“Just Press Play”:
Applying Game Design Principles to the Undergraduate Student Experience

The college experience is challenging–not just academically, but socially and emotionally as well. A recent study by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute found that first-year college students’ self-ratings of their emotional health dropped to record low levels in 2010. (Lloyd, 2011)  This is reflected in the number of students that drop by the wayside over the course of their time in college; retention rates are an ongoing area of concern for all universities. While the Game Design & Development program at RIT has a measurably higher rate of retention than the national average for computer science and similar programs, we still lose approximately 11% of the freshman class, 5% of the sophomores, and 2-3% each year thereafter.  Even for the many students who successfully complete their undergraduate degrees, the transition to a new professional position can be difficult.

McGonigal (2011) argues that “today’s born-digital kids are suffering more in traditional classrooms than any previous generation. School today for the most part is one long series of necessary obstacles that produce negative stress.” (p. 127)  These digital kids often do not see a clear correlation between the material covered in their classes and its application to their careers and lives. As a result, many view those obstacles as unnecessarily arbitrary. Even among educators, the growing pressure to generate quantifiable assessment measures can result in a similar concern that what we ask of our students isn’t clearly mapped either to the professional skills we want them to develop or to our own pedagogical aims.

In the Interactive Games and Media Department, we have identified a series of “choke points” for our students; these are points where they must make significant changes in their understanding of the field and the quality of their work. It a series of steps. It is a process of growth. In game terms, it is “leveling.”

The first of these points is their entry into the college experience itself, when they are asked to take on more responsibility for their progress than in high school. They must rapidly build technical skills while at the same time becoming familiar with current theory and practice. The second is the shift from freshman to sophomore year–as freshmen, students receive fairly detailed and structured assignments, but as sophomores, their assignments begin to focus more directly on creative work, with fewer formal requirements. Assignments begin to have progressively less structure (or “scaffolding”) as students are asked to apply design theory and practice in the context of open-ended and often collaborative projects. Finally, as they approach their senior year, students need to develop the ability to critically assess both their own work and that of others, as well as to define a reproducible workflow for their own creative and technical work.

The “Just Press Play” project aims to produce a proof-of-concept system that encourages student development through achievements and formative feedback. It conceives of the student experience as mirroring what Campbell (2003) has described as “the hero’s journey.” In that journey, not every element of the adventure is directly or immediately relevant to the overarching goal, or at least not in a way that is immediately evident to the protagonist. This is also true of the student experience; students struggle at times to understand how a given assignment, course, experience, or action relates to their educational and career goals. As educators, we strive to connect the dots between their curricular work and their professional goals. Faculty are their mentors in this journey; the Gandalfs to their Frodos.

An achievement-based game system can encourage students to think of the “necessary obstacles” in their path as part of a coherent narrative of their learning and professional development. The game will be designed to help our “student-heroes” determine what tools they need in order to successfully navigate those obstacles (their “academic dragons”) along the way.

What Are We Building?

We intend to build a pervasive game system that engages our students more fully (or, as McGonigal might put it, gamefully) in activities that will improve their ability to manage the college experience, help prepare them for careers in game development and new media, give them a sense of accomplishment and progress along the path to their goal of graduation, and provide them with a way to meaningfully demonstrate and record the variety of skills they have mastered.

On the simplest level, we are developing an achievement system for students in the Interactive Games & Media department, one that will encourage our students to engage in social, collaborative, and creative activities. We recognize, however, that the growing trend towards “gamification” of real-world activities has been rightly criticized by many game designers. (Deterding, 2010) Too often, these attempts consist of simply adding badges, points, and/or leaderboards to existing activities–with little consideration for the underlying issues of motivation, engagement, narrative, and play. These efforts frequently assume that badges and points are in and of themselves sufficient to engage and reward players, despite the fact that purely extrinsic rewards have been consistently shown to be ineffective–and even counterproductive–in cultivating engagement. (Pink, 2010) Critiques of commercially-driven gamification focus on this lack of meaningful game design and player engagement. As Robertson (2010) puts it, “Gamification is the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at the moment is pointsification. [...] It’s important that we make the distinction between the two undertakings because, amidst all this confusion, we’re losing sight of the question of what would happen if we really did apply the deeper powers of game design to more everyday things.” Like our students’ experiences, the objectives in these ‘gamified’ sites seem unnecessarily arbitrary, contributing to the very sense of alienation well-designed games have the potential to overcome.

In designing this system we are therefore drawing not from ‘pointsified’ commercial websites, but rather from the domains of both educational game design (Bogost, 2010; Gee, 2003; Prensky, 2006) and pervasive (aka “alternate reality”) game design. A defining characteristic of pervasive games is that they blur the boundary of the ‘magic circle’ associated with gameplay. As Montola et al note in their book Pervasive Games Theory and Design (2010), these games “inhabit a game world that is present within the ordinary world, taking the magic circle wherever they go.”  We intend for this game to take place online and in physical space. Students would play it in the classroom and the dining room, in shared spaces and alone in the confines of their head, on campus and off campus. The game will invite players to activate the spaces around them, encourage their interaction, and reward their engagement with the learning process.

We will use achievements to measure and reward progress and accomplishment. The working title of the game–“Just Press Play”–reflects our commitment creating a truly engaging game experience, rather than to constructing a set of assignment-like tasks. The game will infuse their day-to-day experience with a real sense of play that reflects the playfulness of learning at its best, the (hero’s) journey it can be. This is a non-trivial challenge; the educational landscape is littered with games that failed utterly to engage their target audience–games that were seen by students as yet another ‘necessary obstacle’ placed in their paths by administrators and teachers, games that simply were not fun. However, it is also the case that, like “pointsified” websites, educational games are typically created without regard for or application of game design principles.

Part of the reason for this is because, as a society, we tend to think of numbers as particularly meaningful in defining individual characteristics and accomplishments–income, age, GPA, “the tale of the tape.” The real meaning of these numbers, however, lies not in the units themselves, but in what we as observers believe those numbers represent–success, maturity, accomplishment, strength. A GPA tells us little about a student’s competencies, but a multi-faceted set of achievements and completed “quests” has the potential to express far more about the student’s areas of interest and accomplishment. The game system we are building is an attempt to frame the growth, progression, and relevance of the curriculum current journey relative to our student’s goals.

In our development blog Think Play (http://igm.rit.edu/~thinkplay), one of our team members likened the student journey to a long car drive–counting telephone posts or mile markers gives you a numeric value for progression, but having that number is less engaging and rewarding than catching a glimpse of a meaningful landmark along the way, or playing games with others in the car. We look at mile-markers, or the interactive map on the back of an airplane seat, when we want absolute markers of our progress. But each trip generates distinct experiences that become part of the memory of that trip, and we turn to games, puzzles, and competitions with our fellow travelers when we want to amplify the meaningfulness of the trip further by contriving even more open-ended moments.

In the context of game systems, this meaningful quality of well-designed achievements and level systems often leads to players using them to assess where they are relative to other players in the game. Viewing another player’s achievements can provide a great deal of information about what that player’s values and strengths. Towards that end, we expect that students playing this game will be able to view the achievements of not only other students, but also faculty, and from that will begin to see what activities and competencies they might want to aspire to. If we think of the “choke points” described earlier as the “level bosses” in our game, the goal of this system will be to allow students to better understand what skills they need in order to successfully defeat those bosses, and to encourage their engagement in activities that will build those skills.

We also expect that as the game develops, our students will play a role in creating the content of quests and achievements. To be relevant and meaningful to students, the content will need to be grounded in the community’s experience, not simply in the expertise of faculty.

We will embed game content in a variety of RIT systems, providing students with the opportunity to launch game-related activities in RIT’s courseware system, library databases, our co-op system site, and others. Students who have opted into the game will be able to see “hidden” content on these pages, and will have the option to activate that content to complete quests and earn achievements. This presents not just technical challenges from a systems integration standpoint, but also significant privacy issues, which will need to be addressed in multiple ways–from explicit privacy policies that communicate clearly to students what information is being captured, to system design that minimizes intrusiveness and risk to the students participating.

We also will provide integration with services outside of RIT. We have already begun discussions with Foursquare about using their API to give our players credit for visits to on and off-campus locations. Similarly, we will explore the use of Facebook applications to allow players to display their accomplishments on their profiles and to embed game content in various RIT-related Facebook pages.

Project Goals and Scope
Our immediate goal is to develop a game-based achievement system that helps our students navigate the intellectual, social, and developmental challenges of their undergraduate experience, and provides them (and us) with a clearer picture of their progress. We are designing this system specifically for students in the School of Interactive Games and Media, but are cognizant that future development should take into account the need to adapt the content for other contexts and communities.

We are breaking new ground with this project, from both a game studies and educational research perspective. As a result, this is by necessity and design a small-scale, “proof of concept” pilot project, designed to address the very specific needs of undergraduate students in a games-focused department at a technical university. While we expect that what we create will provide valuable lessons regarding the use of game mechanics in educational contexts, this initial system will not be easily expanded or ported to work in other environments precisely because it must be a good game, meaningfully grounded in the program and its students’ experiences. Ideally, however, it will serve as a starting point for understanding the core issues involved in creating a “game layer” to enhance the educational experience.

If successful, we recognize that such a system could indeed have far-reaching application in a range of educational and commercial settings–other campus programs and/or majors, other campuses and cultural settings, K-12 schools, commercial publishers and producers of curricular materials, and software and hardware vendors invested in the educational market. We intend to fully document both our design and development process and our assessment of the game’s impact and outcomes. From that, we envision the emergence of a set of best practices and principles for similar projects in both educational and commercial contexts.

References

Bogost, I. (2010). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. The MIT Press.

Campbell, J. (2003). The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (3rd ed.). New World Library.

Deterding, S. (2010, September 24). Pawned. Gamification and Its Discontents. Presented at Playful 2010, London. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/dings/pawned-gamification-and-its-discontents

Gee, J. P. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Picture the Impossible Overview. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uadR-eaTlXI

Lloyd, J. (2011, January 27). Mental health hits a low for college freshmen. USA Today. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/mentalhealth/2011-01-27-freshmanonline27_ST_N.htm

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin Press.

Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (1st ed.). Riverhead Hardcover.

Prensky, M. (2006). Don’t Bother Me Mom–I’m Learning! Paragon House.

Robertson, M. (2010, October 6). Can’t play, won’t play. Hide&Seek – Inventing new kinds of play. Retrieved February 2, 2011, from http://www.hideandseek.net/cant-play-wont-play/