“Is It Truly a Good and Ethical Idea to Teach players/learners to Be SCAMMERS?”
This question arose during the initial brainstorming activity for our P1 teaching game design project. My teammates and I came up with many fun, interesting, and amazing ideas, as we could see from the colorful sticky notes placed on the classroom window (Figure 1). We tried to be as democratic as possible by applying a voting system to select our idea. And yes, the idea that received the most votes was “Scammer/Scamming” (Figure 2).
At first, I wondered a bit whether teaching people to be scammers was actually a good and ethical idea. However, our team eventually saw the opportunity to use this role to help players/learners understand how psychological manipulation works. Previously, I thought that a serious (or teaching) game would mainly be about integrating learning content into a game, but it was not simply that way. SCAMBOO! showed me that the relationship between learning and gameplay is definitely more complicated than that.
Our SCAMBOO! blended fantasy and challenge. Players/learners could become cartoon animal scammer characters, collect scamming tactic chips, target victims, and use hidden defense cards to block other scammers. I really liked the idea of allowing players to become the villains for once while, at the same time, competing against their friends. This idea was introduced during the second round of our team’s internal playtest. However, after a couple of playtests, we realized that collecting resources (the scamming tactic chips) and matching icons on the target victim cards could become the main activity, rather than understanding why particular scam tactics worked.
Throughout the design process, we did a lot of trial and error with different mechanics through several additional external playtests. We tried to increase uncertainty by using dice, but eventually we removed it because the additional randomness and complexity didn’t work well according to the playtesters’ feedback. We also tried hiding the required tactics on victim cards so that players would have to guess vulnerabilities by themselves. Although this guessing method could encourage more thinking, it also made scoring more difficult and slowed down the game. Instead, we asked players to explain their scam attempts aloud, which appeared to help connect their decisions to the learning goals, but sometimes, too much explanation interrupted the flow and the fun parts of play. This made me realize that adding more learning- or education-focused activities to a game does not necessarily make it more effective.
I felt that having many opportunities to watch other people playing our SCAMBOO! was very fruitful because we could learn that the things we thought were clear to us as designers might not always be clear to those new players. All the feedback and comments about the overwhelming rules and difficult-to-distinguish cards encouraged us to rethink and improve the visual design and game instructions. In our latest version of SCAMBOO!, we brought the required scamming tactics information back onto victim cards and added character traits, quotes, and a sentence frame to facilitate and encourage players to explain their reasoning.
Overall, I learned that designing a teaching (or serious) game involves continuous playtesting and revisiting our assumptions. A game can be fun without necessarily teaching what we intended, and a game can contain meaningful learning activities without being enjoyable to play. As someone interested in educational technology and game-based learning, I would love to apply this lesson when designing English learning experiences for Thai students back home. Instead of simply making lessons more entertaining, I would like to create games where the mechanics encourage meaningful thinking and learning happens naturally through play.
Figure 1: The colorful sticky notes placed on the classroom window
Figure 2: The idea that received the most votes was “Scammer/Scamming.”
Figure 3: The first prototype of SCAMBOO!
Figure 4: The second prototype of SCAMBOO!
Figure 5: The third prototype of SCAMBOO!
Figure 6: The final look of SCAMBOO!
AI disclosure: The blog’s thumbnail awas created by generative AI (ChatGPT) to help build the visual layout. The content of the blog post and the written explanation are my own work.
