Creating a Learning Game is an Embarassment!

As the frogs croak and the cicadas chirp, a different kind of insect stung me. The thought kind. In a workshop where I was explaining the process of designing a learning game, a participant asked me a question: how did you design this game? And the answer I gave was not what I explained during the course of the workshop.

This should be embarrassing, no?

But I think this is an honest realisation. A realisation that you can have a razor sharp process to chip away towards the perfect game, but then sometimes you are doing things non-linearly or should I say, out of order, or should I say something just falls from the sky. God delivered this creative piece of the missing puzzle of this unknown game.

This was not how I answered when the question was raised during the workshop. My not-so-verbatim but close answer was: "So we have this process in an Excel sheet, and I filled it out and Kavin and I we met and we talked and then something else came up and so we filled up another Excel sheet, and then Kavin… Kavin… Kavin say something, I am getting lost here. Kavin, help, please help." (Kavin was one of the co-facilitators).

I presented a game development process and then as an example of a game I created, supposedly using said process, I realised that the steps to the process is only a small part of the process. God, this is embarrassing!

However, fortunately there is a simple reframe that will rescue my exposed ego. The reframe is that the steps of the process should be looked at as not steps, but rather tools that can be used at different times.

Let me use the reframe to describe what I described in the workshop.

Step one is to get in the shoes of your audience and try to understand what game experience will work with them. These are learning games, which have objectives. Those of you who are letting out yawns at the sound of the word ‘objectives’, you can yawn now but later you will thank me. The experience of playing the fun game will also teach you something, so objectives are necessary.

This feels like a step, and not a tool. But actually, audience empathy (a term I coined to wide applause), can be a fantastic tool. Stepping into shoes, observing what they observe, shouting at the top of your lungs: "I am a ten year old and I am bored," will give you ideas, will give you thoughts, will give you creative god molecules that land from the sky. But perhaps something real might happen too. The mirror neurons in your brain might fire and you might actually, momentarily, experience what it feels like to be a ten year old and from this experience an idea might emerge. Or it might trigger a memory from when you were a ten year old.

The next step is to go looking for game mechanics (a fancy term for when game actions lead to gameplay) in expected places like in the subject matter, or in the lives of the people who use these subject matters. Think objects, elements and actors. Their actions and/or interactions, which is the next step in my process, will flow from objects, elements and actors. Which is why an Excel sheet helps in the listing of all these. You see them side by side, hand in hand and game ideas flow like water from a million tiny tributaries into one large game-sized river. These two tools are excavators of sorts or simply put, a shovel to dig.

The next bit is Design the Challenge. The challenge, which has to be challenging for the player, emerges as we think of problems and issues. In real life these are worrisome, in the game life these are the stuff of fun. Perhaps this one actually is a step, a necessary moment in the process when vague ideas rain as concrete obstacles. But even here, you might circle back to redefine the challenge after testing, making it somewhat tool-like in its flexibility. 

Yes, even my framework about frameworks is falling apart. Which is exactly my point.

Similarly for adding twists and setting the rules. These feel like steps too or structural necessities you can't skip. But here's what I've learnt: sometimes the rules emerge from the mechanics, sometimes the mechanics emerge from the rules, and sometimes both emerge from a playtest that goes completely sideways. The point isn't whether something is a step or a tool. The point is having enough elements in your toolkit that you can respond to what the game needs, when it needs it.

The last step though is a tool indeed. And like this article, and the workshop, and any creative attempts such as attempts to create games, this tool of the shitty draft and iterate, applies as a broader principle in life. Be willing to create something shitty and be willing to test and iterate. You will look foolish but after five or six iterations, voila, you have a game. And a few iterations more, you will have a game that is fun, and a game that teaches people something.

So back to that workshop. After my fumbling explanation, after Kavin mercifully jumped in with actual coherent thoughts, the participant nodded. Maybe they understood. Maybe they were just being polite. But I realised something: the embarrassment wasn't from failing to follow my own process. It was from pretending there was a neat line from Step A to Step Z in the first place. The real process looks more like a drunk spider web: touching all the same points, just not in any order you'd want to admit to in public.

Foolish you will look and sound, embarrassed you will be.

A worthy learning game you will have built.