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Yesterday I wrote about examples as stories. And I received a comment that prompted some reflection. The comment suggested that scenarios were stories too. And I agree!  They’re not examples, but they  are stories. With a twist.

So, as I’ve said many times, simulations are just a manipulable model of the world. And a motivated, self-capable learner  can learn from them. But motivated and self-capable isn’t always a safe bet. So, instead, we put the simulation in an initial state, and ask the learner to take it to a goal state, and we choose those such that they can’t get there until they learn the relationships we want them to understand. That’s what I call a scenario.  And we can tune those into a game. (Yes, we turn them into games by tuning; making the setting compelling, adjusting the challenge, etc.)

Now, a scenario needs a number of things. It needs a context, a setting. It needs a goal, a situation to be achieved. And, I’ll suggest, it should also have a reason for that goal to make sense. If you see the alignment that says why games  should be hard fun, you’ll see that making it meaningful is one of the elements. And that,  I say, is a story. Or, at least, the beginning of one.

In short, a story has a setting, a goal, and a path to get there. We remove boring details, highlight the tension, etc.  We flesh out a setting that the learner cares about, provide a sense of urgency, and enable the goal achievement.  But it’s not all done.

The reason this isn’t a complete story is we don’t know the path the protagonist uses to accomplish the goal, or ultimately doesn’t.  We’ve provided tools for that to happen, but we, as designers, don’t control the protagonist. The learner, really,  is the the protagonist!

What I’m talking about is that the story, certainly for the learner, is co-created between the world we’ve developed, and their use of the options or choices we provide. Together, a story is written for them by us  and them.  And, their decisions and the feedback are the story  and the learning!  It’s, voilà, a learning  experience.

Learning is powerful. Creating experiences that facilitate learning are creative hard fun for the designer, and valuable hard fun for the learner. Learning is about stories, some told, some c0-created, but all valuable.

The game we designed (as I talked about yesterday), Quest for Independence, was actually a fair bit of a hit. While we couldn’t talk to kids still, anecdotally we heard that the kids were playing it.  And, as the design intended, it led them to talk to the Care counselors. That was good enough, but there was more.

First, the Aussie science program  Quantum  had a bit on it. They even interviewed me (with a big production about bringing stuff to our house), but never used the footage.  They also couldn’t talk to the kids ‘in care’, but it turns out Quest was being used by kids  not in care!  High schools were using it to explore life after school as well. That was a nice outcome.

Another occurrence brought new action. Sometime after the game launched, I became aware of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard for the web. What this did was allowed web pages to do backend processing based upon user actions, and then programmatically change the front end.  In short, web pages could react based upon what had happened before.

For  Quest, this meant that we could port it to the web!  That is, you started the game, the player’s actions were sent to the web, the program could calculate the outcome and render an appropriate new page, with the graphics assembled to represent the game variables, the current location, and more.  This was exciting.

And, again, I had a student wanting to do a project. So the project was to take the game graphics, and the programming, and make the game web-playable. And lo, it was done; the game could be played over the web.  Most wonderfully, it  still can be!  (Yay, standards!)

Naturally, I wrote it up (with the student; a principle I always stuck to: even if I usually ended up writing it all, they got credit for their work and ideas).  And, as far as I know, it was the very first web-delivered serious game. At the least, without Flash.

The underlying principles in the game also became part of a couple of chapters, and ultimately the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences formed the core of my book on serious game design,  Engaging Learning.  

One final reflection is that working on this, on a project that really helped real kids, was still one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on.  It’s nice to help clients deliver outcomes, but saving lives that were at risk?  That’s just too good.  Anyone up for some more ‘hard fun’?

When I was a young academic in Australia, a colleague asked me if I would talk to some folks about a game. He knew that I had designed games before returning to grad school, and had subsequently done one on my thesis research. This group, the Australian Children’s Welfare Agency, had an ‘After Care’ project to assist kids  who needed to live independently. They’d spent their budget on a video, comic book, and a poster, but now realized that the kids would play games at the Care centers. I had a talented student who wanted to do a meaningful honours project, and so I agreed.

Following best principles, we talked not only to the project leaders, and the counselors, but more. We weren’t allowed to talk to youth ‘in care’ (for obvious reasons), but they did get us access to some recent graduates. They gave us great insights, and later they playtested the prototype for fine-tuning.

One of the lessons from this was important. The counselors told us that what these kids needed were to learn to shop and cook. While I  could have made a game for that, when we talked to the kids we learned that there was more.  (My claim: you can’t give me a learning objective I can’t make a game for, though I reserve the right to raise the objective in a taxonomic sense.)   They said what was important were the chains. That is, you could get money while you looked for a job, but… They wouldn’t give you money, however, they’d deposit in a bank account. BUT, to get that, you needed ID.  To get that, however, you needed references. And so on. So that was the critical focus.

I taught my interface design students HyperCard, to have a simple language to prototype in. This meant that we had an environment that we knew games could be built in.  My student did most of the programming, under my direction.  When that wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the development, I used some grant money to hire her for the summer to finish it.

The resulting play was good, but the design was lacking (neither my student nor I were graphic designers). I ended up going with the project team leaders to get philanthropic funding to add graphics. (Which introduced bugs I had to fix.)  They also had it ported to the PC, which ended up being a mistake.Their hired gun used a platform with an entirely different underlying model and wasn’t able to translate it appropriately. Ouch.

The resulting game, had some specific design features:

• It was exploratory, in that the player had to wander around and try to survive.
• It was built upon a simple simulation engine, which supported replay.
• There were variables, like health and hunger and sleep that would get worse over time, driving action.
• The audience was low literacy, so we used graphics to convey variable states, interface elements, and location.
• Success was difficult. Jobs were difficult to obtain, and better jobs were even harder. And, of course, you had to discover the chains.
• There was coaching: if you were struggling, the game would offer you the opportunity for a hint. If you continued to struggle, eventually you’d get the hint anyway.
• There was also a help system, where the basics were laid out.
• There were random events, like getting (or losing) money, or having drugs or sex. (We were trying to save lives, and didn’t worry about upsetting the wowsers.)

There was more, but this characterized some of the important elements.  In reflecting upon the experience, I realized the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences that means you can, and should, make learning  hard fun.  I wrote a journal article (with my student) that captured what I will  suggest are critical realizations (still!).

They held an event to launch the entire project, including the game (and they gave me a really nice sweater, and Dana something too ;).  Tomorrow, I’ll pass on some of the subsequent outcomes.