While the bear’s away, the cats can come out and play?

Well, it’s in a little different vein than the usual game design articles here, but I felt the topic was pertinent enough to entertainment game design to post here. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’m particularly interested in the convergence of video gaming and video game culture with formal Education and educational psychology. It’s one of the frontiers of both Education and gaming, so it makes the news fairly frequently. That said, I was surprised to spot this recent article on Yahoo news:

Inspired by popular video games like World of Warcraft, an Indiana University professor is applying game design principles such as clear, well-defined goals and gradual, incremental rewards to his college classes. A hit with students, the approach has some employers showing interest, too.

Students at several of Indiana University's game design courses begin their class with zero "experience points," which corresponds to an F grade. Instead of completing presentations, they'll perform "quests;" sitting exams becomes "fighting monsters;" and handing in assignments becomes "crafting." Students even team up into "guilds" to tackle group projects.


As much as I’d like to say this is a great idea and recommend that other courses and programs adopt an approach like this.. well, there are some problems. Now I need to preface this.. It could be that this particular game design program in Indiana is already addressing all of these issues. I just don’t have any way of knowing from the two available articles. I believe that there are five significant problems and issues with the approach:

Buying In

The first major issue is buy-in. So far, every single person I’ve talked to about the article has basically said the same thing: “Interesting.. but kinda dorky”. Several people even felt insulted at the idea of ‘pretending’ that college work was like ‘questing’. As I described in a previous article here, two of the five requirements for something to be a ‘game’ are cognitive, wrapped up in the perception and mindset of the game ‘player’. Some activities just aren’t going to be games for some individuals, and getting a person to accept something as a game requires more than just giving non-game activities trendy game labels. But let’s suspend disbelief for a few moments, assume that we’re going beyond just renaming, and look at some real potential differences between a traditional college class and a ‘game’ class.

‘Maintenance’ vs. ‘Progression’

The concept of ‘experience points’ has been a part of nearly every fantasy role-playing game to date. Experience points are one tool that games use to create game ‘progression’, or a method for helping the player feel like they’ve accomplished something and assisting the player in goal-forming. It’s a popular game concept, as the commentary for the Yahoo article highlighted:

“This system works because traditional grading is actually flawed. In the traditional system, you start at 100% and have to MAINTAIN that. Maintenance of anything is harder, more stressful work than PROGRESSION, which is how this ‘gamer system’ works.”


Looking at the difference a little closer, however, it’s really only a difference in frame of reference. If you consider the total points available in a course, and compare that total to your current points, you have a progression system. But if you compare your current points to the maximum possible points available to date, you have a maintenance system. The key difference between these two viewpoints is actually the words ‘maximum possible’. As those familiar with MMORPG game design will tell you, one of the critical requirements for a successful MMORPG is ensuring that the players never feel like they’ve hit the end of progression, the end of the roller-coaster ride. The player should always feel like they have more that they can accomplish, because they minute they reach the end of the ride, they’re probably going to stop playing. So how do you cognitively change the course into a progression system? Remove the ‘maximum possible points’.. don’t let the student hit the end of the progression.

There are two reasonable ways to accomplish this. First, you can make most or all ‘quests’ available at any given point in the course so a student always has the opportunity to make progress. Unfortunately, this isn’t always feasible in some content areas and classes. Sometimes certain activities and assignments require information or resources that the students don’t have yet. It also doesn’t address the progression issue of when the student gets close to the end of the course: What happens when they’ve completed all of the ‘quests’ available for the entire course, and still don’t have as many ‘experience points’ as they would like? Alternately, you can provide a near-unlimited number of ‘quest’ opportunities. In a traditional grading system, this would be called ‘extra credit’.

Meaningful Learning

The previous section described methods for allowing students to experience game ‘progression’ in a classroom setting, and there are a number of potential benefits and problems involved in creating such a system. In gaming terminology giving the player lots of possible methods for making progress is typically referred to as giving the player ‘multiple routes’ for success. In Education, it’s called ‘differentiated instruction’. Giving the player multiple routes to success allows them to play to their strengths, both in terms of activities the student is most comfortable with as well as activities that fit the student's learning style best.

However just as the game designer can re-brand ‘assignments’ and ‘presentations’ as ‘questing’ and ‘crafting’, the player is equally free to rename the activities (quest) ‘grinding’. Anyone who’s played MMORPGs for any length of time can probably attest to how routinized and tedious ‘questing’ can become. While the player may learn valuable skills and techniques during their first few quests, quite quickly quests come down to nothing more than time and route optimization, a fairly mindless activity for most players. To parallel the curricular problem: It is easy to create another worksheet or assignment for a class, but much more difficult to make each activity an equally-worthwhile learning experience. From a survey I conducted on World of Warcraft learning, one of the trends I noted was that players typically reported that game rewards were less meaningful than the rewards from non-game activities, despite being more tangible and immediately useful. Incorporating progression into a course needs to add to the motivational experience, not just suck the meaning out of the activities, and this is no small challenge. Further, dramatically increasing the number of possible assignments and activities (as well as the timings of when they can be completed) would significantly increase both the lesson planning and grading necessary for the course.

Reward ‘Currency’ & Controllable Environments

Anyone who’s played fantasy role-playing games quickly becomes familiar with the concept of game reward ‘currency systems’. The fluidity of game reward currency compared to typical non-game rewards gives games significant motivational appeal: You might be hard-pressed to come up with any tangible benefit to struggling to learn Calculus, but you know exactly what you can do with the gold you’ll get from doing that quest. This is particularly important in enticing players to try a game for the first time. James Paul Gee, one of the foremost experts on video game learning, calls it the ‘Amplification of Input Principle’. Ideally, the game activity should allow the player to feel successful within the first few minutes of playing, and reward the player in an immediately-useful way. What I’m getting at here is that on their own ‘experience points’ are not a currency with much utility or fluidity. In the simplest classroom setting, all you can trade them for is your grade for the class. In most games, however, ‘experience points’ are typically traded for ‘levels’, which in turn give the player access to other forms of more-useful currencies like ‘skill points’.

As I mentioned in a previous article, one of the five basic requirements for an activity to be considered a ‘game’ is that the activity is ‘controllable’. Ideally, not only should the player have some level of control over the final outcome of the activity, they should also have some ability to influence the course of activity events. In this case, that means giving ‘experience points’ greater utility than just currency toward a course grade, or the addition of other complementary currency systems. For example, students might be able to trade experience points for class absences (or the extra assignments or activities that are typically associated with making up missed classes) or the ability to opt out of a test or assessment, or specific amounts of experience points might be required (or used) to ‘unlock’ certain kinds of activities or projects.

Game-play Motivations

Finally, once we’ve adequately established the course activities as a ‘game’, it’s important to examine what types of game players would be attracted to the particular game. Ideally, we want the game to appeal to all students. Players of MMORPGs will probably have heard of the ‘Bartle Test’. The test, designed by Richard Bartle, is designed to identify a MMORPG player’s ‘game-playing motivations’. According to the test, there are four primary game-playing motivations, designated the ‘Achiever’, the ‘Explorer’, the ‘Socializer’, and the ‘Killer’. Everyone has a little of each motivation in them, with a player’s two highest-scoring motivations most directly affecting the kinds of games and game activities that will interest that player. If you’ve never taken the Bartle Test, a free version of the test can be found on the GamerDNA site here.

A course experience point progression system definitely fits best with the ‘Achiever’. Achievers “enjoy setting goals, surpassing previous performances and hitting new milestones. They tend to have lots of high scores, badges, trophies and other concrete evidence of their successful endeavors”. An experience point progression system with multiple routes for success would also appeal to the ‘Explorer’. Explorers enjoy discovering the unique and novel aspects of the game environment and system. They want to examine every possible route to success and understand every nuance of the game environment. "It's not so much the wandering around and poking about, but that euphoric eureka moment the Explorer strives for.”

Unfortunately, nothing about a course experience point progression system directly appeals to the ‘Socializer’. Players with high Socializer scores “enjoy interacting with other people, forming bonds and finding cooperative solutions to the challenges within the (game) world”. Enticing the Socializer would require adding a social and community aspect to the course: not just group activities and assignments, but the ability to discuss the game environment and related activities and to share ideas and understanding. In short, the creation of a course learning community. A lot of college classes encourage ‘study groups’, but the social networks and systems employed by gaming culture are typically much more elaborate and extensive, including blogs, wikis, discussion boards, databases, and facebook and twitter groups. Further, unlike study groups led by graduate teaching faculty (GTFs), gaming learning communities are typically player controlled, giving players ownership over their learning environment.

Most problematic is the ‘Killer’. In general, direct competition between students in a class is frowned upon. Achievement in schools today is typically ‘mastery-based’: student learning is compared against a ‘benchmark’ goal, rather than against other students. Further, laws protect students’ grades and performance. The character-comparison sites and ranking systems common with online fantasy role-playing games would be illegal in a school setting. While carefully-controlled optional in-class competition could be one method for enticing the Killer, another reasonable approach would be to provide averaged student data throughout the course, allowing those interested in the competitive aspect of gaming to track their own accomplishments against the class average in a variety of ways.

In conclusion, I definitely think we’ll see more and more attempts at bringing gaming and gaming culture into our Educational experiences.. and hopefully these attempts will gradually incorporate more and more of the kinds of learning that have been found to be effective in successful video game design, rather than just attempt to give traditional classroom activities game labels.