When are educational games supposed to be difficult to play and win? This is a question that I was considering this past week while playing Shape Invasion and Math Soccer this past week.
When playing Shape Invasion on Funbrain.com, I was immediately struck by how easy the game was to win. Certainly, the combinations of shapes progressively required more elaborate sorting combinations to complete. However, I never found the game very difficult, especially because no game mechanics, nor shapes were introduced during later levels; it was the same repeated action multiple times over.
Math Soccer also lacked a steep learning curve to its gameplay. Besides the math puzzles that children might struggle with, choosing where to kick the soccer ball – what I would argue is the core gameplay element – has no effect on the win state. I repeatedly tried kicking the ball right to where the goalie was located but found that no matter what I did, I would score so long as my math answer was correct.
Saying that I “easily beat these games” might not sound very impressive, as they are games specifically designed for children. Yet I think it is important to question why we hold the assumption that games for kids, especially educational games, will always be easy.
One answer to this question may be that the point of Funbrain games is not to give children a challenge at all. Rather, the intention is to give children confidence in sorting shapes and practicing addition. The difficult gameplay (for their age level) can be found in the math problems they are presented with and not in other mechanics. These other mechanics exist to build the structure of the game, but not to challenge children.
However, I do not find this explanation to be very helpful. I believe that children, though maybe less developed than a college student, can still enjoy and learn from difficult games. In fact, I believe that both Funbrain games have significant weaknesses by failing to utilize their other gameplay mechanics to encourage experimentation and further develop critical thinking.
In Shape Invasion, for instance, moving the shapes around in different orders is an interesting game element that the creators utilized well to help players practice pattern recognition. Adding a steeper difficulty curve in the form of a faster response time, or handling more shapes would continue to work this muscle.
Math Soccer would also greatly benefit from making the soccer component a more important part of gameplay by adding some difficulty to beating the goalie figure. I was quickly disappointed to learn that choosing where to kick the ball did not affect gameplay and I imagine many players would feel the exact same way. I stopped playing soon after I came to this realization. Ensuring that children cannot shoot and score when having the wrong answer, as well as that children are still told when they get the correct answer, would protect the intended purpose of the game: to practice math in a fun way.
Spent, in comparison, is a great example of how high difficulty can reinforce a game narrative. The player is supposed to feel discouraged when saving money to simulate the experiences of low-income Americans. Children’s educational games could aim to emulate this model by building in some difficulty to challenge children. Doing so would keep up engagement by children. And possibly other audiences, say… a 21-year-old college student.
You make a really good point here, and I think a lot of it carries over to non-gaming education as well. When studying a new language back in high school, I was struck by how many ways there were to learn — and all were on a scale from “easy” to “hard”. An “easy” way to learn a language, I would say, would be using Google translate – you see the original text and the english text side by side, all the time, and try to absorb the meaning of the words that way. This requires very little effort, and worked okay, so I trended towards this when I first began learning (not too dissimilar from how I was drawn to failure-less clicker games as an early gamer!). However, I soon found that, if I were to look at the foreign words with no english text, and be forced to think about their meaning, use context clues to derive such meaning, and only look at the answer when I have listlessly thought for more than a minute, the answer would be seared into my brain. You make a connection between difficulty in games and true education here, and I wonder if that is what was happening to my younger self, back then – was forcing myself to take the “difficult” road in language learning the key factor in learning that language?