The first chapter of Glenn Parsons’ “The Philosophy of Design” is dedicated to the definition of the word ‘design’.* Parsons goes through many iterations, finally arriving at

“Design is the intentional solution of a problem by the creation of plans for a new sort of thing…”

I liked this definition at first, but began to grow wary when I thought about how game design fits within it. Most of it fits my intuition quite well. The primary verb of game design is certainly planning. Most of us strive to make as new a sort of thing as we can, given the constraints of hardware, budget, schedule, physics, and imagination. But while we certainly solve many problems as game designers, it’s difficult to think about a game as embodying the solution of a problem.

What kind of problem do games solve? As an educational game designer, I’m trying to solve pedagogical problems, and many other serious games attempt to solve, or at least alleviate, problems in the world. There are citizen science games which tackle concrete research problems. Fundamentally, though, what problem does a game solve? Too much free time? Not enough software to sell proprietary hardware?

There is an argument to be made that games solve the problem of fulfilling psychological needs in their players (or their creators). By this logic, you would have to lump art and design together, as the arts are usually associated with primarily being ‘of use’ insomuch as they are able to alter their audiences’ state of mind. You might be willing to stop there and say that ‘game design’ is a misnomer, and game designers should instead be called ‘interactive artists’, or somesuch.

I certainly have some sympathy with this view. I find game design to be very creative in character, but not all creativity is art. There is something about the practice of game design, especially when done in collaboration with a team, which seems more like the design of a chair than like painting on canvas. The constraints are more palpable. The purpose more distinct. Perhaps the definition is still insufficient?

No.  The resolution of this conflict, I believe, comes with the realization that coming up with the initial idea for a game is indeed not a process of design, but rather an artistic one. Everything that comes after that is the design part. We are solving the problem of “how should we make this?”. The idea may be a theme, a story, a genre, a feeling, a mechanic, or any combination thereof, but we will always need design to support and realize that idea.

Think about it by analogy to the design brief that industrial or graphic designers are given: We need a logo which embodies the dependability of our company and which can be used in a monochrome letterhead. This is not a logo, but is sort of the idea for one. In game design the distinction can get quite muddied as we are usually not presented with game ideas by a client, but rather by some part of our own team (or our own mind), and therefore the process of settling on an idea and the beginning of the design process blend into one another temporally.

Skeptics of this notion might argue that this kind of artistic invention happens all throughout the process of game design — stories, visuals, music — so why should the initial idea be privileged in this way? I would respond by saying that additional artistic invention act primarily as support for the initial idea, rather than artistic objects in their own right, in the way that additional constructions may be necessary for a geometric proof, or floral carvings might give a chair a more old-fashioned character. Taking this to its conclusion, one might say that Michaelangelo’s painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel may be, in fact, an act of design, insofar as the guiding vision behind the project was *not* an affecting image which depicts god’s relationship to man, but an awe-inspiring chapel, and the painting exists in service of that.

The Sistene Chapel

I find this realization very freeing because, though I enjoy the ideation process and of course I have more game ideas than I could execute in 10 lifetimes, it takes the pressure off the designer to create game ideas that fit their team. Those ideas can and should come from anywhere. It also confirms all of our suspicions about those so-called “idea men” we tend to meet at parties and in shared Lyft rides. They may in fact have good ideas, but they cannot be called game designers because they have not yet engaged in the process of design at all.

So, we find ourselves out of the rain and back under the umbrella of design after all, alongside our brethren in architecture, graphic design, industrial design, etc.  Now, perhaps, with greater appreciation for the role of the designer in games and a closer understanding of what most consider the beginning of the game design process, which is not, in fact, game design.

Bobby Lockhart is a game designer at Important Little Games and CodeCombat. You can follow him on twitter @bobbylox.

*Note: It’s no mistake that this period is outside the quotation marks. The author is using logical punctuation.

This post is a response to this article here.  You should read it, and then return.  Done?  Good.  Now I’m going to tell you why all of that is hogwash.

Here is the part of the article I agree most with.  It’s a quote, so the author can’t even take credit:

“As noted by MIT’s Marvin Minsky and Alan Kay, computational innovation and literacy have much in common with music literacy.”

Yes.  Let’s explore those similarities.

When you teach music for the first time in a general music class, do you teach every student the alto saxophone?  No, you give them each a recorder.

The recorder is simple to use, but still manages to illustrate the principles of music.  Students can start to read musical notation and understand the relationships between the notes of a scale.  The “Coding Apps” the article references are the recorders of programming.

It’s as if the author is saying, “Students will never join the symphony orchestra if they only learn the recorder!”  That’s true, but it’s also ridiculous.

First of all, not everyone needs to join an orchestra, but it benefits everyone to have a basic knowledge of music.  Not everyone is going to become a programmer, but to have a basic knowledge of computer science is very enriching.

Secondly, students who are interested and/or talented with the recorder may move on to another more professional instrument.  Just as no one has suggested that students take up the recorder professionally, no one is suggesting that students stop learning about programming when the Hour of Code is done.  If students love Scratch, they’re likely to move on to learning Python, or Javascript, or another “real-world” programming language.  Conversely, if students’ first exposure to programming is punishing and intimidating, they may never move on from there.  With a bad first impression, learners will be poisoned against programming for the rest of their lives.

It’s perfectly obvious these days that numeracy should be introduced to small children with counters and manipulatives, rather than symbols on paper.  “But they’re not learning the important pencil and paper skills they’ll need to truly learn mathematics!” one might say.  This is not a threat to mathematics instruction because we know that students will soon move on.  The same is true for coding apps.

If Scratch were the tool of choice for Stanford’s Computer Science 201 course, I would be very concerned, but visual programming games and apps are a fantastic way to expose children (and adults) to programming for the first time.

~

Rob Lockhart is the creative director of Important Little Games.  If you’re interested in teaching kids to code, check out the game we’re working on, called Codemancer.

‘Games that teach players how to code’ is becoming a genre of game all its own.  I made this little flowchart to show where I think “Codemancer” fits within the ecosystem of games (and other software) that teach programming.  Feel free to share widely.  Enjoy!

It’s recently occurred to me, during my efforts to make my upcoming educational game, “Codemancer,” as flawless as possible, that in some cases it’s better to expose children to flawed technology.  My reasons are these:

1. Children using flawed technology products can understand the humanity of the creator(s).
2. They may be inspired to fix, or to exploit, the flaws they find.
3. Using flawed technology builds up resilience.

Understanding the humanity of the product’s creator doesn’t seem like a big deal to most adults.  We understand that these things we interact with were designed and built by people.  Children don’t necessarily have that kind of awareness.  Even if kids know a device or a piece of software is made by a human being, they might not consider that person relate-able.  On the other hand, if their creation is flawed, children may reason, perhaps the creator is flawed, too — and perhaps I, a flawed person, could become a creator myself.  There is also evidence to suggest that understanding an influential person as a person helps kids to understand their influence as well.

To certain personalities, a mistake in design or development can seem like a thorn in one’s mind.  We may try to ignore it, but the discomfort will, over time, force us to take action.  Lots of normally developed kids fall into this category.  These are kids with a developed sense of taste. They know how technology ought to be.  There are more of them all the time as children’s relationship with technology grows.

There are two impulses that may spring from this kind of personality: the impulse to Fix It and the impulse to Exploit It.  Both can be constructive or destructive, but are always educational.  The urge to fix a flaw may cause a child to learn the inner workings of a system, or to build an entirely new one.  The urge to exploit a flaw might push a child to use an old system in a new way.  Any one might be the seed of an innovation (or a lawsuit) (or both).

When something doesn’t work as expected it can cause a great deal of frustration.  As a child grows up it’s important that they be able to deal with frustration and move forward.  The only way I know to foster the right kinds of coping mechanisms is by exposure.  Flawed technology can, and does, offer that kind of exposure to frustration — usually in a low-stakes environment.  As I observe people learning computer programming the hardest lesson for them is almost never the syntax or the reasoning.  The hardest lesson is this: “nothing ever works the first time.”

In contrast, perfect technology products (and I think there effectively are such things) create the illusion that they were divinely inspired or created by alien geniuses.  There is no chink through which to see beyond the armor and into the works.  The more kids use them, the more frustrated they are with everything else.

Note that I don’t advocate that we give children broken technology.  Broken tech is unusable.  Flawed tech is just a bit tricky.  Broken tech gives creators a bad name.  Flawed tech gives creators a personality.  Broken tech is just garbage — not worth fixing.  Flawed tech is almost right if only I changed XYZ.

So perhaps we should think about giving children the second-best phone, or the second-best software, and know that they will be inspired by its faults.

I started thinking about memorable names in the context of genre fiction, as I was reading the book The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.  I absolutely loved the book, but what hampered my enjoyment at times was the incomprehensible naming of people, places, and things in the fictional universe of the story.  For example, the titular Emperor has two sets of servants: the nohecharei, who are like bodyguards, and the edocharei, who are his attendants.  There is one character named Tethimar, and another named Telimezh.  It was challenging for me, an avid reader of fantasy, to keep everything straight.

It’s clear that the author of The Goblin Emperor decided to value authenticity within the fictional vernacular she created over the reader’s ease of understanding, and it is not my place to condemn that choice.  However, it did get me thinking about what features of fictional names make them more memorable, especially within my discipline of game design, where the narrative has less room for rote repetition.  Below are a few ways of keeping your proper nouns lucid.

1. Decide whether it ought to be a proper noun at all.  Sometimes the best name is just a description of what the place or thing is.  Take a look at this fragment of a map from Metroid Prime to see what I mean.  Of 10 named places, only 2 include proper names.  The rest are simply descriptive.

2. Use a close variant of an existing name.  It may feel a bit like cheating, but re-using the existing circuitry in your player’s mind can be very effective, and serve the overall enjoyment of the game.  Writers do this all the time with place names like “New Tokyo” or “Earth II.”  Slight variations work for human (or other sentient being) names as well, such as Snow Crash‘s “Da5id.”

Needless to say, to pull this off, you’ll have to have some idea of what your reader considers a ‘common name,’ so this will be culture-specific and may need to be localized.

3. Accompanying titles.  People tend to remember the relationships between people and places better than they remember the names.  Think back to the last time someone described the plot of a half-remembered movie.  It probably sounded something like “…and then the main guy’s best friend went back to their old apartment and got the thing…” No proper names at all, just relationships.  We can use this to our advantage by putting the relationship right into the name!

The simplest example is titles like “Professor,” “Captain,” “Archduke,” “Counselor,” etc.  If you’re in a more fantastical setting, you can use things like “King-son” and “Friend Luke” as names, too.  Anything you can do to associate the name with a relationship will help, and when you’ve repeated it enough times you can drop the relationship prefix without confusion.

4. Distinct explicit or implied ethnicity can make each of your names distinct.  If you have three main characters — one an American farm-boy named John, one a burly Norwegian named Jøhan, and one a Chinese national named Jao Han, the player will remember the names distinctly, despite how similarly they are spelled.

5. The Bouba/Kiki Effect is an apparently universal human trait which makes us associate certain qualities of sound with physical characteristics almost synaesthetically.  Hard angular things are associated with hard angular sounds, like “knicknack” and “porcupine,” whereas softer, rounder things get softer, rounder sounds, like “balloon” and “butterfly.”  You can use this property of natural language, making your names tacitly descriptive of their subject.  If your villain is sharp-nosed and bony, you may want to name him “Jack” instead of “Bob.”  Likewise, a domed hall might better be “Woterbund” than “Rinkertin.”

6. Gendered Suffixes cause many names to be self-descriptive, at least to english-speaking ears.  For characters that identify as a certain gender, certain sounds can serve as clues.  In vowels, for example, -a, -i, and -y sound more feminine than -o and -u.  There are exceptions, of course, but I think these indicators still have their place in some fictional worlds.

7. Uncommon letters in proper names should be hoarded like the precious resource they are.  Don’t use them all up in a single name like “Quizikjax.”  Doling out one uncommon letter to each character can make each name stand out, but not overshadow any others.  The least frequently-used letters in english are Z, Q, X, J, K, and V.  However, Even the most-used letter, “E,” can seem weird within a name where it’s not expected, like “Melodee,” so context can make a big difference.

I hope these ideas are at least thought-provoking, and are of use as you create and name people, places and things in games and elsewhere.

I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games.  If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.

The Kickstarter for Codemancer was successfully funded at the end of May, and I learned a lot in the process.  I’d like to share as much of that as I can.

A Mosaic of Aurora and her familiars made from the backers’ Kickstarter avatars. Click to enlarge.

First of all, let’s look at the high-level results.  The final amount raised was $52,725 by 1,862 backers.  That’s 439% of the original goal.  I couldn’t be more thrilled, or more grateful to my amazing backers.  But enough gratitude.  You came here for details, and details you shall have!

A lot of factors seemed to contribute to the success of the campaign, so far as I can tell.  Let’s go through some.

The Research

I did not embark on my Kickstarter journey lightly, but sought the advice of many experienced people.  For instance, I attended the IGDA ‘Kickstarting Your Dream Game’ panel, which brought together many Kickstarter campaign creators to share their experiences and advice.  I sought one-on-one advice from everyone I knew who had prior experience to offer, including Kee-Won Hong (of Iterative Games), Max Temkin (of Cards Against Humanity), Ryan Weimeyer (of The Men Who Wear Many Hats), all of the Young Horses, Craig Stern (of Sinister Design),  and many more.

I also kept a close eye on other crowdfunding campaigns both successful and unsuccessful, especially ones in the categories of games, education, and educational games.  I didn’t make any systematic observations, but by immersion I hope to gain an intuitive feel for what others had done well or poorly in the past.  This was useful, but I still wouldn’t call myself an expert.

The Video

The video is the first thing people see about a campaign (other than the name), and I wanted mine to be good.  It would be especially embarrassing to have a bad video considering that I spent 4 years at (very expensive) NYU film school.  I watched a lot of Kickstarter videos in order to figure out what was done well or poorly by others.

At first, I wanted to make a pure trailer for the game, inspired by Hyper Light Drifter’s amazing Kickstarter video (and I’m sure you’ll still see some resemblance), but I was convinced by a friend to make the video say more about the impact that the game is intended to have.  I believe that this was a fantastic decision, despite my misgivings about relying too much on making the game into a ’cause.’  The game has a couple of messages which I’m really proud of, but I think are more effective if discovered by the player rather than said.  Unfortunately, crowdfunding eliminates the luxury of discovery.  The positive messages I tried to communicate through the video were

1. Programming is a worthwhile thing to teach children, especially girls.
2. Games are a great way of teaching things.
3. This game project in particular combines the previous two ideas in an effective and fun way.

An additional message, which is sort of implicit, but isn’t really clear except after doing some research, is that myself and my team are capable of delivering such a game.  Some feedback I got indicated that even people who believed int he mission of Codemancer couldn’t bring themselves to contribute to any Kickstarter project because of bad experiences in the past, and I could have given them some assurances of my competence in the video (although honestly this is my least favorite part of many Kickstarter videos — “I’m a veteran of blah blah”).

What you watch above is actually the second version posted.  In the first version of the video, I didn’t talk over the gameplay or playtesting footage at all, but I swapped it out with a voiceover version a few days into the campaign because I got a lot of feedback that the video was too long.  It seems like 2:30-3:00 is really a sweet spot (the length of a typical pop song – coincidence?) and the first version was a little over 3:30.

Building an Audience Pre-Kickstarter

A few months into Codemancer development, I put up a placeholder page on LaunchRock, just to have a place to direct interested people, and a way of collecting their information.  Eventually, I transitioned to a MailChimp list, as I began to send out development updates.  That list grew steadily over the period from October 2013 to today (you can still join, here).

The stepwise look of the chart is because every time I’d go to an event or a conference I’d ask if people there would be willing to join my mailing list.  Then, when I got home, I’d enter all the email addresses at once.

I also tried to build up my follower count on Twitter before the campaign launched, which others have figured out how to do far better than I.  One thing that helped is that I blog regularly on Gamasutra.  Once I started to develop Codemancer, I also started including a link to my twitter account at the top or bottom of my blog posts.  When I launched the campaign I had about 950 twitter followers on my personal account, and just 20 or so on the Important Little Games company account.

Sending out an email to my mailing list, and tweeting as soon as the project went up really helped with the next contributing factor…

Funded Early

I was advised that many Kickstarter backers prefer to contribute to successfully funded projects, or projects which are projected to be fully funded.  For this reason, and because I knew I’d continue to work on Codemancer regardless of the outcome of the Kickstarter, I lowered my goal from the original $20,000 I estimated I’d need to the more modest $12,000.  In retrospect this was a good decision.

Here’s the full funding history of the project, courtesy of KickSpy:

As you can see, the project was funded on day 4 (actually, just an hour before we hit day 5).

Project of the Day

Immediately after being funded, Codemancer was featured on the front page of kickstarter.com as the project of the day.  I have no idea why, and I’ll probably never know.  I reached out to a few people at Kickstarter, namely Cindy Au, who has some concentration on the games section of Kickstarter, and Fred Benenson who was an early employee of Kickstarter and a person who I met a few times when we were both taking computer science at NYU.  Neither of these people responded to me directly, but maybe putting Codemancer on the front page was their way of responding?

A screenshot from when Codemancer became project of the day. Yes, I am a tab hoarder.

In any case, you can see a huge spike in funding on day 5 because of being featured ($6,981 that day alone), and I think that momentum carried on even after a new project of the day was chosen.

Press

Reaching out to the press is something I wish I had done earlier and more often, but in all of my preparations for the Kickstarter, I realized that I wasn’t going to have time to do a proper job of it.  Honestly, if any aspect had to go a little neglected, I’m glad it was the press (no offense, journalist friends!).

Despite the late notice, many sites covered the project anyway, and while I’m really happy to get the word out to everyone, I’m not certain how much press coverage translates into actual pledges (we’ll see a bit more about that in the next section).

One exception is BoingBoing, one of my favorite nerdy online ‘zines.  I used their online submission form to suggest that Codemancer be covered (including full disclosure that I’m the creator of the project), and, amazingly, Cory Doctorow wrote up the campaign.  The ‘BoingBoing Bump’ had a palpable affect on pledges and on the amount of twitter hype the game was getting.  You can see the effect around Day 22 on the graph above.

I also self-posted on reddit, which gave birth to a fairly long thread, and led to an impressive number of pledges.

Breakdown of Backers

Where were these people coming from?  Well, there’s a view on Kickstarter where project creators can see the referral information.  Here it is sorted by number of people directed to the campaign:

There are more below, but each contributed 23 or fewer backers.

So what do these things mean?  The first and most common source of backers was ‘Dunno.’  No idea where those folks came from.  Next is ‘Advanced Discovery’ which means people on Kickstarter searching for certain parameters, like ‘Games made in Chicago with keyword Code’ or somesuch.  The ‘backer confirmation page’ is the suggestions users are offered after backing another project, for example ‘backers of XYZ also backed Codemancer.’  The Home Spotlight is people coming from the front page when Codemancer was the project of the day.  I think the rest of the sources are relatively self-explanatory.

I expected Facebook to rank above Twitter in terms of dollars pledged, since most of my friends and family were likely to hear about the campaign there first, but it surprises me that Facebook also ranks above Twitter in terms of number of backers.  I’d love to hear if others have had similar results.

It’s also interesting to note where my backers come from geographically.  With a short Python script, I was able to scrape that data from the Kickstarter site and put this map visualization together on CartoDB (with a little help from this batch geocoding service).

1,262 backers included their locations in their Kickstarter profiles, which is about 2/3 of all Codemancer backers.  Chicago had the most backers, which isn’t surprising because that’s where I live.  I have previously lived in Boston and New York, and they both made the top ten, as well.  The full list is quite long, but the top 20 cities by number of backers were Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, London, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Austin, Washington DC, Sydney, San Jose, San Diego, Raleigh, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Brooklyn (Kickstarter counts this as its own city, for some reason) and Toronto.

There were also many backers who reached out to me during the campaign about localization.  Some even offered to help with the translation themselves.  The requested languages were German (5 requests), French (2), and Spanish (1), Japanese (1) and Hungarian (1).  I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to handle all of these requests, but I’ll certainly try.  In any case, it’s great to get a sense of who wants this sort of game most.

And in case you want to see what all of the backers (who have Kickstarter avatars) look like, here they all are!

A tinted version of this image is now my computer’s desktop background. Click to enlarge.

Breakdown of Finances

Lastly, let’s look at the various ways that $52,725 is not the actual amount of money I can use to continue to develop Codemancer:

1. Pledges that didn’t go through.  I didn’t have as much of a problem with this step as many other folks that I’ve talked to.  $52518.43 actually made it to Kickstarter, which is 99.6% of what was pledged.
2. Kickstarter’s fee. They take 5%, or in my case $2625.92, leaving $49,892.51
3. Credit processing Fees.  This percentage differs depending on the credit card used, so I was never sure how much this was going to end up being.  Now I can tell you it amounted to $2,151.66 or about 4.3%, which leaves $47,740.85
4. Taxes.  I’ve been advised to put away 20% of that amount for income tax in the US (which may be conservative).

That said, the remaining $38,192.68 is a perfect amount of money to see Codemancer through the rest of development, even after fulfillment (thank goodness I didn’t offer any physical rewards) and stretch goals.

Conclusion

I’d definitely recommend Kickstarter to others, assuming you start preparing early and don’t have a full-time job.  Even doing contracting during the campaign was difficult for me, and I brought on friend and PR expert Ryan Olsen to help me manage it all.  I can’t recommend Ryan’s work highly enough, especially for a single-person company like Important Little Games.

That said, Kickstarter was incredibly valuable even beyond the funding, in that it gave me all kinds of information.  I learned about how to explain my goals for Codemancer to different audiences.  I know more about what kinds of people are interested in the project.  I know more about their desires and hopes for the game, and more about my own as well.

Thanks again to everyone involved, and to all the people who gave me such great advice about the game.  If you’d like to be involved, too, you can pre-order the game here.

 ~

I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games.  If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.

I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games.  If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.

<(╯°□°）╯·._.·´¯)·._.·´¯)

I’m working on an educational game that involves magic and magical epistemology.  Consequently, I’ve been doing a lot of research about magical systems.  I’m sharing my thoughts for those of you who may one day include magic in your games.

Whereas the last blog post in this series acts as a sort of catalog of magical systems I’d read about at that time, I’ve attempted here to synthesize some ideas about the underlying philosophies of these systems, in part prompted by some additional recent reading.

COMMUNICATION

Human beings have developed two methods of precise communication: Programs, which are made to communicate precisely to machines, and Legalese, which is used to communicate precisely to other minds.

Many fantasy worlds use the metaphor of a ‘contract’ with supernatural forces.  It’s a pretty straightforward step of the imagination to imagine forming a contract with a demon, a faierie, or any other more-or-less anthropomorphic entity.  Dr. Faustus is the example that comes most readily to mind.  Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet, too, is centered on this idea.

However, the most powerful application of this concept is when you combine it with Animism, the belief that all natural substances possess souls (which, in the ancient world, is equivalent to saying that everything has a mind).  If everything has a mind, you can potentially create a contract with anything – so long as you can communicate with it.

Often these two types of magic coexist within the same mythology.  For example, in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Mr. Norrell is capable of the animistic sort of magic only after being ‘enlightened’ after a fashion.  Recently, I picked up The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Real Magic, in which the ‘second-order’ magic of agreements with humanlike beings is accessible to anyone who has the inclination to learn, whereas ‘first-order’ magic is available only to those with an ineffable ‘knack.’

Somewhat in-between is Monism, the idea, popularized by Calculus inventor Gottfried Liebniz, that everything has some amount of ‘mind stuff,’ or monads.  Monads are not full minds, but can be thought of as mind-fragments.  Presumably things like rocks and trees have just a few.  Humans have enough for a whole mind.  As I understand it, according to Liebniz, God is basically made up of a metric shit-ton of monads.  Individual monads are mechanistic, like logic gates, but can be arranged to do information processing of arbitrary complexity.

This view, as fantastical as it may seem, may have some basis in fact.  Stephen Wolfram, in his book A New Kind of Science, points out that there are surprisingly many natural systems which are in the band between simplistic and chaotic, and that many of these, in turn, are capable of computation.  It’s this underlying philosophy that I adopt in Codemancer — that many natural systems are at least capable of following the kinds of algorithms we feed to computers today, if not the kind that produce what you’d call a Mind.  I’d still classify this as a form of first-order magic, but with a less mystical flavor.

In first-order magic, the mechanism for feeding requests or instructions to these beings is often, of necessity, a bit hand-wavy.  Talking to a demon may be easy because the demon has met you at your own level.  Demons usually speak the local language, and transmit them using sound waves as most of us do.  What language to the beings of first order programming speak?  In Codemancer, they speak a programming language, but in most stories they require some kind of unspecified mental discipline.  Even so, nobody, including Codemancer, explains how the signal of first-order magic is transmitted from magic-user to enchanted object.

EXCLUSIVITY

Fantasy worlds often need an explanation of why Magic cannot be done by just anyone.  This usually boils down to some kind of genetics (or its equivalent, the ‘ineffable knack’ I spoke of earlier).  Sometimes two non-magic-users (or ‘Muggles’ in the parlance of Harry Potter) can produce a magic-user, evidently by some sort of a recessive gene.  In any case, there is an exclusive class of beings with magical abilities, and the rest of the world which has no inkling of the cataclysmic supernatural goings-on which form the plot of these tales.

To me, the business smacks of the servile.  The Divine Right of Kings is dredged up in this fashion and fed to children, essentially teaching that you are either one of the chosen or you’re not.  No amount of striving — no amount of sacrifice can bring you from one category into the other.  This is an ugly feature of magical fantasy which could easily be done away with.

One of the worst offenders is the Amber series by Roger Zelazny, which I enjoyed very much despite its problematic message.  It began with magic-use as entirely limited to the royal family of a fantastical realm (known as Amber) — numbering a dozen or so people.  Later in the series, genealogical excuses are made to bring more and more characters into the club.

Occasionally it’s a quality of one’s character – purity of heart, or determination that grants magical ability.  The Neverending Story, as well as some versions of the Arthurian and Thor legends make use of this concept.  This is a step in the right direction.  Still a bit too obscure, in my opinion, how one would go about improving one’s own ‘purity of heart.’  Perhaps this is where magical systems and theology intersect (Thor, after all, was once a sincerely worshipped deity, rather than an action movie superhero).

Even more rarely, magic use is a question of intellectual rigor.  Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, for example, claims that magic’s use is like brain surgery or rocket science, only moreso.  This seems to satisfy the constraints satisfactorily.  How many rocket scientists or brain surgeons do you know?  If you’re not in the same or a similar line of work, it’s probably pretty few.  It also allows characters a whole spectrum of competency, rather than a discrete jump between the Muggles and the Wizards.  Some people might have read a few books and know a little about magic, perhaps enough to change the channel on the TV without using the remote.  Other might be so well-studied, and consequently powerful, that they are basically Gods.

What I like most about this is that you can train to become a better user of magic, and you can get rusty at it if you forget specifics.  Think of the Rocky training montage, but with magical spells instead of punching.  That is one of the best messages one can give a child (or an adult, really) — Hard Work Pays Off.  That’s part of what I hope players will learn when they play Codemancer.

~

There are many more features of magical systems I’d like to explore in future blog posts.  Please let me know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.  Thanks!

A few days ago I received the following email:

Hi Rob,

My name is Aleks and I’ve been following your progress since very early November last year. I am currently an undergraduate student at Newcastle University in UK and am working on my own educational game as a part of my final year project. And I must say that Codemancer was one of the educational game concepts that inspired me to pick the direction I took with my final year project. So you and Codemancer are definitely mentioned in the research part of my project 🙂

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that there are more people out there who feel that educational games need to be engaging, attractive and interesting, not just… well… educational.

If you feel curious enough to check out what my project looks like, here’s a link to one of the relatively recent updates (without music or sound effects, but with a full walkthrough of the first level), the game is called “The Amazing Adventures of Chloe Pikselle”: http://youtu.be/1vzHTqRw07o

And, well, in case you’re even more curious, here you can find the whole list of updates I’ve done so far (I’m trying to do them weekly), with a few downloadable demos: http://ohpollux.co.uk/projects/chloepikselle/

But anyway, this is not a shameless attempt at advertising myself (at least it’s not meant to be), it’s more of a thank you for the inspiration and a demonstration that this inspiration was not wasted 🙂 I wish you all the best with Codemancer and good luck with Kickstarter!

—

Kind regards,

Aleks

I recommend you check out the demo.  I’ll be trying to support this project as much as I can, and I hope you’ll join me. Welcome to the club of folks developing games that teach programming, Aleks.  I’m sure we’ll learn a lot from each other.

-Rob

This year is the first year in a long time that Eric Zimmerman has not organized his annual Game Design Challenge at GDC.  This has left a hole in my heart; a hole I intend to fill right now (and not with cookies this time)!

I’m organizing an invitation-only game design challenge for some of the best game designers I know (or know of).  I will be announcing the theme of the design challenge once I line up a few more contestants.  Thereafter, each contestant will make a video describing his/her design, and the internet will vote to determine a winner.

I’m working on securing some theme-appropriate prizes, but as of now the only prize is ULTIMATE PRESTIGE.

More information coming soon…

The following originally appeared in the IGDA Perspectives Newsletter:

I am not the first to observe that there is a disconnect between buyers and users of most educational games.  Games designed to be played by children could be purchased by a teacher, a parent, a grandparent, a school superintendent or any number of adults in the child’s life.  Notably absent are the children themselves, who have been gaining more and more buying power over the years (1).  And what buying power they don’t control directly they influence by…let’s say…making their desires apparent to the adults around them.

The problem isn’t just about kids either, educational games for adult learners are most often purchased by an institution, whether that’s the military, a corporation or small business, or a degree-granting educational body.  The disconnect is pervasive.  By and large, educational game purchases are made not by those who want to learn, but by those who want something learned.  This brings up all kinds of philosophical questions about whether a game played under duress or for ulterior motives is really a game, which is a fine debate which I’ve been on both sides of.  For now, I’d rather talk about the dangers that creep in through the gap, and how to fight them.

The possibilities for abuse are obvious.  Making something that looks good to parents or teachers, but doesn’t appeal at all to kids is a common pattern which became notoriously referred to a edu-tainment.  Mimi Ito wrote about how the edu-tainment phenomenon was fueled by parents’ anxieties about their children’s performance in a competitive world (2).  By pandering to those anxieties, companies could sell units without making a particularly compelling product.  In fact, incentives ran the other way.  By making software that was boring, children’s lack of engagement with the material would only increase parents’ perceived need for intervention, causing them to buy yet more software.

Part of breaking that cycle is to encourage parents and children to play the game together, so that parents can assess the game for themselves.  This has more benefits than just keeping marketers honest.  When parents share any media experience, but especially gaming, behavioral and cultural models from the parents naturally pass to their children (3).

The flip side is that games which are fun and effective for children, but which don’t make an effort to be seen as ‘useful’ to parents or teachers don’t do well in the marketplace.  This has become a stumbling block especially for modern games which teach subjects you won’t see on a report card.  Things like ‘computational thinking’ and ’21st century skills’ are difficult to pin down, and hard to justify for an educational community so obsessed with assessment.  That’s why you might hear that a new game is ‘common-core aligned.’  This assures teachers and parents that progress in the game will ‘count’ towards their formal schooling.

Another approach might be to try to rely on the ‘nag-factor’ that motivates so much of the toy and game industry, but unless the game developer is confident that their game can stand out on its own merits among a sea of entertainment-only games, this is a difficult direction to go in.  It’s definitely not the safe choice.

In my own work on Codemancer, I am taking a wait-and-see attitude.  I’ll be launching a Kickstarter in the near future.  Based on who my backers will be, I’ll have to make decisions about where my audience is, and how I can communicate with them.  I hope you’ll join the experiment.

I’m Rob Lockhart, the Creative Director of Important Little Games.  I’m currently building Codemancer, a game that teaches the magic of code.  I’m also available for contracting as a designer and developer of games for learning.  If you were to follow me on twitter, I’d be grateful.