Helping you make games for learning & education
Helping you make games for learning & education
last updated October, 2018
It's easy to say it's a game built for learning/education, but, ideally we should be able to learn from almost any game, or media we encounter. Digging deeper, an educational/learning game is really referring to the idea of a game being purpose-built for learning outcomes. Often these are formalized goals, perhaps aligned with a specific curriculum, or educational standard. Such games are also often built to be played in specific learning situations, for example, classrooms, or during at-home homework sessions. In these regards, a learning/educational game is very much a specific style of game that has been designed to optimize its ability to support a player who is attempting to acquire specific skills, knowledge, aptitudes, insights, etc. about one or more topics.
In terms of optimization it could be to improve the actual understanding of the content, a quality style goal, in other cases, it could be to improve the speed at which a user reaches fluency with the subject matter. Again, the distinction is about the traits and affordances assigned to a game which has a primary objective to support education and learning by its players.
Once you set this very specific frame, a educational/learning game can take on very distinct forms and feature-sets vs. other types of games who, while offering learning outcomes, may not necessarily do it in the same manner, efficiences, or qualities that a targeted learning and educational game may offer.
Is there any dispute that games make for great entertainment? Of course not! One only has to look at the billions spent globally each year on games to realize that they are a huge industry and media form. Even the board game market worldwide is surging due to increasing popularity for games in all their forms digital and non-digital. For decades, and especially over the last 20 years there have been many organizations and individuals building games for purposes beyond entertainment but the question is why?
In some cases proponents of health games cite the wide appeal of games, their ability to draw in players and "engage" them as a critical reason to use games. In a world where attentions are increasingly divided and competed for there does exist some logic to any form of media and messaging that breaks through to get critical attention. Others cite the growing technological power of videogames and especially 3D environments as their motivation to use games. However, these are not the only, or even the best reason to use games for applied purposes. Games do more than grab and hold attention.
Research and examples increasingly show that games may have unique qualities over other forms of media when it comes to tasks such as education, skill development, data-analysis, and behavior change to name a few. These qualities have much to do with the forms games take that enable new communication forms, how games enable dynamic adaptation to users, how games offer better approaches to systems-based thinking, and more. 3D games, while popular, are not always the best solution either. Many simple 2D, and even text games have proven to be very powerful, and often optimized, experiences.
Given that games may have special capacities we also should consider the problems to begin with when discussing 'why games?' In today's complicated and ever-more sophisticated world there is increasing emphasis for an "all-hands-on-deck" approach to problem solving. This is especially true as it relates to health & healthcare. While tried-and-true solutions such as public service announcements can be useful for health issues PSAs have limited reach to youth, and fairly limited capacities for inducing behavior change. The same can be said for seminar and counseling interventions, and more.
Through the growth of health games there is increasing sentiment to add games, when evidence shows success, to the mix of media and non-media tools we use to solves today's most vexing health problems.
Often in the learning games field you will hear the idea of 'games that teach'. It's important to distinguish the loaded nature this phrase can have at times from it's more innocent rhetorical nature. While it's certainly true that games, and other media, can "teach" in that they provide situations where learnings can acquire knowledge, skills, aptitudes, etc. from their one-to-one encounters with games, on a bigger level, it's important to think of teaching still as very much a larger wholistic set of actions that involve human-to-human communication, emotion, presence, and rapid-adaptation.
With the more extreme view that games, by-themselves, don't teach, we instead can better view games as tools within a larger circle of teaching, and instruction, that starts with a person, and ends with a person. Even if the first person, is the designer of a game, the game is merely a conduit for the designer's intended, and unintended instruction. In reality though, most learning games, will work best if they are seen as an object embedded in relationships that involve teachers, and learners, offering extra-game mentorship and peer-experiences, that happen in, out, and around the game itself.
By seeing games as involving others, and human-in-the-loop instruction, as a best practice, we can worry less about the game being a perfect-replacement for the human endeavor of teaching, and more as a force-multiplier for traditional, and evolved frameworks that involve humans helping other humans learning and achieve.
This can manifest itself in a myriad of ways. Specific features could be tied to evaluating the player and adjusting the game to ensure the player masters each specific curriculum requirement. Designs could purposely leave out certain details in a game's subject matter best handled by a lecture, or other learning element guided by a human instructor. Syllabus and teaching methods designed for specific games could offer great moments for reflection on a game's content, themes, and viewpoints. Analytics could aid teachers in guiding future learning episodes both in and out of game. Multiplayer frameworks could support teachers playing in-game with students, or enable tools that let teachers change game circumstances to balance play within a multiplayer peer-learner environment. In each and every one of these cases, the symbiotic nature that arises from seeing teaching as less a game-centric view and one that is still human-centric informs the engineering and design of the game in ways that might not otherwise appear evident if you focus on games as teachers in-and-of-themselves.
For these reasons it can best be said, that games can teach, but that the best teaching involves games that are supportive of a larger human-led teaching process.
Do learning games work?
Through a variety of research projects conducted since the late 1990s there is a growing body of evidence that games can play an effective role in shaping learning and education outcomes such as the Quest Atlantis and River City game projects at U. Indiana and Harvard respectively. This is true in very formalized learning frameworks such as specific grade level curriculums, and in more informal frameworks such as museum exhibits. WolfQuest, an informal learning game, about how wolf packs work together to hunt and survive was evaluated and shown to have created meaningful impacts among it's casual audiences online and in museum and science center environments.
Despite studies providing evidence that games can work, we also know that there have been games that have failed. They either outright failed, or they didn't necessarily improve results vs. existing solutions. Georgia Tech's experimental math games Aqua Moose had many defects that lead to poor learning outcomes and student reviews.
Games might fail because they aren't engaging, or they provide unforeseen sideeffects, or they proved hard to reach audiences-at-scale. There are no sure things.
It thus can be said, "games can work, but projects can fail."
What's important toward making sure a game works is not only that the game be well designed, and aimed properly at the underlying problem, but that, as with many forms of learning, that the players are supported by both the game and surrounding systems be they mentors, teachers, additional materials, calls-to-action, and more.
Quality affects educational game projects no different than other intervention designs, but it is exciting to know that there are excellent examples where games have risen to the challenge offering overall promise to the next great projects.
Do learning games have to be fun?It's quite common for people to say that to be effective that learning games need to be fun. Often in this case the argument seems to equate fun in this case as equal to a popular game, especially when discussing learning games for kids. However, this is an unrealistic blanket declaration, and furthermore it's not necessarily true.
First, and foremost, a learning game, if played for whatever minimum amount of time is required (and ideally shown by testing, and research) must be EFFECTIVE. That is it must ideally result in learning outcomes amongst it's targeted audience. Regardless of how fun it is, if the game doesn't achieve its non-entertainment objective than what's the point? So what a learning game MUST be is effective.
In terms of fun, the problem is that fun is a subjective emotion triggered differently in different players and situations. Even among the best videogames in the world, not all of them are deemed "fun" by all who encounter them. Minecraft might be one of the most successful games of all time, and considered fun by many of its players, but there are plenty of people who played it, and didn't enjoy it. The same could be true of any other game. There are arguably terrible games that still have deep fan-bases who passionately enjoy them. Fun, is also a relative term. Is a decently designed math game MORE fun than a GREAT videogame? Probably not. Is it MORE fun than a rote math q/a system that is more of a testing environment? Hopefully yes. Can people enjoy a game about how to merchandise supermarket shelves? If you work in food sales, it might be the most fun game you've ever played.
Arguing that a learning game MUST be fun is immediately dismissive of what fun is, how we determine what's fun, and assumes learners don't want to learn unless it something is "fun". It's as if all learners have to be tricked in some way, distracted, because their care of learning something that might be of interest or even important to them is so low.
Saying learning games have to be fun is a loaded statement, a bad version of an important priority, and a dead end approach. Instead, consider the larger question of what people should mean when they say learning games have to be fun. The point is they should be AS fun as they can given their ultimate goal, and the other reasons a player should find interest in playing them. This means fun can't compromise learning outcomes, and fun must still fit the constraints of the topic and the game overall. Deep storylines can be fun in a game (again not to everyone) but if your game is about helping someone master adding fractions and might only be played for 100 minutes how much deep storyline can you have vs. a game that might be played for 20 hours?
The reason fun is important for games is because most games compete for your untethered attention, that is attention vs. all else, and where your goal is pleasure and fun at the utmost. This is often not the same competitive context learning games are dealing with. Instead of thinking of fun as a pure singular goal at the top of your motivational pyramid, think of fun for learning games as being an attempt to build the most pleasurable, engrossing game that respects the player. Sure, your game may not be AS fun as the best videogames, but motivated players (i.e. people seeking to learn) find your game respects them as players and provides the most fun, polished experience, they could imagine themselves is possible while also providing them the obvious utility of what they're hoping to learn.
Such "fun" responses from learners come from deeply matching the tasks in a learning game to complimentary game mechanics, building interfaces that optimize the process of playing the game, and offering elements be they story, character design, great tutorials, that players find memorable and supporting during play.
Thus, learning games don't HAVE to be "fun" in any absolute sense. While learning must provide relevant learning outcomes, learning games should also be seen as striving to provide the most fun experience out of respect for their players. Think of fun as being what emerges from a quality development experience.
One of the more interesting elements of the games for health field is how many types of games exist in at least one instance. The gamut of activity is wide if not deep. This reinforces the opportunity that games can be a strategic resource to organizations that are active in health & healthcare.
TABLE X.X showcases a variety of health games that have been developed and showcases the gamut of activity that has taken place in the field so far.
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A number of case studies have shown very interesting learning outcomes from off-the-shelf entertainment games. Be it mastery of group management in online collaborative RPGs, or understanding thematic patterns in history from Civilization, to the architecture of the Italian Renaissance in Assassin's Creed, or just basic rules of offense/defense in Madden or FIFA, many games offer opportunities to learn.
Learning from various forms of media, games included, shouldn't be much of a dispute. The question though is can we harness the best techniques that drive engagement and quality learning from entertainment games to more concerted effect when it's reformulated into more purpose-built educational games that might have larger overall learning goals than many educational games?
It's easy to think that games offer you, and especially your children the help needed to succeed at a subject, or some other learning need. And unfortunately there are a variety of early childhood products that promise the power of games can be used to accelerate your kid into graduating from college at 16 years old.
So what are the ways to separate fact from fiction when it comes to learning games and your desire for personal, professional, or student development? As a general rule, a game would help most if it's part of a larger effort to learn, and master an overall topic, combined with other forms of learning and mentorship. By itself most games aren't going to suddenly launch your kid into AP History class, or help you pass a large-scale certification exam.
At the same time, there are certainly games, and applications of games, that might provide meaningful support and interventions toward learning goals. Good math games that help with practice on concepts they've learned in class but just need more iteration on may help a lot. There are games designed to help students better prepare for driver's education exams that are uniquely effective. Games for acquiring functional language skills useful for tourism, or to buttress early foreign language classes in school also are well situated to be useful if played enough.
Beyond that, the best generalized help games can give, is in developing strategy, organization, and critical thinking skills. This is especially true of games that tend to focus on larger scale-systems design, and executive function goals such as resource allocations, and which reward reverse-engineering the algorithms and rules that govern success at the game. In addition to games that might require improved social and teamwork skills, these sort of everyday entertainment games can provide unique environments by which to develop more advanced skills in problem-solving that can be useful for more complex student-work later in school years.
So on one end, uniquely positioned, rote-learning opportunities offer some specific forms of help when well-matched, and on the other end bigger more abstracted thinking, and collaboration games offer useful life-skill opportunities that might be great outcomes from games you can foster for yourself and your children.
In the middle lie a number of games, often more subject specific, that may offer some help and motivation to learn about subjects from programming, to ancient civilizations, to chemistry, and physics, but if not combined with other forms of instruction, and much more specific game designs, it's unlikely by themselves, games will help a student pass next week's physic's exam.
Yes. It's not pervasive across every school, grade, or subject, and some of it is more informal than formal, but increasingly, schools, and universities are using games in their courses. A great example are the iCivics games that help students learn the basics of U.S. civics including key aspects of the U.S. Constitution.
In time as specific games are built and shown to be useful tools toward meeting student outcomes in any number of topics, and systems integrate those games into the flow of trackable assignments, expect more games to be used.
Sometimes it's necessary to parse very specific forms of games for education. Other times it's an exercise so in the weeds it seems a waste of time. That said, the generally accepted difference between a training game and a learning game offers a couple important insights.
First, we can often think of training games as being aimed at very specific repeatable tasks. They are designed often to make sure a specific process is followed, and very specific rules are ingrained and used to optimal effect. This isn't to say training games can't be something other than rote-practice-to-mastery environments, but in general that is what most people are referring to when they describe a training game that might be as high-end as a flight simulator, to something as simple as a piece-work-trainer for manufacturing, to a basic process for compliance reporting in pharmaceutical development. By contrast, learning games, might be seen as going beyond these ideas, and incorporating deeper understandings of systems, abstract thoughts & opinions, and looking at more generalized acquisition of skills such as differential analysis, generalized decision-making, or evidence-based debate.
Second, training games are overwhelming situated in occupational frames, whereas learning and educational games tend to find themselves situated in academic (e.g. schools, universities) and informal learning environments (e.g. museums) and as such they are often surrounded by very different contexts, mentor, and social structures.
First, and foremost, just don't drop the game onto devices and expect magic. Sure games, even educationally oriented ones can be engaging, almost to a fault, but as consistently discussed in this FAQ, the real magic is when games are well-situated and supported in learning environments created in-and-out of classrooms and learning institutions.
The best way to pursue the use of games in classrooms, which in general means use in-and-out of classrooms in support of learning, is to talk to teachers who are already pioneering uses of games in their own classrooms and courses. Increasingly there are articles, course-syllabuses and videos produced by peer-teachers explaining how they're effectively using games. Another great tip is to understand that games, often reward, those who are good at games, at least in the early going, and that despite what you hear, not all kids are big-time gamers. Thus, when rolling games out within a classroom environment, work to recognize who might be able to both bomb ahead, and exploit games, vs. those who will be less comfortable, and more reserved in their play. Both groups can do well, and benefit from games, but pay attention to emerging disparities in gameplay and support them as they unfold.
In a similar manner, beware of how teams or groups are formed if they are part of a game-based project. Gaming is a skill unto itself you will want to distribute evenly across your assigned teams.
As a final tip, consider also that in a lot of cases groups of players working together on single-player games can be interesting. They way input and discussion can be fostered when not every player is physically in control of the game's input can see increased discussion and reflection between peer players than when each person is individually in control of a game element.
Plan, think about the various technical, and social elements of using games in your classroom, and courses, experiment, and evolve them such that the best elements of the game are exposed to players, while enhancing the areas that develop deeper learning goals, and at times shore up where a game might be weak, or even create misconceptions easily dispelled by your mentorship and instruction.
Serious games tend to be made by seven types of game/software developers:
1. Developers who build games of all shapes and sizes : These hybrid developers seek to leverage their commercial game expertise to help build excellent health game projects.
2. Developers who specialize in learning games : Some developers choose to specialize in learning games, as well as other typs serious games such as health. They often have a educational technologies background, or feature entertainment game designers who have left those markets behind to focus on new markets like educational games.
3. Media production companies : Often companies that produce web-based media and apps will seek to work with their clients to create games. While these companies tend to do best with advertising style-games (i.e. advergames) they seek to bring their client service focus and understanding of production values other types of games. The downside for them is their game design skills tend to be fairly basic, and their understanding of learning and behavior change design is also limited.
4. University based programs : Either as student work, or part of grant-based research a lot of educational games work is based in the world's colleges and universities. Often these are experimental programs but every so often they reach full maturity and make it out as part of a larger public-facing project, university spinoff, or startup.
5. Start ups : There are a number of companies that are building game-based businesses in learning, and more. They are not producing a game for clients, but instead as part of their core business. Some edtech startups may also work with games as part of their overall efforts in the field.
6. Independent and hobbyist developers : There are a number of small games produced by hobbyist and independent developers that cover topics of interest to them. While not everyone is rhetorical in nature, many of these often ephemeral games, are often game-based commentaries on their subjects, current events, or matters of personal storytelling. Given the prominent role health plays in our lives there have been a number of hobbyist and indie developer games centered around health such as the moving game The Dragon Cancer.
7. Internal development teams at health and healthcare companies : Be it pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers, insurance, or health & wellness providers many companies in the health & healthcare industries have large internal development resource or external development networks they can tap into to build their own health games, products, and services. As the digital health space expands expect to see more directly built, or managed projects in the games for health space coming directly from established companies.
Creating a learning game is not a simple process. In many cases the funding is significant, and the work takes a year or more. Even smaller sized projects can take six or more months.
Most organizations and individuals who want to build a learning game are themselves not game designers or developers. Additionally, they may not have much background in software development. They do, often have the expertise in the underlying subject matter, and educational theory and practices. Many have a keen awareness of the problem they are trying to solve and what has, and hasn't worked thus far. As such, they must seek out the technical and production talent to make their game.
Making games takes a lot of work, time, and often capital, but most of all they need "keepers-of-the-vision" to manage them from idea to finished project. Assuming you are bringing the idea, and ideally the capital, what you need first of all is a well-articulated outline of your problem, and eventually an informed design document that matches up possible game ideas to the problems and their specifics that are put together.
Once there is proper articulation of the challenge, the target audience, and some basic ideas of game-based approaches that will work, you can further iterate on the paper designs and plans. Assuming you have well-though-out plans the next step is to identify one or more developers and begin to get them to bid and comment on your project.
Picking a developer and contracting with them may seem like the end, but it's only the beginning. No matter how talented and experienced all developers benefit when the idea-holder, and their expertise is brought to bear on a project, helping with as much of the design, production feedback, and testing as they can.
Great learning games get made when good teams are properly supported and financed. Your game gets made once you have a well articulated plan that not only explains the idea for the game but defines the problem(s) the game is aimed at in great detail such that development talent can best match-up great creativity, game design, and technology toward the solutions you need at the budget you can afford.
Much of this means you will be working with external teams to your organization. Like many media productions organizations undertake be they videos, pamphlets, posters, books, or web sites, games are no different in that they are communication and collaboration style projects that require a dedication to upfront planning and backend polish.
Your get your game made when you bring all the right resources and careful thinking to a patient process imbued with the best talent you can muster.
Games can cost as little as a few thousand dollars to millions of dollars - it's very wide open. Typically most health games efforts cost $50K-$300K for smaller size projects, board games, mobile, and web games with tightly focused designs. Larger six-figure projects often expand gameplay to more involved gameplay, higher-production values, and deeper levels of content and curriculum covered, or they involved more advanced technologies such as virtual reality, 3D graphics, or advanced forms of online play. In the million dollar ranges the driver is often the style of game you're building, and how deep-and-long the gameplay has to be to satisfy the challenge it is trying to solve. Multiplayer features, and extensive cloud-based features can also be major cost-drivers to a project as well.
As a rule-of-thumb developers tend to charge $10K-$12K or more, per-person, per-month. So a small team of five developers working full time over the course of six months to build a game might have a budget of $300,000 or more. More experienced teams in high-demand, and higher-cost-of-living markets, can easily charge more than the $10K-$12K rule-of-thumb.
In cases where projects can cut costs to build the least-expensive games, tactics will include not just simplifying gameplay, but also eschewing certain features such as more involved tutorials teaching novice users how to play, better art, or lack of online play. Cleverness in design can also play a role as well, but cleverness can't be pre-ordained as the solution to the cost-of-learning-games question.
The costs discussed so far are also just for core design, production, and game completion. They may not include costs to deploy the game, promotion, user-support, hosting, and more. This is especially true with learning games that will want to deal with showing important elements of efficacy through rigorously testing. If your goal is to achieve a game that documents effectiveness, the costs could be severa times the actual cost of the game. Even if the project is meant to help with engagement there can be legal hurdles around health marketing rules that can slow down the development process and add to the costs. Backend costs could also be more expensive depending on costs to comply with student privacy laws including ones specifically design to protect minors. Thus, the costs and rigors of the learning games world can create added costs depending on the specifics of your project.
While there are certainly games, quite successful ones, built on budgets below $50,000, it's very commong for minimum budgets in the low six-figures range. If you're not prepared to spend in these ranges, which for many games are tiny still, it's really going to be difficult for developers to offer a solution you might put reasonable faith in.
Hopefully you will! In most learning game project cases to date a clear sponsor funds the creation of a game, be it by grant, or as part of their cost of doing business. A large swath of the serious games space overall (including work on learning games) is a work-for-hire services-based development industry. Clients produce problems and capital, developers build games they hope offer a solution. Yes, in a number of rising cases, developers are raising funds and/or building learning games first, and attempting to commercialize them.
You may have heard that many learning games are funded through grants. This is true to an extent, many learning games are part of research or public interest funding provided by governments and philanthropic foundations. Many others are funded by enterprises for their internal user (e.g. training) or external use in marketing and customer support. Out of the many areas of games made for non-entertainment purposes, learning games, especially targeting the K-8 school grades, are probably one of the biggest areas that sees direct private commercial investment.
The bottom line is you will need to secure the funding for your game. Most developers are fee-for-service companies and are not looking to build games, however interesting they may be, on spec. If you haven't already secured funding you will want to look into various forms of financing for games be they grants or other means of raising funds.
Yes. It's a spotty area still overall. The irony is that many of the learning games that make money are often aimed at very young kids, and their well-meaning parents, but which offer little educational value. Even some well known games aimed at young readers, are often using poor methods aimed at helping with reading. Most of all, they may not offer any benefits for readers, or in other subjects like math, and science, than what would a young learner would be exposed to during the normal course of pre-school, kindergarten, and early elementary grades.
In terms of corporate and organizational learning, many projects are custom-built work-for-hire efforts. There are service firms that exist to service these opportunities and they do as well as they continue to sign new client projects. In the corporate space there are still, very few learning game firms, that offer out-of-the-box product that is licensed and installed across a given industry.
Given the structure of of formalize education there is some selling of existing work into schools, colleges, and universities. However, it too, is a slowly forming process encumbered by cautious content procurement processes, and under-funded school districts. As digital learning grows, and developers make better games geared better for sustainable revenues it is expected there will be more successes than the few mass-consumer young learner products that are successful today.
There is much to know to learn how to make any game let alone one a health related game. Health games lay at the intersection of many domains of knowledge including game design, software development, psychology, cognitive science, behavior change, biology, and much more. Health game projects have lots of unique features that make their development processes, while similar to entertainment games, different. Depending on your role in the process of creating a health game it is helpful to understand the basics of making games, providing input into production, and managing creative, iterative productions.
Since so many health games deal with issues around behavior change and persuasive health technologies it is also a good idea to study up on these areas of activity. Whether it's to understand ideas like social learning theory, message framing, behavioral economics, or the theory of planned behaviors, the last few decades have produced a plethora of evidence-based theories about learning, and behavior change that is critical to the creation of successful health games. This knowledge is not always held by developers, or it's understood, but not in a formalized manner even though many game design philosophies do dovetail with successful learning and behavior change practices.
Beyond the technical knowledge, and the domain knowledge relevant to what your game is about, the most important thing to know to make health games is working with teams of creatives, and how to capture constructive feedback that you can feed back into the game development process.
All-in-all what you need to know to make a good health game is how to identify, and eventually supplement across the team of professionals building your game the various knowledge bases that you bring together to make a great health or healthcare game. This can be a little bit of everything, but often includes the core domain knowledge of the game's subject, and the evidence-based theories that drive outcomes for your problem area.
Games research is quite a robust and ongoing area of activity. Hundreds of university based projects exist, many robust university programs focus exclusively on looking at the impact and capacities of games across a range of sectors.
There is a growing body of work around the use of games for purposes beyond entertainment especially in education, and health, to cite and build upon. Some of it is contained in journals that focus on games, game technologies, and serious games, however, it's important to know that a lot of work on the subject is also published in fields specific to the topic of the game and/or the problem it's addressing. This is especially true for health games where there are many health journals that are the preferred choice to publish in. This is why when working to find prior work, and evidence you will want to look not only for generalized games research, but also specific research within the field/topic your game is targeting.
To pinpoint several papers or research projects that may be useful can be difficult but the resources on SeriousGames.Tips and PlayfulHealth.tips can help you look for research, games, journals, and conferences that may be useful for your efforts.
On EduGames.Tips are many links to useful resources to follow up with via the Web, social media, books conferences, and video. You can also visit our sister sites seriousgames.tips, playfulhealth.tips, and gamesandcrowds.tips for additional resources that may prove helpful. To follow the news about the use of games beyond entertainment please visit seriousgames.today.