Case study
This week, I have been working further on the game cases. I looked at a range of cases and selected four exemplars as material for my discussion.
Among them, Minecraft is a new case.
In this game, players will learn how to combat a pandemic, one block at a time:
- Witness an Outbreak – See first hand how a single zombie can infect an entire village, if left unchecked.
- Social Distancing – Toggle different social distancing measures, varying from free-for-all to a lock-down.
- Run a Zombie Hospital – Discover the impact your decisions have on a zombie hospital’s capacity.
Blockdown Simulator allows younger audiences to understand the effects of social distancing.
Visualisation is the key behaviour of our time. As the Covid-19 crisis continues to disrupt lives and communities around the world, there have been many simulations demonstrating how social distancing can mitigate a pandemic.
However, these models can be difficult to grasp. In such a crisis, clear, relevant information is key to encouraging behavioural change. Minecraft is one of the world’s most popular games, with over 145 million active players each month. In Minecraft, villagers can be ‘infected’ by zombie villagers, who can then be ‘cured’ with the right potions and apples.
Guided by the article Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”, it set out to test different measures of social distancing in the game, noting the rate of zombie infection in a group of villagers over a period of time.
By switching between scenarios, players can see how quickly villagers turn into zombies, and how quickly hospitals become overwhelmed. The result is Blockdown Simulator: a simple, playable model that demonstrates how various social measures can mitigate a pandemic and its impact on healthcare services.
The Blockdown Simulator is by no means an accurate model of the Covid-19 pandemic. The crisis we face today has more complexity and factors than Minecraft could ever imagine. In building this map and sharing it freely, their aim was to initiate a discussion among players about social distance and encourage responsible behaviour.
Research
This week, I’ve done more research on games that encourage player motivation.
Tim, E. (2016). How Games Motivate Players. Medium. Available at: https://medium.theuxblog.com/how-games-motivate-their-players-16ab577001ab (Accessed: 15th of June, 2021).
Jane McGonigal wrote in Reality is Broken, that we need four elements in the process of rewarding someone, and through it, motivate the individual.
These include:
- satisfying work
- perspective of success
- socialising
- significance
Therefore, how to please players and satisfy their needs is what drives them to play the game. In turn, the absorption of the content expressed by the game and the workforce generated while playing the game are the fundamental elements that allow players to learn further and do public welfare.
Conclusion
This week, I have summarised the existing research, come up with a few directions to motivate players to engage in learning and public welfare. And summarized a design step.
- Putting players in their place. During gameplay, players receive different feedback depending on the interactivity of the game. This feedback can deepen the player’s perception of certain things and thus lead the player to behave accordingly.
- Involving players in the design and creation of the game. Engage players in public welfare by satisfying their desire for expression and showing off rights.
- To use visualisation to allow the player to observe the impact of different actions on the progress of the game in a simple and intuitive way, thus lowering the threshold of learning.
- To place the player in the research itself, as a sample or as a tool, using the large base of players and their subjective initiative to greatly increase the efficiency of the research.
A way of generic steps:
- One point is that the style and elements of the game need to fit the theme. To give the player an idea of what they are doing.
- Another point is to make the most of the game mechanics. Make the mechanics fit the qualities of learning or public welfare in order to play a substantial role.
- Ultimately, players actively practice learning and public service by understanding the gameplay and accepting the game setting.