What’s the Point of a Game? Game Design Master Class

For most people, games are fun and a means to relax. But I think there is a very small category of games which blows most games out of the water in terms of value. And it’s a simple yet meaningful principle

Chapter 1: IMagine a watermill

So water can either flow down a river, or someone can put in work to build a watermill and can “harvest” energy from it. Someone can go to the gym and lift weights up and down, or carry heavy boxes for someone and create value through transportation. These examples aren’t completely the same but highlight the same general idea. Instead of doing something, you do something in a way that produces extra value through it’s side effect. Applied to a game, the idea is that instead of playing a game to learn game related things, you play a game to learn actually things. Or coming from the learn-motivational direction: The game is what motivates you to easily learn. Learning happens easily when it’s the side effect of a game. This is why it’s so easy for people to learn the ins and outs of games. Now the idea is to do this in such a clever way, that we can relax, have fun, and learn something valuable all at the same time

CHapter 2: examples

Minecraft. My favorite example, because everyone knows it, most people played it, and it actually does this so well that you learn multiple things at once. The obvious thing is creativity, building, constructing, 3d thinking etc. Valuable, and comes for free. You can be creative and live yourself out creatively. You also learn to move in a game. Get a sense for the mechanics. Creativity through creative visual crafting recipes. All good. But there is something much more valuable which you could learn as well – languages! Back when the game was new, it was only available in English, and so many young children from all over the world who were playing it were naturally learning English through it. Hundreds of Items, all with their English names, all recognizable via their icons. Within weeks you would get a solid basic English vocabulary of around a thousand words. That is incredible! But wait, there’s more. There were countless of mods which would add all sorts of things… and thereby more words to learn. There were intricate mods that let you craft airplanes, Create production facilities, automation and what have you. Giving you words of the incredibly specific and intricate things. But wait, there still is more. Nowadays, Minecraft is available in probably hundreds of languages. This is a double edged sword. On one hand, people can just play it in their native language and do not get this incredible effect anymore. On the other hand, this means that it can be used to more or less learn hundreds of different languages, simply by playing in that very language. There even is text to speech today which reads out the names of the items, so you can even practice hearing and essentially also speaking.

Now, we could engineer a game deliberately to create exactly this effect. It could use this general idea as a baseline (Crafting based game with it’s focus on diversity of things that can be crafted and intricate details). Then, things could be added such as slowly changing language.

Perhaps after you used an item a certain amount of time, the language for that item changes. This way it can be made sure that you actually know what it even is. Secondly, it could be possible that there is an item which gives you a translation. An ingame lookup. Thirdly, it might just display it in two languages in the first place.

There are many ways to smoothen out the initial time to not crash you right into a completely new language. It might also detect words that are very similar to your reference language, and change these out first.

This gives the general idea about how this whole thing could