In one fell swoop it took a game from one of the more entertaining that I’d played in quite awhile, to a completely frustrating experience that I refused to finish and that I’m still ranting about in blog comments years later. And no, I didn’t buy the sequel.
I know this post was about tuning, and not about griping about a specific game, but I’d still love to know what it was that you were playing.