Update

Emotional Learning Games Push Players to Deal in Reality Not Fantasy

On the upper floors of the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Wash., small teams of student game developers huddle together over monitors, clicking and tweaking visuals and game mechanics, taking their best shot at what is for some of them the first game they’ve ever developed.

At 22 and with three years of experience, Harrison Barton is a regular in the computer lab, designing two games since he enrolled in DigiPen’s Game Design program.

"girl, i see right thru u" tackles the complex emotions of grief.

“girl, i see right thru u” tackles the complex emotions of grief.

Barton’s latest game, girl, i see right thru u, is a pixel-art platformer he created, designed and released, with help, in April. Since then, it’s earned a modest amount of attention and three awards, though not necessarily the respect of some of his fellow students.

“I’ve heard the joke: ‘If you can’t make a real game, you can just make a ‘poetic experience,’” he recalls, a snide remark that refers to the Best Poetic Experience award Barton received from the Institute during its annual “game of the year” style event.

Snickers notwithstanding, his game was good enough for the 2015 Serious Play Conference, earning a Bronze award in the Games for Good student category.

It’s an impressive response to a game about grief.

From Tragedy to Game

girl, i see right thru u mixes simple game mechanics with plot lines centered around young characters dealing with real-life situations. It also exemplifies the kind of game focused on social and emotional learning, or SEL, that a growing chorus of education reformers want to see in schools.

Several recent studies indicate increasing the social and emotional intelligence of students, along with reading and writing skills, not only helps kids get along it may actually improve grades.

Some of their efforts are more standardized, like Zoo U’s attempt to simulate a variety of schoolyard scenarios or Class Compete’s effort to deal with test anxiety. Others, like Barton’s girl, i see right thru u, are meant to wrestle with a specific emotion.

And for Barton it’s deeply personal.

The developer said he used the game to process a particularly dark period in his life in which two deaths and his grandfather’s suicide attempt altered a pre-existing game idea —  a platformer where the player was a ghost — into a semi-autobiographical version of Malibu, Calif., where the pink ghost of a 10-year-old named Bethany helps her grandmother, friends and eventually her parents accept the grim fact that she has died.

Barton believes games with anxiety, depression and death in their plot lines would have helped him through what he describes as a very challenging childhood.

“For ten years I got sh*t-talked by kids just because I was different, and I did creative stuff,” said Barton, who was born with only one hand, and identified as bisexual from an early age. “I’m still processing how to even begin talking about it. People can’t really empathize. Being physically different from everyone else in your school…that’s really tough. Kids are vicious.”

“If [a game] has a story aimed at kids, it’s usually, ‘Kid goes to middle school dance. Feels awkward. Asks girl out. Lives happily ever after.’ And I had a huge dissonance with that because my life was so not that,” he said.

So Barton went looking for validation in other forms of media, like animé, to find more diverse depictions of young adult life that didn’t conform to a “cookie-cutter framework.”

“I guess I’m not that weird because there’s other people who share my experience,” he said.

Games that depict the harsh realities some kids face daily aren’t only the province of students tucked away in computer labs within sight of Microsoft headquarters.

The Game Changer Chicago Design Lab is using support from The University of Chicago, as well as $1 million grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, to create a space for students to design games that actually reflect their own real-life experiences. Some of their young designers are from Chicago’s South Side, and use the lab’s digital tools and resident expertise to create graphic novels, transmedia projects and games that explore gang violence, sex and poverty set against an SEL backdrop.

The games themselves are as diverse their designers; a board game called Smokestacks goes one step beyond teaching players about the harmful effects of smoking and explores how kids feel about tobacco companies specifically targeting them as potential smokers.

A four-player cooperative game called inFection 4 acts like an STD simulator where players use “Condom” and “Vaccine” cards to help their characters dodge emotional and social consequences like “Shame” and “Misinformation.” Not to mention STDs.

One of the lab’s most recent projects, a role-playing game called A Day in the Life, draws ideas and inspiration straight from the minds of high school students. Designers hope kids will see a bit of their own lives reflected in A Day in the Life’s interactive story as they use positive SEL choices to help their character escape from a highschool drama-filled time loop.

SELling Down Under

If school administrators in the U.S. have been slow to ask teachers to fill an already packed lesson plan with anxiety and death, at least one country seems poised to make it a priority: Australia.

The NSW Department of Education — which oversees schools across Eastern Australia, including Sydney — announced in April it would include SEL as part of its new Wellbeing Framework education initiative.

Robyn Hromek

Robyn Hromek

“The whole [department] has placed SEL front and center as one of their main priorities. This is an acknowledgement of the importance of social and emotional wellbeing to learning outcomes for students,” said Robyn Hromek, a registered psychologist and distance counselor for Sydney Distance Education High School.

In 2009, Hromek published research in which she and co-author Sue Roffey argued games are “especially suitable” as a basis for pedagogy and teaching SEL skills because they’re designed to use discussion, role-play and problem solving to engage players.

“I find that games provide a naturalistic life-space in which mentoring, peer support or counseling can take place. Teachers and support staff use them as part of targeted programs for kids needing extra practice with social and emotional skills,” she said.

Hromek has been using board games to teach social and emotional learning skills to children for nearly 20 years, and founded Thera Games which has produced 15 different games designed to help kids who have trouble making friends, poor emotional control, or feel victimized by bullies.

In the U.S., the big question is whether large classrooms of students will respond to games that deal with anxiety, depression or sexuality and if educators can show relevant, concrete results of emotional growth to skeptical parents and administrators.

DigiPen’s Barton doesn’t necessarily consider girl, i see right thru u to be an educational game, but he hopes more educational developers will have the courage to incorporate more niché styles of storytelling.

“I can’t claim to be a school system expert,” Barton said, “but I definitely think a game for high school students that dealt with sexuality and gender issues would have been helpful for me.”

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Christopher B. Allen Christopher B. Allen is a contributing editor for gamesandlearning.org, as well as a radio producer and anchor for Montana Public Radio. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Montana, and won 1st place in the 2014 National Hearst Journalism Awards for radio broadcast. Chris is also an Air Force veteran.