As speedrun.com currently lacks a global leader board for the Funbrain game Shape Invasion, I am going to go ahead and crown myself king at a sub twenty-seven second time. And therefore, as the current reigning champion of this game, I am going to use my high credibility to tell you how deeply flawed it is when it comes to game design.
Shape Invasion created for the site Funbrain in no way tries to hide the fact that it is an educational game that is intended to teach young kids about shapes and pattern recognition. However, I believe it fails in the ways of engagement it is trying to achieve as it lacks the core aspect of what makes games entertaining. Within Zimmerman’s Gaming Literacy: Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century, he goes about defining games as “paradoxically occurring” for they exist as a contradictory relationship between rules and play (26). It is easy to see within Shape Invasion that there was a lot of focus put into the rules of the game. The game’s educational focus influenced the game’s development as the designers seem to believe in the notion that design and play can take away from the learning experience; therefore, I would go as far as to describe Shape Invasion (and even more so Math Soccer) as being interactive study sets and not games.
There is a problem within the explicitness of a educational game where the awareness that you are being taught something directly counteracts the educational value you receive. I had realized this when reading Kaufman and Flanagan’s article, “A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes,” for within their argument they talk about this disconnected and non “embedded” approach to game design. I found commonalities between prosocial and an educational games as they both attempt to instill within the player an auxiliary concept that exists outside the “magic circle” of the game. With this overt method of teaching, they say that the approach “may limit a game’s persuasive impact and ability to produce beneficial outcomes, particularly when the apparent aims of the game trigger players’ psychological defenses or reduce players’ potential engagement with – and enjoyment of – the game experience”(1). In the case of Shape Invasion, the problems of disconnect fall heavily within the latter of their argument for it is a reduction of engagement that acts as the Achilles’ heel in educational children’s games. For once you lose the very short attention span of “iPad babies”, then the effectiveness of learning will drop tremendously.
The speedrunning activity I had done with Shape Invasion was a direct response to how these games made me feel. I wanted to take something so quick to lose my attention and put my own engaging spin on it. By trying my hardest to be the best at such a mundane task, I feel as if I was able to play outside the constraints that the game presents and stay engaged with the material for longer. For only while trying to poke fun at the model of the game was I actually able to find fun in the product itself. I can now proudly say I understand the difference between circles, squares, triangles, pentagons, and hexagons.
You bring up a problem and demonstrated a potential solution, and I’d like to piggyback off of that. How do we combat the lack of variety and gaming in “Shape Invasion”? Additionally, you identified the main objective as pattern recognition, but pattern recognition of what, exactly? You say you now “understand the difference between [polygons],” but I defaulted to using colors to match the patterns. To resolve many of these issues, I suggest that these shapes instead be used to create different patterns during different levels. For example, it could teach color theory by grouping cool vs warm colors or teaching basic geometry/counting by ordering the polygons by number of sides. You also charmingly demonstrated speedrunning as an additional challenge, which I would argue teaches fine motor movement and dexterity, which are valuable skills for future gaming and life in general. This variety in gameplay and concepts may not qualify as “embedded gameplay” because the different topics are all still strictly educational, but it certainly adds more variety and concrete learning objectives that will hopefully engage the notoriously difficult-to-engage “iPad baby” demographic.
People often mod videogames to make them more difficult, board games have expansions or extended rulesets, and table top RPGs have homebrew rules. It’s interesting that you’ve taken a game at “level 0” of difficulty, and applied a set of restrictions, a modular new rule set, and transformed it into “level 1” of a game. Yours is perhaps a bit more extradiegetic to the game than most added rules. One could imagine playing Shape Invasion by saying that every turn you had a “move limit” of 2, you could only swap two things twice. Or perhaps the person who makes the least amount of moves wins. There are definitely levels of difficult that can be built around shape invasion.
But I’m interested in something else that was brought up in class: should we? Should we try to make it more interesting? Why do we bother, why do we care? It’s a boring game, meant to teach kids about shapes, but it’s not even guaranteed to teach them about shapes. Has the game designer done his research about the learning modalities when it comes to shape recognition? The psychological processes or mental constructs that are necessary for shape recognition? What is “shape recognition”, how does it develop, do you need to teach it via a videogame? Or do 3D physical toys with another dimension to them, that the kids can hold and grasp, better for the development of visuospatial ability? I don’t know. I’m critical of educational game in general 🙂
That video was genuinely hilarious. I loved the intro so much. You make a really good point about the dullness of some educational games, and the necessity for our brains to be stimulated in order to really learn.
I found this article equally interesting for the implications of speedrunning as a practice. It’s interesting to see which games get selected for speedrunning- sometimes it’s popular games, like Ocarina of Time, or impressively hard games like Dark Souls, but I’ve also seen people speedrunning things like Wii Sports, or iCarly for the Wii, or even educational games like Putt-Putt. Part of this is the humor and irony of choosing to speedrun a children’s game, or something that is itself easy, but I think much in the same way you tackled Shape Invasion, there’s more to it.
It’s interesting how a lot of games almost get a second life through speedrunning, especially when speedruns are so radically different from normal play. There are new strategies, completely unthinkable glitches, and complicated setups to be able to speedrun a game. When a game gets as popular to speedrun as Ocarina, the speedrun and casual playthrough are such radically different experiences people are almost playing two different games. These aren’t “hard modes” either, but completely unintended methods of playing the games that the developers probably didn’t even think about. Ultimately, speedruns and self-imposed challenges represent a fascinating other dimension of ways players can interact with games.
Nicole already brought this up before me, but I want to go a little more in depth on speedrunning. Most games associated with speedrunning typically have a large focus on movement. Platformers, whether old or new, are a big favorite. Super Mario 64 has a multitude of routes for speedrunning, ranging from 70 stars, to 0, to all 120. Celeste similarly has multiple routes, whether simply climbing the mountain or collecting every berry. Plus, it has an in-game clock that keeps track of your fastest time for each level as well as your global time spent playing the game. Other games encourage speedrunning in other ways. If an area is clears extremely fast in Dead Cells, the player is rewarded with cells and a bonus weapon. Slay the Spire and Hollow Knight both have achievements for clearing the game super fast. Instead of being a “different, unintended method” of playing the game, more and more modern games are embracing speedrunning. Granted, not every game is designed with it in mind, but it’s definitely something a lot of developers are considering!