In his critique of McGonigal’s “Play, don’t Replay!” campaign, Brendan Keogh said: “To the games evangelists, games become hammers and all the world starts to look like a nail.” While his central theme did not build on this point, it served as a starting point for this thought.

Choosing a medium for an intervention is not a simple choice, and should be somewhat iterative.  Any intervention should justify their choice of medium. It is a valid design approach to review the strengths of each available medium.  Only then, should one ask: why a game, and not a billboard, brochure, or elearning style app?

For example, consider two tools to help a 4th grader memorize multiplication tables: a set of flash cards, and a video game. Which one is more expensive to build, risky to design? What benefits would a game really bring, in light of the goal?  Why build a new game when there are many such games already? What significant problem could such a new game bring? Not much, argued math game designer Keith Devlin.

Games are justified when their unique abilities are mapped to the needs of the project.  But how can one decide when that’s the case? One way to start is to review “what can games do?”

OK, here is a random ambitious idea for immersive toy. I call it ToyWorld. It is a way to make ANY real-world toy come alive onscreen.

It requires a hardware accessory for a game console or PC. Imagine a plastic breadbox that is a 3D scanner (a motorized turntable, a button, and two USB webcams – COGS maybe $30). A child puts any toy inside and clicks “scan”. The toy model appears fully textured onscreen. Auto-rigging 3D software finds any limbs, puts bones in, so the plastic toy immediately starts running (slithering, flying) around a virtual world.

Child then designs the toy’s character. She clicks one of a few basic AIs: “good / bad / boss / minion.” The toy immediately starts acting like that role (e.g. attacking props, vs throwing them in the air). Child selects one of 4 generic settings: scifi, dinosaurs, barbie-style modern, medieval. A 3D environment with props (trees, buildings, paths) appears, and the toy begins running around the world, acting in character – bad guys recruit minions and take over planets…or castles, etc. Child places basic level items like gold coins, spikes, fences. The toy starts grabbing coins, avoiding spikes, running around fences.

The worlds get better, constantly. provide ever-deeper trees of AI and interactive behavior, using Minecraft’s model of constant updates. Pets appear. Weather. Aliens attack. Fires. Viking ships invade.

Players can share and play with EACH OTHER’s toys. Remotely. Angus can get Shoni’s “bad dinosaur” and stick him in his space world.

OK, it’s kind of ambitious.

Do you aim to deliver do-good messages in an entertaining medium (e.g. video games, Youtube videos)?   If so, I’m arguing that your campaign’s entertainment value is more important than your actual message.  Not equally important. More important. I feel it is surprisingly hard, expensive, and risky to engage an audience, and surprisingly easy, quick, and safe to deliver a simple message to an engaged audience. Does this sound imbalanced or wrong? See if this example convinces you.

Typical metro rail safety campaigns scold us (“STAY OFF THE TRACKS!!”) or aim to motivate us through fear of personal harm (“You’ll lose your legs if you play on tracks!”). However, one campaign has used a very different approach that achieved exceptional success: “Dumb Ways to Die” (dumbwaystodie.org). Before reading why the designers think this campaign is so successful (http://dumbwaystodie.org/why-dumb-ways-to-die-is-an-award-winning-campaign/), watch the “Dumb ways to die” video and form your own opinion.

What about that video, as an intervention, seemed most innovative to you?   I was first struck by the ironic, slightly mean-spirited concept. My guard was down, because I had never before seen such a snarky tone in any do-good campaign…until the last verse. Then, the catchy music slowed to a dramatic pause. My suspicion rose along with my attention…and yes, the message was finally delivered.  However, they kept it light, and gave me more entertaining elements, so I still liked it overall.  The video may not have been only delivering the stated message* but my point here is about the balance between entertainment and message-delivery: most of the video was purley entertaining. We are all experts at extracting a message embedded in an entertaining experience.  The designers recognize that.

The snarky tone is an example that suggests a broader point:

As intervention producers,  our do-good intention can limit and blind us to the best path to achieving our mission.

There are many barriers to such campaigns. One common barrier are the clients’ willingness to let the ends justify the means. Stakeholders in any important mission have emotional reasons for being involved, and these emotions can prevent a purely logical approach to campaign design.  Let’s say Sam the Metro Rails exec is our client. When a drunk teen is found, bloody and maimed on the rails, Sam may get that call.  To Sam, joking about rail death is tasteless at best. This is no laughing matter.

Stakeholders like Sam that hold the pursestrings want to make an effective campaign, but their design intuition may be exactly wrong.  It is intuitive for such stakeholders to try to scare the public into behavior change.Yet, as this campaign has shown, there are far more effective approaches waiting for us to discover.

For those of us who can overcome their instincts and be logical about their campaign design, I feel there are great gains in effacacy to be had.

End.

————————

References

Examining the Communication Effects of Health Campaigns A Case Study Using Find Thirty Every Day® in Western Australia. Justine E. Leavy, Adrian E. Bauman, Michael Rosenberg, Fiona C. Bull SAGE OpenMay 2014,4(2)DOI: 10.1177/2158244014533557.

* Secondly, the video does not beat a dead horse.  Everyone already knows playing on railroad tracks is dangerous.  Instead of aiming to remind us of something we know, this campaign adds a new reason not to play on the tracks: peer pressure.  The video makes risky rail behaviors (standing too near the edge of the train platform) as absurdly stupid-sounding as taking your helmet off in outer space.  By laughing at the squished cartoon guy on the tracks, we accept that being unsafe around trains would make people laugh at us for choosing such a dumb way to die. The fear of social scorn is a tremendously powerful deterrent, especially for teens (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08870449908410754).  When tempted to put a coin on the tracks, we choose not to, because we picture our friends thinking we’re a dummy, not losing fingers.

http://www.academia.edu/4174420/Attention_and_Rhetoric_Prolepsis_and_the_Problem_of_Meaning

What is juicy design?  The general idea is expressed poetically here: “the satisfying feeling we get when potential energy is converted to kinetic energy. That point where we release energy from a design in a way that creates surprise, delight,…”

Most hit casual games are loaded with examples, but Popcap’s games are most commonly cited, with good reason. Plants vs Zombies, Peggle, and earlier games all are amazing tutorials on making tiny actions, whose meaning is vanishingly small, satisfying and building holistic player satisfaction.

Let’s discuss the concrete implications (aimed at the beginning game designer, as a FAQ).

Q: How is Juicy different from basic good software interface design practice?

A: Most designers are comfortable with logical or factual design lenses: e.g. a “click” sound helps the user realize they clicked a button. Simplify  the screen so the important ideas pop out. These make sense.   By contrast, Juiciness is not as logical. Juiciness is an emotional lens on design.  A well-designed juicy game matches the players subconscious feelings of fairness and reward/punishment “I did that well, so something good should happen.”

Q: So, Juicy means good reward / punishment, Skinner Box type game design?
A: No.  Juicy is about tiny player action.  When you collect a coin in Plants vs Zombies, after doing a successful move, notice your FEELING of expectation of “good stuff”.  Notice the satisfaction of the coin appearing. Then, before you click, imagine the coin just vanishing when you clicked it.  Now, click it. That little flash and spinning of the coin, traveling to your points? That’s juiciness. It’s all the small stuff.

Q: So, Add fancy animation and your game is juicy?
A: Maybe.  A poorly-design juicy game has fancy animations that don’t relate to the player’s experience. It will feel ‘tacked on’, or unrelated to the core game activity.  Or, it’s overdone: Imagine audience cheering sounds for every tiny decision. It is too much – it feels false.

Q: Does juicy relate to the big picture – the game’s purpose – or is it more about UI in the moment?
A: It’s both, in a gluey way. Good juicy features connect the moment to the big picture. reward system.  When user intention is responsive and satisfyingly reflected back by the game.

Q: Is a Juicy design approach better than other ways of designing games?
A: No. “Juicy” is merely a narrow but useful lens to view a game’s design.  One cannot simply “make a game juicy” and be certain it’s better.  For example, consider characters in a casual game.  A mascot game character, like the Bookworm worm, reacts to player choices and personified game outcomes. The worm’s primary function is to mirror and validate the player’s internal, emotional state (though it also provides hints).  This is “juicy” character design.

Now consider the player character in a serious first-person immersive war simulation game.    Can the enemy see the player’s head above the barrel?  This is not an emotional, “juicy” design decision. This is a rational design issue.  The player’s character is highly functional: its shows the player’s position in the field, the action the player chose, and the reaction or impact.

The primary purpose of most 3D game player characters is not to reflect the player’s emotional state (though it is part of the purpose – for a richer discussion see Gee). Imagine “improving” the game by having player character thinking snarky comments, celebrating head shots or wiping tears away, when the game is primarily strategic.  Hopefully it’s obvious that making this character more “juicy” could easily hurt the player’s overall satisfaction.

Your comments or critiques are welcome.

You’re a learning game designer, looking for ways to explain the basic ideas behind your ideas to stakeholders. You need “greatest hits” theory that’s simple enough to explain to anyone.

Here’s Wolfram‘s great diagram and explanation of the components of a game:

Wolfgang’s 4-layer cake of game design

It obviously doesn’t describe ALL designs, but it’s a great starting points.

http://www.funstormgames.com/blog/2012/06/designing-around-a-core-mechanic/

I love it when someone names and explains a truth I’ve been half-aware of for some time.  This just happened today with the Jill Avery’s term “Gender Contamination”.

This article explains:

“Gender contamination” is the loaded and fascinating term coined by HBS senior lecturer Jill J. Avery to describe just how uncomfortable women and (more often than not) men become when a product they use to symbolize their gender is extended to appeal to another gender. She first noticed this phenomenon while working at Gillette, where the company was careful to call its women’s line “Gillette for Women” in order to create separation between pink razors that smell like papayas and black manly-man razors that smell like manly-man things. This piece describes a couple of other examples stemming from the research, including the struggle to get men to drink diet sodas (black cans and avoidance of the word “diet” help) and how gents on Porsche message boards managed their insecurities when the car company came out with an SUV.

It’s a really cool idea.

I’ve observed one particular instance of Gender Contamination that I found interesting. This phenomenon is sort of a variation on the idea above.  It happened in 3 steps:

1. A product started gender-neutral,
2. It became dominated one gender (by accident or design) and
3. now is being marketed explicitly to another gender.

I’m thinking of Lego. Legos used to be mean generic, gender-neutral building blocks. Then came themed kits, which was a key reason Lego is the second largest toymaker in the world.  By selling kits, instead of bulk blocks, Lego can differentiate and market an endless series of products.  This is especially important because Lego’s patents recently expired.

Here’s where the gender contamination idea comes in.  Lego’s history of gender-neutral themes did not continue with their kids.  A few kit themes are gender-neutral today (e.g. Lego City) but most are not. Lego has found huge commercial success in making kits themed and licensed around boy-friendly storyworlds (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Batman). Lego has churned out many original storyworlds around action and violence (e.g. Chima).

The sad result is many, even most, girls today don’t play with Legos after Duplo.  Lego became a boy’s toy.

Now, Lego’s trying to fix that.  They’ve recently launged a girl-targeted storyworld called Friends series.

Maybe it’s just because it’s new, or because I’m a guy, but to me, Friends feels …weird… even though I’m not opposed to Lego’s intent.  In fact I think it’s great that Lego is reaching out across gender boundaries, even if their motives are impure.

What’s wrong with Lego Friends?  It’s certainly got some clear weaknesses, as amazing game designer Erin Robinson explained so powerfully (here).

However, I feel something else uncomfortable about Lego Friends, and I can’t explain it. I wonder if Brand Contamination theory (or this minor variant of it) might be part of the key to articulating that other nagging feeling.

I’d love to hear Jill and Erin discuss how the idea of Gender Contamination explain the Mysterious Discomfort of Lego Friends.  Here’s hoping they’re inspired to explore it together.

There is a growing public perception that “most educational apps stink” in today’s App Store, in part because they are ineffective.  That’s partly why I’m so happy to see Google promoting quality apps in their new App Store for Educators:

“Apps submitted to Google Play for Education will be evaluated by a third-party educator network, which will review them based on alignment with Common Core Standards and other factors.”  In the demo video, it is revealed that CUE is the 3rd party doing the reviewing.

I’m also very happy to see Google offering design advice to educational app designer/developers.  In this article I suggest ways Google could improve that advice.

In this first section, I argue that Google should require app developers to prove their app is effective.  I then review Google’s advice more broadly.

If I could make only one change…

If I could make only one change to this list, I would add this:

• Prove your app is effective.

For example developers should be required to say, “Students who played the game [Motion Math] for 20 minutes for five days improved on a fractions test by an average of 15%.”  (link).  Pearson offers a free, generic framework (link) and many other similar resources exist.

I’m not talking about screening low quality apps.  I’m talking about screening apps that don’t measure anything at all.

Google told learning app designers (here, my bold):

Apps with highest educational value will have these characteristics:

• Designed for use in K-12 classrooms.

• Aligned with a common core standard or support common-core learning.

• Simple, easy to use, and intuitive for the grade levels the app is targeting. App is relatively easy to navigate without teacher guidance. Not distracting or overwhelming to students.

• Enjoyable and interactive. App is engaging to students and lets them control their experience.

• Versatile. App has features make the it useful for more than one classroom function or lesson throughout the school year.

• Supports the “4Cs”:

1. Creativity — Allows students to create in order to express understanding of the learning objectives, and try new approaches, innovation and invention to get things done.
2. Critical thinking — Allows students to look at problems in a new way, linking learning across subjects and disciplines.
3. Collaboration — Allows students and (if appropriate) educators to work together to reach a goal.
4. Communication — Allows students to comprehend, critique and share thoughts, questions, ideas and solutions.

Edutainment, initially hailed as a educational revolution, failed to disrupt classroom practice. One of the many reasons, argued MIT researchers, was the products’ frequent lack of efficacy (link). Google could help the latest generation of developers avoid repeating this clear and well-understood mistake in the field.

Bad learning apps can actually hurt learning. Some popular learning products are widely believed to be ineffective (such as toddler DVDs), but it is less commonly known that bad learning apps can do harm, not just fail to do good.   “Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007) empirically demonstrated that for each hour children, ages 8 to 16 months, were exposed to commercially available audiovisual programs (e.g., Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby), the children developed 6 to 8 fewer receptive vocabulary words (i.e., words they understand) than their counterparts who were not exposed to such stimuli.” (Christakis 2009).  Google should prevent ineffective products from being confused with unknown or proven good educational products.  Requiring any sort of efficacy evidence would be a simple way to screen many of these products.

Obviously not all 1-person app developers can afford to do a “proper” randomized controlled trial, but I believe anyone can do a simple pre-post efficacy test. Some learning goals are less obviously testable. How does one evaluate efficacy of “systems thinking”?  It can be done, if only by using very qualitative, unstructured interviews.

I wish Google should require all apps in the education store to

1. make a clear, specific claim of efficacy,
2. provide evidence of that claim, and
3. have that evidence validated or reviewed by a 3rd party

Google’s CUE approval system is a good first step toward the 3rd point, but I hope for more: I want a scale rating,  not just approved/not approved, so proven apps are first on the list, and the reasons are clear.

A Broader Critique

Next, I want to talk more broadly about Google’s design advice: Is this list good advice? 

Advice is cheap to make, but VERY EXPENSIVE to follow. Every point on Google’s list adds huge cost and risk to the app developer.

Specifically, I ask:

• How should developers decide which, if any, of these to follow?
• Should other stakeholders, say publishers, criticize an app, using this advice?
• How?

There is difference between a wishlist and useful design advice. For example, consider this design advice: A quality car should include as many of these features as possible:

• seats 12
• 100 mpg
• 0-100-0 in 4 seconds
• Less than $10,000
• Made from environmentally friendly materials
• Looks awesomer than a Lambourghini
• Parks in half a parking space

• Where did this advice come from? Who wrote this? What are their qualifications?
• Is the source ‘data’ trustworthy?  Is this a wishlist of a naive enthusiast?  Is it based on lessons learned from a single case study? Is it a broad summary of the academic literature, written in an ivory tower?
• Does this advice apply equally across the entire diverse landscape of the field?  Should learning game apps that practice, be more collaborative than instructional apps?
• Does this advice fit with other expert design advice?  See below for examples. Are there conflicts or commonalities between this advice and existing, prevailing views of experienced designer/researchers?  What reasons are given for this variance?
• Is this advice realistic? Is it even possible to build an app that fits all, or even most, of this advice?
• What are some examples of apps that follow this advice?  Discuss merits and weaknesses of exemplary designs.
• Could and should this advice be used by stakeholders, other than developers, to assess or critique?
• Is there any evidence or reason to believe this advice will yield improved learning apps?  Are there cautions on any dangerous combinations?

I am considering writing a review where I compare, point by point, Google’s advice to prevailing views from Gee, Osterweil, specifically for learning game designers. (if that’s something you’d be interested to see, let me know).