 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you here today We have a terrific guest on a great subject and we have all kinds of things to talk about now I'm absolutely delighted to host this week's guest for two reasons One is that we've been looking at gaming and education for years in the Future Trends Forum We have we have front-loaded all kinds of game platforms game designers game schools of thought We've explored deeply the many ways that gaming can enhance education So we have now this is the other reason a person whom I think of as an exemplar of this field Michael Townsend has created one of my favorite narrative games called a dark room But he also just this month published with Google and how to game how to game an educational game that explains How the hardware of quantum computing works? You can play it easily if you look in the bottom left of your screen You'll see a little box says the cubic game press that and you can dive right in so I'd like to do with Michael Townsend is to have him talk about all the different ways He designs these games what he has in mind, and I'd like him to be able to answer your questions So hello Michael greetings. Hey, how's it going? All right? How's Toronto? It's actually kind of nice today It's lovely I did lovely little walk down to my local cafe and got a good coffee, so I'm in good spirits nice Nice very nice. Well welcome to the forum and thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me We have a traditional we ask guests to introduce themselves in a particular way Not what you've been working on but what you're looking forward to working on for the next year So what are the big projects or the big idea is there top of mind for you? Damn? I have no idea like I just I just finished a thing and so I'm in sort of that artist assumption absorption mode where I'm just doing whatever and and seeing what ideas pop up I've got a couple sort of concepts on the go, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm gonna be doing for the next little while I mean the summer is gonna be crazy like it is, but you know, I Don't know the answers. I don't know That's an honest answer and I appreciate it But that absorptions a key part that sounds like a key part of your process Absolutely. Yeah, you can't create without spending a good amount of time just absorbing everything around you We have to do it. Otherwise, you don't have any raw materials Good point good point Friends if you're new to the forum, I've got a couple of quick questions to put to Michael And he's gonna grapple with them as best he can but what I'd like to do is I'd like to share all the different Questions you have so today as he starts answering my interrogation Please start thinking about the questions you'd like to put to him And and if he can't answer them, he won't and if he can he'll go after them So the first question I'd like to ask is one that I I asked you or my students asked you I think Looking at the cubic game. Can you tell us a little bit about your thinking that went into it? You're trying to translate a very very complicated Set of information how quantum computers work and you're trying to translate that into a game What was your mental process for doing that or was your design process for doing that? So first I got to say that I don't speak for Google at all. I just have to have to say that right away I don't speak for all this is all me and then I can answer the question so When I approach anything The first thing that I do is again absorption and then break the problem down once I feel like I understand it break the problem down into a few pieces so with the cubic game I looked at The actual structure for the hardware layers of a quantum computer So how these things work on a broad level on a very general level and I broke it down into what I saw is sort of its main component parts and Then I tackled each of those main component parts from a game mechanics perspective How can I sort of represent? this idea this one piece of quantum computing in a gaming metaphor that that translates well and Just sort of keep doing that until it's done So in in individual sections of the idea of are the are the knowledge that you're trying to share that map Onto individual loops or mini games or sections within the game. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So like diving a little bit down into more When when making a game We're in designing a game mechanic to try and explain an underlying metaphor and and you're always doing that right like whether you're underlying metaphor is a game of tennis like impong or a quantum computer like the game when you're looking at Mechanics that you can use as metaphors for those things Applied a spark from sort of reality So in the concept of quantum computer the three broad layers that I broke it down into was sort of the quantum layer Which is the base layer of quantum computing is the fancy weird qubits that are doing their quantum magic And that's sort of the smallest most basic component of the computer But it's only a very small piece of a quantum computer on top of that They've got the analog layer which is necessary to communicate with your qubits from the outside world And then on top of that you've got a digital layer that controls the analog layer and makes it accessible Like a normal computer would be and so I broke it into those three pieces and then found mechanics that sort of represented the major challenges that engineers face in each of those layers and and tried to sort of gamify them Mm-hmm. It's it's fascinating. Of course, there's a fun recursive idea friends If you if you haven't played the game yet I don't want to spoil your fun because I think it's delightful, but I love the idea and it's not it's not unique to this game But still it's always cool when you when you're using a computer to play a game to use a computer You know, there's a there's a I love that recursion to it. I love interface games interface games are some of my favorite Is there is there any interface game that you haven't made that you're especially fond of that you recommend? Oh Oh damn. I mean there are a ton. There. There are a few in the sort of same genre as a dark room that I'm a big fan of One of them would be space plan I think is is really really great There's a game called TS what is it TS 500 TS I don't know Off on it. It's it's another interface game. That's really really great electronics There's so many that products make a lot of really really like cool interface games that TS 100 TIS 100 is is one of the most extreme examples of that kind of meta self-referential that you that you're talking about Oh, nice. Thank you. Thank you Rends me of there is a space game where you actually had the command line interface was in the game to command robots as they moved around Yeah, yeah, I know that one and like the view is like a granny surveillance camera or something, right? Yeah Yeah, my my son who's never used a CLI was into it and so I was telling him now next step Fortran So let me let me ask a follow-up question before I date myself even worse So that gives us a sense of your of your mental process and where metaphor is key and then linking up You know breaking the main big task into smaller bits and then Kepting that to game loops. I guess the second one to ask is you know, you are doing this I know you're not speaking for Google, but you do this as a contractor working for Google What was that relationship like? I mean, how did they what did they provide you with? I what constraints do they impose on you? What was that like? Well, we all sort of came into it not really knowing how the relationship was gonna work They were they were building an experiment and I'd never done work like that for a company before and so we kind of figured it out as we went But the relationship was very very casual and very very flexible it was it was really great I had a lot of flexibility and build Building is a big part of my creative process when when it comes to design. So I kind of just sort of made the game and and Engaged in constant communication and feedback with with them and with the quantum team there to make sure that I was staying on track And that everything was good and we did a lot of play testing that they helped me with I had designers on staff there that did a lot of the graphical work It was it was great. It felt a lot like building my own game supported by a team. Oh Nice nice. Yeah, I'm very lucky And and just just to be clear when you say that you for you a key part of design is building My senses you mean building right away and fast to get things right Yeah, especially with games That's really important because the interaction is 90% of what you're building and you can have a lot of ideas in your brain about how the interaction is going to feel and like What's gonna work and what's not gonna work? But you're not actually gonna know until you have it in front of you and you're playing it And so you need to get to that place as fast as you can because the time that you spend before you get there is We're very likely going to be wasted time This is interesting You know in higher education that is often this partnership between a faculty member and instructional designer where they Collaborate on doing certain digital projects for our class. I think you just outlined one really interesting way from the to collaborate We have a quick question that came up from our wonderful friend Stephen Airman, which I should have asked myself But I was too excited. He asks what is an interface game? Can you define that? Oh, I mean, that's I don't know that that's a term that anybody uses other than me But an interface game as I designed as I define it is a game where The game literally is an interface So like a lot of video games, you know, you're from a camera That's over the shoulder of a guy carrying a big gun or something, right? Like or whatever But interface games the game itself is like an interface to an application that doesn't look like a game per se It looks like a web app and I just love those things because it's it's it boils games down really to their root component Which is here's a box play with it figure out how it works How can you change it? How can you master it interface games or just little puzzles? I just love playing with them Excellent Stephen. Thank you for asking and Michael if you've invented the term we I think we've not coined it It works for me friends If you're new to the forum you can see that we are very happy with all your questions So as we proceed if we jump over a term too quickly, please throw out a question. We're happy to handle it And and even as I say that more questions have come in. Here's one from John Hollenbeck who asked a deep question What makes a game educational? I sense as a builder you can constraints choices which directs learning like a lecture Yeah so I Think that all games are educational first of all and and I can explain why for it Pretty quickly is that play itself is Educational right like the earliest examples of games the early exact examples of play those things exist to teach concepts and You look at the animal kingdom they play to learn you look at children. They're playing to learn play is Fundamentally educational and games are the aesthetic expression of play just as you know movies are the expert at the aesthetic expression of I don't know drama like human interaction and and Paintings or the aesthetic expression of pictures Games of the aesthetic expression of play and so by nature they are educational. They're teaching you something It's just that we as game designers, especially designing for entertainment Don't usually think about what the game is teaching in most games all they're teaching you is how to play the game And that's not useful really I mean it is there there's transferable skills and a lot of things that are that are broad that you can learn but like What differentiates an educational game from an entertainment game would be that you Intentionally use the mechanics of the game to teach something that that you want to see you're thinking more about what the game is actually teaching the players There are lots of ways to do it. I Don't think most people do it well Then what what role does the In the chat John said he follows up by saying no different from how to get a degree Which is another game? But I'm curious about one part of John's question, which was about constraints now and And he compared them really interestingly to to a lecture, you know lectures limited by time and other things How what role the constraints play in designing educational games? hmm, I Mean when it comes to design I find constraints are more around the technology that you're using The time that you have to build Constraints like I didn't really have a lot of constraints from Google In so far other than that they wanted something very similar to a dark room. That was really my constraint They're like we wanted an experience like this Which I probably would have done anyway because I think that that kind of format is very good for education when When I'm thinking about how to use a game to teach the constraints around Education I think are are more around sort of cognitive limits of People that are engaging with it. So if you If you draw, you know a grab bag of 50 different game mechanics on somebody right away They're gonna get overloaded. Yeah, and so with games you can pace the delivery and You can actively integrate the sort of lecture with the test, right? The lecture will be repeated until you pass the test and it doesn't feel like that Because you're playing a game, but it's true And so a really really good example is from the very first level of the very first Mario game A really really good example of sort of integrating a lesson with a lecture or with a test very beginning Mario's there you run you learn that you need to run forward So you've learned that you can't proceed until you've learned that then Immediately you're faced with a little goomba and you have to learn that you can jump over him And if you don't learn that you die and you keep dying until you learn that and they won't give you anything harder until you get past that And that's really really core to game design in general Is that you need to introduce your challenges one at a time and repeat those challenges until the player can pass them? And then you can build on that and make it more complex and more difficult and exactly the same thing for education My students were keen on identifying that as scaffolding, which is a term of art in pedagogy you know you think You think for example of a foreign language where you only Introduce so many new vocabulary words at a time because if you give some of the dictionary they drown And then you give them one verb and they have to keep working at it until they get to work So that's just that's just how games work, right? Like yeah Well, let's get harder right and as game designers like we've known that for ever since we started designing games But it's exactly the same as education because games are education In in the chat Rebecca Frazi adds another classic term From a century ago actually by a really really powerful one called the zone of proximal development Which a Russian theoretician came up with that's just that there's that zone where you know where you're the game It's a little tougher and so you've got to be a bit more challenged But it's not going to destroy your your life immediately It's gonna be enough for you to go and it can't be too boring. It can't be too easy You know can't just keep jumping the goomba over and over again. You have to add to them or make And game design we would call that the challenge curve. Yes James Paul G has a terrific book about this where he really really brings these together and he agrees with you The idea that every game teaches you something It might not be a great thing or might just be how to play the game But they do have to teach John wants to join us up on stage. So let me bring him up. I can make some room Hello, John. Hello. Hello. Hello My son's in Toronto at York, he's just graduated up there and he's gonna try to figure out how to live so Not here That's what I tell him this This conversation I go back a long ways in education But I just want to bring up something from the Horry Pass and that's Seymour Papert's Mindstorms I don't know if you're aware of that book. Oh Yes Yeah, we drug this. Yeah, see this is this goes back to what I was doing back then but Essentially the argument is that Papert makes is do we want the computer to program the student or the student to program the computer? and I still say that that Mindstorms is The only book of creative use of computing as an educational device And I guess what I'm trying to get out of my questions is that when you design an environment like a game you're in charge of right and wrong and To a to a degree But like if you give somebody a trombone There's a lot of possibilities that they could they could take this. It's a it's a different experience than a close form game and so I guess I mean you just find the success criteria. Okay, but some games don't even have success criteria, right? Like look at Minecraft, right? You just play that you play it to play it. There's no right or wrong way of doing it at all Yeah, I think that's another and that's another in the paparian way, you know, and actually Lego Lego Mindstorms That's and that's I was wondering why the word Mindstorms It's because of Lego Mindstorms and I wonder there's a connection. Yep We need we need a course in in in all of this and what yeah, because it's easy You know, it's easy to shuffle by all of this stuff But you know, there are some there's some phenomenal writing in the 70s 80s and 90s about what computers should be Based on what people were seeing then it's not to say that we old farts had all the ideas But it was just a different perspective available that But anyway, I mean that's just the one comment. It's like My son is a gamer To the to the detriment of everything and I don't mind it so much because he's gaining some kind of skill But at the same time he's not gaining agency in that he is Not in charge of making a world which he now has to do as a college graduate But you know like that that sounds a hell of a lot like my path. Yeah, like like I said, you can't you can't create without consumption and By consuming media and consuming culture and consuming ideas you The the creative seeds Appear and whether or not you decide you're gonna follow them and actually make stuff and do things as is up to you But games can help with that too because games absolutely help develop a sense of agency Yeah Thanks, I mean this agency I just wanted to pick your brain on something that I feel better about my son's path right now then Well, you should and John congratulations. That's great to hear. Yeah, thank you. Yes He's yeah, he's in danger of a double major in writing. So I wish him all the best in life. Yes indeed indeed And if you haven't I put a link to an early PDF of Papert's book It's it's a terrific book. I've been trying to exit it for one of my classes. I really recommend it It's also He's also the mind behind the logo language, which is where teaching kids how to have a program Well, that's a that's a video question by the way So if any of you want to join us and you can tell that Michael and I are both very kind to you please We'll clip the raised hand and we have more questions coming in We have the excellent Roxanne risk him and Roxanne asks What are your thoughts and have you seen more attention to game design on? Accessibility meaning for students who have cognitive physical mental challenges Yeah So the answer to that is absolutely yes The this is actually a really really big topic in game design circles right now If you were to jump on dig, you know game design Twitter, it's it's a really really big concept and it's a really big specifically because of a recent game that's been released called Elden Ring Hmm and I could talk forever just about that, but the This game for whatever reasons for various reasons has really brought up this debate about accessibility and gaming and and where How much responsibility game designers have? for accessibility and like whether or not accessibility impacts a creative vision and all of these things is is a very much in The game design sphere of consciousness right now My thoughts my opinion on it is that accessibility can never ever hurt a product and as An artist as a game designer you want as many people to be able to enjoy and play your game as possible and Accessibility is absolutely a part of that I Am ashamed to admit that the games that I make are not accessible because I'm one dude I would love I intend to do better at that because I Should do better at that But yeah, it's it's really big right now. Very very big. There are lots of things that you can do in game design to The aid with accessibility, but I'm absolutely not the right person to talk to that to speak to that there's there's a really great a Really great guy Grant Stoner, I believe his name is who is himself a disabled gamer and he speaks very very very well and eloquently on this stuff And I would strongly recommend that you follow him Michael if you can is it Grant Stoner? Yep Grant Stoner. Okay. Thank you That's really helpful. Oh, yeah on the Twitter. You super crib 1994 Very good very good As always Roxanne, it's a great question by the way Roxanne risk and has just as almost pretty your natural gift For doing screen grabs that make everybody look great. I Just I just gave up. I just let her do it. She's just remarkable that but she's thank you. That's a great question And Michael, thank you for that very candid answer. This is this is definitely a huge topic And I think we'll be doing more and more of this We have more questions coming in all over the map So let me bring these up. This is from Lee Nichols and Lee comes back to one of John's points Games are interactive and great agency to the player some educational models do not Do you think that's a major factor in the attractiveness of using games in education or are there bigger factors? Yeah short answer. Yes longer longer answer is that Going back to an earlier point that I made in that play is sort of the fundamental building block of education I would say that the fact that most educational models don't include sort of an interactive Component is to their great detriment because the interactivity is what builds curiosity and builds confidence and builds all of these connections that Strongly strongly aid in learning like I I don't remember where I read this but I strongly believe it to be true that that the single most important thing when it comes to whether or not you're going to learn something is curiosity and Games interactivity build that like nothing else like a textbook can't do that. You already have to be interested I'm thinking about your example of Mario Where well you have to go someplace and you it's not working. Well, why not you want to solve that? Yep Absolutely, there's a wonderful more recent game I'll kind of post nuclear game Fallout 3 and it begins with the main character as a baby And the tutorial is your first 16 years of life And so, you know, all you care so puts you in their shoes like how do I get out of this crib or who is this person? Then it drives you through very very nicely. That is a really really good example of something called leudo narrative cohesion Yeah, so Narrative I'm sure that that word is familiar to people but ludic Ludo is sort of the the the fancy word that we use in game design to represent the interactive component of a game And you know narrative cohesion or dissonance is how well your mechanics your interactive component Dovetail with your narrative component to to strengthen your point and and that's like that's what Game is really really shine when your mechanics and whatever metaphor like whatever you're trying to get across your point your narrative You're whatever and those things dive when they resonate your game is good and So when you look at the beginning of Fallout 3 In a tutorial situation, you have to limit player agency so that you're keeping that cognitive window small, right? Like you have to drip feed stuff But why would the character in a narrative sense be limited? Well, he's a kid kids have limited agency. It's perfect, right? Like that's a very very good example It's that's a great game as a whole which I recommend But it's but yeah, I think that's a great great tutorial There are people who've been throwing in a bunch of questions now and I need to I need to get up Stop asking my own because these guys are good We have Nathan Kelber from Ithaca. Hello, Nathan Who asked I completed a PhD focused in games and play recently? I became a programming teacher your games have inspired me to try to create games for fun. How would you get started? Just do it So Consume Play lots of games until you feel inspired and then build it The trick there the real strong difficult trick is limiting your scope As a first-time game designer or developer your you're gonna want to think huge your your inspiration is going to be huge It's gonna be far too big try and make it really small My game a dark room is a good example. I was able to build that in two weeks Which is small enough for one person to do before burning out and feeling tired And you can get bigger after you're comfortable and after you've got your sea legs and stuff But like think of something small build it if it's really your first game Copy somebody else find a game that you like that's small that seems easy make your own version What though if I can't Nathan if my question is off-base, please What RPG maker There are lots of different game engines and lots of different tools out there From like RPG maker or specifically focused on building a very specific style of game Others like say unity are large engines that can do complicated 3d games You know at triple a stuff built in unity So depending on what you need to do You put your engine I just want to drop a little bit of a sort of self-promotion my stuff at least everything That isn't really new is all open source the source code is available on github You want to like go look at how a dark room is built? Maybe copy it jeans it. That's a really good way to get started That's fantastic Thank you. I didn't know they were open source. That's terrific. Yep. Double speak is on github and yeah, look so like I Learned to build stuff and learn to work on the web by tearing apart other people's stuff, right like and so If I didn't have all of that stuff that I could tear apart to learn I wouldn't be where I am and so it's my responsibility to make sure that the next generation has stuff to tear apart That's really forward-looking as a futurist. I approve and I'm glad to hear that In the chat, there's one more recommendation, which is to make tabletop board games as well. I second that yep Pen and pen and paper and cardboard is a really good way of prototyping even if you intend to build a digital game in the long run prototyping on paper There's a way to get to your interactive state faster, right? Do you build it in cardboard? You can play it with your friends and see how it works before you even start to code Very very smart So I think everybody here is like cracking their knuckles now and getting ready to start setting things up But we have questions we have one from our dear friend Tom Ames Who asks can you compare the curiosity learning effects of open-ended games like Dungeons and Dragons versus closed games of the fixed end? Well, I think that open-ended stuff like D&D Yeah, it teaches very different things right like Dungeons and Dragons From a game design perspective is an extremely open game, right? Like the the system the set of rules requires a human involved to Improvise and make decisions. So not all the rules of the system are codified in the rules of the system. Yeah Games like that those those are teaching you Very different things like D&D builds social skills more than anything like yeah It builds math because you got to roll dice into a lot of math, but mostly it builds social skills your like social and Empathetic skills right yeah, like you're learning to put yourself in a different person's place You're learning to look at emotions and perspectives from maybe different angles. You're learning to improvise and deal with things on on a You know that you made on a predicted problem-solving skills all of those things are developed by games like Dungeons and Dragons Whereas a closed game like say the qubit game is a significantly more linear Where we have designed, you know the path that we want you to take the things that we want you to learn and when We can tailor that very specifically to target very specific skills that you probably couldn't teach in D&D That's an interesting way of putting it You could think of some professional games for the workplace You know designed to teach you how to repair a drill or something that'd be that narrow and with the rise of VR and AR I believe that all education will be gaming at some point in the future who knows when but like I Just I hate the term game I really do because like it says as soon as we add interactivity to anything we call a game and That's dumb Yeah, but I hope you're right The there's the claim the 21st century will be the ludic century which I have hopes for I mean and you can already see it starting right like gamification as a buzzword Got pretty popular like 10 and 10 years ago What is time now? I'm not sure how many years ago things are but I think it was around 10 years ago Where where everybody started to realize that you could very strongly shape human behavior by adding a point system and and it's been used for good and evil but like that that's the beginning of this sort of ludic Immersion this like blurt blurring of the line between games and reality Abby Johnson in the chat points out that there are other negative Senses of game the word game like gaming the system and in my work for the past 25 years when I introduced games to academics they often think game being something just for children or yeah a game is a psychological manipulation so it's there there is Yeah, then they often mean the nation is this like is this like a logical manipulation Yes, it was speech Tom, thank you for that fantastic question. Tom has a real gift for asking very deep questions Speaking of which Sarah Stolberg Berkowitz. Sarah. I hope I didn't get this wrong professor Berkowitz asks this question I'm interested in using games and student assessment not just learning I mean assessment is really tricky, right like And Like I have a lot of opinions on grading but it's a it's a necessity and a truth of our academic system and our education system I think that it would be very difficult to design a game that Works as both an education game and an assessment game that could actually give you like a grade point or some like this The students are 70% on this test or something That would be tricky I Don't know how to do that. That would be a very interesting problem if you want to work on it. Hit me up Sarah um, what a great question And we'll see what can come from this Just an infold disclosure, I'm starting my gaming and education seminar again in a couple of weeks So Sarah, I may put that before my students to see what they think of as well good question good question and Lee Lee Nichols has a follow-up question, which is really really good. How does a game designer think about player failure? Do you think that is similar or different from how education handles failure? Well Game designers think about player failure a lot because Players will fail. I think if you're you're not well, not all games have failure states But if they do have failure states and most games have failure states That's got to be a really big part of your design. I Another thing that I have strong opinions on I think that player failure is Almost a necessary evil in a lot of situations, right like because without states a game loses a lot of its teeth But player failure is inherently frustrating, right? Like failure sucks. It's not a fun feeling Yeah, and so as a game designer you either have to really limit player failure or make it fun and There are lots of ways to do that and different games have different approaches There are games like the from software games like Dark Souls Elden Ring those games their take on player failure is sucks to be you you deserve it and It it hurts and it's intended to hurt right like they've designed it so that player failure is Bad like you really don't want to fail and that generates stress and tension and they use that well other games Let's use an example like Super Meat Boy Super Meat Boy is like Pretty fast-paced platforming. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it's it's really really really hard And you're gonna be trying to beat a particular, you know part of a level thousands of times really really hard But what they do is they shorten the Back loop so the time between when you fail and when you start again Is almost zero there's no reset time Right as soon as you die You're right back at the beginning of the thing that you buy that right back Immediately the music is going you're ready to go. There's no time Try again. Try again. Try again. Try again and without that beat of oh, I've got to do this again You don't even have a chance. It's just ah, I'm gonna do it and After you find you succeed It shows you a little video of all of your attempts Played on top of each other and you see like thousands of these little meat boys diving into saw spikes and like Oh, it is so cool And so that way they've turned that frustrating thing of player failure into just something that's kind of fun and hilarious Wow, so I I've only played a little bit I haven't I haven't gotten that far but and then there are games that just don't do failure like You can't really fail at the qubit game. You can't really fail at a dark room Mike. My games don't tend to have failure Yeah, it's it's always positive. You're always accomplishing something The failure state is just now you're accomplishing things slower Well, that's a that's a good point or some games though if you're actually the villain then the failure state might be good for humanity you know the There's one game where you where you play at oil company trying to ruin the world It's from Moly Industries and so if you fail, you know, that's a good good for everyone But here we have we have a guest who I want to be up on stage because he's a person from a wonderful company This is Jeff Fisk from Muzzi Lane software and he has all kinds of thoughts all kinds of thoughts Hello Jeff. Well, Michael. I your I've got the gray hair. You you don't back in the 90s. I was making games and Did commercial games for about 15 years and I know here's games and now Muzzi Lane We are trying to do what you know, the impossible right turn education turn games in education and our take You know so much of what the reality is and some of the things you touched on is who is your consumer? Yeah, how is it actually gonna get consumed? So like when you say a RVR is coming? We all know it is but how many of us The God or the PC to move it forward, right? So It actually as you make it it's accessible, but our take is role-playing Let's put the student in it and have them practice. So we work heavily with McGraw Their take was teach something some teach someone something like for a piece of marketing then have them run a scenario where they run the food truck and They actually apply it and what's what's fun about it is that they experience the same cognitive in their brain You're just doing the same thing. I was trained as a professional pilot. You're in the simulator You know, it's an analog, right? So our challenge and when our design approach is how can we make an analog for training, right? And you can argue it's more simulation than game. I I We do kind of lament that we can't really use the same types of key challenges in game mechanics Because students would actually get really angry if they failed frequently when they're doing a homework assignment Right. So love the I Agree with everything you've been saying you're more up-to-date on what's been happening You know, I could give my real world references go back a long time But yeah, it's it's an exciting field obviously Brian's trying to bring us all together to Try and crack this not I will mention that SUNY Buffalo for example has an instructional design program in gaming and they use our tool They used to use unity too complex. So when you're trying like you said you want to start with that quick analog So our platform is no scripting just boom you're going there what you see is what you get We can launch it play for free. We don't charge until you start making money. So That's an incredible platform you've got I Don't but please Michael have a what do you think of this of everything that Jeff has just been saying? No, he's absolutely right right like the way if you want to teach a particular sort of skill or So where I want to looking for you return to teach a particular kind of Punk of stuff like a a food truck or whatever. Why if you can put the player Into a context where they're doing that thing even if it's even if it's not actually that thing if it's if it's like a Simplification of that thing or like a metaphor of that thing That's transferable right like it's transferable because They if you could either it's an emotional state You're trying to put them in you put them in an emotional state That is similar to the emotional state that they'll be in when they're actually doing the real thing and if they're in that same state You're going to be developing confidence you're going to be developing connections You're going to be developing all of this stuff and that is exactly how I built the Cuba game Yeah, that that meditative deep state so the first game ever made was a Civil War game It was an analog for a paper and pencil blew up the paper and pencil rules so the restrictions to turn take advantage of the computer, but yeah, you You you think about it and you ingest it and you you regurgitate it out into a different form To so that as a user is playing it They they don't realize that things have happened in their subconscious. Yes, like you are describing Your your favorite tutorial the fallout three well similarly if you really want a crash course in game design Portal has got a great breakdown in there They actually have a design breakdown afterwards is if you have the gold edition You probably can find it online where they actually show you how they designed it and the entire game actually The first few levels are actually all the tutorial and that that used to be like all part of one scenario And as Michael was saying that the cognitive overload is real you can only have the person either consume The game or consume the UI you can't have them do the same thing at the same time Hmm, so you have and importantly described that process and sure enough you cut yourself on the back for Figuring these complex puzzles out But in fact the designers show you how they introduced you and taught you how to do those things a level earlier They just didn't call it that So it's very it's a very interesting Yeah, and like When you do it like that you can teach people things They don't even know it right like it's inception and that's what makes It's so effective if people would come off testing the cubic game and go it was fun But I don't think I learned anything about quantum computing and then I'd be like oh really well Then tell me like what's quantum computer built up and they're like oh, it's this that did you know that before and they go? No, right like And I was gonna say that that right there is the promise of game-based learning right is that you can teach people things Even though they don't realize it there was There's one book on this which is titled the don't bother me mom. I'm learning Which I love and as soon as you as soon as someone thinks that you're trying to teach them something they shut off Yeah, unfortunately, that's that's a that's a legacy of schooling Jeff Thank you and if Jeff if you can't just just throw a link to a Muzzy Lane in the chat So ever the few people who don't know of you all can can click there and learn more So I also just dropped a link in the chat to extra credits design club And don't don't be thrown off by like the silly animation and the like chipmunks style voice stuff these guys know their shit And they cover some really really great topics that the entire series is good But design club is particularly interesting They deep dive on design choices in popular games and why they've done things the way they've done. It's really really informative Terrific. Thank you. Thank you See what we're hoping to do is we hope that this Hour of conversation has been stimulating enough that people don't run away and start playing games. It's kind of perverse, right? If we succeed in this or if we fail everyone's happier We have a great question from Sarah Sanguario who is going to have to be a hired by numerous universities really soon Because she is amazing and Sarah asks are the mechanics that you utilize for people who are completionists? Along the lines of accomplishments So I'm not exactly sure what that what that question is getting at but it does Make me think a little bit about the aesthetics of play This is something that game design academia sort of has broken games down into I think it's like seven Main aesthetics of play And one of one of them is like completion. Yeah, there are definitely some players Who are motivated by completion by ticking off boxes by like finishing everything? and If you if you want to design a game that's going to have mass appeal You're going to try and include mechanics That sort of hit on all of the different aesthetics of play so that there's something for everybody Typically a game will focus on one or two main aesthetics that are their primary aesthetics, but it's definitely useful for all games to include some aesthetics of For everybody and achievements Accomplishments are an excellent example ready like even games that don't actually have completionism in their core mechanical loops Most of them have an achievement system on Xbox live or on steam or whatever Certain way you get a little achievement and the completionists can hunt all of those achievements It makes your game more compelling and more engaging And Sarah just confessed she just outed herself as a completionist And and Jeff added some some good Muzzy Lane info including how to find him For completionists if if you're looking for this by the way, I just found a new little game I mean like ten minutes to play tops It's from the the Financial Times and it's a game which puts you in charge of the world for the next 50 years as you try to solve climate change And it I'll just put a link to it here It's an interesting one to think about in part because it has a completionist mechanism of as you were just saying Michael awards And you get a little trophy case which they bring up every so often Yep, and that just that's just there to drive engagement right like There's no mechanical purpose for that to be there, but it's it's there because people like it It gives you dopamine it hooks you into the system. It keeps you engaged But it doesn't have a little narrative coherence you're talking about before right There's right like most of these achievement systems are very um fourth wall. You're right like they're outside of the game The diet diagetic non non diagetic non diagetic. Yeah Yes, and everyone gets that that's a tricky one. Um, well We're coming close to the end of our hour. Um, which is ridiculous But uh, I have one question before anybody else gets a chance to put one in, uh, which is to ask you Where where do you see educational gaming design? Headed over like say the the next five years. Are we gonna move completely into a virtual reality? Do you see more narrative or crafting games? Do you think there's a big bubble of gaming about to burst or where do you see this all headed? Well, I think so I mean there's a lot to cover there. Um, I think vr is about is a dead end I think ar is going to change the world Uh, I think that Just by nature of progress and Sort of the marketplace of ideas I think that games and education are definitely going to continue to grow because they are so effective right like An educational system that includes interactive components will always outperform one that doesn't And so yeah, I think that that gaming and education is going to continue to grow I think the gaming as a part of our life is just going to continue to grow And we may eventually we may we may have to abandon that term game Pretty soon because I do think that it's going to completely infuse into all parts of our life Just because life is more fun with games So it's one of those ways in which something becomes Ubiquitous that we stop referring to it. Uh, we stop naming it as something. Yeah, um, that's that's a fascinating idea. Um, I love uh geno bondo Her ears perked up and so did sarah's they said wait, what what about ar and vr? Why is vr a dead end? So I mean this is this is definitely just an opinion of mine, but I do think that vr is a niche product I don't think that it's it's ever going to be something that everybody has right like you're not going to see people walking around the street with vr goggles strapped to their heads because it is fundamentally isolating vr is a fundamentally isolating experience and humanity is a fundamentally social creature so Like yeah vr is fun and like I enjoy dropping into my vr headset and playing beat saber sometimes and it's kind of cool and it can be used in very targeted situations But it's not going to become a ubiquitous part of everyday life Whereas augmented reality absolutely will um once the technology gets down to a point where it's And easy everybody will have ar instead of a cell phone And once that install base is down everything's going to be different right like Things will change in ways that I can't predict uh, this is uh the science fiction writer neil stefanson. I asked him what the next uh Uh handset or the next hardware would be and he said it would be spectacles That that was the uh, of course not just spectacles, but spectacles with audio and you control them with it with gesture and so on Stevenson has been very good at predicting the future. He's very good one of one of the sci-fi writers that I mean A significant portion of today's current hot technology is 100 inspired by works of deal stefanson right like like metaverse, right Facebook renamed to meta because of neil stefanson exactly exactly um people want people blew this up michael on the chat Tom hams thinks vr is going to be something you visit like a movie theater like a holodeck abby johnson says that vr is expensive and also gives a lot folks motion sickness That's that's a problem that will be solved right like motion sickness and in vr design is absolutely something that is a big part of Being a vr designer is trying to design experiences that don't trigger motion sickness and finding ways to mitigate um And like cost of headset that'll come down. That's a technology problem more is law will solve that um But the the fundamentally isolating experience will never never stop Um, and if you do get rid of the isolating experience it's no longer vr. It's ar Uh quick question for everybody, uh, who has been using the chat. Uh, I would love I've gotten requests to blog up the chat record I'd love to do that. Uh, I'll anonymize you all just remove your names If anyone has any objections to that, please, uh, say so in the chat If you're not using the chat, well, then move on. Um, but, uh, um, that's a michael That's a fascinating phrase that vr becomes ar once it becomes social. That's uh, It's a very very interesting idea. Um, we've had a whole bunch of other comments Abbey johnson made me happy by mentioning alternate reality games and larping So that's a whole other field which doesn't even require digital technology. Uh, nathan kelber That's a very very good point. There's a history of games breaking off into art forms Theater or music or notable examples We continue to use the words play with each but don't want to call them games A very very good point. Um, and uh, unfortunately if this is bringing us to the end of our time Um, michael, uh, it seems like the best way to keep up with you is basically to run really fast Behind you, but um, but besides that is uh, is twitter where you where you mostly Update the world on your work or should we just follow doublespeak games? Yeah, I mean usually I don't Um, I've I've developed a little bit of a an air of mystery as a reclusive artist But that's just because I don't like engaging with social media if people ask me to come talk. I do as you can tell um Yeah, I mean if you follow doublespeak on any of the social platforms I've got a presence. Um, if there are new new things that doublespeak has released I update there, but it's very very infrequent um Only only when I actually do stuff I understand understand. Well, I'm glad that you came out of your reclusive shell in far off toronto No, you just asked me to talk. That's all it takes Sometimes that is sometimes that is yeah, but no, I like all the socials Follow me on socials and I'll an email if you want to talk. I'm michael at doublespeakgames.com. Um I'm I'm always around very good. Well if there's uh We'd love to uh bring you back perhaps next year when we learn about your next project, which will probably take over the planet Uh in the meantime, michael, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic hour I really appreciate it and I look forward to what all of your absorption and thinking of media now Brings out of you next for your next game. Yeah, we'll see. I'm I'm also interested to see what happens I never know Take care and enjoy spring as it comes to canada. Yeah, thank you you too Now don't don't leave everybody. Uh, I've got to let you know what we're up to over the next few weeks I do want to thank you all for your uh for your great questions and comments Um, if you're if you'd like to keep talking about this, um, I'm happy to keep talking about this on twitter Just use at brian alexander or of course at shindig events Or just go to my blog brian alexander.org because uh on all those places I get things stirred up about gaming and of course Use the hashtag f tte If you'd like to dive into the past of our previous sessions on gaming, we have a whole bunch Just go to tinyurl.com slash f t f archive If you'd like to keep thinking about gaming and all the other issues around the future of higher ed Remember forum that future of education that us will show you what's coming up next And if you're proud of something that you'd like to share if it's game related or otherwise Just let me know email me and I'd be glad to share with everybody else. You guys are wonderful I'm happy to celebrate you And thank you again for thinking with a really exciting topic today Uh, I hope all of you are safe and sound and doing well in the meantime Take care be well get ready for summer or winter depending on which side of the planet you're on And we'll see you next time online Bye bye