Welcome to Games Can Teach. My name is Joe Rheaume, and I'm a designer and programmer of educational games. The purpose of this blog is give you some practical examples of how games can be used as educational tools.

I thought I’d begin with an example any casual game designer probably knows by now.

No one reads the instructions. You need a tutorial!

There are so many free casual games out there, that you'd better make sure any player trying out your game for the first time is having fun as soon as possible. Why should they spend the time to read about how to play if they're not totally sure the game is worth it? Even if they do try to read the instructions, chances are that not much is going to sink in. They see a big wall of text, and they have no context, because they haven't tried the game yet. Instant Cognitive Overload.

For example, look at the instructions page for IncrediBots.

See what I mean? Of course, the fine folks at Grubby Games are smart developers. That page is really just there as a reference. It contains all the information you need to know to play the game, but they only expect you to read those parts that answer your specific question. Anyone who actually wants to learn to play IncrediBots for the first time will find a series of tutorials that walk you through every basic aspect of the game. Just load the game and play "Levels" one through eight, and you'll have all the basic knowledge you need to start designing your own two-dimensional, physics-based robots! The tutorials don't just tell you what to do, they wait for you to demonstrate you understand each step before you can move on to the next one. All information is delivered in context. You demonstrate that you understand what the tutorial is telling you by playing the game - which is fun!

Good games don't stop teaching at the tutorial, either. A good game will scale its challenges so that each new solution builds on the last, keeping players at the edge of their competency, which keeps them interested, and forces them to get better by learning more about the game. During normal gameplay, the hand-holding is over. Players must plan, experiment, and practice in order to figure out how to progress. Some games might continue to give you hints if it looks like you're having trouble, or if playtesting showed too many players were getting stuck, but for the most part, it's the challenges that drive learning by forcing the player to discover the solution for themselves. When you have some free time, why not try some of the IncrediBots challenges? I suggest starting with the "Dump" challenge. You can also take a look at my solution if you like.

Of course, all I'm describing here is how a game can teach you how to play itself. The challenge of designing an educational game is to make sure that the lessons taught by the game can be translated to the real world. That's a topic for a future post, but hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. The Game Tutorial is your model for educational games. Your game should have a tutorial, but the whole game should also be a tutorial for your educational content.

About IncrediBots

I chose IncrediBots for this example because it's a very complicated game. The game is about building vehicles and robots out of shapes and joints. The joints themselves are very complex and include concepts like max and min rotation, motor strength and speed, automatic motors, and configurable user input. The game itself is amazing. It gives players a few basic tools and lets them design their own solutions to a series of puzzles, bringing user generated content to an unprecedented level for a Flash game. Players can save and load robots from one challenge to another. They can also share robots with other players, and save and share replays of levels too! There's also a "Sandbox" mode for people who just want to play around without a specific challenge. It seems to be built on many of the concepts of Fantastic Contraption, which itself probably got some ideas from Crayon Physics. IncrediBots was developed by Grubby Games (who happened to be my booth-neighbor at PAX 2008). It's been nominated for an IGF Technical Excellence award and a Casual of Gameplay - Best Interactive Art or Web Toy award.

Play IncrediBots!