Designing games for how we learn

Posted by Caroline.

I love trying new games. I’m constantly picking up new PDFs and strong-arming my friends and loved ones into learning them and playing with me. We’ve been doing this a bunch so far this year, and I’ve noticed that there are two main things that can get in the way of my learning a new game:

• A long explanation of all the various rules I may or may not need to use throughout the whole game. I try to stay engaged but boy oh boy am I spacing out after about 20 seconds.
• A big list of moves / prompts / stuff I’m expected to choose from as I’m playing, each with a sentence or two explaining what they are and how they work. I will not memorize these and I will be distracted trying to read them when it’s my turn to make up fiction.

In these moments I’m experiencing something I talk a lot about in my education work: cognitive overload. Very simply put, cognitive load refers to the amount of stuff you can manage in your working memory. The more moving parts a task has, the higher the cognitive load of that particular task is. And the higher the cognitive load, the lower the chance that the information will scoot over to your long-term memory. If you want people to learn and remember things, you need to make sure there isn’t too much information at a time, and you need to give them tools for reinforcing their learning.

Facilitators can help with this a little (by not info-dumping), but fundamentally I think it’s a game design challenge. With GMless games in particular, in addition to co-creating the fiction of the game, we are also co-navigating the game’s rules. In a lot of these games we’re building a setting, exploring identity, role-playing, crafting fiction, and negotiating awesome stories, all while learning and utilizing and explaining rules. It’s a lot for our working memories to process.

Reducing Cognitive Load

We can reduce some cognitive load around fiction creation by giving players choices in what they do on their turn (dictated scenes vs played scenes in Microscope, for example, or the three different moves in Epitaph), or around setting-building by giving players structured steps to build a world (like In This World, or the traditions in Downfall). Beyond specific mechanics, though, we need to think about how players learn and navigate games in general.

The easiest processes to learn are ones that are repeated a few times. In games these usually occur in “rounds”. I’ve been thinking of these as loops. A loop is a series of steps that are repeated and are performed the same way and in the same order each time. We start and proceed through the loop sequentially, following steps laid out in the text. We are able to quickly learn loops because they take advantage of one of my favorite study techniques: spaced repetition.

The hardest processes to learn are rare or one-off occurrences, things that players must actively inject into the game. I’ll call them invoked rules. These are rules that you need to either remember to do when you reach a fictional trigger, or rules that you can decide to invoke when you want to.

Loops and Invoked Rules

Most games have both of these. Let’s take Downfall as an example:

• Loop: Escalate the Flaw, two scenes (a subloop; we’ll get to subloops later), reflect.
• Invoked Rule: “But there’s a consequence” – triggered at player discretion when the Hero does something that you think requires a price.

You’ll notice that there’s only one invoked rule (“But there’s a consequence”). The core loop includes actions that I could have instead written as invoked rules (escalate and reflect). If I’d put those two other moves outside the loop, they would be easier to forget, and so they’d be less likely to happen at all. Putting them in the loop reduces the amount of things players need to learn and remember while they are making fiction, which makes the game smoother and more fun. Keeping processes in loops (and outside of scenes) also means we aren’t interrupting fiction to reference rules. Double fun!

The type of reinforcement that players get via loops would be called spaced repetition in the education sphere. Spaced repetition is what it sounds like: studying/learning the same bit of information over and over again at periodic intervals. It’s one of the most effective ways to move things into your long-term memory. For games, the more we can involve spaced repetition via loops, the more we can ease players’ cognitive loads and enable them to focus on playing the game rather than learning the game.

Let’s take a look at a more complex game, and one of my favorites: Kingdom. We have a core loop and three subloops, plus a few key invoked rules. The game takes advantage of spaced repetition by embedding invoked rules periodically throughout the loops:

• Core Loop: Declare crossroad, play scenes (subloop A), resolve crossroad (subloop B).
  • Subloop A: Scenes. Choose characters and situation, role-play, reactions.
  • Subloop B: Crossroad resolution. Review, role moves (decide, consequences, feelings), resolve crisis if necessary (subloop C), pass time if wanted
  • Subloop C: Crisis resolution. Show it, do stuff, vote, narrate fiction

• Invoked rules: Use role, fight or fix, overthrow, change role. (The rules remind you of these options during subloop A and subloop B)

Kingdom helps you learn and remember those invoked rules in a few ways. The most integral invoked rules in the game are the role moves, for example Perspective makes predictions during scenes. The game can run fine if you never activate any of the other invoked rules, but using your role is central to play.

Kingdom does three clever things around the role moves that makes them easier to hold in working memory. First, each role has (and is defined by) only one move, so it’s easy to remember when the move can be activated and what it does. Second, it reinforces the moves by building them into the loops in the scene instructions (subloop A in our example). If you’re Touchstone, for instance, at the start of each scene the facilitator should be reminding you that you can use your “show how the kingdom feels” power. Third, it reinforces it during crossroad resolution, as each role gets a chance to shine and tell us what happens to the kingdom.

The text you read during the crossroad resolution phase cleverly reminds you of all of the other invoked rules as well. For example, you get an opportunity to overthrow other characters and take their roles, or fight-or-fix someone else’s move. This reminder helps you learn and remember that you can use these moves in future rounds (not just in crossroad resolution). If you didn’t totally catch all the moves the first round, you’ll get them as you keep playing.

Design Takeaways

As game designers, one of the most helpful things we can do is try to keep invoked rules, loops, and subloops simple and clear. We can have as few invoked rules as are necessary for the purpose of the game. We can try to reinforce them through the loops so we aren’t info-dumping on players at the beginning of the game or giving them a big menu of things to read when they really want to be focusing on fiction.

Finding the most fundamental loops and invoked rules for your game to create the fullest embodiment of your vision is super challenging. For Marc and me, we are absolutely guilty of overloading early drafts of games with too many steps and options. Unfortunately it’s not enough to just trim those down – they all need to align to the game’s core purpose. And then they all need to be presented in a scaffolded way. It’s a lot of work!

But when I’m playing a game that has done that hard work, I have so much fun and appreciation for the writer who put it all together in a way that makes me feel like a rockstar when I play.