Games and Learning

each for the Sun, developed by Filament Games, was the winner of the 2013 award for Best Gameplay at the tenth edition of the Games For Change Festival.

No one said changing education would be easy, but at Filament Games they have made it their mission.

The Wisconsin-based developers of such titles as the iCivics games and “Reach for the Sun” aim to bring the power of games to teach to kids in all segments of society by cracking one of the toughest nuts in the learning games business — the formal K-12 education market.

“In institutional education you have an opportunity to say we make this thing and it gets adopted – the caveat being it is really hard to get it adopted – if we succeed at that then all the kids will have access to it. It taps into the equity component of our mission,” Filament’s Executive Producer Dan White said recently.

Listen to the full conversation:

The following is an edited transcript of the gamesandlearning.org conversation.

gamesandlearning.org: So let’s start at the beginning and the birth of Filament and its evolution as a game developer. Can you take a step back and say where did it come from and what need did it aim to address?

Dan White: So, when we founded Filament…

I like to say that one of our early slogans was: educational games that don’t suck and it was very pointed – which was why it was never part of our outward facing p.r. materials — but internally that was the mission.

The reason for that was up until that time there was really this paucity of games that didn’t use the fact that they were serving education as an excuse to be essentially fancy flash cards or skill-and-drill experiences.

So we were really interested in the idea of creating games that didn’t treat the learning as something that needed to be sugar-coated or obscured. We were really interested in developing games that had an honest dialogue with the player and created systems and identities that the player could inhabit and tinker with that would give them — allow them to have an authentic interaction with the materials we wanted them to learn.

At the time we didn’t necessarily articulate it this way, but what we were really talking about was higher order thinking skills and creating game experiences that had less of an emphasis on rote content and more of an emphasis on creativity, systems thinking, collaboration, et cetera. And that really remains true to this day. That’s kind of the need we are trying to fill and it is still very much a need that needs to be filled. It’s just at this point there is a larger number of people within institutional education that agree that that is and ought to be a big priority for institutional education.

Yeah, there’s just raw content that needs to be covered and there always will be, but in the 21st Century in the age of the Internet, when pretty much anything you want to know is just a Google search away, what are the types of experiences and skills we need to be imparting in order to make students competitive once they leave school?

Those kinds of skills and experiences are really hard to deliver via traditional media like textbooks. So that is what we really set out to do, that’s really what we continue to do to this day.

The system beneath

gamesandlearning.org: One of the things that’s interesting about that is those aren’t skills – you don’t have a 21st Century skills class. You have math or you have English. How do you get systems thinking into the structure that already exist that are often not systemic but topical in a school?

Dan White: Any time we sit down to develop a game about something we often find there actually is a… there’s already a system there and it’s just a matter figuring out what is the best way to represent that to the player and by best way I mean it is easy to overwhelm the player by creating a system that is too high fidelity. It’s easy to create misconceptions by creating a system that is too simplistic or iconic. So finding that right balance is really tricky, but really just about anything we set out to teach we always found that there is some system that lives beneath the content that we can use as a mechanism to interact with the player.

gamesandlearning.org: And is that often times more interesting than the content itself?…

Dan White: Oh, absolutely.

gamesandlearning.org: But why do you think that is?

Dan White: Well, so an example that jumps to mind is, very early on, we did a game with the Jason Project called “Resilient Planet.” In the game you take on the role of a researcher and you go out and collect data and you use that data to make arguments. In the process of doing that you are exposed to the traditional content so you learn about how a particular species of animals and you learn about particular tools of the trade, but what’s really cool is that when you step back you realize that the game is really about the process, the methodology that scientists use to answer questions about the world.

The particulars of how they do it is certainly interesting, but is not the key takeaway, right. In schools, I think for the foreseeable future  …

We can’t get away from the content. It will always be the bullet on the back of the box. “This teaches X.” “This fulfills these four aligned learning objectives.” But – I don’t think it makes sense to call it a subversive mission, but maybe the secondary motive there is that we are leveraging game technology for what we think it does best and teaching these skills and concepts that we think are important.

gamesandlearning.org: One of the things– I heard you speaking in a webinar a few weeks ago and you mentioned in some ways Filament chose a … slightly harder road in the learning games space by saying we are aiming directly at the classroom. Rather than saying we can make a fun app that we stick in the App Store and sell to parents, you aimed directly at the classroom. Is it true that that is a harder road to go and if so why?

Dan White: I think so and it is really because institutional education is really so idiosyncratic. All the way from procurement to standardized tests, you have to deal with very difficult buying cycles, the fact that the end user is often very different than the actual person putting down the money, lots of approval processes. You have to deal with the fact that teachers are held to a high level of punitive accountability to get students to perform against standardized tests. They don’t have a lot of time and they don’t have a lot of flexibility to experiment with new things that may or may not work.

It is definitely a higher-pressure situation and usually a higher pressure situation is more risk-adverse and we are talking about cutting edge technology and cutting edge teaching methodology. You parents are always will to do – parents love that stuff. Parents love buying the latest new-fangled thing and often the more expensive it is the better so they can give their kid that extra advantage. It’s just not how it works in schools. You’ve got challenges in all aspects of the development and distribution process that you have to contend with in schools that are not just there on the commercial side.

Now on the commercial side there are also plenty of challenges. You have a very noisy market as a result of the fact that the barriers to entry are so low. I am certainly not saying there aren’t challenges on both side, just I think on the institutional ed side I think there are more to contend with simultaneously and I think many times the challenges are in direct conflict with each other. You might have to do one thing to satisfy one constituent and a completely different thing to satisfy a different part of the target market.

Making a difference through education

gamesandlearning.org: So here might be the overly obvious question – why? Why? Why choose that institutional education market?

Dan White: For us it is because we are a mission-driven organization. We very much believe that when you create a good piece of education technology and you make it available on the commercial market and the parents who can afford it are going to buy it. And the kids who come from families that have access to that kind of technology are going to benefit from it.

In institutional education you have an opportunity to say we make this thing and it gets adopted – the caveat being it is really hard to get it adopted – if we succeed at that then all the kids will have access to it. It taps into the equity component of our mission.

We want to have an impact and we don’t want that impact to be limited to the kids who come from a background of privilege and that is the beautiful thing about institutional education.

gamesandlearning.org: How is the environment shifting for educational games in the institutional space?

Dan White:… So I think we are starting to see a shift back to teachers having more purchasing power and hopefully more latitude in how they use their class time. Now these are really slow shifts so whether they will occur in the course of the next two to three years I can’t really say with any degree of confidence, but I do think the trends are there and I think the trends are pointing towards higher demand for things like educations games.

The other thing worth pointing out about the next couple of years is it stands to reason that as more and more of the straight-up content – the types of content you used to see in a textbook – is available for free online there should be more dollars in the system that used to be spent on generation of that content should be available for new things and new experiences and hopefully experiences that are not just about content…