The first learning game I worked on professionally back in 2008 was called Gamestar Mechanic. Gamestar is designed to teach elementary- and middle school-aged kids about games and game design. It originally grew out of work by some of the leading games and learning researchers of the time – folks like Jim Gee, Alex Games, Robert Torres and, in particular, Katie Salen for those of you who know the field – and the core pedagogy of the game involved thinking about a game as a system. I was fortunate to get to work on Gamestar as my first commercial game project for many reasons, but especially because the idea of thinking about a game as a system – and the particular framework Gamestar uses for doing so – turned out to be a really useful lens for someone new to the industry.
This podcast is about digital learning games, but over this episode and the next one, I’m going to cover two non-digital learning games… in fact two non-digital educational games in the sense of being designed for educational purposes, as I discussed in Episode 1. I want to do this because I think as learning games, each of these games is interesting in its own right, as is the contrast between them. But I also want to use these two games as a way of introducing the games-as-a-system perspective: plus a few other concepts I’ll be referring to throughout the series as we deconstruct and analyze digital learning games. In my experience teaching game design, I found that introducing these concepts in real-world games, rather than videogames, made things clearer, so I figured that’s what I’d do on the podcast, too.
By the way, I had originally planned on covering these two games in single episode, and I even mentioned that in Episode 1. But I decided it was better to stick with the “one game per episode” approach I have planned for the rest of the series. Plus the podcast gods tell me shorter episodes are better. On deck this time is a game I mentioned in passing in Episode 1: Snakes and Ladders.
Snakes and Ladders, or, as it’s more commonly known in America from the version Milton Bradley first released in 1943, Chutes and Ladders (I guess we’re not as keen on snakes here in the States as our friends across the pond). I’m betting most of you know this game, but in case you don’t, I’ll provide a quick overview:
Snakes and Ladders is board game for two to four players. The game board consists of a fixed track of 100 spaces with the starting space at the bottom of the board and the finish at the top. When her turn comes around, a player rolls a six-sided die and then moves her piece that many spaces forward along the fixed path towards the goal. But the gameboard also features the snakes (or chutes) and ladders that give the game its name. The chutes and ladders provide “shortcuts” along the path, allowing the player to skip over some number of spaces depending on the length of the chute or ladder. If a player finishes her turn on the bottom end of a ladder, she automatically advances to the top, skipping over the spaces in between and getting that much closer to the goal. If she finishes her turn at the top of a chute, she automatically slides backward to an earlier point along the path, skipping over the spaces in between and getting farther from the goal. Under ordinary rules, if a player rolls a six, she completes her turn and rolls again. At the end of a turn, play passes to the next player, and the first player to reach the final space on the path wins.
Even if you know Snakes and Ladders, you might have been surprised to hear that it’s and educational game. But it turns out that Snakes and Ladders originated as an educational game in India, where it was known as Moksha Patam. We’re not quite sure how old Moksha Patam is because the game boards were traditionally made of decorated cloth, so we only have surviving examples from the 17th Century onward. What we do know is that Moksha Patam developed as a sort of educational allegory rooted in Hindu philosophy. The fixed path players move along is meant to represent the karmic journey. The ladders represent traditional virtues like humility and generosity, while the snakes or chutes represent vices like anger and lust. The number of ladders is traditionally a little less than the number of chutes (9 versus 10 in the modern commercial version), which serves as a reminder that the way of virtue is less common than the way of vice. The game is meant to teach an object lesson: acting virtuously moves one forward on the path to attaining spiritual liberation – or moksha – while acting viciously will lead one towards spiritual imprisonment and a lower form of existence: like living as a snake.
This is all probably news to you if you’ve only ever played the modern, sanitized version of the game featuring images of cheerful children on a playground. But even the earliest Westernized versions of the game from when it was brought to England in the 1890s replaced the Hindu virtues and vices with Victorian virtues like Thrift, Penitence and Industry and vices like Indulgence, Disobedience and Indolence. In short, Snakes and Ladders was designed as a moral and philosophical education game. More on that later, but first, let’s break the game down. Here comes the systems thinking way of dissecting a game I mentioned at the top of the episode.
Whether educational or not, we can think about Snakes and Ladders and other games as a kind of system. Like all man-made systems, games are made up of elements that work together to achieve a purpose. In the case of games, that purpose is to provide a fun experience to the player, and in the case of learning games, a fun and educational one.
I think about game systems as having six elements. I mentioned of them in Episode 1.
Rules are the specifications or restrictions that define what is and is not part of the game and what is and is not permitted of players. This includes the game’s formal ruleset: things like rolling a six in Snakes and Ladders granting you a bonus roll. But it also often includes things beyond the formal ruleset. For instance, gravity is a rule that governs many real-world sports, as well as videogames that include physics simulations.
We’ve also encountered goals: the outcomes a player is trying to achieve. Goals can involve achieving a single, well-defined win condition, like being the first to reach the finish in Snakes and Ladders. Sometimes they involve some other sort of achievement, for example collecting a certain number of points. And other times, the goal of a game might just be not to lose. Game designers love to talk about Tetris in this respect because it doesn’t have a win condition. No player has ever won Tetris: every Tetris game ever played has resulted either in a loss or the player abandoning the game.
Part of what makes games enjoyable is that achieving the goals is non-trivial: games involve challenge, our third element, which, in this context, refers to the things that make it difficult for the player to achieve the goals, or that at least contribute to the possible that he might lose. Challenge may come from the game’s inherent design – like the challenge posed by the risk of landing on a snake in Snakes and Ladders – or, in multiplayer games, may come from the difficulty introduced by competing against other players.
This one element is sometimes taken for granted, but games also have space. A game’s space is the portion of the world – the real world or a virtual one in the case of videogames – where the game takes place and where its rules apply. For Snakes and Ladders, this is the physical game board, as well as, say, the table it’s placed on and the chairs the players are sitting on around it. In a digital game, this might the Mushroom Kingdom or the fictional continent of Tamriel.
That brings us to our final two elements: components and mechanics. Components are the entities, or “nouns” of the game. The stuff that populates the game’s world. The grid squares on the board, the snakes, the ladders, the game pieces, the die and the players themselves are all components of Snakes and Ladders.
If components are the nouns of the game, then mechanics are the verbs. They’re the things you, as a player, do when you play the game. If you’re wondering if something is a game mechanic, a useful test is to see if you can find a literal verb expressing the mechanic that completes the sentence “the player [blank]s,” as in “the player runs,” “the player jumps,” “the player solves a puzzle.” If you can, it’s probably a mechanic, and you can go ahead and convert it to the gerund form – like “running” or “jumping” – if you want to express it in game designer lingo. “Moving,” “rolling a die,” “climbing a ladder,” and “descending a chute” are all mechanics of Snakes and Ladders.
Of these six elements, most game designers would agree that mechanics hold a special place. I’d go as far as to call them the “crown of the elements.” One of the things that sets games apart from other forms of art and entertainment is that games are an in active medium. You can be engaged very deeply and actively – intellectually and emotionally -- while reading a novel or listening to a symphony, but you don’t have agency in how the work itself unfolds. That’s not true of games. With games, you, the player cause the experience to unfold as it does by doing stuff. What you do is central to the experience, and so it makes sense that what the game’s designer expects and requires you to do would be central to the game’s identity.
Another way in which the centrality of mechanics is reflected in the way we think about games is the term core mechanic. Not only are mechanics essential to what makes games games, but there’s usually one (or a very small set) of mechanics that are so central to a particular game that that mechanic defines the game’s identity. That mechanic is what we call the “core mechanic.” Sometimes core mechanics go on to define whole genres: the core mechanic of jumping from platform to platform in games like Super Mario Bros. gave us the platformer genre.
I mentioned the mechanics of Snakes and Ladders a moment ago: moving, dice rolling, climbing and sliding. So which one is core? I think they’re all plausible candidates. As a player, your “mission” is to move your piece to the finish, so moving seems like a strong contender. Climbing and sliding are directly related to the game’s signature features: the ladders and snakes. Those things are right in the name! So maybe they’re it.
But I’d argue for dice rolling as the core mechanic. Why do I say that? Well, at least when I think about the play experience of Snakes and Ladders, the thing that stands out for me is that it’s just about as pure a game of chance as you could possibly have. The players’ actions – and the game’s outcome -- are completely determined by the ruleset, the fixed, linear layout of the gameboard and the random outcomes of the dice rolls. There is zero opportunity whatsoever for player choice. The dice roll is the embodiment of that lack of choice, and that’s why rolling strikes me as the core mechanic.
Some additional support for the dice roll interpretation comes from the philosophy behind the game itself. Remember when I was talking about Snakes and Ladders as a sort of allegorical learning game? Well, it turns out the elements of Hindu philosophy the allegory is getting at are very much tied to the dice rolling mechanic. Unfortunately, the allegory’s lesson and meaning are a little hard to grasp, especially if, like me, you’re used to the Western way of thinking about virtue.
Western attitudes towards virtue tend to emphasize choice. People are seen as agents with the option of making good or bad choices in the face of moral dilemmas. To the extent you make the good choices, you’re virtuous or moral; to the extent you make the bad ones, you’re vicious or immoral.
If this is how you’re used to thinking about moral issues, I’m with you. But set that all aside for a second. Ignore the choice dimension and think just about the consequences. Another way conceptualize virtuous actions is that they are the ones that will tend to get you closer to some desirable end, like living in harmony with God’s plan or achieving eternal salvation in Christianity. Vicious actions do the opposite.
This is the perspective Snakes and Ladders is taking. It’s trying to embody the lesson that virtuous conduct brings you closer to moksha – spiritual liberation. Viscous conduct sets you backward on the path towards moksha, keeping you trapped in the karmic cycle of rebirth and incomplete self-actualization. The game isn’t intended as a lesson on how to be virtuous: it’s a lesson on the nature of virtue.
When you look at the game through this lens, you start to see many of the design choices in a new light. For instance, most Snakes and Ladders boards feature a snake that starts only a few spaces away from the final square. This reminds us that even at an advanced stage of our moral development, we are at the risk of sliding backwards. Even the fact that the numbers of snakes and ladders are nearly evenly matched has an allegorical purpose. Author Salman Rushdie put it this way:
“All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil.”
All of this is why I think the pure chance mechanic of dice rolling suits the game well: well enough to be the core mechanic. If the game included any player choice at all, it would risk undermining the game’s focus on the nature of virtue and spiritual freedom. And it would probably risk players interpreting the game as an object lesson in how to be a good little girl or boy.
By the way, none of that is to say that the game, or Hindu philosophy, is denying or trying to minimize the role of personal responsibility in morality. There wouldn’t be much point in educating people about the relationship of virtue and vice to spiritual liberation if you weren’t ultimately faced with choices between good and bad paths. It’s just that this particular game is about imparting a different moral lesson.
This brings us to the last thing I want draw out of Snakes and Ladders: just as games have mechanics, so to does learning. And I don’t mean this just in the sense of learning games having mechanics, though that’s also true. I mean that all learning has mechanics. There are verbs to what teachers and learners do. Lecturing is a mechanic. Giving or taking a quiz is a mechanic. Telling an allegorical story is a mechanic, and, as we have seen, that’s the core learning mechanic of Snakes and Ladders.
As we look at different learning games during the series, I’m going to talk about game mechanics, learning mechanics and the relationship between the two. When you talk about game mechanics, you can have opinions about whether the mechanic itself is fun or engaging; or whether it is well executed in a particular game. If I put on my critic’s hat, I’d argue that the major weakness of Snakes and Ladders is that the mechanics of dice rolling and moving in the complete absence of player choice don’t make for a particularly engaging gameplay experience. History and philosophy content aside, this is among the reasons why the Westernized version of Snakes and Ladders is marketed as a game for young children: as a sort of developmental game that’s a fun enough training ground to introduce kids to the world of board games but that’s unsatisfying for people above the age of five or six.
All this also applies to learning mechanics. Allegorical storytelling is a venerable learning mechanic: teachers from Plato to Jesus have famously used it and so have lots of learning games. Sometimes that mechanic is used effectively and is a good choice for the circumstances. Sometimes not so much: in the Bible, Jesus gets frustrated that his disciples aren’t getting the point of one of his parables. Jesus scolds the disciples for being dense, but as the comedian Julia Sweeney observed, maybe don’t teach in parables then…
With learning games, we can also look at the relationship of game mechanics and learning mechanics. One lesson that’s stuck with from making learning games is that the best learning games often have a strong alignment between their game mechanics and their learning mechanics. And the opposite is usually also true: the less the learning mechanics have to do with the game mechanics, the weaker the game – and the learning experience – usually are. I think Snakes and Ladders, considered as a learning game, does a pretty good job of aligning the two: it’s just that the game mechanics, qua game mechanics, are kind of meh.
For the time being, I’d say hold that theory about aligning game and learning mechanics as a provisional hypothesis. It’s a theme I’m going to return to throughout the series, so you can decide if you agree or not.
That wraps it up for this episode. Next time, we’ll take a look at an educational game that contrasts with Snakes and Ladders in almost every respect: one with lots of mechanics, tons of player choices, and, unlike the allegorical Snakes and Ladders, one that aims to deeply and realistically reflect its subject. Its development is not only deeply intertwined with 19th Century European politics, but is also the source of some of the most significant innovations in game design: innovations without which entire popular videogame genres wouldn’t be possible. It’s the “great-grandfather of wargames,” Kriegsspiel.
If you’re enjoying the podcast, be sure to check out the website at historyoflearning.games. You can find transcripts and links to get in touch. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.