I love video games. So do my students. And the more I play video games, the more I see parallels between great game design and great curriculum. I started thinking about this while watching an interview with Edumund McMillen, an independent video game designer most famous for his game Super Meat Boy. This is an excerpt from that interview that got me:
Interviewer: “This next question comes from my personal experience playing your games: Why do you make em’ so damn hard?”
Edmund McMillen: “I make my games so damn hard….I make my games hard because…..it’s important for things to be challenging to be rewarding. Very important. Life. Like, it’s the way life works. If everything was easy, you would never feel good about anything. It’s important to feel that sense of accomplishment in games. I think I’ve used the analogy before like, nobody goes and runs a race so they can...like….all tie. You know what I mean? You want to feel like you did something awesome, and in order to feel like that, stuff needs to challenging. You wana be a winner, and you want to feel like “I’m so cool, I did that!” And in order for that to happen, it can’t be artificial, it needs to be hard. That said, I try to make sure my games aren’t frustrating.
That’s applicable to a classroom. Kids hate school for a lot of reasons, some simple and some not, but one of the most important is that the work they do often feels trivial. When I give kids multiple choice questions based on a text or work problems from the book or quizzes based on the lecture, those tasks quickly become boring, trivial, and (most importantly) unrewarding. They start to feel like boxes to check off. What I need to do, instead, is create challenges in my classroom that feel rewarding when completed. These tasks need to be rewarding because: A. The student learned a new skill or new content they didn’t know before and B. It was really hard and, at the beginning, the student couldn’t do the skill or understand the content. To steal from McMillen’s philosophy, we want kids to feel like “I’m so cool, I did that!” In order to get there, things have to be genuinely difficult. The question becomes: How do I make my classroom challenging, but not frustrating? I think video games can help answer this.
After all, most kids hate school, but love video games. It seems advantageous to look at what video games are doing to make difficult tasks fun. I think their design principles apply directly to good curriculum & instruction.
1. Gamify Failure - Dark Souls
Kids need to learn how to fail if they are going to become life-long learners. That said, I haven’t done a very good job of making failure the centerpiece it needs to be if I’m going to actually, explicitly, teach kids how to fail in my class. Enter Dark Souls.
To put it lightly, Dark Souls is a hell of a game. It’s renowned as one of the most difficult yet groundbreaking games ever made. It drops you into a world with a very simple task: Ring two bells, one at the top of the world, one at the bottom. It explains almost nothing else besides the controls, which are very simple. There’s a button to swing your sword, a button to use your shield, a button to role/dodge, and a button to heal. Easy controls to learn, hard to master. Every new part of the world throws new enemies at you with different attacks, different damages, and different styles. You have to master those simple controls if you’re going to find the nearest bonfire to save the progress you’ve made. If you’re unable to make it to that new bonfire without dying, the game kicks you back to your previous bonfire. Almost always, the first time you encounter a new enemy (especially a boss), you will die. Often, you will die many times, forcing you to repeat sections of the map over and over. This is where the gamification of failure comes in. The best I’ve ever heard this summarized is by Mike Symonds in his criticism of a different game, Red Dead Redemption 2, for its sense of triviality on Polygon (I’ve bolded the parts that will apply to education). Part of his analysis on Dark Souls follows:
“These games are punishing in terms of difficulty, but that difficulty usually seems fair, despite the often cruel traps. The design team expects these traps to kill you the first time you encounter them, which is how you learn. They use that consequential loss to teach you about that area. That is Dark Souls’ most important mechanic: the act of dying itself. Developers in general are finding ways to make in-game death increasingly rare, as death is often a frustrating setback that wastes the player’s time by making them repeat meaningless tasks they’ve already mastered. People don’t like losing time once they’ve already accomplished something, especially if the task wasn’t enjoyable the first time around. But the developers of Dark Souls embrace death. You are resurrected at the last bonfire you used, and you have one opportunity to return to the place of your death and collect the souls you dropped. Since they use failure and repetition to teach you how to actually progress, this happens all the time. The goal is for you to learn the positions of traps and to master your enemies, their attacks, and the timing necessary to defeat them. Every boss feels like an impossibility, at first. But I master my countermoves and the weak points of the enemy until I can confidently beat them. It just takes time, and a lot of failure. I’ve never seen a game that’s better at gamifying my failure than Dark Souls. But what about the fact that these games rarely explain themselves to the player? Isn’t that frustrating? Nope! It’s all part of the incredible design of the game. Every nook and cranny is full of secret purpose and endless strangeness. The lore in these games is not only full of odd, macabre stories, but also unique opportunities and information to help you on your way. You can zoom past these odd corners of the game without knowing it, or you can explore them or go online and research the secrets. It’s all there to discover, and the way you discover these things, or miss them altogether, is part of the experience. I feel terror, confusion, and satisfaction when I remember these games. But I also feel the deepest sense of accomplishment I’ve ever had in a game. Those feelings wouldn’t exist without the initial difficulty and confusion that were purposefully placed into the game in order to elicit those reactions from players. “
That’s a lot to apply to the classroom here, but I’ll try to do it quickly. Take each bolded statement above and let’s apply it to a classroom:
A. “These games are punishing in terms of difficulty, but that difficulty usually seems fair.”
When I think about teachers I’ve worked with who have a reputation as being “the hard teacher” with students, it was usually because their class was arbitrarily hard. That usually related to the AMOUNT of work said teachers were requiring of the student rather than the actual academic difficulty of said work. Some teachers think that giving kids a lot of work = “being a tough teacher that you’ll learn a lot from”. I don’t buy that. To be difficult but fair, I think curriculum needs to come in very small doses. Just like Dark Souls, you take the world one small chunk at a time.
I think curriculum (depending on the content) should come one question/task at a time. But make that question difficult. I teach US History. This year, I want to plan lessons around one or two questions. For example, a lesson might center around “by the end of class, you need to be able to explain how the Emancipation Proclamation changed the strategy and intentions of the Civil War.” At the end of class, EVERY kid (aside from differentiated situations) will have to answer that question in short answer format. I think it has to be in short answer format, as multiple choice or True False often aren’t as difficult because they don’t get at the higher levels of Blooms Taxonomy that genuinlly lock in student understanding of content. Students need to be able to pull information out of their own brain, organize it, and convey it effectively. Being able to do that will build a genuine sense of understanding and, hopefully, an accompanying sense of accomplishment.. To speed that process up, I’m using Socrative.com to speed up student responses and feedback time. Socrative also allows students to learn from their failure, through their classmates, in seconds. More on this at the end of the post. Again though, I think difficult but fair in the classroom means fewer questions at a higher difficulty level. Simply requiring a massive amount of work doesn’t make a class difficult, it makes it frustrating and unfair.
B. “People don’t like losing time once they’ve already accomplished something, especially if the task wasn’t enjoyable the first time around. But the developers of Dark Souls embrace death…...They use consequential loss to teach you...”
Use my short answer question above. Say a kid answers it only partially correct. To me, that means they got it wrong. If we move one while a kid still has gaps in their understanding, those gaps will compound down the road. They need to be addressed in the moment. This means the student should be able to do the task again until they master it. The only consequence for not getting it right should be having to do it again. Not only that, the student should be rewarded if they have to do it multiple times.
This is just like Dark Souls. In it, the only punishment for failure (death) is the loss of souls you’ve collected in your previous life. You’re able to collect them if you can make it back to where you died, but if you die before you get there, you lose them forever. This is logical. If you’re not good enough to do what you did before (almost always caused by carelessness and rushing), you don’t deserve the souls you earned previously. At the same time, if you do make it back to where you died, you are rewarded with the souls of your previous life AND the souls you collected in your new one. In my classroom, I want to emulate this by giving kids points for their first response and, if their second response is better, adding the points from the first response to the second response. Once students reach X amount of growth points AND have answered the question fully, they can move on. More on how I plan to do this at the bottom of the post.
C. “Since they use failure and repetition to teach you how to actually progress, this happens all the time.”
Failure should be normal in a classroom. It’s a REALLY hard culture to develop, though, and I still haven’t done it as well as I want to….but I’m getting better. Failure should be so common that, when a kid gets a question wrong, they shouldn’t even really be frustrated. This, again, is Dark Souls inspired. At the beginning of Dark Souls, I was terrified to die because I didn’t want to lose my souls (they are used to improve your character). Part of this was because I’ve been conditioned that “dieing=failure” in games…. Just like kids have been conditioned to think “I got it wrong = I failed and I’m dumb.” But you start to die so much in Dark Souls that you quickly realize that it’s part of the game. In other words, it teaches you how to fail. How many classes really do that effectively? Very few, mine included. But I think a great classroom curriculum and culture makes failure a norm, just like Dark Souls. Again, more on the plan for this at the bottom.
D. “Every boss feels like an impossibility, at first. But I master my countermoves and the weak points of the enemy until I can confidently beat them. It just takes time, and a lot of failure.”
Asking an 8th grader at the beginning of a class period to explain, off the top of their head, what the Emancipation Proclamation was and how it changed the strategy and intention of the Civil War, with no previous instruction, would engender feelings of confusion and terror. It would “feel like an impossibility”. That feeling is important, because when the student is actually able to answer that question on their own (again, in short answer format), those old feelings of impossibility will be laughable. That will build real confidence in kids. It reminds me of one of my heros, Randy Paushe. In The Last Lecture, he says, “There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Self-esteem? There’s really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.” Dark Souls follows that maxim almost exactly. I think a good classroom should as well. The plan for this, again, is at the bottom.
E. “But what about the fact that these games rarely explain themselves to the player? Isn’t that frustrating? Nope! It’s all part of the incredible design of the game. Every nook and cranny is full of secret purpose and endless strangeness. It’s all there to discover, and the way you discover these things, or miss them altogether, is part of the experience.”
This one is hard, and it’s the one I struggle most with. As a teacher, I really want to start getting away from lecture of almost any kind. I want kids to have all the information presented to them that they need for a given class, very simple directions, then turn them loose to work at their own pace to understand it. That could be through a video on a laptop, a google form, a reading, etc. My job as a teacher is to guide them when they get stuck along the way (a “guide on the side” as they say). To me, this is what a classroom should look like in 2019, especially a tech infused classroom…..and as much as I say that, if you walk by my room on a given day, chances are you will see me standing at the front of the room talking for at least ⅕ of the class. I was taught the 5-Step lesson plan, my admins embrace it, I use it. Direct, explicit instruction is part of that equation. But as education evolves, I want to get towards self paced learning like that described above and in Dark Souls.
I think that, were I to actually teach this way, there would be push back on all sides. If I handed kids a reading, told told them they were going to have to answer a short answer question by the end of the hour, then turned them loose….I think they might embrace it at first. But when mistakes were made along the way, kids would complain, “you aren’t teaching me anything!” because I never stood at the front and explained things piece by piece. Administrators would likely agree, as would parents. But by continuing to use this outdated model, sometimes called the “sage on the stage”, I think we foster a lack of curiosity and a mental laziness in students. Video game makers get it. Their version of a “lecture” is the tutorial at the beginning of the game. They make tutorials simple and quick. Just enough to learn the basics, then off you go to play the game and learn by playing. Because that’s what kids want to do, they want to play! When we lecture in our classes, we make the tutorial the WHOLE GAME. The kids never get to “play”, which is really the ONLY thing they want to do. I found an educational framework on Twitter called The Modern Classroom Project that seems to fully embraces the “guide on side” framework by harnessing the full power of technology. I want to try to use this model for at least ONE of my units this year.
F. "I feel terror, confusion, and satisfaction when I remember these games. But I also feel the deepest sense of accomplishment I’ve ever had in a game. Those feelings wouldn’t exist without the initial difficulty and confusion that were purposefully placed into the game in order to elicit those reactions from players. “
This sentence speaks for itself in the classroom. If you want to be the “hard teacher”, this is the genuine way to do it. Through feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment engendered through tough-but-fair content that is genuinely challenging. You take something a kid can’t do on their own, distill it to a very small but challenging task, then guide them until they can complete it. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. Like Dark Souls. You don’t do it through piles of worksheets, homework, and penalizing kids for failure along the way. Okay, so that’s it for Dark Souls. Next post in on Super Meat Boy, the game that inspired this blog in the first place, but below are some tools to make the philosophies above a reality.
5 Strategies to Gamify Failure (Apply Dark Souls) in the Classroom
1. Ask A Question, Don’t List an Objective - It’s recognized as educational best practice to tell kids what the point of a lesson is right up front, usually by sharing the SWBAT or the criteria by which they will be measured, at the beginning of the lesson. I still want to do this again this year, but I want to reframe the learning objective as a question. I’ll ask the question at the beginning of the lesson and give kids time to answer it, 4 to 5 minutes or so, usually as a Do-Now/Bellringer. I want them to be baffled. I want them to feel a little nervous, a little scared. I want their answer to be garbage (I won’t tell them this). I then will collect those answers, the hand them back to the students at the end of the hour after they’ve gone through the lesson and answered the question again. I want kids to compare their answer at the beginning to their answer at the end. I hope this will build their confidence, allow them to see their growth, and make them less afraid of failure.
2. The Modern Classroom Project - I mentioned above that, by lecture, we make the tutorial the whole game. To embrace the dark souls mantra of “explain nothing, only learn through exploration,” I want to use the framework prescribed by the Modern Classrooms Project for at least one of my units this year. Essentially, students move through a weeks worth of lessons at their own pace. They get all the materials up front, the order they need to be completed in, and they can only move on when they truly master each objective. If they get done early, it becomes their job to mentor other students in the class who weren’t able to move as fast. I’ve always talked about doing this, but this year, I actually want to do it.
3. Socrative Short Answer Questions - This is a great tool for allowing kids fail with very low stakes. Kids login to a room on their Chromebook / Device, you can shoot out a question to the students, they all answers in short answer format. Student answers pop up on the screen at the front as they submit. When done, the teacher can then click a “class vote” button where students can then read each classmates answer and vote for the ones they feel are “best”. This makes learning social, which kids love, but it also allows kids to fail with almost no consequences. I’ve long used Socrative in this way, but this year, I want to embrace the concept of retrying when we fail. In the past, I’ve talked about the highest voted answer, discussed why it was a good answer, then moved on. This year, I want to take our top three “vote getters” and have them become teachers. I’ll then ask the class the same question, but this time, they can ask me or the three class leaders to help guide them in their response. Then, we will re-vote. I hope this normalize failure without penalizing it too much, and I also hope to reward students who show the most growth in their answers. This seems like a good strategy to “gamify” failure.
4.. Kahoot - This is an ed tech tool that just about everyone knows about, but I like it in that it is so simple. Like Dark Souls, it easy to learn, hard to master. In addition, there are consequences for failure, but they aren’t so high as to feel unfair. When a kid answers wrong, they have a chance to learn from their mistake without being punished (either via a grade or through and sort of social shaming). I play Kahoot every Friday as a part of current events in my US history classes, and I think it reinforces many of the Dark Souls concepts listed above.
5. Low Stakes Do-Now Quizzes - This one is very similar to #1 above, but again, the more low stakes we can make failure, the better. I want to assign readings the night before, then give kids a quick (short answer based) quiz to test / gauge their retention of concepts from the reading. I don’t want to take this for a grade, but I will have students pass their responses to each other and rate their response based on a rubric on the board. Then, we’ll go through answers on the board to start class off. We’ll talk about why the students gave each other the rating they did.