I jokingly described the last game our team was struggling with as a helicopter going down in flames. Fortunately, that game is now in good shape and we are heading toward play testing. However, with only two weeks left in the program, there is still one last game to develop for the high school students. If the previous game was a helicopter in flames, then the current game is a flaming helicopter sitting in the bay of a cargo plane filled with fire ants, hurdling at breakneck speed into the side of mountain. And each ant has its own tiny airhorn to insure the journey is as unpleasant as it is lethal.

Sometimes I just need to vent.

Conflict appears to be an inevitable part of the artistic process, but that struggle must be weighed against its impact upon the relationship of the participants. People should always come first, especially students. However, there may be some bumps and bruises along the way. I used to live in a self-imposed utopian fantasy where all collaboration was effortless and combat free. But then I saw Mirra Bank’s film The Last Dance, a documentary about the collaboration between Maurice Sendak and Pilobolus. Sendak, most noted for his book “Where the Wild Things Are,” is a brilliant storyteller. He is a master storyteller who can use linear narrative to convey powerful ideas in simple ways. By contrast, both the origin and the creative process of the dance group, Pilobolus, borders on anarchy. The group was created by atheletes who considered themselves outsiders to the modern dance world, and their choreography is borne from unstructured improvisation.  During their collaboration on a dance piece about the holocaust, Sendak and Pilobolus butted heads constantly, and their falling out almost caused them to abandon the project. However, the creative struggle resulted in a brilliant compromise between improvisation and storytelling that could not have been achieved by either party alone. We have a similar struggle when working with students. We must develop a tangible product of genuine scientific merit and social impact while retaining student interest in the scientific process. In working on this game, I learned that it’s sometimes necessary to momentarily sacrifice one of these goals in order to make it to the finish line. The reward for making this sacrifice is that all three may be restored upon completion of the game. A momentary sacrifice of the project goals may serve to regain student interest, which in turn fuels the project forward.

There were several difficulties in designing this game. It took a long time for the student to feel secure with her topic. This lack of security most likely resulted from not spending enough time learning about the topics in detail. She also found it very difficult to implement her topic as a game because she did not fully master the principles of game design. As I discussed in a previous post, switching topics is fine, but the penalty can be severe when time is short. Students typically switch topics because they don’t have the skills or resilience to overcome obstacles in the design process. This lack of experience and patience, at its worst, can result perpetual topic switching that leaves the student with nothing to show for their effort. It’s our responsibility as facilitators to urge them forward, even if you have to be momentarily villainized as a slave driver.

When a project is going well, the best thing an advisor can do is step aside. It might be counterintuitive to step aside when a project is not going well. We reached a point in the struggle to come up with a design where any suggestions I made were met with immediate resistance. I remember several times in my graduate student days when I resisted all input from my advisors. I knew that any suggestions by my mentor meant more work, late nights, and missing my friends. It was far easier to push against the people that were trying to guide me than it was to do the work necessary to fix the project. While you might be able to convince a graduate student to forgo a party to spend a Friday night pipetting until dawn, you are guaranteed to have a more difficult time with high school students. Teenagers are not always rational agents. The prefrontal cortex of teenagers is still developing connections to the rest of the brain, which limits their ability to make deliberated decisions or control emotional outbursts. Nevertheless, teens are incredibly shrewd. They know how to maximize a short-term reward and minimize short-term punishment. Unfortunately, they are not terribly great at deliberated decision making or delaying gratification. They often fail to see how a little bit of effort at the outset of a project could save them weeks of agony. Of course, this phenomenon is ubiquitous in adults as well but, as any parent will tell you, the effect is exaggerated in teens. Thus, sometimes you have to step aside to let students learn for themselves. Just make sure to be available when things are about to run off the rails. Sometimes, the freedom you give the student renews their interest in the project, which provides the necessary motivation to complete the work.

Teen Angst is designed to educate teenagers about the effects of substance abuse, unprotected sex, and nutrition. All three of these topics were considered by the student designer to be the most important topics for her age group. Players make decisions about these topics and their decisions have various positive and negative effects upon four resources: health, IQ, relationships, and money. The object of the game is to respond to all the decisions while maintaining positive resources. While we had no qualms about the topic, there were many battles fought over the game mechanic. Specifically, the student was very much wedded to the idea of a linear narrative, like that found in movies or books. Game designers continue to struggle with developing interesting linear narratives in games because games are all about free choice and linear narratives are not. While linear narratives offer a dramatic story arc, the story in a game is more often an emergent narrative that is derived from player choice. Players interact with agents in the game space, which results in a story. Some stories in games are very rich (e.g., Bioshock or Spore), and other stories are merely implied (e.g., Chess). My suggestion was to develop a role-playing game (RPG) about teen issues. Instead of doing battle with monsters like you would in a classic RPG, the players would have to “do battle” with various social situations involving sex, drugs and nutrition. My prediction was that the game would play like a pen-and-paper version of the popular strategy game, The Sims. Unfortunately, my suggestion did not go over well with the student. She didn’t understand the conflict surrounding linear narratives, and thus I stepped aside. The student went ahead with a straightforward question-and-answer game that plays much like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The problem with trying to write a story like this is that you can’t account for every scenario a player might make in advance, and thus you resort to forcing the player to choose between a limited number of options, which makes the experience behave less like a game and more like a multiple choice test. To her credit, she quickly hacked a version of the game in PowerPoint that minimized this problem. Rather than sending players on a new story trajectory with each decision, players would receive a brief tale about the outcome of their decision before returning to the main story arc. To sum, the order goes like this: (1) Main story scenario, (2) Specific question, (3) Feedback and allocation of points, (4) a vignette describe the consequences of the players actions. While players testing the PowerPoint version of this game will not be fooled, a fully digital version of the game will give the player the illusion of real choice even though all choices return the player to the main narrative.

The second challenge we faced in this game was that it was too easy. Because the player only had a few options to choose from, it was difficult to scale the difficulty of those options. The correct answer was always obvious, and it made the game very boring. Consequently, we modified each question to have positive benefits for one resource and negative consequences for another just like a game of “Would You Rather.” For example, a player might be asked to choose between going to a party and making friends (but failing a test) or staying home to study (but not making friends). There are no correct answers, and decisions are guided by player preference. Point totals are allocated according to the real life severity of the consequences (as determined by the student designer’s interpretation of the scientific literature). Questions and answers are infused with real data and lessons from various authoritative sources (e.g., drugabuse.gov, an authoritative website sponsored by the NIH).

It appears that we have averted our helicopter crash yet again. I’ve found that students struggle with experimental design, but they have creative ideas and they are very willing to design materials for the game. Now that we have solidified the core mechanic, I’m eager to see how she implements these ideas in her game. We are already a week over our time budget so, we have to playtest and collect data next week!

And sometimes you get unlucky. Sometimes designing a game or an experiment takes days, weeks, or months of tweaking multiple variables. It’s like flying a helicopter. Move the stick and the other controls have to be adjusted to compensate. As you panic, you and your experiment hurdle to the ground in a screaming ball of flames.

A student approached me with an interest in racial prejudice and cognitive bias. Both of these topics have been studied in great detail, and there are educational programs designed to teach students about racial stereotypes. However, to my knowledge, there aren’t any games that educate students by exposing them to their own cognitive biases. Consequently, we though it would be good idea to have students participate in a mystery game where they had to find a killer via clues and mug shots. We anticipated that players would demonstrate an in-group bias for their own race** and an out-group bias for other races. Specifically, they were expected to identify other races as the perpetrator more often than members of their own race. They were also expected to identify their own race as victims more often than other races.

We were particularly interested in an effect reported by Hilliar and Kemp (2008). In their experiment, faces were morphed between stereotypical Asian and Caucasian faces, and subjects were more likely to report these morphs as Asian when they were labeled with an Asian name rather than a European name. Unfortunately, every game mechanic we came up with introduced a confounding variable into the experiment. There is an art to identifying confounds and younger students typically lack the experience it takes to find them. As facilitators, we should weed out the confounding variables without destroying the student’s self esteem. My solution is to first notify the student that you are working in parallel on a new design. At this point, the student is already aware there are difficulties with the experiment, so the news is not too surprising. Then, take the best suggestions the student made during lab meetings and write them down. Include as many of these contributions into your design as possible. Graduate students are well accustomed to having their experimental proposals nitpicked in order to make them stronger. However, younger students often feel the war being waged on the experimental design is a personal attack. Because it is more important to keep students interested in science, I recommend keeping the academic lashings to a minimum. Show the student what the problem was, how to improve the design, and let them know their contribution was essential. You don’t want to turn into this guy.

The most critical improvement in the new game was that it now relied upon a more robust experimental paradigm. Rather than using ethnic sounding names and morphed faces, players will make judgments about several faces from five major racial groups attending York College (Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, and Black). 40 faces from each racial group will be combined to yield 200 faces (Figure 1). Within each racial group, 20 faces will be male and 20 will be female. The game is still a mystery/who-done-it, and the object of the game is to accurately identify the perpetrator, an accomplice, a witness, an innocent bystander, and the victim. Each of these characters represents an archetype associated with a particular emotional valence, ranking from negative to positive. For example, an accomplice is typically regarded as negative, but not as bad as the perpetrator. Players rank faces in the game using these characterizations similar to a Likert scale. We predict players will more likely identify members of their own race as victims, bystanders, or witness. Conversely, players are expected to identify members of other races as perpetrators or accomplices.

The core mechanic of this game is similar to Mastermind Challenge (a two-player version of the classic Mastermind), Guess Who (a pictorial variation of 20 Questions), and Clue. Like a combination of Mastermind and Guess Who, each player will attempt to identify the five characters that their opponent selected before the start of the game. Opponents are allowed to answer simple “yes-no” questions on each round of play, and players are allowed to adjust their guesses based on this feedback. However, unlike these games, players will be making judgments based on both faces and clues that are revealed on clue cards during each round of play (Figure 2). Face cards are accompanied by character cards, which indicate certain qualities about the character. After 40 rounds of play, the players guess who the five characters are, most likely revealing a racial bias.

Game play commences with the reading of a story that describes the mystery. Players are told that each story comes from a real life case. Player tokens are placed on a game board and five location cards are placed on the board to make its appearance resemble locations described in the story (Figure 3). Face cards and character cards are arranged in piles (Figure 4) according to the five character categories (i.e., Perpetrator, Victim, etc.). Face cards and character cards are shuffled within each category. Players take turns picking a face-character pair for each of the five categories. These selections are noted on answer keys and placed in envelopes. For each round of play, players will roll a 4-sided die and move a token on a game board to one of the locations along the shortest path possible. Locations are spaced far enough apart so that, on average, it takes 10 turns to get from location to location. During each round of play, five face cards and five character cards are flipped over for each player to reveal the faces and character information. Then, a clue card is flipped over. Clue cards ask one “yes-no” question about a character type (e.g., Victim) using the context of the story, and that question is meant to reveal something about the character’s four traits (“what,” “where,” “why,” and “when”). For example, a question intended to reveal information about the Victim might read “Was the victim seen in his bedroom between 9pm and midnight on the night of the crime?” This question is designed to get at “when” information for the character. Character cards all have checkboxes to indicate yes or no for the four traits. If the “when” box is checked in this example, the player should conclude that the character was present during the crime, and this character might be the Victim. For each round of play, a new set of cards is revealed beneath the previous set. After the first round of play, players can switch any set of cards from one category with another set from the same category and hazard a guess. The opponent indicates whether the guess is correct with a simple “yes” or “no,” and how many are correct without revealing which ones are correct. When a player lands in one of the five locations on the board, they must Report to the Chief Inspector. During the report, they must stack all the cards from previous rounds of play, making them inaccessible for swapping. Statistically, this should happen about every 10 rounds of play, and thus players will do this four times during the game. The final guess is made after 40 rounds of play and after the player has visited the final location. If you’re still reading this, welcome to the flaming helicopter crash that is experimental game design.

While the game could be played only with character cards, the inclusion of face cards allow us to expose the player’s bias. While each character within a race-gender classification has a unique character card, there may be characters from other races or genders with a similar card. Eventually, players have to start making judgments about faces in addition to character traits, and that is how we intend to expose racial bias. While judgements of character cards are explicit, judgments of face cards are implicit. The distribution of faces, clues, and character traits had to be carefully balanced within each character category. Within each category (e.g., Perpetrator), there are 40 face cards and 40 character cards that correspond to each round of play. 20 of the faces are male. Within that group, there are four members from each of the five racial groups. Each of those four faces is paired with a unique character card.

While the experiment and the game mechanic are in far better shape, there are many things that could be improved. There are no tangible resources to manage in the game. Nevertheless, not every game requires physical resources. And managing resources might actually make it easier to keep track of the characters, thus making the game more about record keeping. Similarly, writing down clues might make the game too easy. Consequently, the one boundary that we have imposed on players is that they are not allowed to take notes. More important, however, is that the game lacks a method for controlling flow. I’m concerned that the game will either be too easy or too difficult. Only play testing will determine whether that’s the case. Finally, in writing this post, I realized that it should be possible to combine character and face cards, but I’m forgetting why I didn’t do that in the first place. Why do I have a sense of dread? What am I doing in this helicopter, and where are we going?

**I use the term “race” to indicate the socio-cultural group or ethnicity that the player identifies with.

Hilliar, K. F. and Kemp, R. I. (2008) Perception, vol. 37, pp 1605-1608.

In this post, I’ll describe the progress we’ve made on a second game for the York College summer research program. We only have six weeks to design the games, collect data, and present our results at a local conference. There might be time to shower and eat.

Sometimes you just get lucky. A student comes to you with an interest that turns into a pithy concept that’s easy to implement as a game. One of my students expressed an interest in multitasking. This issue has received a lot of attention in recent years due to the rapid proliferation of the Internet and mobile technology. Most people, particularly my college students who text during lectures, operate under the illusion that they can multitask. The illusion of multitasking is convincing because they we can accomplish more than one goal at a time by rapidly switching between tasks. People who operate under this illusion are not entirely misguided. We have an enormous capacity to process large amounts of sensory information from various modalities (e.g., sight and hearing) at the same time. And we have the ability to execute multiple motor commands at the same time (e.g., walking and chewing gum). However, we are particularly terrible at making more than one decision at a time. In attention research, this phenomenon is referred to as a “bottleneck.” As a demonstration, try to read a book while listening to the news. At some point, if you are absorbing the reading, you will miss some critical information on the news. Hal Pashler’s laboratory at UCSD has done revealing experiments on multitasking. They found that when subjects were attending to a stimulus, decisions made in response to a second stimulus were delayed until after a decision about the first stimulus was made. Our educational objective for Multitasker was to demonstrate to students that performance suffers when you attempt to multitask. We predicted that students who played the game would have a different opinion of multitasking relative to students who did not play the game.

Because we have very little time to make this game, we opted to make a board game. Another advantage of making a board game is that players can be challenged with very physical tasks, which we hope will make the lesson more evident. The core mechanic of the game revolves around trying to complete up to four tasks at the same time. A timer will be used to insure players perform each task for a sufficient period of time. We decided to adopt a few of the mini-games in Cranium (i.e., drawing and sculpting). However, some of the tasks will be modified so they can be performed simultaneously. Additionally, we might have to find tasks where the fail state is obvious. For example, it’s obvious when you drop a ball during juggling, but it might not be obvious when a person stops drawing or sculpting. Also, we are still looking for two tasks that can be accomplished with either a foot or using the voice.

To insure that players will not be overwhelmed immediately by performing four tasks at once, the number of possible tasks on any given round of play will be determined in advance in a series of levels. In level 1, the role of a four-sided die will be used to assign the one of the tasks to the player. In level 2, the role of the die, even or odd, will be used to pick two tasks. In level 3, the role of the die will be used to pick two tasks, but the player can choose the third task. In level 4, all four tasks must be performed. If a player successfully performs three challenges in a row, then they advance a level. However, if the player fails a given trial, they are moved back a level. Thus, flow is maintained by introducing and removing tasks. It’s worth noting that this method of using a 3-up/1-down staircase is standard in psychophysics. The object of the game is to be the first to complete Level 4, performing all four tasks three times in a row.

While the core mechanic of the game, objective, and reward/punishment schemes are designed, we are still looking for a fun method of providing feedback. In a previous post, I provided arguments for starting the design process with an educational objective and a game mechanic before designing the user interface. However, as I also mentioned, you can get surprising results from developing the three in parallel. Even though there are still details to complete for the game mechanic, my students also designing a toy that will serve as the centerpiece of the game. They toy will have several functions: (1) It will act as a repository for the game materials; (2) It will act as a method of keeping score and ranking the players; (3) And it will hopefully convey a message about student life. Raph Koster and Jessie Schell both indicate that user interface should be a fun toy. It’s an invitation to play, and I’m hoping my students can come up with some fun ideas that go beyond the traditional game board (a.k.a. “Game Bored”).