GoodTeacher
Please note that this game bears a tight relationship to the Game-a-Day from yesterday, Synesthesia. I’d recommend playing or reading about that game first.
This game illustrates what I believe are sound teaching principles.
First, please note that at a mechanics level, this game is 100% identical to Synesthesia. It is quite different, however, in one very important way: GoodTeacher creates an environment conducive to learning, rather than simply testing the player on a new concept after putting unstructured resources in front of him/her.
These two games present a problem that I’m fairly certain most players haven’t previously mastered, and it’s also a problem that cannot be easily reduced to a simpler one. This is to prevent players from “cheating” at these games by just mapping it mentally into something already known. These two properties are an essential part of how this experiment was formulated, and without it, we could only explore past or high level problem solving, and the discussion could not focus on learning.
As an important game design distinction, this game is not easier than Synesthesia. The mechanics and tuning for these two games are all the same. The only difference is in what type of environment each game establishes to facilitate learning.
My theory is that not only will a player score higher in GoodTeacher, but because of differences in how learning is facilitated, if someone spends time playing GoodTeacher that player will be able to turn around and immediately perform better in Synesthesia. The opposite is rather unlikely to hold true.
The following qualities make this game a more effective teacher:
- Positive feedback. While on target, a hum noise indicates success, and the cursor gets a white circle around it. When doing the right thing, immediate feedback is delivered as confirmation that it’s right. Coaches, parents, teachers and managers without a clear vision of what they’re asking for can come across as “I don’t know what I want, but I know it when I’ll see it,” and this physical metaphor makes a physical argument for why that philosophy is fundamentally broken. Figuring out which way to go from a “Wrong position” message is futile, whereas figuring out which way to go from a “Right position” cue only requires getting a sense of what direction to move in to stay in a good spot (which is communicated by the shifts in background color).
- No distraction. Judgement isn’t constantly in the player’s face. The score won’t show up until the round ends. The health bar is invisible. Like the other game, the player loses health twice as fast if moving too far from target. That may sound like it gives the player “more” information, but why should that matter, given that the goal is to stay on top of the color’s position?.
- Articulated big picture. See those gradients that appear between matches? Those are the positions corresponding to every color that the background can change to. Where is Orange from Purple? Down and to the right.
- A chance to practice in a situation that realistically reproduces testing conditions. During the time between rounds, the safe area slides about in exactly the same way that it does during gameplay. It waits for the mouse to enter it before moving to the next spot, then it does a quick slide to a new random position; there’s now have visibility on how this invisible safe region moves during the examination.
- The crutch (visible safe radius) barely sticks around long enough to know its there. It’s only being used to establish (A.) that the circle’s starting position is carrying over from the time between rounds and (B.) the size of the safe zone is reasonably large. There’s never temptation to play using the crutch, because it often won’t even last until a single pivot. In this way, the player is encouraged to pay attention to the background color as the primary guide from the start, and the player is therefore more likely to get a feel for the colors and their relative positions.
Granted, this task is still hard. It legitimately requires new learning, including figuring out a way to internalize the position-color mapping, gaining a tacit sense for how quickly the circle moves between points, and generally staying on top of what amounts to an invisible circle.
I literally played this game for an hour and a half to prove to myself that it’s possible to learn and get better at playing it. Of course it turns out that it’s an entirely learnable oddity - if a circus bear can ride a bicycle, then pretty much anyone ought to be able to practice and develop this skill if they set out to do so (hopefully involving less electric shock than circus animal training). Just be warned going into it that delving into the full meaning and purpose of this game and its cousin Synesthesia may require more time investment than, say, Steak.
I believe that what is presented here is a considerably smarter way to train the player in something new than simply testing them on it, as most of my prior Game-a-Day projects have done.
It’s time for me to get smarter about these projects…
Playing this is good practice for the exam: Synesthesia.