This question about business models arises whenever game-based learning organizations talk, and it surfaced again at a recent gathering of the Gates Foundation’s Games for Learning and Assessment portfolio. A seminal study we drew from is the Games and Learning Publishing Council‘s (also Gates-funded) deep market analysis of the learning games space, with particular focus on barriers to marketing and selling games into the K12 space. This analysis of the market prospects for learning games also touched on barriers to investments in this space, particularly the reluctance of venture capital to enter.

In a breakout group focused on the topic of sustainability, we honed in on a subset of the overall issue: how to fund new product lines. This isn’t the same question as how to create sustainable businesses, but R&D operations are key to our business models. And typically, this is what the existing process looks like:

How learning games are funded today

At the “Now What?” phase, we usually see a few options:

1. The product is incomplete, and we scramble for more funding to finish or fix it. During this time, the product isn’t evolving.
2. The product is great, but the revenues it generates is inadequate to underwrite marketing, sales, support, patches, upgrades, data analysis, etc. Even if it’s educationally successful, it’s a commercial failure, at least not without further investment.
3. The product is great, and it’s commercially viable.

Anyone who’s familiar with the Lean Startup model would recognize the above model as broken. Too much is risked on that first investment, and not enough is there to support iteration, nevermind total pivots. Worst of all, while user testing may be happening, market testing is not.

So what’s the alternative? This is what we sketched:

How learning games might be funded to support longer-term sustainability

In this model, we put out a smaller product faster and, importantly, begin commercialization efforts sooner. In the perfect case, we find commercial partners early to invest in the product. The benefits: we fail faster, and commercial viability is a factor in that earlier success/failure evaluation.

The upshot would be many more pilots, many more failures, and a bit fewer fully-developed games – but those that do survive are already tested for market viability.

Now the reality for a lot of nonprofits is that we’re rarely in a situation where our investors (typically, philanthropic grantmakers) are in a position to support a pure form of this model. Often, grants have rigid requirements and timelines, and the high cost of securing and reporting on grants incentivizes grabbing the biggest grant possible as quickly as possible.
After this gathering, I realized that a few changes would make the MVP model a lot more viable for many of us:

1. Grantmakers could deliberately underwrite MVPs, ideally with a commitment to support winners. This is exactly what the Gates Foundation did with its recent literacy courseware challenge. More of this kind of investing needs to happen.
2. Large grants could have longer execution periods to allow us to structure product development in stages and go through multiple iterations.
3. Both grantmakers and grantseekers should realistically budget for market testing and iteration.
4. Commercialization should begin sooner in a product’s lifecycle.

Of course, suggestion 4 begs an overarching question. We could individually or as a consortium retain more business development talent and create more commercial alliances. But as we continue to forge ahead on the supply side of the learning games market, the question that remains is whether the demand is there to sustain us.

But the reality is, what makes a game mature is not, “I got a gun, I curse, that woman is naked…” that’s adolescent, it’s not “mature.” It’s the opposite of mature. I find it so ironic that we get that so completely backwards. We give mature ratings to the most immature games. In Disney Epic Mickey, it was about how important family and friends are to you. And [Epic Mickey 2] is about, “Do you believe that there is evil so profound in the world that it’s beyond redemption?” In this game, you have to decide who to trust. That’s maturity!

Warren Spector Explains How Epic Mickey Is Like Deus Ex (Kotaku)

Here’s one exchange that transpired on Facebook:

Kristen Maxwell: At SXSW 2 years ago i asked Warren Spector about Ultima V’s ethical/political underpinnings and why we don’t see that kind of allegorical use of the medium… he copped out and said that games shouldn’t teach an agenda. Neil Stephenson did a similar dodge at GDC Austin this year when i asked him about the lack of subversive lessons in games (his book Diamond Age is about the transformative power of a subversively-themed game/learning device a poor girl accidentally receives). He said that it wasn’t in games’ interest to promote such an ideology.
Matthew Weise: There is no such thing as a game that has no ideological underpinnings. Politics are everywhere, especially in places where we pretend there are not.
Maxwell: Their dismissal said to me “we’d rather everyone remain ignorant of what thee games are teaching than take responsibility for it”

By contrast, Bart Simon of Concordia’s TAG writes, “Is that really the response to the situated morality of action that we want to take as game designers… to ‘make players see and feel what’s right’? Do we really want to come off being so paternalistic? Not just in interviews but in the actual design?”

While Simon proceeds to argue for a “label on the box” (“this game is designed to make players see and feel what’s right …according to the designer”), Maxwell and Weise point out that authorial values are embedded into games whether we like it or not (and whether we know it or not). Game developers create worlds in which, by design of the rules, what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is at least suggested or incentivized if not enforced. This doesn’t take volition or free choice out of the hands of the player – at a minimum, players can always (rage) quit – but it certainly argues against the idea that developers can claim moral neutrality when they create their games. Unconsciousness, perhaps, or ignorance – but not neutrality.

But what of the project of moral education itself? Simon jumps to a critique of how Chen realized the moral vision of Journey:

The fact remains that while Journey is a fairly ‘on the rails’ experience in which one sometimes gets the feeling of being railroaded (I did ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’ and shed a tear all at the right moments I assure you) the opposite condition of some mythical realm of free choice and even handed moral deliberation most certainly does not exist.

Elsewhere, Sam Gilbert agreed that “it’s not really a moral game if you don’t have a choice in the matter. The multiplayer interaction is really sweet and pleasant, and you feel good about yourself and about others when you’re able to help each other, but it’s pleasant because it’s extremely limited. There are no moral dilemmas or sacrifices involved–you’re just sort of forced to be nice to each other.”

And thus emerges the ongoing tension between character education (instilling desirable habits) and moral education (deepening moral reasoning). Having not played Journey, for want of a PS3, I can’t personally evaluate whether it succeeds as a character education tool. If you walk away “feel[ing] good about yourself and about others,” then perhaps it does. But the lack of moral choice in the game would detract from its value in moral learning, except perhaps as a foil for discussion (as in this blog post!).

To flip this conversation around… character education seems to be the more intuitive way to think about video game (im)morality, at least among laypeople. Many of the critiques of violence in games concern themselves with how players repeatedly perform bad acts, rather than whether they’re making immoral or unethical decisions within a biased system. I wrote about this with Prof. Scott Seider several years ago.

So my biggest lesson learned is that human behavior may appear to be a bad moral behavior, but it’s not really their fault; they’re just following their instinct. It is the designer who creates the system who has the responsibility to moderate the right behavior you want. By providing feedback for the things you want to see and by providing zero feedback on the things you don’t want to see, you can actually quite control the moral value in the game…. It’s really the system that’s defining the people’s behavior, rather than that person himself is better or worse.

Full transcript follows…

Starting at 1:18 in the podcast, Chen describes his experience with an early, 4-player prototype of Journey rendered top-down, in Flash:

During that process, I almost lost my faith in humanity… We spent all this time creating these desolate, lonely desert environments, difficult so that people should help each other to get through difficulties. And what happened is, when our designer was saying ‘Hey these mechanics where the two players could help each other to climb over rocks are very cool, but there isn’t really physics between the players so if the players can push against each other, like one player can push the other player up, that would be awesome, right?’ and we say ‘yeah yeah if you had physics the players could push against strong wind, the player behind him could push him, and help each other, that’s awesome.’ So we implemented the physical collision between players, so then they could start pushing each other. And we were very excited to see if our playtesters would play the game helping each other pushing against wind, and pushing each other to climb up to a higher place. Instead of helping each other, what happened is the players just repeatedly pushed each other into the deadly pit so they die, and then they saved them by touching them… then push them down again, really torturing each other. And I was thinking like Jeez, these players are just gods in a top-down kind of abstract game, just ruthless and cruel. And I was very disappointed because the game has been designed about helping each other, and we told the people you’re supposed to help each other, but they still couldn’t resist their basic instinct to torture each other. And so I was really really sad at the time.

And one day I run into a child psychologist and tell her about my experiment. And she said actually, that makes sense, because your game is so abstract. Even though they are adults and have moral values, when they go through this abstract world, they don’t really carry moral value into abstract space. And so to you, and to the game, these adults are no different from babies who were just born. And she was saying babies are just seeking reward, basic input-output relationship, so if the baby… was slamming a spoon against the table repeatedly because it generates feedback and it was satisfying for them to make it louder and louder, and some parent was yelling at the baby to ask the baby to stop, but to the baby, she might think the yelling is a stronger feedback, like ‘Oh, people are paying attention to me, I better keep doing this.’ They don’t have the context that the feedback is actually punishment. Once they actually build up the context that’s a punishment, then they stop doing it.

So what happened in the collision incident is that when we offered the collision, people started to experiment with it like a baby. And when you push people around, what’s the maximum amount of feedback you can get? And that’s killing someone, when they die they release a dying call which is very loud, and they will change state and be dead, and you can revive them, and it’s the biggest reward you can get for pushing someone. It’s more rewarding than pushing someone against the wind or up the rock. That’s why the players keep doing it, because they like more feedback.

So realizing that really it had nothing to do with moral value, it just had to do with feedback, because everybody is just a baby in the game. So we said what’s the least amount of feedback we can give for pushing each other, which is nothing. So we actually removed the collision, so… nobody started to think about it any more.

So my biggest lesson learned is that human behavior may appear to be a bad moral behavior, but it’s not really their fault; they’re just following their instinct. It is the designer who creates the system who has the responsibility to moderate the right behavior you want. By providing feedback for the things you want to see and by providing zero feedback on the things you don’t want to see, you can actually quite control the moral value in the game…. It’s really the system that’s defining the people’s behavior, rather than that person himself is better or worse.

I was disappointed at online gamers initially, but then I was disappointed with the way people designed online games — you can actually make them a much nicer place.

Badges in short are a means to enable and extend learning. They need not be behavioral lures so much as symbols of achievement, expressions of recognized capacity otherwise overlooked. As with any means they can be mistaken for ends in themselves, but there is nothing intrinsic to badging that will inevitably make them so. And dismissing them out of court because they just might motivate learning for questionable reasons, as Cathy Davidson rightly suggests, is to do so at the peril of a good deal of learning they do well to prompt, promote, even proliferate.

Of course, all of this could just as easily be said about grades – don’t some children pursue “A”s as an end in themselves, while others simply enjoy learning, while others (too many) actively disdain good grades? To ignore the fact that badges have some intrinsic attraction for players-cum-learners is to miss one of their main strengths. Of course, that attractiveness can wear off over time, especially if players begin to sense that the badges are being used for not-fun purposes (say, grading).

In our experience with badges – and gamification in general – at iCivics we’ve found a substantial increase in player engagement with our learning games. Just look at the simplest metric, average time on site, and how it leaped after we added badges, points, and other gamification elements:

Last month (February 2012), average time-on-site was 7:20 as compared with 5:40 in February 2011. That’s a 29% increase in time spent interacting with our games and other resources! It excites me to contemplate what might players be learning in the extra 1:40 that gamification helped create.

In videogames, badges (or “achievements”) can serve extrinsic functions such as summarizing complex stats down to something developers can analyze and use to tweak their games.* But to leap that far ahead in learning games seems premature to me — there is so much more we should be exploring in terms of how badges can motivate learners to experiment or try new things. Badges have been key tools for game designers who want to increase replayability, or who simply want players to experience more of the game they so painstakingly created.** And if our goal is to foster learning, isn’t there something great about rewarding exploration and experimentation when so much of the rest of our society instead punishes failure?

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* See the latter half of this analysis of the psychology of badges on IGN by Rick Lane.
** See, specifically, the “Skate this Way” and “Uncharted Territory” purposes of achievements in this thorough Gamasutra piece on achievement design by Mary Jane Irwin.)

Read my former colleague Nicole Haber’s blog entry wondering what the “gold coin” is to motivate a change in our national dialogue about climate change: If the earth is our princess, what is your gold coin?

iCivics has a similar civic engagement game, Activate, which has a different model of social change, one that involves awareness-raising, fundraising, and pressuring officials.

This NPR Planet Money podcast (“From Harvard Economist to Casino CEO“) about how Caesars Entertainment Corporation’s CEO, a former Harvard Business School professor, Gary Loveman, uses empirical data to shape the gaming experience. Yes, this is “gaming” as in gambling, but the relationship to Farmville and World of Warcraft is more than semantic. Just like WOW and other online games, modern casinos have access to a deep amount of data about user behavior through their rewards cards. But unlike Blizzard, Caesars cannot tweak its formula to guarantee particular results — for example, making sure that newbies win enough to keep them coming back. They can know who all the flailing newbies are, though, and dispatch employees to make things right for them (e.g. comp them some extra coins, dinner, or a limo). As Loveman observes, the goal is to comfort the newbies who fall into the low “long tail” of gambling returns.

Caesars’ approach to resource allocation has interesting implications for what a just distribution of resources might entail in a larger game – the game of our real economy. After all, Caesars isn’t providing a safety net for losers because they care — they do so because it’s good for business. Companies like Blizzard and Zynga are similarly tweaking their rules constantly to ensure maximum profitable participation rates. How might what they are learning inform the way we think about the rules of our political economy? Can game worlds – whether Caesars Palace or Azeroth – provide a Rawlsian space to experiment with different notions of “justice”?

Hunt for the Noor Stone seems to be a fairly straightforward adventure-style game, typical of most transmedia projects, which is well-executed but not really replayable. Then again, the film itself is also a one-shot deal, so the game needn’t have a long tail of replayability.

The game was developed by Playwala, which roughly means “play business” in Hindi.

(Quantitative, simple, rubric-based)
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Points
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Grades
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Badges
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Tags
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Free assessment
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(Qualitative, rich, unstructured)