Unlocking Games
26 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 7 years ago -A show about social impact games and how they provide a new way to explain the things you care about. Every week we cover how a game applies (or misses) the lessons of our work and research in instructional design and user experience. You'll always learn practical tips applicable to your own work. We're both lifelong gamers with a deep love of both classic and modern games - we know what works and what doesn't.
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Episodes
Episode 26: Being Big Brother in Orwell
April 03, 2017 02:19 - 33 BytesFirst, an important note: This will be our last episode for a while. Brandon and I have both developed outside commitments that keep us from spending the time to do more episodes right. We might be back someday! But please enjoy this and each of our past episodes - we're proud of each one, and I think they'll still be relevant down the line. To anybody who has ever listened to an episode: I sincerely thank you. We're also releasing this episode outside of our normal schedule, because there...
Episode 25: We Wanted to Be Chicago
March 31, 2017 02:17 - 41 BytesReleased in early February, We Are Chicago is a serious game with serious goals: to put players in the shoes of a teenager amid the problems of Chicago's South Side. As Aaron you navigate the landscape of gangs, high school, family dynamics, and a part-time job. Structured almost identically to a Telltale game, you are presented with dialog choices in sometimes difficult situations. But for us, the game didn't live up to its lofty goals. Bugs, strange narrative choices, and some fundament...
Episode 24: Getting Punched by Interesting People in This War of Mine
February 17, 2017 02:15 - 53 BytesThe game is more than two years old and based on an event from the 90s, but This War of Mine still feels fresh and relevant. This War of Mine drops you in the middle of a city under siege. But you're not a well-equipped well-trained super-soldier packing the latest gadgets. You're a civilian, just trying to make it to the next morning. This is more Survivalist Sims than Call of Duty. Developers 11 Bit Studios set out to re-create the experience of the '92-'96 siege of Sarajevo, but it's...
Episode 23: Naked in the Desert on the Migrant Trail
February 03, 2017 02:14 - 35 BytesWith immigration and a border wall in the news this week, it's a good time to look at 2013's The Migrant Trail. Released as a tie-in for Marco Williams' documentary The Undocumented, The Migrant Trail is a browser-based game where you're in the shoes of either an undocumented immigrant attempting to cross the Arizona border, or a border patrol agent on the lookout for border crossers. If you've played Oregon Trail, you know how the basic mechanics work. You select a person to attempt crossi...
Episode 22: Freezing Rain and Dysentery on the Voter Suppression Trail
January 20, 2017 02:12 - 30 BytesWelcome back to season two! We're slightly shifting focus to social impact games: games that explore social issues like elections, climate change, homelessness, and immigration. Each episode will evaluate the effectiveness of a different game. What was it trying to accomplish? Did it work? Our goal isn’t to take a stance on the issues or evaluate the accuracy of the games, but to examine how effective their design is at achieving their goals. We'll draw on the theories and ideas we tal...
Episode 21: Agents and Avatars in Final Fantasy XV
January 06, 2017 02:10 - 47 BytesMany games put you in the role of someone else. It's right in the name of at least one genre: Role-Playing Game. We identify with each of these avatars to varying degrees. It's hard to feel much of a connection with Pac-Man, but Link and Chrono were much easier to map onto ourselves. What did we take away from that mapping? What does current research say about how we relate to our avatars? This week Brandon introduces theories about how we connect with games' avatars, then we look at Fina...
Episode 20: Putting Console Controllers on Your Resume
December 30, 2016 02:09 - 36 BytesWe’ve talked often before about how games can use a GUI to teach you a skill or task useful in real life. But is another angle on this idea true too? Is expertise using the buttons on a console controller transferable to actual job skills? Militaries around the world certainly seem to think so. More broadly, it might make sense to design interfaces around skills and aptitudes that users have already learned elsewhere. Gamers often learn how to use a controller at a very young age, w...
Episode 19: Boom, Headshot!
December 23, 2016 02:07 - 24 BytesIt’s not often there’s breaking news in the world of academic articles on gaming, but a potential retraction of an article is worth talking about. A 2014 study called “Boom, Headshot! Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy†concluded that playing games with a gun-shaped controller, even briefly, will make the player much more accurate at shooting a real gun. That study went on to be cited in policy documents and the news, but there’s just one pr...
Episode 18: The Power of Not Believing in Yourself: Part 2 (Self-efficacy and Bloodborne)
December 16, 2016 02:06 - 33 BytesLast week we talked about self-efficacy, particularly how it relates to the high difficulty of the Dark Souls series. But Dark Souls actually goes against lots of advice about the relationship between self-efficacy and performance. It turns out there’s also controversy about giving rewards just to build self confidence or self-efficacy. Should we all get trophies for participation? Is that really helpful in the long run? Bloodborne give us another example to look at. This week we talk abo...
Episode 17: The Power of Not Believing in Yourself – Part 1 (Self-efficacy and Dark Souls)
December 09, 2016 02:04 - 37 BytesHow good are you at Dark Souls? Or put another way: What's your perception of your related self-efficacy? The Dark Souls series is hard. Really, really hard. We're just preparing you: You'll die often, in new and interesting ways. So why do players stick with it? In the 1970s, psychologist Albert Bandura developed four factors important to achieving high levels of self-efficacy: Performance Accomplishment: doing something well once means you'll feel ready to do it well again in the fut...
Episode 16 – Accessibility is Better for Everyone
December 02, 2016 02:03 - 51 BytesBen Heck's clever customization of an Xbox One controller for one-handed use.[/caption]The word “Accessibility†might bring to mind ramps, braille, and other physical world accommodations. Those are important, but the concepts extends to games and other digital media too. Sometimes it might even be a practical market share consideration: By some measurements 20% of gamers have a disability, and 8% of all men are colorblind. Making something more accessible has side benefits too - I kno...
Episode 15 – Synthesizing and Salvaging Discovery Learning
November 25, 2016 01:46 - 30.8 MBHappy Thanksgiving! If you’re looking for an escape from the post-turkey awkward conversations, check out the conclusion of our series on Discovery Learning. In our previous two episodes, we examined the positives and negatives of discovery learning. But what’s the takeaway - is it a good or bad idea? Of course it’s more complicated than that: A combination of discovery learning and expository learning is the way to go. By providing feedback and scaffolding as students work through pr...
Episode 14 – Adventure Games and Discovery Learning Gone Crazy
November 18, 2016 01:44 - 38 BytesDiscovery learning remains very popular today, BUT! All is not well in the land of self-guided education. Every time the research catches up to discovery learning and starts to question how well it works, the name changes to aliases like problem-based learning, experiential learning, constructivist learning, etc. Pure discovery learning leads to frustration and misconceptions. Often all the effort of learners gets devoted to surface-level trappings instead of deeper mastery. Lots of the lit...
Episode 13 – Discovery Learning in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter
November 11, 2016 01:43 - 26 BytesThe Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a 2014 all-around spooky game that doesn't hold your hand. There's even a note at the beginning stating that you're on your own. You're expected to learn as you go, figuring out not only how complex puzzles work but also sometimes the fact that you're being confronted with a puzzle at all. That approach matches up quite nicely with the theory of discovery learning. In that framework, learners are expected to figure out underlying concepts on their own, throug...
Episode 12: User Testing and Moral Choices in the Bioshock Series
November 04, 2016 01:41 - 38 BytesBioshock is one of the most critically lauded games of all time. Released in 2007, today it still holds a place in Metacritic’s top 25 games ever. The game’s story, all about an underwater city that fell victim to a mix of Objectivist thinking and superpowers, is still largely hailed as an unusually mature experience among games. But does it deserve that praise? And did Bioshock: Infinite improve on anything when it showed up in 2013? This week we talk about Bioshock’s approach to mo...
Episode 11: Metagaming and Knowledge Management
October 28, 2016 01:46 - 44.4 MBInstead of examining one game in detail, this week the broader concept of metagaming caught our attention. From Dungeons & Dragons to Tekken to League of Legends, tons of games can be played at a meta level. There’s so much information about games out there, and whether you take it into account can make or break your play style. It’s not always looked at kindly, but metagaming is a powerful tool. Players of card games like Netrunner have built elaborate lists of potential card combina...
Episode 10: Managing Expectations for No Man’s Sky
October 21, 2016 01:33 - 31.9 MBWe made it to episode 10! Double digits! Released in August, No Man's Sky was one of the most hyped new games of 2016. Promotional materials and press coverage promised 18 quintillion planets to fly your spaceship to, and innumerable things to do on and around each destination. Gamers got those 18 quintillion planets on launch day, but not much else. No Man's Sky is a perfect case study in why you shouldn't inflate expectations about a product or service, but also a lesson in how not to ha...
Episode 09: Incentives and Emotional Impact in Papers, Please
October 14, 2016 01:23 - 44.1 MBThis week we concluded our three week Arstotzkan travelogue with a look at how Papers, Please handles incentives and emotional impact. The game has an unusually subtle approach to morality and choices, and avoids Mass Effect style extreme polarized choices between good and evil. How does this all tie in to incentivizing performance improvement? What about Empathy, Narrative, and Intrigue? We cover a lot of ground this week. Papers, Please is available on PC, Mac, Linux, and iPad. At the tim...
Episode 08: User Experience in Papers, Please
October 07, 2016 01:10 - 34.4 MBAfter our discussion of Papers, Please’s lessons in instructional design, this week we found the game’s interesting and sometimes counterintuitive applications of user experience and design principles. There’s friction in almost everything you do in this game, but why isn’t that annoying? And just how does Papers, Please handle abstracting analog objects into digital representations? Why did we keep playing despite such a high cognitive load? This is our second episode of a three-p...
Episode 07: Instructional Design in Papers, Please
September 30, 2016 01:07 - 34 BytesIn Papers, Please players step into the shoes of a border control agent faced with increasingly byzantine rules to admit or deny entry into Glorious Arstotzka. Each game-day presents you with new restrictions on what paperwork to check. The difficulty ramps up slowly but surely, and by the end of the game you’re adeptly cross-referencing 4 or 5 documents at one time in purposely limited screen real-estate. Papers, Please somehow manages to make bureaucracy fun, in part due to a remarkab...
Episode 06: Communication Training via Witness
September 22, 2016 15:12 - 14.2 MBWitness, a cooperative crime-solving mystery board game, is on our minds. In Witness, each player knows different facts about the case. Gameplay revolves around whispering clues to each other in an effort to piece everything together. It’s so clearly applicable to communications training and working in cross-functional teams that Witness doesn’t just provide lessons - it might actually be useful as a game played during training. Show Notes & Links: Witness Shut Up & Sit Down’s...
Episode 05: Onboarding in Super Mario Maker
September 15, 2016 15:09 - 25.2 MBSuper Mario Maker, a game for the Wii U, could probably support entire books about the approaches and design choices it reflects. It’s a complex level creator for classic side-scrolling Mario games. Anybody can use 72 different pieces in infinite combinations to build the Mario level of their dreams (or nightmares). Imagine being dumped into that playground with no structure or rules. Without guidance and constraints, figuring out how to design fun and challenging levels could easily be...
Episode 04: Cooperative Learning Principles in Pandemic Legacy
September 07, 2016 15:05 - 27 BytesBrandon introduces Pandemic Legacy and its applications of cooperative learning principles in this week’s shorter “lockpick" episode. Pandemic Legacy is a collaborative board game that takes a serialized approach to gameplay. Players work together to stop the spread of diseases around the world, and consequences of decisions made during one game carry forward to the next time. Pandemic and Pandemic Legacy are available wherever finer board games are sold. Show Notes & Links: The Stat...
Episode 03: Experiential Learning and Text-Based Training in Mr Robot: Exfiltration
September 01, 2016 15:01 - 21 BytesIn a smaller “lockpick" episode, we take a look at the new awkwardly named game Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n. The game (available for iOS and Android) pretends to be a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Set in the world of the TV show Mr. Robot, you take on the role of a hacker specializing in social engineering. It’s a choose your own adventure style experience where you decide whether and how to blackmail and coerce your way into systems. Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n s...
Episode 2: Gone Home
August 25, 2016 14:52 - 62 BytesThis week we discuss the UX and Instructional Design potential of Gone Home, 2013’s 12th highest rated PC game on MetaCritic and the 2014 Games for Change Game of the Year. It’s also an excellent walking simulator. Gone Home is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Show Notes & Links: An Application of Bloom’s Taxonomy to the Teaching of Business Ethics This American Life Episode 584: For Your Reconsideration Testing Theories of Attitude Change With Online Panel Field Experiments G...
Episode 1: Life Is Strange
August 08, 2016 02:17 - 40.5 MBIn our inaugural episode, we talk about elements of Instructional Design and User Experience that caught our attention in Life Is Strange. The first episode of Life Is Strange is free to play on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Steam. Show Notes & Links: Cathy Moore's Training Scenarios Building Expertise, by Ruth C. Clark Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain Elizabeth Loftus' work Don't Make Me Think, by Steve Krug