Educational Games

We got our new clients for the next four weeks today.

As promised, Bob Roemer came in and wanted a game about Thermodynamics. This is a hard problem, and there are a lot more issues with creating a game that requires calculations than I had thought before I came into the EAE program.

First, mandating that a game requires calculation presents problems. The biggest problem is that requiring calculations is essentially game-ified story problems that are presented slightly more fun than just beating your head against a calculator. This problem leads to the second problem, which is that no matter how you present them, story problems about thermodynamics aren't fun. At all.

Now we're stuck holding the bill of a game that is doomed to be marginally fun at best, but this seems to be the fate of almost every one of the mechanical engineering presenters that we had today. This isn't surprising. Coming from a mechanical engineering background, I'm sure that they gave us as many constraints as possible to help guide us to the kind of thing that they wanted. This was intended to help, I'm positive, but the result is several already finished products that basically need some better art slapped on top of them. Despite their best intentions, the practically finished game concepts that we've been told we can't work out of are already not fun.

On the positive side, these games don't require being as inherently fun as the Beehive Cheese game, say. People won't be playing any of these educational games for fun, they'll be playing the games because it's part of their homework. This additional incentive means that we don't have to make the games fun enough to want to keep playing for the sake of playing, but requiring calculations is still a remarkably limiting factor.

There are positive approaches to requiring calculation. I feel that games that would be optimized with calculation should start off in a ballpark estimate that tends to work. As difficulty increases, the allowable tolerances for acceptable answers would decrease so that the player could either spend several dozen tries trying to get the exact answer or simply try to calculate the exact answer by hand. This concept of "if I were clever enough to eyeball this I could do it" makes the player feel like they're *choosing* to calculate, which in reality is the only feasible solution to the problem. I think this would be a great way to ease students into a calculation-intense game.