Venture Sprout

Do games stimulate learning? How can addictive game mechanics be employed in the service of educational goals?

I had a great conversation with a fellow entrepreneur today about games and learning. He shared that he spent some time playing Farmville but could not envision himself spending his time creating a game that just seemed to waste people’s time. But we both decided that game mechanics were important for non-game people to understand. So I guess I’ll have to keep my World of Warcraft account live for at least 1 more month.   Here is a list of resources, subject matter experts, and links to follow to further investigate the general topic of games, game mechanics, and learning.

Interesting people and links

1. Amy Jo Kim

Since 2006, my thinking on social applications has been heavily influenced by the work of Amy Jo Kim.  In an  interview in the interaction design blog Bokardo,  Amy Jo Kim describes game mechanics:

Game mechanics are a collection of tools and systems that an interactive designer can use to make an experience more fun and compelling. Used well, game mechanics make a Web design more engaging, sticky and viral by incentivizing certain behaviors. However, game mechanics are not a panacea: to be effective, the mechanics need to be integral to the experience.

Two slide presentations introduce her concepts around applying game mechanics to interaction design and social application design.  The first is called “Putting the Fun in Functional“.

The second slideshare is called “Power to the Players”:

2. Raph Koster (bio, blog, essays, presentations, Metaplace )

I first ran into Raph Koster’s work when I saw him present at Kevin Werbach’s Supernova 2008 Conference.  I blogged about the panel, called “All the World’s a Game,” which sought to investigate these questions:

Massively multiplayer online games offer glimpses of how social interactions and work will develop in the Network Age. What can they teach us? How can businesses and online communities leverage insights from virtual worlds to develop more effective systems and practices?

I wrote an extensive post on the UpTake blog.  Raph linked to my post and an interesting comment thread developed.  There is also a video of that session. Raph has an intriguing presentation called “The Core of Fun” that is worth scanning.

Summary points Raph made:

1. Raph shared about “emergent” play, like endgame raids in World of Warcraft and Everquest (aka Evercrack) not originally envisioned by the game developers but created by the players.
2. Raph: “Humans enjoy transgressive play” and will always try to break free from the game constraints.

More detailed points Raph made:

1. In response to Dave Elfving’s concerns about designers being trapped into a “gamist” mentality (more on this later), Raph responded that “games are indeed reductionist. All games resolve to mathematic models.” There is the danger that game designers fall into the trap of reinforcing simplistic but effective mechanisms for addictive play. But gamers are capable of transcending simple game mechanisms to create “play” that was not originally envisioned by game designers.
2. For example, World of Warcraft is not about raiding (where a large group of high-level players engage in coordinated action in several separate teams to take down a “boss”). Everquest was not about raiding. Raiding was designed by high level players in Everquest. the actual game is killing mosters. The users created the raid. Raiding is not really part of the game of World of Warcraft. Raiding was “tacked on at the end of the game.”
3. On the difference between playing World of Warcraft and raiding: “We’ve all been asked to go to dances. And forced to learn to dance. Endless succession of middle school dances, proms, etc….and then at the end of the game, you are asked to join a ballet company…synchronized collective action by a number of skilled players.“
4. Flickr was originally a MMO called “game never ending”. You could post photos as part of the game. But then they slimmed back their plan and
5. “Humans enjoy transgressive play with game models.” People try to break out of the channels provided by the game. Raph gave an example of his son. First, “he hacked the game. Then what becomes a hack becomes a cheat code. Then, he look for hacks beyond the cheat code. Then we bought the PC version of the game to hack the data files. Finally, one eventually turns into a game designer.” (Not sure this is normal behavior and there was some comment that his son must be exceptional).

3.  Douglas Thomas

Also at the Supernova conference was Douglas Thomas ((bio, bio, You Play WoW? You’re Hired in Wired 04/06, WoW Factor at ojr.org, The Play of Imagination Beyond the Literary Mind (doc) with John Seely Brown on HASTAC.org, What kids learn in virtual worlds on CNET, The Gamer Disposition on Conversation Starter blog at HBS Publishing which summarizes his presentation at Supernova).  He talked about The Gamers Disposition and highlighted key attributes of the gamer, which I blogged about at CNReviews.  Here’s an excerpt from CNReviews:

1. Gamers are bottom-line oriented

From the HBS post:

Today’s online games have embedded systems of measurement or assessment. Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one another, through systems of points, rankings, titles, and external measures. Their goal is not to be rewarded but to improve. Game worlds are meritocracies where assessment is symmetrical (leaders are assessed just as players are), and after-action reviews are meaningful only as ways of enhancing individual and group performance.

2. Gamers understand the power of diversity

From the post:

Diversity is essential in the world of the online game. One person can’t do it all; each player is by definition incomplete. The key to achievement is teamwork, and the strongest teams are a rich mix of diverse talents and abilities. The criterion for advancement is not “How good am I?”; it’s “How much have I helped the group?” Entire categories of game characters (such as healers) have little or no advantage in individual play, but they are indispensable members of every team.

3. Gamers thrive on change

From the post:

Nothing is constant in a game; it changes in myriad ways, mainly through the actions of the participants themselves. As players, groups, and guilds progress through game content, they literally transform the world they inhabit. Part of the gamer disposition is grounded in an expectation of flux. Gamers do not simply manage change; they create it, thrive on it, seek it out.

4. Gamers see learning as fun

From the post:

For most players, the fun of the game lies in learning how to overcome obstacles. The game world provides all the tools to do this. For gamers, play amounts to assembling and combining tools and resources that will help them learn. The reward is converting new knowledge into action and recognizing that current successes are resources for solving future problems.

5. They tend to “Marinate on the Edge”

From the post:

Finally, gamers often explore radical alternatives and innovative strategies for completing tasks, quests, and challenges. Even when common solutions are known, the gamer disposition demands a better way, a more original response to the problem. Players often reconstruct their characters in outrageous ways simply to try something new. Part of the gamer disposition, then, is a desire to seek and explore the edges in order to discover some new insight or useful information that deepens one’s understanding of the game.

I have a feeling that the theory that multiplayer gaming cultivates this kind of behavior is a little utopian. These behaviors may be great qualities that successful gamers have, but I’m not sure that games actually create these behaviors.

4. Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen has one of the best blogs on entrepreneurship and viral games and applications.  For example, I just read an older post about cultural differences between web people and game people.  Here are some of the categories of things that he covers:

• Viral marketing
• Engagement and design
• Freemium and ad monetization
• Metrics and targeting
• Media and games

5. Mitchel Resnick

Back when I was in Boston (a long time ago), I volunteered with a MIT Media Lab project led by Mitchel Resnick to pilot educational programs at the Boston Children’s Museum. The facility created a “Computer Clubhouse” where kids could play with programmable Lego Robots using a simple programming language.  Resnick emphasized a methodology called Constructivism.  I have not kept up with what Resnick has been up to, but here is an interesting 2008 blog post about his latest efforts–Lifelong Kindergarten Group, PicoCrickets and Lego Mindstorms.

6.  Bill Gurley post on Megastudy.net

I was doing a little bit of research on a company called Megastudy.net that apparently has been incredibly successful in Korea, in the online video instruction space.  Turns out Bill Gurley of Benchmark was looking at this too, and wrote a great post about the company.  Here’s his summary of what Megastudy is about:

Here are some quick notes on the company:

1. Megastudy is at it’s core an online learning web site.
2. The business model is subscription for each course.
3. The “teacher” of the course gets something like 23% of the revenue for each class they teach.
4. Because its online, a teacher can have an unlimited number of students.
5. As a result, there are Megastudy teachers making over US$1mm/year in a country where the average teacher makes something like US$40K.
6. In order to sort to the top of the list (and be popular), these teachers must be promotional, funny, engaging, effective.  Bottom line, they must be entrepreneurial.

Point #5 and #6 would create an interesting conundrum in the U.S.  Many here argue that U.S. teachers are underpaid, so in that sense it should be a huge welcome.  That said, I don’t think any teacher union in the U.S. would support the “eat what you kill” business model in use at Megastudy.

We have an investment in one interesting company that is borrowing part of its model from Megastudy, and part of the MMORPG world.  its a collaborative learning web site called Grockit.   Here is the TechCrunch review.

Grockit itself might be an interesting case to look at where game mechanics are being applied toward educational goals.

Conclusion:

Game mechanics are critical to all social applications.  Understanding why people play games, what makes things fun, and what makes things addictive, is critical to social game success.  Learnings can come from various fields.  How can game mechanics be exploited to generated positive social outcomes, like education or community knowledge creation/curation (like Wikipedia)?  I believe that this trend of game mechanics applied to non-gaming applications is just beginning.