Out of the corner of my eye, I watch distractedly as the stopwatch tick… tick… ticks higher, my chances of winning dropping with every passing second. Click on Macedonia the screen flashes just as my friend claims victory with a triumphant “Done!” I slump dejectedly.
As much as I enjoy games like Seterra’s Ultimate Map Quizzes, I’m also acutely aware that they’re not for everyone. While I’m lucky that a few of my friends enjoy trivia enough to get into heated geography quiz competitions, when I began considering the assignment to create a learning game that is first and foremost fun, it was challenging at first. My early notes scribbled on notecards in class included “simulating the day-to-day of a stressful job??” and “personality types: forcing players to choose actions outside of their comfort zone”. While somewhat interesting, my initial impressions didn’t yet walk the line between interesting and educational—most of them tipped heavily one way or the other.
Luckily, I wasn’t in this alone! I was placed on a team where everyone had listed “emotional involvement” as an interest on our team formation forms, so we were already on the same page as to the type of response we wanted to elicit from players. That shared interest helped us quickly settle on a game type: social deduction!
As we soon came to learn, popular social deduction games are deceptively simple. Secret Hitler? Only has three playable card types. One Night Werewolf? Has a moderator walking players through every action (Ultimate Werewolf doesn’t, though!) When we began trying to cram educational aspects into a functioning deduction game, we started off with huge ambitions—too many card types and too many restrictions. Simplifying the gameplay became one of our earliest and biggest challenges, and fixing these issues came at the cost of adding more explicit learning components in our first versions.
However, as our game came together, historical details began to fall into place! Late night sessions spent devouring articles about French history (the Revolutionaries really just kept hauling the King and his family back every time they ran away—it took a long time to get to chopping off heads!) were incredibly rewarding as initial hypotheses (“There has to be a newspaper that rallied people to the insurrection…”) were confirmed (“A-ha! Le Père Duchesne!”). The more I learned, the more opportunities for embedded learning appeared in the game.
Yet, even by the end, the hardest balance to strike was the same one we ran into initially: how to add in extensive learning without over-engineering the gameplay. In our final brainstorm as a team, we looked back through the notes of all of our playtesters and teased out one key area where we could increase engagement: identity cards. If we could get people to walk away with at least one historical figure and event that they remembered, we’d consider our learning goal met. After all, how many people remember trivia from a bar night compared to the characters from their favorite childhood video games?
This tradeoff between complexity and impact became one of my biggest takeaways: educational games don’t need to be complicated to be meaningful. Ultimately, sparking curiosity (like the video we watched about Julia) is sometimes the best thing you can do to extend learning past the scope of a single game.
