Before this assignment, when I thought of educational games I thought of the dull computer games I played in school that amounted to little more than gussied-up flash cards. I was surprised when we began discussing games like Ark Nova, Wingspan, Terraforming Mars, etc. as educational games. I thought “but wait a minute, those games are fun?!?!” This assignment opened up my view of what it meant for a game to be educational. I realized that teaching games can be so much more profound than I ever expected.
When we were brainstorming our initial concept, we had separately come up with the ideas to teach CBT concepts and home pest control. Then someone threw out the idea to combine the two concepts. At first we laughed about how silly the idea was, but after talking it over we were all so delighted at the idea of a bug therapy game that we just ran with it. I am really glad we did even though it was a bit of a dark horse – the silly concept is a great way to create enough distance from players’ real lives that they’re able to engage with both the game elements and the educational elements.
Our goal was to get people to practice challenging negative thoughts. I think the judging game format works well to that end. It might have been more true-to-life to have players write out originally-composed positive affirmations, rather than having them pull from a hand of cards that we wrote. However, the enjoyable challenge of the format is working within the constraints of pre-written cards and having to come up with creative justifications for playing a card that might not exactly fit the prompt. What’s more, writing the cards ourselves allows us to model positive affirmations for players who might not have a ton of formal therapeutic experience.
I felt from 247G that I had wrapped my head around designing for fun, even if I felt I could use some more practice. I was surprised at the complexity and difficulty added by designing for two outcomes – learning and fun! I felt that as we iterated we swung back and forth between the game being fun but relatively uninformative to somewhat informative but dry. I’m pretty happy with where we landed. I think we were able to preserve the game’s fun while also getting players to practice strategies for emotional regulation. If we were to take the game forward, I’d want players to be more confident identifying cognitive distortions. I think having little background on them makes it difficult to engage with that part of the game.
Going forward I’d like more of my games to have an element of teaching to them, especially because I’m interested in creating games about social justice and marginalization. Teaching is central to social justice movements, so having the skill to educate through games is going to be incredibly useful for me. I’ve learned that learning is a complex process, but I’m looking forward to revisiting it in my future games.
