- Kids wanted to learn at school
- 7 universal emotions: disgust, contempt, sadness, happiness, fear, anger, and surprise
- Sophia: The game-learn emotion: fun is the cognitive mechanical process by which we convert fear into happiness through surprise.
- Meaningful game: connect to the real world, “sticky” you will remember it. Mechanics involve exploring a confusing space and creating order. The “ordered state” gives you insight about the real world creating a fulfilling feeling of mastery & understanding.”
- Candy crush is not related to the world and it is not sticky (you won’t really remember it). However, it is compelling.
- Different genres of “emotion” games elicit sophia in different ways.
- Each core mechanic gives different emotions and leads to a core emotion.
- When designing for Sophia, identify fear created by absence of skill then scaffold the person into the happiness of mastery.
- When making learning games, we know the effect we want to achieve but the trick is finding the emotion.
- The pain of absence in an educational game is the pain of not having that skill and alleviating that pain is gaining confidence in it. For example, the argumentative game the speaker developed showed the player challenges they would face without good argumentation and that incentivized them to get good at it.
- We can articulate problems through the Sophia framework. What if your mechanics don’t accomplish the emotions you want? Not enough surprise preceding satisfaction? Lack of tension because fear is not clearly articulated? These are also problems we find in education.