 Teaching people new ideas about space itself is not easy. Players have to be walked carefully towards new insights. In level 10 of the puzzle game portal, you have to propel yourself over a gap by using the momentum of falling, which might seem an impossible intuition, but the designers crafted the game around this moment. We combine our understanding of portals, gravity, momentum, and elevation to solve this, but the geography of the level and the affordances of the play space suddenly imply what we must do. The designers guided us towards enlightenment. However, its implicit communication extends to the narrative of the game as well. One level asks you to carry a cute companion cube through a series of obstacles, only to incinerate it at the end. Much like with the puzzle, the design of space forces us to learn, but the learning here is a little different. We learn about the insidious nature of GLaDOS and the facility you are in, and this scenario is a microcosm of the broader manipulation happening at the science center at large. Conveying ideas implicitly is a staple of Valve's game design. Half-Life 2 uses a similar device when it introduces new weapons. When you get the revolver, you are safe behind the desk, and the door opens revealing some enemies in a narrow corridor. It is then clear to you you should use this weapon in scenarios reminiscent of this. The gravity gun is introduced in a similar way, giving you the tools to recognize how you can use blades in the environment to cut down enemies. Much like Portal though, there are implicit narrative cues as well. Early on in the game, a guard commands you to pick up a can, so later, when you see them mistreating others, you are personally invested in thwarting them. This encodes the broader narrative of a repressive authoritarian state, and along with dystopian iconography, the idea that you should rebel against tyranny is almost implied by your environment. Non-verbal communication or implicit learning has become entrenched as good game design, and we are taught that this is how we should design when communicating mechanics to players. Super Mario Bros. starts you on the left of the screen, signifying you should go right, and the angry eyes of the Goomba, mushrooms, and coins all teach you the mechanics of jumping, power-ups, and risk-and-reward play, all without saying a single word. The Legend of Zelda's opening screen has five directions to go in, but the dark contrast of the cave beckons you towards it, which is where the sword happens to be. Other methods of implicit communication include color, light, cameras, and other characters. Mirror's Edge uses red-climable objects to guide you through a level, and Eco teaches you what to do by having Yoda be chased by ominous black creatures. Emotional cues can manage our behavior in games. Where does this heuristic of good game design come from, though? Don Norman's seminal book, The Design of Everyday Things, suggests that we should design objects with their function implicit in order to maximize the user experience. For example, a door should signify whether it should be pushed or pulled purely through the design of its handle. This implicit interaction learning is rooted in deeper ideas about learning and cognitive psychology, and games have adopted this same language. Other theories like the Zone of Proximal Development and Flow Theory permeate much of modern design convention and inform how games have and continue to be made. Teaching without teaching. This is the idea of nonverbal design in games, using what we can call conveyances or affordances. However, Jonathan Blow gave a talk where he expanded the definition of what this should mean to designers. Blow argues conveyance is the ability for a designer to get players to understand the ideas that exist in their head to convey effectively. He also argues for its inverse, or inverse conveyance. This is the idea that the products we design actually reflect the ideas you had in your head. So conveyance is both about translating ideas into systems, but also translating systems into ideas for others using nonverbal cues. This conceptualization allows us to unite mechanics and themes under the broader idea of conveyance. Recently, we have seen a trend away from implicit learning towards more explicit cues. Instead of guiding people organically through a level, we put waypoint markers and points of interest. Instead of showing players implicitly how to use a mechanic, we put explicit button prompts on screen telling them what to do. Open-world games have moved away from the freedom afforded by games like Zelda to strangely linear affairs where you dart from waypoint to waypoint. Explicit learning techniques have perhaps undermined the aesthetics of exploration, mastery, and competence, but they have also improved it in one domain, that being accessibility. Overt tutorials might seem obnoxious to us who have played games for a while, but it is an accommodation for those who have just joined the medium. What exactly is good design here, though? In the book Game Design Vocabulary, the authors decry how games have forgotten this implicit language, suggesting we have regressed to explicit teaching because we never understood why we designed games the way we did. If we simply replicate heuristics without understanding their underlying psychology, it's only a matter of time before we lose why we did things in the first place. However, it could also be that implicit learning isn't the only way people learn. In the book Beyond Game Design, the authors outline how not everyone has an implicit learning strategy, others learn by imitation and replication, i.e., more explicit cues. Just like how some people would rather try to build furniture without looking at instructions, there are some who prefer being given a list of things to do. Also, some people learn better when in a social setting, whereas others like to do things in isolation. The reasons for this aren't many, rooted in our cultural and evolutionary heritage, but what's of more interest here is that these variations do exist. So the idea for what constitutes good design and hence good conveyance is much more fluid than we might have initially thought. One method of teaching we know of is giving people a playground to experiment in. This is why Minecraft, despite being utterly obtuse to outside observers, teaches its systems in such a powerful way. It throws people into its world and expects them to infer the rules by experimenting with its systems. Games also need to force players to use specific skills and learn what to do without overt instruction. This requires an earlier device we ran into, which is the use of constraints to force players into certain actions. For example, Dark Souls seems like it has many directions you can travel in, but only one direction has enemies that you can actually manage. It constrains its play space while still crafting the illusion of freedom. Another version of this exists in Resident Evil 2's opening, which puts you in a scenario where you are surrounded by zombies with no bullets. This situation teaches you that it is okay to dodge and avoid enemies, the importance of ammo preservation, as well as instilling the thematic idea about fear. A more common form of skill testing is to ensure players demonstrate all the skills they have learned in a more explicit test, whether it be an obstacle or boss battle. The dungeon design of the Legend of Zelda uses this expertly by introducing new abilities that are tested in each dungeon. In his book, What Video Games Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Guy argues that the immersive interactive nature of video games engages players in ways that formal education doesn't, and we can actually learn a lot about learning from the methods of conveyance used in games. Instead of passively hearing information in a classroom, games put us in an active, situated context that forces us to demonstrate real skills. In the real world, failure is often a crippling reminder of your inadequacies, but in games, the act of pushing past failure is something built into the very structure of games. It is the art of failure. Guy calls interactive roles semiotic domains with active, situated learning, which means to say that we learn systems in real time with an embedded role. The reason this works is that this is presumably how we have learned in the past, both in our infancy as individuals and in our evolutionary legacy. We learn to bite doing in a social context and in accordance with the demands of a harsh environment, not the passive education of a modern classroom. Games also provide a competitive, cooperative, and social context that can aid in learning, accommodate other styles and forms of learning, and allow us to play with systems, tinkering with their internal machinery. This assortment of ideas was brought to bear in the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. In the game, the developers used something called a chemistry engine to link all the elements of the world together to enable systemic play. In the first area, though, they made sure to introduce all these abilities with specific shrines. Outside of this constrained opening, though, the game's philosophy was to enable player expression, so they gave players room to experiment with all these systems. However, in their GDC talk, the designers also spoke to the importance of using the fiction of the world to communicate its mechanics. For example, the priority between our real-world elements and the game's world allows players to solve puzzles by thinking of the relationships between elements. We have seen how games convey their mechanics, systems, and processes in subtle but powerful ways. But what are the limits of this idea of conveyance? The real crux of this is whether we can actually use games to communicate ideas to players outside the bounds of the game itself. That is, to use a fictional set of systems to effectively communicate, to convey ideas in the real world. We may think that SimCity teaches us about urban planning, but is that really what's going on? People who play the game are not suddenly privy to the dynamics of city planning. They just have some ludic interface to manage relationships. Designers are stuck with using interactivity and nonverbal language to communicate ideas to players. And this might have some fundamental limitations. This is where we need to go back to the ideas of James Guy, as well as the duality between implicit and explicit learning. Guy is also interested in using games to teach. And we have seen this in interesting ways in the past. Projects like Folded have used the systemic skills of gamers to uncover the dynamics of protein folding, leveraging gamer systems literacy. However, the idea we shall tackle here is that of transference. How do we map things in a game to learning in the external world? This is where the duality between implicit and explicit learning comes in. Mechanics and systems need to be contextualized with outside material to ensure there is a isomorphism between the systems that exist in a game and the real world. Till now we have been stuck with implicit techniques as a heuristic of good design. And we have introduced explicit techniques as a matter of accommodating different learning styles. Perhaps by combining the two we can get to true conveyance. The game everything is meant to be a systemization of the ideas of Alan Watts. A mechanical version of his idea that everything in the world is interconnected and our ego is an illusion. The game starts at a microscopic scale and lets you explore things at your own leisure as you make your way through layers of resolution driven by your exploratory instincts. The mechanics I play here make this sense of exploration joyful and genuinely relaxing. And apart from some simple prompts you are encouraged to explore things for yourself. In isolation the metaphorical meaning of these mechanics do exist but they are weakly isomorphic. It is hard to be certain what their purpose is. At various points in the game lectures by Alan Watts start playing in the background. He pontificates about the illusion of the self how the universe is connected in fundamental ways and how our ego can trap us. By supplementing the exploratory play at the heart of the mechanics with more explicit auditory cues by Alan Watts himself the mechanics within the systems connect to a broader set of ideas outside the game. Another game that exemplifies this duality between implicit and explicit learning is Never Alone. Conceived off as a game to preserve the traditions of the Alaskan Inupiat tribe it was designed alongside the elders and members of the community to enshrine their stories for a new generation. The game tells the tale of a girl and her fox friend as they've voyaged to save their village from a blizzard and it uses traditionally meaningful mechanics to do this. You solve cooperative puzzles reinforcing the idea of connection between the Inupiat and their animals. Also your ancestors emerge to aid you in platforming sections showing the idea of connectedness at the heart of their philosophy. In itself these are powerful implicit techniques. However the game uses an additional supplementary device to ensure there is some educational transference. Whenever you encounter something of interest you are prompted with a cultural video which shows interviews with Inupiat elders and members as they explain the significance of different things. When you encounter a fox they explain how integral animals are to their way of life and the deep emotional connection they have. When Selad comes to your aid they explain the metaphysics behind its existence and how they are all bound to nature their past and their ancestry. These vignettes can be skipped making sure they are not intrusive but they contextualize the implicit mechanics used in the game to teach us about a little known tribal tradition. Our final example comes from Jonathan Blow himself because games Braid and the Witness are motivated by both nonverbal communication and explicit narrative cues. Inspired by the what-if questions of the book Einstein's Dreams as well as works of literature like invisible cities Braid encodes its meanings through its interactivity but supplements it with explicit cues to give it a powerful but subtle story. For example one level has mechanics where your movement through space corresponds to time creating some deeply counterintuitive puzzles. The text introducing the level the picture that you assemble out of it and its position in the context of the story all speak to the idea that we associate a time with a place and how reminiscing about the past can transport us physically. The mechanics in the level are communicated with traditional nonverbal cues with each level introducing with the same screen but minor variations. Nonverbal design was important here but to realize as narrative ambitions the explicit vehicle of readable text was necessary. Each level has poetry words literally sprawled on the screen to speak about things without speaking of them at all. With the witness though on the surface it is an open-world puzzle game about lines that communicates its language nonverbally. For example the first sequence of puzzles gradually increases the complexity as you proceed teaching us about separating black and white tiles. However if you search behind the puzzle you find an audiologue that speaks about the duality between the scientific and subjective perspectives of truth. By using this explicit cue he mapped the mechanics of separation with the duality of knowledge using implicit and explicit techniques to communicate an idea. By the end of the game you realize all these pieces are puzzles in a grander story about the nature of truth itself. You start to unlock videos by different intellectuals through the ages all of whom represent philosophical traditions. There are scientists like Richard Feynman who speak about the importance of explicit experimentation but also Eastern traditions that speak about how all that we need is right in front of us. The game makes no explicit claims about the right answer but presents these ideas in earnest to get the player to ask their own questions. The witness becomes a poetic metaphor for the ideas we have been exploring. There is no singularly correct way of communicating mechanics and ideas to players. It depends on the type of game one is making the audience that plays it and the different learning styles we all have. By understanding these techniques perhaps we can use games not just to communicate ideas inside the game but to bring these ideas outside the magic circle of play.