Precision of Emotion: A New Kind of "Fun" Approach in Educational Games

[Music] so this is precision of emotion a new kind of fun approach hopefully you're in the right place and so I'd like to do stupidly hard things and so this is my first game design talk and I have I would I think is a new approach so that defining what fun is and there's a new word associated with it both of these are stupid things to do in game design theory but and I know what you're thinking just like oh god another one and it's gonna be another word somebody shoot me but just stay with me and we'll see if I can defend this thesis so you all know Raph Koster is a theory of fun one of the great works on game design right everybody knows this okay good so RAF RAF is over there and he said that's what games are in the end teacher is fun is just another word for learning so when I went to work at the glass lab we thought well holy cow this is our

chance we're making educational games fun is learning therefore this should be super easy and this is about that based on a lot of thinking from James Paul gee who's work I hope you know as well going all the way back to Lev Vygotsky most known for the flow state or the zone of proximal development aka what we all do in games and so if you dig deep into this you get you know Jesse Schell at the top who says fun isn't important which i think is a valid thesis about game design rap saying fun is learning jim g saying fun is the scientific method and then Piaget Fred Rogers all the way down to the Gonski play is a self actualizing tool than mine that maximizes the zone of proximal development you can keep going all the way down and you get down to neuroscience which I'd like to get into but that's a completely different talk she might be wondering who the heck I am so I said I like to do stupidly hard things this graph kind of I used to just display why I kind of tend to jump around between subjects I like things that are really difficult before they've taken off as soon as they start to

become financially successful I flee so in two years ago I joined the glass lab and I've you know it's just one of the longest times I think I've been with a company except for the very first company I was with we recently released Mars generation 1 argue bot Academy which is a set on Mars and collaboration with NASA and the National writing project an RPG pokemon game with robots to teach argumentation to middle schoolers and we recently released a findings study on that that shows a great leap forward up to a year of gain and argumentation based on about 3 hours of play and two hours of curriculum so we're really pleased with that glass lab just give you a bit more detail people tend to get very curious was started in 2012 and was a three-year grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the MacArthur Foundation to create formative assessment based learning games we can talk a lot about that later but that's also a another big topic so when glass lab started we were given Sim City by Electronic Arts which was an amazing thing and we looked at

Sim City I thought ah we can teach anything with Sim City there's so many things we can teach water systems we can teach civics we can teach you know argumentation anything is possible within Sim City because it is an innately learning oriented product it's the thing that teachers think about when they think about learning in games it'll be perfect and so then we put the game in front of kids all by itself in a school setting and they said well this is pretty fun but we weren't learning anything so why are you wasting our time and it was really surprising to us that kids in that particular setting are hungry for learning there was a deep satisfaction and actually a deep effective state that they went into when they were learning that was not what we were used to seeing from when they were playing games when they were having fun and so I realized fun is learning is the beginning it's not the end and there is so much more that we have to learn about the learning process and how it applies to find how it is distinctive emotionally from fun and this effective state that kids went into was incredibly fascinating to me I couldn't place it you know it was it was

actually kind of a new state and you need really good teachers to create it or really good products to create it and I was talking to one of our learning designers about how you might look at that effective state and I said you know has anybody ever tried to like identify a palette of universal emotions and he said yeah there's a guy named Paul Ekman who did a study probably one of the city's most well four is actually the basis for the show light I mean where he was connecting emotional states to facial expressions and he took a whole bunch of photographs all over the world of people having different emotions and asked people in all different countries to identify what was going on and then they dropped all of this all the way down and found seven Universal emotions it was six initially and the seventh one was added so there's disgust contempt sadness happiness fear anger and surprise Universal across all cultures and all people but where's fun none of these seemed individually to be fun some of them were sort of related like

definitely sadness sometimes like if you played Final Fantasy seven you experienced this terrible sadness happiness seemed to be pretty close surprise seemed really important but none of them individually seemed to be hitting this thing that was fun and eventually what I realized was that fun wasn't one emotion it was a process between multiple emotions it was something that was arrived on or an affective state that was emergent out of multiple emotions that actually seemed to have a consistent sequence and that seemed really interesting so here comes the word okay I call it Sofia the game learned emotion and I think it's the cognitive process by which we convert fear into happiness through surprise so you can look at it as this transitional state where initially you're fearful and then you have this moment of realization and delight and then you feel super happy and this process actually deeply does connect with a lot of the stuff

that Lev Vygotsky said and Piaget has said about what happens when kids play so I want to talk about microbes so how many microbes live in your body they're biologists in the room or people who are bionerd they might know any guesses a lot how many a lot a trillion all right you guys are ringers yeah actually it's a hundred trillion microbes per person they outnumber human cells ten to one you have a thousand species of microbes in your gut alone in 200 on the surface of your eye so you're disrupting a lot of them when you blink how do you guys feel how do you feel creepy it's gross right a lot do not want right so if you think about the Milky Way there's a hundred billion stars in the galaxy your body has a hundred trillion microbes in it biologists call this the microbiome and there have been recent studies including

this one that says the Piper Hoffman no relation red-meat changes you've got bacteria to cause heart disease so basically when you eat red meat if you're a meat-eater you get this bloom of chemical in your body that then is converted into stuff that will eventually give you heart disease however if you're a vegan and you eat a steak doesn't happen so biologists noticed this and they said dude what is going on and it turns out there's a gut bacteria that releases that bloom and they think now that that might be what causes heart disease so if you kind of oscillate back and forth between eating meat and not eating me you probably could avoid heart disease so it's really interesting things that are now just being discovered out of what's called the second genome this biome that's inside of us is really more like a coral reef and is you know ten to one more than we are and our human cells ourselves oh I'm missing a slide sadness how do you feel now good thumbs up right better yeah man I got a grip on it's a super weird thing and I understand it and again that's what I think Sophia is

I think it's the process by which you confront this creepiness and this man something foreign go go away I don't want it and then you realize wait a minute I'm starting to get a grip on this then you say oh now I know more about the world my slide was out of order sorry about that so games on some games have more Sophia than others which is interesting and I think these are the games that we tend to think about is either smartphone or learning fun and games and if we kind of put them all together and look at them I think partly what we see is that they have some sort of connection to the real world there's some kind of exploration that's going on in some kind of discovery and you're creating order out of chaos and then when you have that ordered state that you've created in the world you have this deep satisfaction about yourself you feel a mastery you feel understanding you feel actually like you have a bit more of a grip on your life and by the way the feelings might be missing from formal education today which might be part of why there's so much effort to bring games into education so a glass lab we

talk about meaningful games and I gave a keynote and meaningful play I think Casey might be here somewhere when we talk about a meaningful game we draw a distinction between a game that connects to the real world and a game that does not connect to the real world so candy crush is a great game I played a lot of candy crush is very engaging and it's very um it has a certain kind of satisfaction because it is so completely disconnected from the real world it's an escape but it's not sticky I'm not sure I'm gonna remember that I played candy crush a lot 5 or 10 years from now however journey I will remember forever because the system's inside of journey changed me and I think about my relationship to eternal recurrence and the rest of the world differently now that I finished playing during so I think that's an important distinction to make within games not in terms of quality but in terms of the effect that it's having on the player and if some games have more Sophia than others it got me thinking about how can we actually categorize games differently than just according to their mechanics I think that if you look at games as a comparison between the core emotion that the game itself is evoking you start to

get a really interesting hierarchy and I would like to see the rest of this belt out there's the fear genre Silent Hill in amnesia that just makes you feel afraid in so many ways and has you confront all of these horror concepts there's the together genre which you can see this kind of esoteric collection of games that really evoke this emotion of togetherness and knowing other people and knowing how human beings work and then there's I think a relatively new or there's some old games but these games are becoming bigger the complicity genre papers please and sweatshop in it which is my favorite new genre that actually has this very complex emotion of initial engagement and then mastery over a system and then what have I done right this is a very complex emotion really fascinating but within all of those genres because Sofia is the game emotion there's Sophia in all of them so you can take two games like God of War and Animal Crossing in God of War you're going to discover controls has this

really elegant tutorial system that leads you to think that you are achieving your own mastery over these controls that are eventually going to make you feel extremely powerful once you have them in Animal Crossing even though it's a completely open sandbox game with all the emergent narrative very whimsical it has this fish loop in it and many other loops such as digging up fossils that give you a mastery sense that make you feel very grounded and mastered in that world so and I think in both of these games you're still finding the fear and God of War I'm getting destroyed and then you're getting surprised and delighted and eventually you're reaching happiness because you have this feeling of mastery so Sofia is the process and it drives the core the feelings of mastery and God of War create Fierro they create dominance feelings of mastery and animal Animal Crossing create a sense of togetherness a feeling of understanding people and being connected to them oops so when we follow this down I just gave that away completely that sucked okay I was gonna

see if you could identify these loops at these games based on their loops themselves let's take I guess the one on it's it's my left I'm not sure if it's your left aim shoot and watch anybody who did not see the slide want to guess yeah it's too much like anyway so these two loops I think are very interesting because you can take the individual mechanics that form their core loop and bring them back together to create a core emotion now in the case of Angry Birds on the Left the dissonance between these core mechanics creates this wackiness in combination with destruction that gives the game an extremely unique feel however the world of warcraft' loop creates something this is fantasy adventure power feeling that's a very widely and deeply explore genre in games in general so you could apply the world of warcraft loop to all kinds of different games what unifies them is their core emotion but that core emotion emerges from the individual mechanical connections between the verbs that form the heart of the game so when

we're making learning games and I think this is it's very integral to why all of these thoughts emerge from the process of making in games we have an effect we want to achieve which is at the player at the end should actually be able to perform something that prior to playing the game they could not perform it's very specific but it is not effective in mostly it's not emotional not unless you force it to be so when we thought about how could we make this into an actual great game instead of something that's just very performance-based and a lot of the sort of educational games that we think of is not being when we say they're not games there's a lot of things that we're saying but partly I think what we're saying is that they're not very emotional and they're not creating an emotional effect so when we thought about argumentation we thought about what progression of emotions do we want to have that would make you feel as though you had mastery over this competency it's a little bit tricky because there's a lot we have to do to achieve the actual effect of increasing your argumentation competency but I think there's an emotional progression

we have to take the player through too if we're doing well which is to say here is the feeling of mastery over this particular competency that's really more in a Guitar Hero space guitar hero is not gonna make you better at playing guitar but you will feel like you're better at playing guitar and that's very motivating right it makes you think I want that thing and emotions it turns out can be pretty complicated I think our approach in what we're trying to do with these games is actually ultimately to alleviate suffering if you look at Sophia loop that fear is already existing inside of a person they just kind of don't know that it's there if you have an absence in your world model you actually are going to be feeling bad things about that absence if we can identify what that is then we can create a context by which we can tell a player here's why you want to do this thing for the most part in games that are pure entertainment games we don't have to say why you should do something I don't need a wife or why I'm gonna kill the dragon I'm gonna kill the dragon because the dragon is there and that's a lot harder when you're talking about Pascal's triangle or the quadratic equation and

the thing is what if Pascal's triangle is actually way more important than killing the dragon you have a problem you have to actually articulate the Y so the Y for us with argumentation was if you don't have argumentation you're a little bit helpless in the world of people you're socially not effective if you can't persuade people that what you think is important you're confused you can't articulate the things that are important to you so if we could reverse this and address the pain of absence of argumentation we would create something that makes clarity and structure wittiness and that you have this compelling effect on the people around you because you're so persuasive and that persuasion is grounded in reason and logic so the theory of this is nice but what do we do with it I think that Sofia is a lens through which we can view games I think that we can identify lots of problems that emerge from the absence of this

process being clearly articulated I this is sort of adjacent to ideas about ludonarrative dissonance if the performance of something is different than the narrative that is given to the player but it's more abstract to say what if your core emotion is either not what you intend it to be or is out of alignment with itself what if the core verbs that you're asking a player to perform over and over don't create the emotion that you hope that you want players to achieve I've seen a lot of games and a lot of processes of games where we don't even really think about how do we want the player to feel at the end or how we want the player to feel at the end is good or having fun or engaged and not something very precise which has has to do with the absence of the game before the presence of it and how it changes you I think a lot of times there can be not enough surprise preceding satisfaction this is a particular problem inside of educational games where you can guide a player through

something actually it's in social games too but if you don't allow them to discover for themselves what is supposed to happen next the experience feels very flat if you don't clearly illuminate the fear and the why you can also have a lack of tension in the game a lack of reason to play that ultimately manifests as lost retention I mean by the way all of these things together are the same problems you would have if you were trying to teach someone something so I wanted to leave some time for Q&A because this is a very prototype idea and I'm hoping to get some help with so I think that's where we are [Applause] oh hi Aaron great talk Edwin McCray narrative designer I was wanting to know how important you feel story and narrative is and creating the

sort of Sofia crisis that's a really interesting and difficult question um I think you know it's funny when I came to glass lab I believed very strongly that it should be all about the mechanics and that if we leaned on story we were going to be it would be because we had an absence in our mechanics and I came to realize through watching a lot of kids play that human beings learn through story it's how we learned everything and so to leave that behind and to resist it was very foolish I think it's incredibly important and I think it falls into that ludonarrative dissonance place where you want the narrative to be serving the performance of the game you can't not have that performance and mechanic present but you also can't have the story absent either thank you okay no other questions I guess that's it I don't know I don't know what my question

is yet but I know that I have a question so let me try to struggle through this sorry so you're talking a lot about emotions and games and I'm trying to identify for myself with the themes I'm experiencing here at GGC one of which is the threat of like should we as game designers be starting to look at emotions other than the emotions that we are sort of using as a crutch for the majority of games that we're working on probably fall into the fierro genre a lot and then I remembered from the micro talks of the have the notes right here I swear take your time we got a few minutes the micro talk on interpersonal somebody help me out the person was talking about specifically for example in games like Chef of Colossus where you

feel a connection to an antenna to an NPC that is sort of beyond the connection that you would have to a normal yeah Matt Park interpersonal subjectivity but there is also Cara Allison's intersubjectivity the moment when a feeling is shared between characters such as an out of this world when the alien sort of boots you on the nose I wondered what basically my question is what you think the Sofia sort of definition and how it interacts with moments like that I'm not sure not having seen the talk it's tricky so do you mean specifically emotional exchanges that are happening between other characters or between the player character or breaking the fourth wall so there was one quote from from Kara where she's talking specifically about how

games that have intersubjectivity have moments when you realize the designer thinks of you as human and okay yeah hopefully that helps again I'm just trying to insert it does I mean that I think that's a very complex thing that's happening where you're having this authorial relationship so I think it's a one of many moments in games that we seem to be having more often like with games like the Stanley parable we're reflecting back on what the game is doing itself and then pulling back and breaking the fourth wall on that and saying let's think about that as a relationship between human beings how Sofia interacts with that is an interesting question I probably would have to think more about it but basically I think Sofia is what's going on in the game and what you're experiencing which is gonna create this kind of an immediate affective layer and then you're reversing that so it's it's a you could call it a narrative technique where you're saying I'm gonna trick you into doing these things papers please does this - if you've been into

the flow of the performance of papers please you have one emotional layer and then you have another layer on top of that that is actually running against it so what you have in the net is this complex interaction between multiple layers of emotion Thanks so in the description it said that this model was around taking stress to happiness but in the presentation had said taking for fear into happiness so I'm not asking for my money back I'm just curious I'm just curious you know what why the distinction and why did you choose fear specifically as opposed to stress yeah it's an interesting question I'm gonna actually run back to the diagram of that because I actually think that when we say fear we mean a whole lot of things and there are many layers within fear itself anxiety and worry and frustration and I think you know I was talking his

mark here I don't know yes there is I was talking to mark about this and he's my great cognitive science devil's advocate person and and he was saying this seems like a bad feeling why would you want to create a bad feeling and I think the lowest level of fear is actually curiosity so I think there are many gradations of these major emotions that create different subtle effects and I would say that stress is probably in that anxiety fear space it just isn't it is an archetypal because eventually if you get all the way up to fear it's something that's very clear and if you could argue that by the time you're creating fear you've gone too far probably especially in a commercial game unless you're actually deliberately creating here it's a good question though oh no it's nichole I think I think he was oh sorry I didn't even see you guys so a lot of

these emotional loops that I've seen have some model of feeding back into themselves I'm aware that for a specific interaction in the game someone could go through the entire Sophia loop you have on the sides right there and receive some insight but they're still playing the game so could you elaborate on how it could cycle back into itself what the player still wants craves after receiving some insight sure that's a really good point I mean I think I use the gear icon here deliberately because I think that effective games are these interconnected gears so there are many Sophia loops that are going to move between each other often in a complex interconnected game that has one experience the gears are going to touch each other but in a lot of experiences Animal Crossing is one of them they can be completely separate you can actually do what you can do nothing but fossil hunting in Animal Crossing or you could do nothing but fishing and it's the choice between what you do that makes the experience interesting so there are lots and lots of these loops there should be probably one Ark you know which is why we look at a core loop just

to kind of keep focused but that's almost more of a production tool than it is design is anything yes thank you great wonderful talk I love this I love this model and I think that's super high praise thank you thank you so Nicole's offer from Zeo design and so the relationship between emotion and action is really key and I love what you're doing with with the idea of emotional progression that there being a core emotion to to a to a game and I was just curious this opens up a lot of it's a really great way we think of things a lot at Zeo in these gear type looping fashions so awesome what do you think the future I just wanted to ask you about like what could this what new kinds of things could you use this model to build do you think what's the next step that's an excellent question actually can I turn it around on you can I say what do you think maybe you should come next year

either yeah well what I think you can do is you can obviously you can deconstruct you you could simply deconstruct those genres which you've already done we've done a lot of really interesting work going into Netflix and deconstructing emotional profiles the emotion profiles of you know different genre so comedy is made out of you know a couple core emotions which is great I think that just having the intent creating an emotion profile so imagine Netgear you can you know maybe with labeling it with various emotions with emotion profile and then running that gear kind of like a four wheel drive or something put a couple of those gears onto a little truck and then drive it over the terrain of your game and swap out those gears you know as a way of saying I think so I think that that would be an interesting way to model something in the future and in just in general if we have the intentional emotional outcomes you know from our mechanics I think that's going to be a really great thing so yeah maybe I'll talk a little bit about actually I was just curious I mean I think you're right like I think near-term where this has been useful to me is is where it

intersects with learning we're intersects with analyzing games and what they need especially when you're about midway through and you're kind of not sure what it's going to be it's just a way of focusing yourself but ultimately from what you're saying I think you can look at the application of the gear model itself as varying depending on the core emotion and then leading to suggestions of new mechanics potentially or even new types of emotion it's almost like a kaleidoscope like depending on which direction the gear is turned I suppose exactly and then if I could just add on what you're saying with a loop and with a gear the reason why it's a gears is a circle and one of the ways that we find when we consult on game projects as in our client business is that those those loops are often broken so we get we get good you know curiosity to get you in some challenge to get you over the hump with the success and then we get like really weak feedback and it doesn't feel like you've won and that's important in learning games especially because the winning in learning games is that something yeah and so I was being able to close that loop so great hi one of

the things that I have been I recently I've been doing a lot of stuff with with middle schoolers and high schoolers and I have been noticing that this particular group is hypersensitive to feeling disrespected by all and there's it feels like there's something it's not even just fairness it's like if I don't respect my ability to understand the nuances of this story right I'm done and yet we tend to very strongly as designers do that a lot like we feel like we have to lay out every bread come for them and I feel like that is very closely connected to this in some way totally it's it's almost like you they can't even get to the point where they're feeling the fear or the stress if they don't feel that respect and if they like they start to disrespect the designer or the game and and they can't

take that first step and then everything from there is downhill and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that or ways to sort of as designers to bust through our own fear that they won't understand the more complex nuances of what we're trying to bring to them yeah absolutely I mean I think the answer is minecraft as you answered always for middle schoolers is minecraft minecraft throws them in and shows them nothing it is hard it is broken it is like when we look at that from a UX standpoint we go what is going on in this game and yet the middle schoolers love it because they're deeply hungry I think it's about understanding the emotional state of your player let me try and do this a lot at class lab is really put ourselves in the state where this very complex thing is going on where kids are becoming socially aware overwhelmed by the world but aware of it beginning to challenge authority so you build this model of your student and you get that's completely predictable that that's how they would react and yet you have the contrast of all of these bread crumb a hand holy tutorial experiences and wonder why they're bored and they don't play them so I think it's partly that

very tricky dynamic between building for scale which then means you're going lowest common denominator which means you're over the head of most of them versus throwing them in by ourselves we are actually at thank you so much by the way for that question and middle schoolers are the best players I think we have to go to the wrap-up room because we're at 12 o'clock right now but I will go next door to 2002 for anybody who wants to continue talking sorry [Applause] you