A long time ago I took some theatre classes. Amongst the different theories about how to get the best performance was the Meisner technique, which basically said “if you take the actor’s mind off of ‘acting’, they’re going to do it better.” You can see the reverse in action easily – just ask a friend if you can photograph them walking normally and revel in how self-consciousness destroys any sense of what “normal” or “good” is.
Incidental learning takes a similar tack. If the player is distracted from the educational content, that education is going to be better. Simple enough in concept, hard to do in practise. Something I discovered recently, though, is that something similar can happen in the process of game design, too. Whilst looking for optics applications I found the site for the Simulations at the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose simulations come very close to being games – and being fun games, for that matter.
The site has dozens of simulations, covering things like optics, electromagnetism – even chemistry. There’s a DC electricity simulator that shows you individual electrons and the path they take around circuits. An optics simulator that lets you move an object around, adjust a lens and see where that puts the projected image. A sim for solubility gives you a salt shaker, a bucket of water and lets you see how crystals form in dynamic equilibrium.
They’ve been produced to demonstrate the physical phenomenon they examine as clearly as possible – no backstory, no fancy graphics or exciting music. What they do have is a mechanic grounded in reality, which is always good, and enough control over the environment to test out what that mechanic is. Between this and the Automatic Game Design that Julian Togelius wrote about recently, we seem to be expanding the breadth of our approach to game design quite dramatically.
It doesn’t work perfectly, of course. At some point, a system has to be identified as a game and decisions need to be made to make it ‘fun’, but I was pleasantly surprised by how far a system could unintentionally come toward being a game. If you give some of the sims a whirl, though, you’ll see what I mean. On a number of occasions, I found myself thinking “Hey.. if you added [X], this would make a great game.” Do have a look, I highly recommend it.