Design Principles for Creating and Maintaining Immersive Experiences in Educational Games Brian J. Arnold (
[email protected]) Matthew J. Koehler (
[email protected]) Spencer P. Greenhalgh (
[email protected]) Michigan State University
Abstract: To maximize the learning possible from educational games, designers need to find better ways interest, engage, and immerse players. In this paper, we draw upon our experience and upon the rich traditions and research from film, storytelling and media to better understand how games can also be designed to create and maintain immersive experiences. We distill these sources into ten design principles that good games use to help establish and maintain immersion in games. We discuss how use of the proposed principles may help designers and practitioners get the most out of educational games.
Introduction Educational games have a long and storied history. Although not intended primarily for amusement, educational games attempt to tap into learning in a way that is motivating and engaging to learners. That is, by embracing gaming, or at least elements of game design (e.g., challenge and reward, feedback, intrinsic motivation), educational games seek to enhance learning in ways not possible in more traditional settings. When done well, educational games work. Recent meta-analyses suggest that educational games are modestly effective at producing learning and cognitive gains compared to traditional or non-game learning (Clark, TannerSmith, Killingsworth, 2015; Wouters, van Nimwegen, van Oostendorp, & van der Spek, 2013). However, educational games are not always effective at engaging, motivating, or generating interest in learners (Wouters et al., 2012)—many fall short on the basic premise of tapping into the enjoyment of games to enhance instruction. Whereas commercial games seem quite effective at engaging children’s hearts, minds, and time (Gee, 2003), educational games seem to struggle at doing so. Understanding why educational games might not fully engage learners requires an understanding of how players interact with (and immerse themselves in) games. Immersion is defined as the degree of involvement with something. Brown and Cairns (2004) identified three levels of immersion in games. The first is “engagement,” which is when the interest and desire to keep playing is sufficient to justify the time and effort needed to learn how to play the game. The second level is “engrossment,” a feeling of emotional attachment that “makes people want to keep playing and can lead to people feeling ‘emotionally drained’ when they stop playing” (p. 1299). The third level is “total immersion,” a state in which players are cut off from reality and the game is the only thing that matters. The concept of total immersion is similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) concept of flow, “the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment” (Chen, 2007, p. 31). Flow occurs when learners experience optimal levels of challenge (not too hard, not too easy) relative to their abilities. As Chen (2007) pointed out, “Descriptions of the Flow experience are identical to what players experience when immersed in games, losing track of time and external pressure, along with other interests. Gamers value video games based on whether or not they provide a Flow experience” (p. 31). In this view, immersion and flow are related concepts— both speak to involvement of a person in a task and the distortion of time (Jennett et al., 2008). Flow, however, is a specific and optional state of immersion in which nothing else matters—“immersion is not always so extreme” (Jennett et al., 2008, p. 642). How well games do at immersing players matters. Players who are more immersed, engaged, or in flow are more likely to play the game again and see value in playing the game (Chen, 2007; Holt, 2000; Hsu & Lu, 2004), and
players who spend more time playing educational games are likely to learn more from them (Tobias, Fletcher, & Wind, 2014). To maximize the engagement—and therefore learning—possible in educational games, educational game designers need to find better ways to interest, engage, and immerse players.
Purpose Educational games may have a problem inducing and maintaining immersive experiences for players. Fortunately, the remedy is relatively straightforward. Game designers need to make sure their games strike the right balance between the challenge offered by the game and the skills that each player has. This has been the implicit focus of much effort in game design, and many games include adjustable difficulty settings, tutorial levels, and a level of difficulty that increases over time. Each of these game features help ensure that players can find the right challenge to match their skill level. Researchers interested in exploring this match between skill and challenge have focused on approaches that measure immersion (or flow) during gameplay (e.g., Nacke & Lindley, 2008) and how immersion impacts future use of the game (e.g., Hsu & Lu, 2004). However, long before immersion in games was discussed—indeed, long before video games even existed—film, media, and storytelling were already successful at creating immersive experiences. In this paper, our goal is to draw upon both our experience and established traditions in film, storytelling, and media to describe how games can also be designed to create a sense of immersion. Specifically, we present ten design principles that game designers can use to help establish and maintain immersion in games. Although these ten design principles may apply to any game, we propose that they should especially be applied to educational games. Use of the proposed principles may help designers and practitioners alike get the most out of educational games. If these principles are applied to the design of educational games, we argue, educational games might well become as engaging, interesting, and immersive as their commercial game counterparts. If practitioners use these principles to help choose which games to use in their classrooms, they may be more likely to choose games that engage their students.
Ten Design Principles that Good Games Use to Establish and Maintain Immersion Our collective experience playing games and our review of existing literature has resulted in 10 design principles that good games use to establish and maintain immersion. In the sections that follow, we explain each of these principles and give examples of how they can contribute to immersive learning experiences.
Help Players Suspend Disbelief In 1817, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term suspension of disbelief (Tomko, 2007). This term refers to an audience’s decision to stop arguing with clearly false information being presented and to enjoy pretending it is true (Lu, Baranowski, Thompson, & Buday, 2012). In order for players to enter states of immersion, they must be able to suspend disbelief and buy into the basic premise of the game. Early stages of gameplay are critical for helping players do this—as players learn the game’s rules, language, and concepts, some learners display an initial reluctance to engage in the learning task. Their immersion is predicated on their being able to suspend disbelief (Herrington, Oliver, & Reeve, 2003). The best games use the introductory stages of the experience to help players suspend disbelief. For example, many players of fantasy games begin with no reputation or ability. Players are introduced to the idea of amazing magic, powers, and great people well before the player encounters them. Eventually through gameplay, they not only encounter these powers but also acquire them. This auditioning process, known as “plant and payoff” in narrative fields (Davis & De Los Rios, 2006), makes it much easier for players to suspend disbelief and enter a state of immersion by preempting disruptive surprises caused by unforecasted obstacles or abilities. Without plant and
payoff predictability, players may be surprised by the addition of new elements and lose their sense of immersion when they are introduced to the experience.
Tell Consistent Lies Players and audiences must suspend their disbelief because game designers and storytellers are lying to them. So, why do audiences believe the lies in the first place? They want to. The need to pretend, the desire for escapist entertainment, is strong and deeply rooted in the human psyche. Play, it is argued, has an important role to play in cognitive development (Piaget, 1951). As long as incredible abilities, events, or characters are properly framed in recognizable “universal” metaphors, people will accept the lie and accordingly suspend their disbelief (Arnold & Eddy, 2007; Schell, 2008). Game designers and storytellers enter into an unspoken contract with their players and audiences that can read something like this: I, the storyteller, will lie to you, but I will be consistent in my lies. In return, you will suspend your disbelief and be transported to another world and entertained (Arnold & Eddy, 2007). A “contract is a contract is a contract” (Behr, 1995, p. 9), and if the unspoken contract is upheld (i.e., the logic and the pattern of the lies are consistent), the player can remain enjoyably immersed. As long as the logic and the pattern of the lies are recognizable, the player can remain enjoyably immersed. If any portion of that contract is violated, however, immersion can be disrupted and the illusion shattered. For example, pretend worlds can be fantastic, like the video game Skyrim, wherein player ride atop horses and slay dragons with magical swords, or more abstract, like the video game Tetris, wherein four-unit squares fall out of the sky to be stacked by the player. Each of these worlds is consistent, but if Tetris blocks began to rain down on a Skyrim town, the lie would become inconsistent and players would lose their sense of immersion.
Use a “Seamless Style” of Directing Immersion is easiest to maintain when nothing violates the integrity of the fiction. In that vein, audiences prefer what has been called a “seamless style of directing” (Katz, 1991). Originating in cinematography, this term suggests that anything that the storyteller does to draw your attention to a camera move or transition between two scenes is counterproductive to the audience’s experience of a seamless style. Likewise, educational games focused on immersion would generally do best to avoid elaborate flying camera effects, distracting transitions, or forced confrontations with the mechanics or interface of the game when establishing immersive experiences. There are times, however, when good game design dictates that immersion intentionally be disrupted. For example, when a player finishes a task, achieves a level, or moves to a new virtual location, there are natural departure points for the player to step away. The player’s sense of urgency and the tension of being in the middle of a complex task are both reduced. Therefore, the player is offered natural places to take a break (Schell, 2008) rather than being driven to walking away from the game when they become frustrated or angry. In these cases, overlaid screens which cover the gaming action and ask the player to make choices about what to do next are well-designed breaks in the action.
Minimize Bugs It may be self-evident, but game bugs—malfunctions in the game—can become profound immersion disruptors. Bugs redirect player attention away from the game content and force the player to examine and confront the seamridden smoke and broken mirrors making up the game world. For example, if a bug crashes the game, then the player is knocked out of the immersive state and forced to wrestle with the game delivery device (Bernhaupt, 2010). Even if it is only temporary, immersion has been disrupted. The best games are the ones that pay attention to the heavy cost that bugs can inflict on player enjoyment and therefore invest heavily in extensive playtesting and rapid patching of problems that are found.
Pay Attention to User Experiences (UX)
UX, or User eXperience, is an umbrella term used to describe the relationship between a technology and its user, between human and machine. In games, this most commonly takes the form of the graphical user interface (GUI), the displays and on-screen controls that players use to interact with the game. When UX is good, the user interaction contributes to immersive experiences. When UX is bad, the user interaction with the machine results in frustration and disruption. For example, the 2015 role playing game Witcher 3 was very successful, selling 4 million copies in only two weeks. However, despite being viewed on large flat screen HDTVs, the text in the menus was too small to read (Klepak, 2015). Players generally enjoyed the game, but when it came time to read dialogue options or alter their player statistics, the tiny text stymied player comprehension, and poor GUI became a profound immersion disruptor. Properly designed, the graphic user interface of a game should make it easy for learners to interact with the game (Zin, Jaafar, & Yue, 2009). Accordingly, the best games pay close attention to User eXperience.
Don’t use Time as a Hostage There is a trend in mobile phone gaming apps where players must wait for desired outcomes to be realized (Hornshaw, 2013). For example, a player may have chosen to create a new building but now has to wait 20 real-time minutes to see the results of her creation. The player can shortcut this wait time by spending in-game tokens, but these tokens cost real-world money. This is, in effect, holding the player’s time ransom—either lose the time or pay the fee to get that time back. This is an effective business model, helping game developers release “free” games that actually result in substantial money back to developers. However, having to spend 20 minutes (or money) at key points in the game disrupts immersion.
Minimize the Cost of Failure Video games traditionally have conditions by which the player knows if they have won or lost (Schell, 2008) and often represent failure as a symbolic death. For example, Pac-Man gets touched by a ghost and dies. This clear visualization of failure is an important feedback mechanism in games and encourages players to come at the problem with a new strategy. However, prolonged, graphic, or overly expensive deaths (those which profoundly diminish the avatar's power or progress) tend to disrupt immersion and discourage continued play. The same is true of other symbolic failures, and game designers should ensure that players do not feel they have been unfairly punished for not succeeding on their first (or second or third …) try.
Engage Players in “Verbing” Immersive gaming experiences take place when the player is actively engaged. Digital play affords a wide range of actions which can be described as verbs, including shooting, jumping, catching, collecting, and other common actions. Vigorous gaming experiences depend on vigorous action verbs challenging the player; when verbing is interrupted, so too is immersion. Players are much more likely to be immersed when the gaming experience mirrors physical play—like running, jumping, hiding, tagging and sliding—or work actions like organizing, rationing, evaluating, and deciding. As with any storytelling medium, the higher the stakes and the greater the conflict, the more likely the narrative will be engaging—and therefore immersive—for the audience. More active verbs like shooting, finding, and destroying tend to be more immersive than passive verbs such as watching, waiting, or observing.
Give Players Better Choices One of the great joys of playing complex games is the player’s ability to make choices (Charsky, 2010). Properly designed and frequent choices allow players to see those choices reflected by in-game actions and consequences for an immersive, flow-inducing experience.
However, if poorly designed, the choices can feel too predetermined (Lange, 2014). When players are forced to take an option that they personally would never choose—or one that they believe that their character would never choose—the act of choosing becomes an immersion disruptor. For example, imagine that a player’s avatar must cross a troll-guarded bridge and is told they can either kill the troll or pay the toll. If the player’s character lacks the money and yet holds no animosity for the troll, the player might entertain a host of alternate solutions such as bargaining, distracting, or tricking the troll. Leaving out these in-game choices and forcing players into making less desirable ones puts them in disharmony with the game and disrupts immersion. Ultimately, players tend to be more motivated when presented with choices.
Maintain the Fourth Wall The camera set up for a traditional studio situation comedy involves rooms with three walls, based on the three-wall format of staged theater wherein the fourth wall is the audience (Dawson, Levy, & Lyons, 2011). In narrative media, the place from which the cameras shoot is known as the “fourth wall” (Arnold & Eddy, 2007). Sometimes actors, usually in comedies, “break the fourth wall” when they directly address the camera. When artfully deployed, it can be humorous and engaging; however, it ultimately draws attention to the “seams” of the storytelling and can become an immersion disruptor. In many ways breaking the fourth wall is analogous to intentionally and overtly violating the seamless style of directing rule. Playing games is most immersive when game designers maintain that fourth wall—they keep players immersed in the self-contained universe. In games, the fourth wall can be broken when players have to leave that world to tinker with game settings, go to external websites to lookup up how to complete difficult parts of the game, or use 3rd party software to better communicate with other players (e.g., Ventrilo, Skype, TeamSpeak, Mumble). Breaking the fourth wall corresponds with an immediate disruption to immersion as players consciously step outside the game.
Discussion These ten principles provide a framework for the educational games community to use as they further consider the relationship between games, immersion, and learning. First and foremost, although some of these principles are drawn from empirical data, further qualitative and quantitative research would help provide a stronger foundation that this community can build upon. Previous research has used frameworks or taxonomies of game features to identify priorities for educators designing or implementing educational games (Boltz, Arnold, & Greenhalgh, 2015; Wang, Shen, & Ritterfeld, 2009), and empirical analysis of the effect of the principles presented here could indicate in greater detail how these principles can be applied to create immersive experiences. However, even as they stand, these principles have implications for designers and implementers of educational games. Designers seeking to create educational games that are immersive should keep these principles in mind as they move towards a finished product; for example, they might choose game mechanics that emphasize “verbing” and should put extra effort into ensuring that their design is free from bugs and represents a positive UX experience. Likewise, teachers must have an appreciation for the features of the technologies they use in their teaching if they are to implement them effectively (Koehler & Mishra, 2009). Knowing whether educational games implement these principles may help teachers determine which games to use in their classrooms as well as how to use them. Furthermore, issues of engagement are of interest to a number of pedagogical methods, not just those that use games. Teachers and instructional designers of all stripes may find inspiration in these principles for how to make teaching more immersive. For example, problem-based learning, where students organize their own learning around solving an authentic problem, would likely benefit from helping students suspend their disbelief, thereby encouraging them to engage more fully with the problem and therefore with their learning. Likewise, a number of pedagogical approaches might benefit from being more active than passive or from giving players meaningful choices.
Conclusion The immersion afforded by effective educational games has implications for the engagement and the learning that students experience. Higher levels of immersion are likely to make students more engaged in their learning, which can then lead to greater learning gains. The design principles included in this paper are drawn from our own experiences and from existing research on how games and other media create a feeling of immersion and can be used by both researchers and practitioners to lead to more immersive educational experiences. As discussions and implementations of educational games continue, we hope that these principles will serve as an invitation to more frequently consider the role that immersion plays in these discussions.
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