To start this devlog, I thought I’d try and say something about what The Eigentlich Institute actually is, and why I’m making it. And to do that, the best place to start might be with gamification. Gamification took off as a buzzword in the digital learning world a number of years ago. Its popularity has ebbed and flowed, and every now and then someone tries to popularise a better word for it (because gamification is, obviously, a spectacularly horrible word), but it’s stuck around.
The principle of gamification in learning is, essentially, to take the things that make people want to play games, and use them to make learning fun, compelling and “sticky”. Most games are learning experiences to some extent, so the idea is that if someone will spend hours trying to master the skills involved in a game, we can find a way to get them to do the same for information that they have some real-world reason for wanting or needing to learn.
When I’m not making this game, I work as a designer of corporate learning, so I have both experienced and designed an awful lot of theoretically gamified things. There are some very good examples of gamified learning out there; there are some that feel good to use but which I’m not convinced are enormously effective as learning; there are some that are hilariously awful; and there are some that might be effective but are used in potentially exploitative ways.
The most popular aspects of game design to lift and use in learning are competition and scoring. Scores, badges and leaderboards crop up in most gamified stuff. I think they can work well, and there are examples of them being used brilliantly, but they're not the game elements that interest me most personally. The things I like in games, for the most part, are strategising, solving puzzles, exploring, roleplaying and telling stories. I like talking about incremental games in relation to gamification because they’re maybe the purest form of Making The Numbers Go Up game design, and in most incremental games, I get a brief Making The Numbers Go Up hit and then lose interest. But I loved - and saw through to the end - the experience of Making The Numbers Go Up in Universal Paperclips and A Dark Room because as I did the game revealed mysteries, made me laugh or changed how I thought about the character I was playing. That’s storytelling which is light touch but deeply embedded in the game mechanics, and that’s rare in learning games.
The Eigentlich Institute: Hampton Court came about because I wanted to make a history learning game - or, because that’s just not enough buzzwords, a gamified story-rich interactive learning experience - which leaned a lot heavier on the kind of game elements I really like. I wanted deep, highly personalised narrative, some gentle puzzle-solving, and I wanted to use foreshadowing, plot twists and relationship building in specifically gamelike ways to immerse the player in a time and place and give them a reason to care about what they learned there. The learning games I’m most interested in are those where the game mechanics aren’t a fun layer on top of the teaching, or a reward for doing it, but fundamental to the learning, and I wanted to take that approach to narrative in learning as well. Gameplay, storytelling and learning, all intertwined and integral to each other.
The game is set in 16th century England in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. This is a period which is frequently studied by 15-16 year olds for GCSE exams in the UK, and which can seem incredibly dry to students. There are lengthy explanations of how government worked to make sense of, and complicated religious differences to unpick, and an arguably unreasonable number of men named Robert. But it’s also a period full of dramatic conflicts and betrayals and interesting relationships, and by plunging the player into exploring and investigating and making decisions, they can be immersed in the drama and start to take on the detail as and when it becomes useful to their gameplay.
Finally, this is predominantly, a text-based game. “Fifteen year old students love reading loads of text” is not, it’s fair to say, a view that you’re going to hear a lot of people put forward. But I think text can be digestible and appealing as long as it’s delivered in tiny bites, and text allows a degree of personalisation that nothing else does*. A story-driven game that’s mostly text can give the player a narrative that’s customised at every step to the choices they’re making; it can give them more information about things they’re unsure of and leave them to get on with it when they know what they’re doing; it can let them build relationships with characters and vary every interaction based on how those relationships develop. For a story-driven learning game, I think that’s really powerful.
*Or at least, that nothing else does for a solo part-time dev aiming to stay somewhere vaguely within/near to/on the same continent as the scope
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