Games that are ‘about’ something

We make fun games, with a purpose. They are often a direct response to a brief or commissioning opportunity, linked to learning or communication objectives and targeted to specific audiences. If you think that sounds boring, you are wrong! It’s awesome.

One of my all time design heroes Raph Koster tweeted this earlier in the year:

I love this quote. Its now my favourite way to describe what WE do - 'games that are about something'.

A fair proportion of our games are commissioned by broadcasters, educators and not-for-profit organisations, such as the BBC, Turner, Channel 4, Wellcome Trust, Tate and the Science Museum. The 'about' in these games is the history, the science, the learning message - essentially the communication objective of the project - and all our games, start with it.

This post captures some thoughts on our approach to creating games that fuse a project's objectives into the core of the game, and put the ‘about’, at the beginning of the game design process.

Understanding the ‘about’

Game design is extremely hard. Balancing fun, reward, objectives, jeopardy, play loops, score systems, and controls is a challenge in itself. Add educational objectives - the constraints or unchangeable rules in your game system - and it gets super tricky.

To get the education into the heart of a game, the team needs a thorough understanding of the content. Over the past 11 years we've worked with Egyptologists, Medieval battle experts, Astrophysicists, Neuroscientists, Resilience experts and Philosophers in order to bring this knowledge and expertise into the project team.

The content forms the backbone of all educational projects, and content experts knowingly or not, provide the bones from which the game design hangs. The game design is improved by the integrity and validity of the content it contains, and the experts are vital in providing this. They also make the working day a little more interesting!

Making the ‘about’, fun

Broadly speaking, we design games around the education and knowing the content allows us to approach things right. To help orientate the design process, we think about four different 'shapes'. These are very unscientific and crucially not mutually exclusive.

Abstraction - Making the unappealing fun

Abstracting a project’s educational content is a very good way of getting challenging or unappealing content in front of a willing audience. However in order to make sure the education is still central to the design, our approach is to create winning strategies which are directly related to the learning objectives. To learn to how to win you must first understand the underling education.

A game that demonstrates this beautifully is Proximity, one of a suite of SuperMe games which embeds real life resilience strategies into the game's core mechanics. With Proximity, our challenge was to create a game which communicated the merits of being an individual but rewarded co-operative, not-competitive play. The final game was synchronous multi-player, formation-flying game with a score-multiplier system, which rewarded not only team work but team-spirit.

Metaphor - Making the strange familiar

When we’re trying to explain the underlining principles of something, a metaphor can be the simplest and quickest way to do it. They are a great tool for making complex content more tangible. The challenge is to not overwork the metaphor, which is very easy to do, once you start adding game mechanics, jeopody and score-systems.

Our forthcoming ‘Wondermind’ project for Tate Kids uses games to explain how young brains evolve and grow. All the games are set within the visual world of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and each game uses a specific location and character to explain a different neuroscience concept.

One such concept is Plasticity and the notion that a child's brain is over connected with many more points of communication between cells than in the adult brain. Over time, the connections that are used the most are kept and those used less are lost - our challenge was to explain this simply to a pre-teen audience!

The solution uses the metaphor of a forest as the brain, with paths and rabbit holes representing the brain’s synapses and connections respectively. The objective is for Alice to catch the elusive white rabbit, but the pathways that aren't used will quickly become overgrown. The winning strategy is to keep as many pathways open as possible by not always focusing on the rabbit but on the pathways themselves. To master the game, the player must understand the underlining principles of Plasticity.

Simulation - Making the complex accessible

When the content we’re working with has complex rules, relationships and behaviours our preferred approach is to create a simulation. Games are really good at demonstrating complex things, but the challenge with simulations is often one of reduction in the name of fun over realism.

We’ve previously created them to show how DNA is passed between generations and we are currently building one to show the social, environment and financial effects of running a shoe shop. Most famously we used it to bring the Launchpad gallery (and physical science) to life in our sandbox game - ‘Launchball’.

In Launchball, you are presented with a grid-based level and the objective of getting a ball from an entrance to an exit. The player is given a selection of blocks each with it’s own unique behaviour and effect on the ball. The simulation brings to life Newtons laws of motion, alongside magnetism, conduction and other physical science phenomena.

In the example below the player must place a ‘Wind turbine’ on a circuit to generate electricity to power an escalator and move the ball towards the exit. To solve the puzzle you have to understand that copper conducts electricity. To master the game, you need to understand the concepts that are modelled - the player must get what the game is 'about'.

Narrative - Adding a story layer

Narrative is less an approach and more a device for packing in content. In fact it's a bit of a cheat, as it (unless you're very clever!) usually sits on top of the actual game layer.

In a world of casual games and on-the-move gaming, narrative has become deeply unfashionable, yet a 'good story' is great vessel for delivering a lot of content in a succinct and meaningful way. It doesn’t suit all educational games, but a story-based structure can be a simple, and perfectly formed solution.

We've used storytelling in many of our games, from our interactive drama productions for BBC History, online game suite's for Kudos’s Spooks to docu-drama games like Trafalgar Origins and 1066 for Channel 4.

Most recently we told the story of the Opium Wars and the role of the British in bringing about the formation of Hong Kong. High Tea is set 10 years before the event and places the player in the dubious role of a Sea Merchant trading opium for silver, and buying tea to satisfy the demands the British tea drinking public. It's a hugely popular game and shows the power of a good story.

We’re going to be at the forthcoming London Edu-Games meet-up to discuss these four 'shapes', and perhaps find some more. If you want to come along, sign-up on their Meet-up page. Hope to see a few of you there.