Video Game Design: Educational Game Psychology in a Nutshell

Game psychology, in a nutshell, is about reward and punishment.  The Paranoia XP rulebook says it best.

If you reward players for doing something you like, they will do more of that.

If you punish players for doing something you don't like, they will do less of that.

 Applied to video game, this generally means, if you want your players to keep playing your game, reward them for it.  Applied to educational games though, the meaning is much less clear.

In educational video games, the above psychological truth is applied to only one facet of the game.  "something you like" is construed to mean learning and solving problems related to the educational goal of the game.  "something you don't like" is applied only to failure to correctly solve the problems presented.  The game generally rewards success with points, a good grade, some visual recognition of the student's success, or even actual game play in a non-educational element of the game.  The reason educational games are, for the most part, an epic failure is that they miss at least two other facets.

In non-educational games, the reward/punishment psychology is applied to the game itself, to encourage players to keep playing the game.  You reward the player for playing the game and progressing in the game, because you want the player to keep playing your game.  Most educational games miss this motivational facet entirely, putting great effort into rewarding players for success in the educational element of the game, but ultimately not motivating them to actually want to play it in the first place.  An educational game that cannot keep players engaged is worthless, no matter how good the educational aspect of the game is.

The educational aspect of an educational game is always viewed by the game designers as the "something" in the above quote.  From the point of view of educators and parents, education is the "something" that they want to encourage students to do more of, but educators and parents are not the target audience of educational games.  Students are the target audience, and designing a game without focusing on the target audience almost always ends in failure.  If you don't believe this, look at educational games.  The fact is, the educational aspect of the game is not just the something we want players to do.  It is also a reward or punishment, and when we apply this to motivation to play the game, it becomes crystal clear why there are almost no decent educational games.

The educational aspect of most educational games is the "work" portion of the game, without any fun.  We hope to motivate students to work through the educational portion of the game, so that they can learn what is being taught and gain some skill in the subject.  We do this by rewarding them for their successes.  Unfortunately, this is not what the players see.  The players don't see the work as the thing that they have to do to earn the reward.  They see it as a punishment for playing the game.  When we punish people for playing our games, they don't want to play those games.  If we cannot see beyond our idealized version of how the game aught to be played, through the eyes of the players, our target audience, we will miss the fact that our games are awful, because we are using learning, which should be fun, to punish the players for playing the game, and in the end we will find that we have alienated our target audience and caused them to hate learning, which is the opposite of our goal.

When making a game for any purpose besides entertainment, it is essential to understand both our target audience as well as the psychological ecosystem created by our game.  If we lose sight of the primary goal of any successful game, to engage players and motivate them to continue playing, it does not matter how good or effective our game is at its stated goal, it cannot be successful, because a game that no one wants to play cannot have a positive impact on anyone.

There are three essential facets to the above quote when designing educational games:

1. Reward the players for playing the game.  This should be the first goal for every game.  If no one wants to play your game, it cannot benefit anyone (except, perhaps, as an example of what not to do).
2. Do not let the educational element of the game become a punishment for players.  If the educational element becomes a punishment, it won't matter if people play your game either, because it will just make them hate learning and hate the subject you are trying to teach.  It does not matter if your players come away knowing math or reading or anything, if they hate it so badly they never want to use it again.
3. Reward players for trying to solve your educational problems, and reward them more for success.  Don't punish them for failure.  The time lost on a failed attempt is already punishment enough, and one of the strongest motivators for playing games is that the cost of failure is low.  Don't make it worse, especially in a game that may already be less motivating than you might want it to be.

These are in order of importance.  A game that does not satisfy #1 has no value, because no one wants to play it in the first place.  An educational game that does not satisfy #2 harms the education of the student, instead of improving it.  An educational game that does not satisfy #3 probably does not satisfy #2 or #1, and even if it does, it is not going to be as effective as it could be, because it does not encourage the player's brain to consider the value of the information to be high enough to store.

This is educational game psychology in a nutshell.  Making effective educational games is not horribly difficult.  In fact, it only requires the same mentality that making successful non-educational games does, with a few extra priorities below the most important one.