Research Report

Paper Offers Insight into Strategy, Design behind Trip Hawkin’s “If…”

The makers of “If…,” the highly anticipated learning game from the founder of Electronic Arts, are letting us under the hood of the project to see how they envision the game  and how it will help kids learn social and emotional skills.

If characters

“If…” build a first-person adventure game on top of core lesson plans to teach social and emotional learning.

The insights come in the form a major white paper the team produced while developing the first chapter of the game that has been released to the public.

Trip Hawkins, who revolutionized sports and other simulation games, said the paper grew out of the effort to build a game that would teach so-called Social and Emotional Learning, or SEL.

“The need for it arose when there were even internal questions on the team from people wanting to understand better, ‘OK, how’s learning supposed to work in this?’ and ‘Can we really prove that there is learning going on?’ Hawkins said in a recent interview.

The paper is steeped in the science of SEL and game design, but also stemmed from Hawkins own experience with the power of games.

“Some of what’s in there is drawing from the decades of experience … having observed a lot of situations that involve transference of knowledge from game playing into the real world like learning how to fly an airplane first on a consumer computer flight sim and then maybe using a more professional flight sim and then being in a real airplane and then becoming a real pilot,” he said, adding, “Not just the process of learning how to do it, but also developing the motivation to do it through being able to have the fantasy of doing it through a simulation.

“So I’ve had an appreciation of the kind of learning benefit that can come out of fantasy and simulation for quite a while I just had previously in my career applied it to topics like football and airplanes and not to school curriculum.”

Listen to an extended conversation with Hawkins and If… collaborator, SEL instructor Janice Toben.

Hawkins, who made the paper available to the gamesandlearning.org audience, said it helped outline the overall strategy of the game that has launched its first, free chapter and is nearing the launch of the next to consumer-facing pay chapters.

“In IF… we offer a compelling fantasy narrative – yet one that explores real-life relevant situations and emotional challenges – and cast the child as a hero with the unique opportunity to make a critical impact on this virtual world,” the paper reads. “By leveraging narrative and role play in this way, we seek to leverage our tool to support learning and empower the child with a sense of agency.”

The paper and our conversation offered some insight on how the game hopes to effectively deliver on the goals they have outlined.

Much of that is incorporating the SEL lesson plans from those teachers who have been doing it for years, most notably Janice Toben who oversaw the effort for more than two decades at the Nueva School.

“The [social and emotional learning] goals came from an exhaustive reading of the literature and also the experience I had for 27 years teaching students these skills we distilled those goals and … those had a role in the white paper and we had to explain how the story, inspired by Joseph Campbell, but really written by Trip, how the story would open up to these XSEL goals through some real, specific concrete skills that young students can learn and those were drawn from real life, real time lessons that I had been teaching the students,” Toben said.

In many ways, the game design effort paralleled Hawkins’ work at EA, building a fantasy/simulation game atop a core set of content.

"If..." tracks hundreds of individual decisions kids make in each chapter to ensure students are learning core SEL skills.

“If…” tracks hundreds of individual decisions kids make in each chapter to ensure students are learning core SEL skills.

“Janice has a wonderful binder full of these lesson plans that she has been refining and polishing since 1981, so it’s a pretty fabulous resource. It kind of takes me back when I was doing EA Sports and John Madden dropped one day a big three-ring binder on the desk and said, ‘Here you go.’ And it was the playbook for the Oakland Raiders,” Hawkins recalled. “The playbook for the Oakland Raiders was very important content and curriculum for football and Janice’s lesson plans are the right content and curriculum for SEL.”

During the conversation, we also got a sense of some of the business strategy behind the effort. Hawkins said the idea is to create a game that works in both the consumer and school markets, but he has considered how to make that financially viable.

“We initially make our debut on the consumer side so that we can then develop that market first and have customers fund our continuing R&D,” he said.

“Certainly a school is going to have more functional requirements, for example they are going to want to have a more sophisticated teacher management system, they are going to want a lot more accounts per device, and they are probably going to want to have more explicit data about student choices that is available to the teacher,” he added. “So there is a more advanced feature set that we are going to have to work our way towards, but the other thing is we are going to want to be more confident about the learning measurements.”

We will be tracking If… over the coming months and reporting on their efforts.

Here are a few other excerpts of our conversation with Hawkins and Toben.


On the translation of lesson plans to a game:

JANICE TOBEN: As an educator it was a challenge to think that we could do social and emotional learning through a game and that it would be as meaningful as it would be with real live children interacting in a cooperative experience and then reflecting on and extrapolating the elements out of that that they want to put into their world together on the playground or in the hallway.

I was at first a little concerned about the transfer but in addition to the research into the plasticity and the flexibility of the child’s mind when not confronted with lots of shoot-em-up kinds of things but with this idea of fun and choice…

So if you think of self-awareness building or the management of emotion, for example, those are intra-personal skills and those actually work really beautifully in terms of raising awareness in games. There is vocabulary that can be built…

 

On the difference between designing commercial games and learning games:

TRIP HAWKINS: First of all there are a couple of fundamentally different models of developing video games … Sometimes someone who is very creative just out of whole cloth on a blank sheet of paper just comes up with something completely new. The Russian gentleman who invented Tetris, he just invented something out of thin air. It wasn’t a copy of something else. It wasn’t referencing something in the real world.  He just invented a great new idea.

So, that’s not generally the way I made video games personally, although I have supported a lot software artists and developers who have made video games that way, where it’s a purely creative process.

Generally for me personally, the kind of games that I tend to make are ones that are involved in simulating something that has a fantasy dimension and allows therefore a player to do something that is pretty epic and is not afforded to them in real life but because they have simulation elements they have something that relates to real life. Those projects end of being about systems design. Your, for example, making a football simulation and you have to have all the player statistics and you have to have the expert coach help you with a lot of details like how you are going to have the computer is going to make decisions and call plays  and decide which way the guys are gong to run on the field – what the game industry would call AI…

When you are doing that sort of systematic design you’ve got to have an interdisciplinary team and everyone has to be passionate about delivering an authentic result…

That model of being systematic, it can be applied to virtually any topic. When you start to think about it being applied to learning and education, that’s where you have to take curriculum seriously and ask yourself ‘What is it governments believe is important in education?” Because if you are not lined up to do what governments believe in you are probably not going to get very far as far as what is it you care about teaching and having people learn…

Obviously, we’re harnessing ourselves to these constraints about what does the government say is important, what does the science say is important, what does the domain analysis say, what does the teaching standards require and we’re making the game development team conform to that instead of making their own Tetris…

Just for me personally, I am more likely to come up with a presentation style that is more of a simulation of something where you get to be a hero just because that’s the way I think.