Instructional designers often face large amounts of important content that we know is useful to our learners. But one of the key challenges in our professional practice is how to most effectively present all of this learning material, without overwhelming the learner. Games are an incredible tool for instructional designers. They’re engaging, interesting, and make you want to play, opening up the learner to real learning in an active and meaningful way. However, designing games for learning can be a difficult challenge without the right approach. This is the first of a three-part series about the 3 things you should keep in mind when designing effective games for learning so that content and game-play work together to get the desired results.
Who is your learner?
You can see the popularity of games across age, gender, and ethnicity; everyone loves to play games on their phone, computer, or gaming device. However, not everyone finds the same types of games fun. What one person finds fun, another might find boring.
Take chess for example. This is a game that is highly focused on spatial awareness, strategy, and memorization. That is fun for a lot of people, but others may find it tedious or boring. Or a mobile game like Candy Crush, which can be considered either fun and engaging or boring and repetitive depending on your player. It’s important to keep your learner and their desires in mind.
When developing games we often design for ourselves and what we would find fun, rather than what the learner would engage the most with. To understand your learner, you need to find out what motivates them. Here is a list of motivators to consider when you’re working to identify what may or may not be important to your learner:
The motivators above will directly impact the game that you design for learning. For instance:
a learner that has a low desire for social contact might not like a multiplayer game
a learner who desires order might not enjoy an open-ended exploration game
a learner who values honor might be motivated by a role-playing game where the player is trying to make the best decision
Of course, designing the perfect game is an impossible task, because you can’t build an individualized game for each individual learner with structure, goals, and interactions that they would find the most fun. It’s just not realistic and feasible. However, you can look at the similarities between your learners, and then make choices that engage them the most at those intersections.
Here is an example to really emphasize the importance of answering the question: “Who is the learner?” Imagine you are employed by a property management company. In your position, you work with a lot of leasing consultants, and they tend to be very outgoing and motivated by competition, social contact, and status. So if if you are designing a game for this audience, you should lean toward a multiplayer game to address the competition/social contact motivators, and including a leaderboard to address the competition/status motivators. However, this approach would be the exact opposite of what you might personally find fun, especially if you desire order, honor, and independence. Competition, social contact and status might actually detract from learning, because you do not find them fun. So remember: you are not designing for yourself. You are designing for your learner.
Continue reading the second article in this 3-part series..
Related Articles For Further Reading
Overview of Accessibility Considerations for Instructional Designers
eLearning Graphic Design: Overview of how to deliver successful learning outcomes
How To Use The Situated Learning Model To Spark Spontaneous Learning
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