The Total Learner Experience

Strategic Play

Part 4 of a six-part series reviewing examples of the six activity modes. Read Parts 1 and 2, and 3.

Strategic Play emphasizes the manipulation of resources – military, financial, or “human” – over a longer term. In games that emphasize problem-solving, achieving pre-set goals determines progress, while games that encourage a strategic mode of play often enable players to select their own or the computer’s benchmarks. Games with strategic activities include The Sims, titles in the Tycoon series, Civilization, and the Age of Empires. Few educational titles have incorporated this play mode.

I love strategic play, but I am only semi-good at it. To excel at strategic play, you must be able to see the multiplicities of options and how your decisions now affect future fortunes.

Desktop Defense: This is my favorite online strategic game. The player is given a starting pool of money to purchase or improve towers which then are placed on the game board to prevent the egress of little blobs of different types. As these blobs are stopped, the player gets more money to spend on the defensive towers. This is a common set-up for strategic games; another good example is Bloons Tower Defense with monkeys and balloons, always a winning combo.  

A simple-to-learn, hard to master board game is Othello, which is a territory-capture game. Here two players are assigned a color, black or white. The players gain territory by placing their color to capture the other color between two of their own. These tiles get flipped -- exposing the player's color, and hiding the opponent's. Play continues until all squares are filled. The exposed colors are tallied and whoever has the most wins. 

Many games categorized as Role Playing Games (RPGs) contain a good bit of strategy. Based upon the Dungeons and Dragons games popularized in the '80s, RPGs, such as Monster's Den, have the player form a party of characters of varying strengths and weaknesses. These characters have human personas -- pictures, names, and types, but really are a series of statistics that the player controls through add-ons found mostly through pillaged treasure and reward. Often cast in a mythological world, character death is temporary and nullified through use of potions or spells. Ensorcelled armor or weaponry improve the stats of the character.

Designing for the Auto-Compulsion Loop (ACL)

Instructional Designers can take a lesson from the popularity of social games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars. These social games are played primarily through Facebook and allow players to play asynchronously in competition and cooperation with their friends. A recent study conducted by Popcap resulted in some interesting statistics (via Raph Koster's website):

• There are around 100 million social game players
  
• 24% of US and UK Internet users play social games at least once a week
  
• Slightly more women than men
  
• Average age of 43
  
• Only 6% of them are 21 and younger
  
• They’re not all housewives: 41% of them work full time, and only 11% are homemakers.
  
• 2/3 of them also play other sorts of games — casual or hardcore.
  
• And if they, do they spend more time on the social games than on the casual or hardcore games
  
• And they’re stuck: more than half have been playing for a year.
  
• A third play more than once a day
  
• 2/3 of them play over an hour a week — 12% report over 10 hours.
  
• And they report that their social game playtime is increasing
  
• For half of them, it’s the MAIN reason they use Facebook.
  
• And also, half of them say it’s very unlikely they will spend real money

The underlying phenomenon behind these statistics is in the factors that motivate players to repeatedly engage -- this audience isn't the stereotypical hardcore 20 hour a week WoW addict -- the motivating factors seem to be the granular achievements earned while playing combined with the inclusion of the player's real friends. 

Explorative Play

Part 3 of a six-part series reviewing examples of the six activity modes. Read Parts 1 and 2.

Brandon recently asked me to clarify the point of my recent posts regarding the activity modes. I'm hoping curious sorts will play the games I discuss and reflect on the commonalities between them. I'll post how these games can be used educationally once I've discussed examples of all six. Excuse the slowness of this feature -- I'm posting from Virginia, and the record snowfall = lack of electricity.

Explorative Play.  Another activity mode widely experienced in games is explorative play, where physical space and travel is simulated through the layout of the game arena. By hiding certain areas from view, the player is allowed to discover new areas and challenges in turn. Explorative play can be easily modified by the addition of other activity modes. Many three-dimensional "shooters" combine active and explorative play, where players find their way through virtual buildings or cities while dodging bullets and shooting enemies. Slower-paced educational games often pair exploration of an area with problem-solving activities.

I personally dislike explorative play. It makes me anxious because I don't know what's around that corner or in the hidden parts of the game board. I love Civilization. The first time I played Civ3 I played for 10 hours and then realized that I didn't know what I was doing. Finally aware of the actual rules, I played for another three hours. Similarly when Civ4 came out I played til dawn one long night. But the initial stages of the game -- the time where you send explorers out to scout the edges of the world with a completely hidden topography holds no appeal to me. Sure, there's treasure and unknowns, but those things can be scary and dangerous as well.

In Little Wheel, the player explores the game space by solving puzzles and problems. Successful players are taken to another game space to undo other puzzles. Myst is the best known of these types of puzzle games.

Second Life is, of course, a social experience at heart, but it also incorporates a large amount of exploration of space and environments. In virtual worlds, people navigate their avatars through areas, discovering new spaces and interacting with objects by flying, walking, running, and jumping.

Bubble Tanks is a shooter that takes place within a series of contiguous bubble realms. Rather than experiencing player death, the player's bubble tank is spat out to another bubble once its power has diminished.

The key to the explorative mode is understanding that not all options may be available simultaneously, and rarely is there a tiered, linear progression through levels. The explorative mode allows the player to feel in control of their movements through a larger space.

Language Communities on the Web

Having spent many years in a language classroom, I was excited to discover the abundance of free language instruction on the web. The three I found the most impressive were Livemocha, Babbel, and Busuu. All three offer interactive language lessons for a variety of European languages while Livemocha includes a number of less traditional languages (such as Persian, Esperanto, and Urdu).  Busuu is based upon the European system of language levels (A1, A2, B1, B2…) and was selected as an official UNESCO project while Livemocha follows the American system of classes (101,102, 201…)

Here is a rundown of each:

Busuu tracks your language progress via a “language garden” where your plant has the opportunity to grow into a tree as your progress through the lessons. Busuu’s strength is vocabulary building since each lesson begins with a picture, pronunciation, English translation, and example sentence. It also attempts to have you learn the language via short passages and related questions.  Like Livemocha, there is also a writing section where other users rate your responses. This feature is the main advantage of a true online community where the website can take advantage of a speaker’s native fluency. Thus, the user becomes both the student and the teacher.

Babbel gives the user more freedom to adjust the language to their level and has a stronger focus on common phrases.  My favorite aspects of Babbel are its forum and the chatrooms. In the easy to use forum, you can ask specific grammar questions not covered in the lessons. For instance, what really is the difference between nouvel and neuf? Also, the chatroom is a quick and easy way to put your language skills to the test. It should be noted that although all three sites offer a great array of services with a paid membership, Babbel is the most limited for users not willing to pay.

Livemocha tries to incentivize its users to progress with a points system that also hands out awards at different levels. While it is rather basic, I can attest that I have continued to practice lessons simply to attain the next shiny medal available. The lessons are very structured. Each includes a section to learn vocabulary/phrases, review them, complete a writing submission, and record a spoken section. The last two sections are then rated by native speakers in the community. In a sense, this tool provides you with free teachers who correct your grammar and pronunciation. One area I would like to see them add would be grammar. This fall before visiting Turkey, I wanted to use Livemocha to learn a few phrases and sentences. However, I found it difficult to extract even basic grammar only from the vocabulary and sentences the site provides.

8 Tips for Designing an ARG (as a Learning Experience)

In November 2009 myself, Brandon, and Dolly published an article about Alternate Reality Games in the eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions e-magazine (download a copy here).

Since the article was published, several instructional designers have asked us to pull out some practical tips on how they can get started designing their own ARG. For this post, we thought we would reference eight key tips from the article that provide a starting point for you to consider as you embark on your ARG design.

1. Establish Clear Goals	Document what are you trying to achieve with the game. What are you trying to get your audience to experiment with or learn? After all, participants should be learning something while having fun. The Threshold, a game designed by Cisco had clear goals from the beginning, generating very positive feedback from players: "The Threshold was a four-week long alternate reality game designed to build teamwork, build awareness of Cisco products and services, and to provide an entertaining and fun experience."
2. Tell a Meaningful and Entertaining Story	Make your story relevant to your audience and engage them in the unfamiliar by tapping into what is familiar to them. Don't get too carried away with the story to a point you forget it's all about the audience. The designers at LAMP (Laboratory for Advanced Media Production, Australia) felt that an intriguing story about the school's production studio would motivate new students to participate in their game. The "Safesets, Sabotage and Madame Blash" mini ARG (mARG) is an excellent example of a game that has a relevant setting and background story that is sure to entice players.
3. Don't Become Overly Attached to Your Story and Characters	Be quick to adapt to your audience's responses. Let them participate in the design process as the story unfolds. Interact directly with them (via non-player characters), respond to their reactions, be prepared to change strategies, puzzles, and/or storylines to conform to how the audience is changing the game. The Cloudmarkers were a self-organized group of players involved in the famous ARG "The Beast." They initiated a Yahoo! group in order to discuss the latest findings in the game. Their discussion was closely followed by the developers and, since ARGs are normally developed as they are delivered, the developers would often include members of the group in the game plot as it unfolded.
4. Plan, Plan, Plan	Even though you need to be flexible, lay out a plan of the events and outcomes. For instance, create a flowchart of the action items such as clues, puzzles, characters interactions with the players, next moves, etc. This will make it easier for you to visualize and strategize how the game is going to be played and will give you a better idea of when, what and how to adapt. Here is an example of a flowchart being used to plan the actions in Ascendency Point, a live event for the game Perplex City.
5. Create a Reward System	No matter how cool your game design is and how engaging your characters and story are, chances are you may still have difficulty getting people to participate. Instill competitiveness and collaboration by offering rewards. Make it fun. In the Duke's Quest ARG we created, it was a challenge to get players involved without a reward system. This can be a challenge when organizing small group ARGs which tend to involve even those who might not be interested in games just for "fun's" sake. A reward system might be that extra incentive they need to get involved. The Dark Knight ARG (developed for The Dark Knight movie), had a message from the Joker requesting players to submit photos of themselves in Joker make-up in order to receive a mystery package in the mail.
6. Leverage Social Media	Consider using social media utilities to both design and deliver the game. Services such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and others can serve as a medium for puzzle delivery and for players to interact with each other and non-player characters.
7. Have Closure	It's OK to have cliffhangers for a next instance of the game, but make sure your game has closure. Players need to feel like they've achieved something at the end. This can be a live event at which players gather with characters for a final announcement, conclude the game going over their achievements, distribute rewards or even set up expectations for a segue.
8. Play an ARG	It is true, the best way to design something effective might be to actually get your hands dirty. If you want to know how to design a good ARG, play an ARG. By actively joining a game you may learn how to relate to your audience's feelings and expectations when designing your own ARG. You can find active ARGs and read up on old games on websites and communities like ARGnet.

I hope these tips can help you get started designing your own ARG. The potential for active engagement is inherent to ARGs and may help you deliver a truly effective and experiential learning activity. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on ARGs in general. Please feel free to contact me or add to the comments here with your responses to these questions:

• Have you designed or played an ARG before?
• Was it specifically designed to teach or motivate the audience to experiment with technology or a concept?
• What are your best practices and advice for those interested in using ARGs for learning?