![]() This decision is more about emotional investment and curiosity than it is about challenge-a different kind of “flow” to maintain. Maybe some players will choose to access a tutorial before taking control in an activity. Maybe the same idea applies for players steering towards their emotional “sweet spots.” If we minimize mandatory explicit guidance, we let player decide how much they’d like to pursue the joy of discovery. Jenova argued that we should give players more fluid control of the challenge they take on, so that they can manage their own position relative to their own intellectual “sweet spot.” This idea seems to connect to one Jenova Chen explored in his master’s thesis: games should try to keep players in “ flow,” balancing challenge and ability. Maybe they’ll return to the incomplete areas later after all, the game is cleverly designed so that players will absolutely know they skipped some spots. This escape valve allows a frustrated player to proceed to an area they might find more interesting-prioritizing joy, empowerment, and discovery over completeness. The game designers are not asking the same question as the education researchers.įor example, in The Witness, players can skip several whole areas of the game and still reach its ending. Yes, they’d like players to thoroughly understand the game’s mechanics, but that’s a secondary goal. The game developers are optimizing for joy, empowerment, discovery. Alex Peake suggested: okay, fine, maybe the test scores are better with heavy guidance, but who cares? As a game designer, what I care about is: do they finish the game? Are they going to play my next one? I shared this paper at a meetup of educational game developers at this year’s Game Developer Conference, and they looked at me like I was from another planet. Maybe the minimally-guided experiments in that paper didn’t do that. From game design, we’ve learned that we can’t just naively remove all explicit guidance: we must carefully mold players’ interactions to implicitly provide that guidance. For instance, it focuses on total novices-maybe discovery-based learning triumphs with more expertise. There’s plenty to quibble with in this paper (and there are plenty of rebuttals). Meanwhile, over in education research, one top citation has the foreboding title “ Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based experiential and inquiry-based teaching.” The authors review the experimental literature and find, on balance, that direct instruction reliably delivers better test scores than minimally-guided alternatives. Instead, to preserve the joy of discovery, they should carefully structure their activities so that players will learn what they need to learn through play. In this talk, “ Vow of Silence,” Hamish Todd deconstructs the design decisions in these games and urges his students to eschew tutorials and explanations in their designs. There’s a whole subgenre of celebrated games that relish in their reticence. From there, things escalate quickly- all without words. A second puzzle in the sequence might offer a few possibilities, allowing players to confirm or refute their theories about the puzzle’s rules. At first, there might be only one path through the puzzle, forcing the player to connect a particular symbol to the properties of that path. In The Witness, players learn intricate game mechanics through a carefully-scaffolded series of puzzles. One key point of debate in both fields: exactly how much explicit guidance should a student/player get in an activity? These fields often appear to be talking past each other-which is a shame because they’re exploring many of the same questions, though often not phrased the same way. One strange consequence of our interdisciplinary approach to research is that we’re substantially influenced by both academic educational research and also video game design.
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