W4 Fun Analysis

People won't want to play a gamelet if it's not fun, or if it's not enjoyable in some way.

Unfortunately fun or enjoyment are very complex, poorly understood matters. Game designer Marc LeBlanc (quoted in Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, MIT Press, 2004, p334) lists eight kinds of game-related pleasure;

sensory pleasure

fantasy

narrative or drama

challenge

fellowship

discovery

self expression

submission to rule

Not all of these may be applicable to educational gamelets. We may find that there are limitations due to (1) restrictions in how immersive the gamelet medium can be (though the very low tech first generation adventure games were very engaging) and to (2) the requirement that an educational game has to support repeated, or at least sustained, play, given what we know about how dependent learning is on repetition.

Going beyond this high-level breakdown we can identify a number of features that seem to be responsible for sustained engagement in many games.

Competition. For some people, competing against someone face to face, or against a highest score list, or against a personal best, promotes engagement.

Goals with tuned difficulty level. If a gamelet's goal is too easy to attain the game will be boring; if too difficult, it will be frustrating. Since people get better with practice, especially in an educational gamelet, there has to be some way to escalate the difficulty to compensate. Many games do this with explicit levels; some do it with automatic difficulty changes based on player performance.

Partial reinforcement. Though it violates common sense, it is very clear from a great deal of data that rewarding someone for their behavior occasionally creates much more dedication to a task than rewarding them consistently. This is related to difficulty level: if you win every time the game is too easy; if you never win you can get discouraged, but if you win occasionally you may stay with game for a long time.

Progress toward the goal. Engagement seems to be increased if you can identify clear progress towards the goal, even if you don't ultimately win. Like the goal itself, progress should be neither too easy nor too hard. In baseball, getting on base is progress, and scoring a run is more progress, but neither one in itself constitutes winning. In a solitaire game, exposing a buried card constitutes progress. One analysis of the progress effect is that since it takes work to make progress, you don't want to waste the effort you have invested by quitting the game before the end, if you have made some progress. Another analysis is that you are rewarded for making progress, so you feel good about the game even if you don't win.

Emergent events. (This may not be best term for this... we may be able to come up with a better one.) In many games, every now and then something interesting happens more or less automatically that marks progress. In the gamelet Snood, every now and then a hit causes a bunch of snoods to be released, not just the one you hit, if you have hit the right things to set this up. In many solitaire games you may be able to play off a bunch at cards on one play, also if you have set things up right. Having these things happen may act as intermediate rewards during play, and help to sustain your interest. (Again, the partial reinforcement idea says these things will be more effective if they don't happen too often.)

Balance of chance and skill. While most games require some level of skill, there is abundant evidence that not much skill, or even user control is necessary to make a game engaging, if other elements are present. I've spent a lot of time playing two forms of solitaire that have very, very little user control (and hence skill) but are quite strong on emergent events. In games like this, chance is essential to keep the game varied and hence interesting. Chance also plays a role in "lightening up" a game. If a game depends solely on your own skill, there can be stress associated with failure. The stress is diluted or eliminated if it is obvious that success or failure is influenced by chance as well as skill.

Collecting. Games like Pokemon are driven by the players' wish to collect sets of things. Maria Klawe and colleagues (see reading below) found that they could motivate a bunch of sometimes boring educational activities by providing cards that students could only collect by playing.

Narrative. The Zoombini games (see reading below) embed a bunch of logic puzzles in a narrative frame in which the Zoombinis need to escape from their island, and the puzzles are set as challenges they have to figure out to cross rivers, etc. There's some reason to think that the narrative frame helps to sustain interest.

Character attachment. The Zoombinis are built from combinations of separate attributes (what kind of hair, what kind of shoes, what kind of glasses, and the like.) They are really just tokens in various logic puzzles that hinge on discovering what combination of attributes pass some test. But, unexpectedly for the designers, play testing showed that some players chose favorite Zoombinis are paid special attention to the fate of their favorite character. This kind of attachment could contribute to motivation and interest.

Social engagement. Some games are fun because of the interactions players have with one another while playing. Social forces may also act to encourage continued play rather than quitting.

Assignment

Remember that you are encouraged to work together on this assignment with another student, as long as you keep clearly in mind that this does NOT mean dividing up the work.

W4-1 Spend about an hour or an hour and a half with the following readings. Turn in a brief (few sentences) summary of what ideas you can extract from them about what makes games fun and sustains children's interest. Are there ideas that should be added to our list, above? (You do not have to read all the material in the papers, though you may choose to: focus on those parts of the discussion that addresses fun and engagement.)

http://www.terc.edu/handson/s96/zoom.html

http://mathforum.org/technology/papers/papers/klawe.html

W4-2 Find a solitaire card game that is popular enough that you can readily find a description of its rules, for example FreeCell. Play the game enough to get a sense of it. Using the categories suggested in the notes above, describe what makes the game fun to play, or, if you feel it is more appropriate to the case to state it this way, why people keep playing it. Pay particular attention in your description to any features you feel are important in this respect that are NOT included in the categories above; we will want to add these to our framework.

W4-3. Do the same as for W4-2 for an interactive gamelet of your choice, eg Pacman, Snood, Tetris,....

If you have time, take other solitaire card games or gamelets that seem different from those you have already analyzed and analyze them.

Place your responses to the three questions, plus any added work, in your Yahoo folder, using a filename that makes clear that it is your submission for W4. Due Monday, Feb 14.