Learning By Design – Verbal Spewage

What Game Design Teaches, Part 4

Technology also plays a factor in what can be accomplished in a workspace. Game designers are limited in what they can make with the tools at their disposal. While a lot of what is used to make a game is conceptual, there are plenty of physical tools needed to make the task easier. Knowing how to roll dice is one thing, but if you don’t have any on hand to get a sense of what the players will experience, it’s nothing but speculation. The same goes for card games. Although some games use special symbols or non-standard playing cards, game designers can keep a key handy to interpret the numbers as stand-ins for the symbols or write on the cards themselves. These last two examples are illustrations for repurposing the supplies on hand to provide a new use to existing technology.

One of the core principles of play is to find new uses for what has already been created. Even in this vein of thought, the objects can only function within their limited roles. For instance, a hammer can have its use extrapolated out from its original purpose (driving fastening pins/nails into place, shaping metals, shaping stone, etc.) which is essentially leveraging a weighted end to hit an object with greater force. The challenge is how to use what’s there for a new goal. Using the hammer as an example, its function reaches a point where smashing items as the only option can undercut the premise of the game’s obstacles. This limitation stems from the tool’s range of functions, which results in games that have a variation or reskinning of the object. Whack-a-mole is still the same game even if the moles are replaced with gophers, for instance. The game’s core mechanic is one of timed reflexes. Reskinning the game doesn’t change the victory conditions but it can influence the player’s experience. Without adding anything new, the game audience will be bored rather quickly.

Why so much emphasis on the hammer? Because each tool has limits and the hammer is one of the easiest examples of this as you can scale it up to become a mallet, maul, sledgehammer, and sports equipment to include bats, clubs, and sticks used to hit balls. Sure, they look different, have different game rules, and lead to vastly different experiences, but they ultimately use the same laws of physics to leverage a weighted end for more force. Pen and paper do wonders in creating a design, but the complexity of a system and how the various parts interact with the players can render those tools ineffective once you get past the planning stages based on biological limitations. The human brain can only keep so many details at the forefront and be able to react to constant changes.

What Game Design Teaches, Part 3

The differences in the mechanics have as much to do with the skills for an age group as they do with the presentation and overall goal of the game. By goal the reference is not to the game’s objective, but rather what the designer intends players to learn/hone from the experience. This is what makes the design process as much fun to create as it is to explore spaces in the same genre. It’s also how you can end up with games that rely on physics (especially in real-time games) while others are steeped in psychology and behavior studies (the core of poker and chess, for example). Neither chess nor poker explicitly state in their rules that they rely on psychology to win, but the bluffing mechanics as well as strategic planning needed requires players to learn the subtle clues their opponents express physically or through their pieces teaches players to use these skills to discern the other’s thoughts.

Because of the social mechanics used by these games, you have to create a welcoming space where designers are free to open themselves up to this level of self-examination. This isn’t to say that it has to be a support group per se, but you do want to ensure that exploration of games which rely on deduction and bluffing where a person’s feelings or personal lives are involved don’t feel like a crucible or that the designers are under a microscope. Games that use a social component may use math to govern outcomes, but their true strength and enjoyment are the rewards of successfully “mind reading” the other players. To do this, you need different tools from more straightforward games.

Add to this games that rely on engineering challenges (similar but not the same as physics-based mechanics) to solve puzzles (Kerplunk, Don’t Break the Ice, and Bausac, for example) or those that use a limited space for the pieces and/or game board to place all the data used therein. The play space has to vie for real estate as much as the components do to fit on the game boards, the table, and in their respective boxes. If the space is too small, your designers might not be able to implement their ideas as intended—or at minimum, not be able to playtest their full design. The other problem with space constraints is the exploration of the upper limits of wieldiness for that genre.

What Game Design Teaches, Part 2

Configuring Your Space

Before diving into the myriad skills that game deign encompasses, let’s talk about space. Like any program, you have to create an environment conducive to the outcome expected. Throwing a bunch of games in a room might let people enjoy themselves, but it won’t necessarily help people explore how design works. It would work well for a board game night program, and that can feed into a design program, but they aren’t interdependent. Ideally you should have a stock of games on hand that match the types of games you want to design. There are a couple of reasons for this, which will be covered below.

The most important reason is you don’t know if your audience has played these games before or not. And, while some perennial favorites are ubiquitous, not everyone has grown up with them or had access to them. So, this is as much an issue of equity as it is ensuring everyone has the same reference materials on hand. But the other aspect for this reason is is simply having a referral point where your patrons have something to look at or use as a benchmark to test against their own designs.

The second reason may be less crucial to the success of the program, but it’s one that is important nonetheless. Quite simply, there are multiple themes and rules that can create games that have the same mechanics and belong to the general classifications for the modules laid out in this program. What this lets new designers do is understand that there is no one way to accomplish a task. Both Chutes and Ladders and Candy Land are racing games, but they use different mechanisms to get there. The same is true of matching games like Memory and Husker Du. All are racing games, but they use different looks and methods to determine who gets to the end first.

What Game Design Teaches, Part 1

What Game Design Teaches, Part 3

What Game Design Teaches, Part 1

Depending on your programming needs, you can skip this section. That said, reading this will provide some insight as to why these programs are not only valuable but necessary in today’s world. With that in mind, let’s cover the basics, though if you’re interested in this as a program, you probably already have a grasp on what game design can accomplish and why you want to have a design program. Game design, like all design careers, is a multiple disciplinary skill set. This means anyone looking to do it well will have to study a wide variety of topics in order to draw from the best sources necessary to create a game that matches the expectations they have.

The key benefit that game design provides for libraries is information literacy. While at the outset this might not seem applicable, as the designer works on a more complex design or ways to take various mechanics to create a new game experience, the central asset developed is insight into how information is or can be structured, how it gets interpreted, and how it can be applied. Drawing a simple game board might not convey this, but the way the rules develop points in this direction and it becomes more apparent in complex game designs where players have multiple elements to keep track of during play.

As noted in previous installments, game design is deeply rooted in STEAM principles and practices. Depending on the modules used, the act of game creation will use these areas in varying degrees. The effect is to develop 21^st century skills in a fun and meaningful way that encourages experimentation. A fundamental aspect of STEAM being that failure can be fun is engendered in a game design program as the participants are provided with the tools and perhaps a prompt or design challenge, but otherwise do not have any guidance to impinge on their approach to solving or meeting the end goal.

Tools, Games, Interaction, and Play for 18+

What Game Design Teaches, Part 2

Learning by Design – Tools, Games, Interaction, and Play for 18+

There is one final group to discuss: adults. Although development slows down around age 18, physical development doesn’t fully stop until about age 21 and the brain’s development finishes approximately at 25 years of age. The reason this matters is that, while there’s a lot of intellectual and physical maturity for game players of this age, the brain is still looking for ways to maximize survival strategies. As such, the risk mechanisms that older adults take for granted aren’t fully developed in adults who’ve yet to reach their mid-twenties with some research saying those centers of the brain being fully formed in the individual’s 30s.

What is different about games played and developed by this age group is that there is enough experience in the person’s life to draw from when creating based on themes, stories, or rules. No additional tools are needed at this point, but the designers will have developed a strong sense of what they enjoy and what they would like to make. These individuals gravitate towards their preferred styles of play and mechanics as ways to hone their already acquired skills with some more adventurous sorts looking to try developing new skills. The games are also as likely to tend towards the abstract as much as they are towards story- or theme-driven systems.

Those new to design at this age can skip past a lot of the earlier aspects of the design program because they’ve already internalized much of the procedures and understand how games work. That said, they can still benefit from some of the language used to help build a shorthand when discussing their ideas and projects while also avoiding a few of the well-known pitfalls in some designs based on game type. The modules address some of these issues.

Interaction and Play for Ages 13+

What Game Design Teaches, Part 1

Learning by Design – Interaction and Play for Ages 13+

Some of the developmental milestones at this point are effectively continuations of those seen at the age of 12 on. The differentiation in physical characteristics, especially those pertaining to sex and transition to adulthood continue and often leave the child feeling awkward as their minds also are moving from adolescence to adulthood. At 13-15, teens begin to question more, especially authority and structures of rules. They still retain thinking in absolutes while also believing bad things happen to others with some sort of personal exemption for them. This dovetails with the belief that they’re the center of the universe (for good or ill). Emotionally this has the teen vacillate between independence and reliance on caregivers, which can lead to frustration and inner turmoil as these are issues stemming from a search of personal identity. The teen will want to spend more and more time with friends and develop a social network, but will also have time where family takes precedent.

From 15-18, there’s more confidence in the teen, but there also comes a bit of hesitancy as well. The teen is able to use more sophisticated techniques to problem solve, but they cannot apply these tools consistently. Teens at this stage are learning to organize their lives and establish school/work/life balances, but they are still exploring these concepts as part of the continued search for identity. Because this often runs up against established authority, teens often question rules and procedures. Concerns with appearance often go hand-in-hand with identity and growing sexual desires on top of stress and excitement from decisions about a teen’s future. Thus, there’s a lot of emotion ups and downs for the teen, which can lead to emotional turmoil. The desire to spend less time with family and more with their social network means teens are subject to peer pressure, but they are more likely to resist as their identities are firmer than in their younger years.

These aspects of development help lead teens to the styles of games that cater to exploration, especially ones where player agency has primacy. Such games often have a strong social component as well, which contributes to the interactivity in the game and adds another method for exploration. While not all will gravitate to 4X (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) games like Civilization, most of the games that are of interest do contribute to expression and exploration of identity. The sociability of the games may transfer to online play or a group crowding around a screen to watch, but the conceptual space to find one’s sense of self is still there, albeit in a manner that may have little to do with the game.

Tools and Games for Ages 13+

Tools, Games, Interaction, and Play for 18+

Learning by Design – Tools and Games for Ages 13+

From the age of thirteen and beyond, the interests of the individual diversify into so many avenues that there is no way to classify the myriad skill combinations a person can develop. This is also the age at which the most complex ideas for game design become attainable as they require a high level of abstraction and/or moving parts to work properly. Not coincidentally, these are the same design tools used for modern video games with their branching paths and use of multiple strategies to solve intricate puzzles. This makes it difficult to focus on any one design structure, but it does increase the level of sophistication that can be brought to bear on an idea.

Despite all of the ways game design begins to diversify with interest, there’s a few thematic elements that traverse the range of design at this point. Most of these come down to the individual’s skill set and design processes that inform each game developed. What they have in common is how the games explore skills in different applications while still retaining those core skills and how they translate to varying situations. Given this desire to hone skills, it should come as no surprise that the core design tools for this group tends towards the abstract and narrative play. These are both areas where meaningful production arise.

Creating game with meaning is trickier as the idea of conscious decision has to balance with the need for chance to play some role in the game. Rather than being arbitrary, every choice should be driven by individual agency with decisions favoring one or another participant decided by an outside arbiter. This is where the dice, cards, etc. determine outcome. This isn’t to say that games that use random chance as the start point aren’t valid designs, but rather that their inclusion should make use of individual choice to plan against or utilize that random element for the possible strategies players can employ. Thus, designers from this point on have been exposed to subsystems, synergistic effects, complex storylines, and a full modularity of a game’s assets, which may be represented in expansion sets, adventure modules, or add-ons. The design tools for this group include:

Decision tree/branching storylines
Mini-games, and other puzzles that enhance game play but are optional
Optional rules and components that extend the life of the game
House rules that modify an existing set to adapt the games to the usage of the usual players, in computer terms this is akin to “modding”

Tools and Games for Ages 11-13

Interaction and Play for Ages 13+

Learning by Design – Tools and Games for Ages 11-13

Yes, there is some overlap here with the previous grouping and the following one. That said, there are a few key differences in game play that makes this age group appropriate to discuss on its own. Part of this comes not from the biological changes this audience undergoes or faces, but rather in the core competencies of game play development that occur in this transitory period. What is different here is the level of sophistication in the style of play and the enjoyment of established concepts matures to incorporate deeper levels of meaning. What is often embraced at this time are more immersive experiences and a greater awareness of resource management.

What kids can create at this age range starts to include games with storylines of increasing complexity, the use of multiple resources, and more integrated systems. Rather than being a new skill or tool, this coincides with the greater understanding that comes along with information the child learns. This is also a continuation of the growing modularity of game systems and the recognition of analogous structures. Thus, while much of the material is derivative and linear, the games at this age begin to incorporate nonlinear elements as well as a greater level of choice in game play (which coincides with greater awareness of other viewpoints). The two game tools that fit this intermediary phase are:

Introductory resource management systems
Development of storylines, predominantly linear, interspersed between game play

Interactions and Play for Ages 9-12

Tools and Games for Ages 13+

Learning by Design – Interactions and Play for Ages 9-12

The developmental milestones for kids in this age group sees a lot of rapid change from year-to-year that makes condensing it into a brief overview difficult. Kids start out growing used not only to employing tools with increasing skill, but also a greater body awareness that, by the latter half of this age range grows into greater awareness of gender differences. As such, the mastery over self and tools and working until exhausted are some of the key identifiers of this age group. Sports also become more important as they help with the exploration of physicality and eventually being in a constant state of motion while awake by the end of this age range. The types of games tend to take these developments into account.

In terms of information and intellectual development, the younger end of this age range is still in the information gathering phase as they continue to commit facts to memory. It is not until the latter half of this age range that they begin to use logic, categorization, and deep thought to better understand and use that knowledge. The child also starts to internalize physical lessons into mental ones as analogous structures. Conceptual frames, like time, are elusive for the 9-10-year-old crowd, but become easier to manage and use and can be applied to the worldviews of others. This growing awareness helps with the social developments of the child discussed below.

Kids begin this age range unwilling to do anything they find unpleasant, which includes chores and often being around the opposite sex. They can be responsible and carry out chores. Emotions have more sway over the first half of this age, but mellow out as reason develops. Friendships grow in importance, but it is not until the second half of this stage that relationships with parents begins to change. Group activities continue to become more important to the child and by the end of this age range, the desire to conform to peer pressure begins to develop as the drive to feel connected to a social fabric of shared interests grows. Interests grow more important and sharing is communicated as much by enthusiasm as it is dislikes, which may be more prominent than the former.

Tools and Games for Ages 9-12

Tools and Games for Ages 11-13

Learning by Design – Tools and Games for Ages 9-12

When children reach this age, they no longer can be tracked as a group with all the same milestones. The individual child has learned not only how to maneuver and manipulate the environment he or she has grown up in, but also developed skill sets that sow the seeds of future specialization. This accounts for the greater variety of products and activities available to them. Some will gravitate towards physical pursuits while others find pleasure in more mental disciplines. Game play for this age reflects this diversification with myriad forms of physical and mental games children enjoy.

One of the things that games for this age group take advantage of is the growing level of abstraction children engage in. This can be seen in other media children consume as well: books, television, music, etc. The increasing abstraction allows for more immersive storylines as well as longer ones, which hold the child’s engagement for longer periods of time. Thus, while there will be some straightforward linear elements in a game, the emphasis as the child ages shifts towards ones involving more strategy and planning. The players move from straight victory conditions where everyone can see what their opponents are doing to one where multiple avenues are available, even if they become increasingly improbable roads to winning.

Designers in this age range should have enough experience with a good selection of game mechanics that include simplified multidimensional rules (where routes to victory lay in differing strategies), multiple playing pieces, and variable game play. This is a good assortment of tools to create a large variety of game types where the designer can manipulate the math and information used in one game to create an entirely different one where both theme and rules feel unique. The sources of inspiration will likely be easy to spot, but this is a good yardstick to measure success as you can help the designer avoid any pitfalls by seeing where they might take their idea. The exploration kids enjoy at this age allows for designers to grasp and isolate the concepts embedded in a game system, which is why the yardstick technique works so well. Game tools for this age include:

Simple card mechanics
Modularity in boards and pieces
Higher level of abstraction in gameplay using real-world equivalents (e.g. skill-focused design)

Interactions and Play for Ages 6-8

Interactions and Play for Ages 9-12