I played CellCraft, a real-time strategy game that teaches cellular biology through the management of your very own cell. In the game, you control a cell and must gather resources such as glucose and fatty acids to produce more cell organelles to fight off viral attackers. The game was designed by Anthony Pecorella, with domain expertise supported by Dr. Jed Macosko and Dr. David Dewitt. The types of fun that CellCraft curates are fun through challenge and discovery, but what’s interesting is that these aesthetics are developed through very different interactions.
The fun of discovery is directly created through the game’s mechanics. Players uncover information directly through the encyclopedia mechanic, which teaches the player about the possible actions and their real biological counterpart. Players also get a dose of discovery through moving around a map filled with critical resources. In both of these cases, the mechanics create a straightforward dynamic where new information is revealed to the player over time, leading to anticipation and curiosity.
On the other hand, the fun of challenge is created through more emergent dynamics of gameplay. In the game, the cell can produce organelles that are capable of defense, such as the slicer enzyme, consuming both time and resources. There are also viruses that can attack the cell in waves. While these mechanics create some difficulty on their own, it’s the interaction of these mechanics in real-time that adds layers to the challenge. Someone who doesn’t adequately produce slicer enzymes ahead of time would quickly be overrun by larger virus waves. Someone who doesn’t recycle unnecessary organelles would run out of resources to produce defenders. The dynamics of managing resources in constant flux and under time pressure is what creates the aesthetic of challenge.
Along the way, the game also creates several tangible outcomes through the aforementioned mechanics and dynamics. The encyclopedia mechanic that contributed to the discovery aesthetic also creates an explicit information outcome, transferring facts about cell biology to the player that they take with them after the game. The game is able to effectively achieve this because the actions performed in the game are simplified versions of real-life cellular mechanisms. By actively participating in the game, players would hopefully be able to recall the experience and the associated information alongside it.
The dynamics created by the mechanics that fostered a fun of challenge also transfer the explicit skills of preparation and resource management. These skills are fostered through repeated trial and error, where players observe the outcomes of the choices they made throughout their gameplay. The game marks whether or not a player succeeded in keeping the cell healthy with a grade at the end of the level. If a player did poorly, they can reflect on what went wrong during the level and then try again. Through repeating this process, players can build intuition and anticipatory reasoning, which are valuable implicit skills.
In conclusion, CellCraft delivers on its goals of discovery and information transfer because it grounds all of its mechanics in reality. However, what makes it extra compelling is how the interaction between the mechanics creates a new layer of fun through challenge, which in turn build hands-on skills.
