Transformational Framework
the
A process tool for the development of Transformational games
The Transformational Framework is designed to help you create games that change
players. The Framework is centered around eight exploratory questions critical for
every team working in this space. Inside you’ll find insights, best practices, and tips to
help you navigate the challenges of developing transformational games.
www.transformationalframework.com
Sabrina Culyba
The Transformational Framework is based on the
work of Schell Games, an independent game studio
that specializes in bridging entertainment and
education to create games and other experiences
that are both engaging and enriching. .
p r e s s . e t c . c m u . e d uw w w . s c h e l l g a m e s . c o m
Published By
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL FRAMEWORK
This book was designed for print.
To order a print copy, visit www.transfromationalframework.com
Copyright © 2018 by ETC Press, Sabrina Haskell Culyba
http://press.etc.cmu.edu/
ISBN (Print): 978-1-387-89527-4
The Transformational Framework is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License, except where otherwise noted.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
RESERVED IMAGES:
All images listed below are excluded from the Creative Commons license and any
use, copying or distribution of this content is strictly prohibited without the express
written permission of their respective copyright owners.
• Pg. 10: Screenshot, At Risk © Kognito LLC
• Pg. 10: Screenshot, Bury Me My Love © The Pixel Hunt / Figs / ARTE
• Pg. 10: Screenshot, Duolingo © Duolingo
• Pg. 10: Screenshot, Happy Atoms © Schell Games
• Pg. 10: Screenshot, Harness Heroes © Simcoach Games
• Pg. 10: Screenshot, Never Alone © Upper One Games, E-Line Media
• Pg. 11: Screenshot, PlayForward © play2PREVENT
• Pg. 11: Screenshot, Re-Mission © Hopelab
• Pg. 11: Screenshot, SuperBetter © SuperBetter
• Pg. 11: Screenshot, The End © Preloaded
• Pg. 11: Screenshot, Win the White House © Filament Games, iCivics
• Pg. 11: Screenshot, Zombies, Run! © Six to Start
• Pg. 12: Screenshot, Assassin’s Creed III © Ubisoft
• Pg. 12: Screenshot, Gone Home © Fullbright
• Pg. 12: Screenshot, Minecraft © Microsoft
• Pg. 30: Photo of Cardboard Prototype, I Expect You to Die © Schell Games LLC
• Pg. 30: Screenshot of White box, I Expect You to Die © Schell Games LLC
• Pg. 49: Photo, Sabrina Haskell Culyba, © Sabrina Haskell Culyba
• Pg. 59: Screenshot, PlayForward, © play2PREVENT
• Pg. 59: Screenshot, The World of Lexica, © Touch Press Inc.
• Pg. 59: Screenshot, Happy Atoms © Schell Games LLC
• Pg. 78: Graphic, Map of Ethiopia © vitaly suprun
• Pg. 79: Photo, Jessica Hammer © Jessica Hammer
• Pg. 94: Photo, Happy Atoms © Schell Games
• Pg. 95: Graphic, Happy Atoms Pillar Poster © Schell Games
• Pg. 95: Photo, Yotam Haimberg © Yotam Haimberg
• Pg. 114: Photo, Sabrina Haskell Culyba © Sabrina Haskell Culyba
• Pg. 115: Screenshot, The World of Lexica © Touch Press Inc.
• Pg. 130: Screenshot, Water Bears © Schell Games LLC
• Pg. 131: Screenshot, Water Bears © Schell Games LLC
• Pg. 131: Photo, Jason Pratt © Jason Pratt
• Pg. 156: Screenshot, Night Shift © Deepika Mohan MD MPH
• Pg. 157: Screenshot, Night Shift © Deepika Mohan MD MPH
• Pg. 157: Photo, Michal Ksiazkiewicz © Michal Ksiazkiewicz
• Pg. 175: Photo, Brooke Morrill © Brooke Morrill
• Pg. 203: Photo, 9-Minutes © Games for Change
• Pg. 203: Photo, Emily Treat © Emily Treat
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Sabrina Culyba
Transformational Framework
the
Written & Developed By
A process tool for the development of Transformational games
Acknowledgments
The Transformational Framework and this book have both evolved
over a number of years from the experiences and input of many
individuals and teams.
First, thanks to Lynn Fiellin, MD, and her team at the Yale University School of
Medicine and the play2PREVENT Lab, particularly Kimberly Hieftje, PhD and
Lindsay Duncan, PhD.. The early roots of inspiration for this Framework can
be traced to the Game PlayBooks that Yale and Schell Games collaboratively
developed in 2011 for the PlayForward project. Thanks also to Ben Sawyer,
of Digitalmill, for his work with Yale and Schell Games in shepherding the
PlayForward project.
Also inspirational in the early creation of this Framework was the work of
Barbara Chamberlin (Project Director of the NMSU Learning Games Lab),
Jesús Trespalacios (NMSU), and Rachel Gallagher (NMSU) in their 2012 paper
in the International Journal of Game-Based Learning, The Learning Games
Design Model: Immersion, Collaboration, and Outcomes-Driven Development.
Many teams have used some version of this book and the Transformational
Framework since 2012. Often these teams were working with book drafts
that were woefully incomplete. Thank you especially to the studio members
of Schell Games for using iterations of the Framework and generously giving
of their time to share their struggles and ideas for working on
Transformational games. In particular, I’d like to thank the team members
and partners of these projects: Ivy, Lexica, STEM, Nightshift, Happy Atoms,
Odyssey, Anti-bully, Scrubs, Mechanisms, Parks, and Fancy Hat.
Thank you also to Anisha Deshmane and Charles Amis for their time
reviewing drafts and sharing comments.
Additional thanks to the students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon’s
Entertainment Technology Center who, since 2014, have been using the
Framework and this book on many of their Transformational student
projects. Their positive experiences helped me believe this book would be
helpful for others.
Acknowledgements
3
Most of all, my heartfelt gratitude to David Culyba,
my partner in all things.
From your work using the Framework with your students
to our many, many long conversations,
your influence is written into every page of this book.
Your insight and patience are an endless well of support.
A book like this is not possible to complete without support. I’d like to
extend special thanks to the following cheerleaders and contributors:
Harley Baldwin – who saw the value in the Framework’s development and
encouraged its growth at Schell Games, who supported the writing of this
book, and who contributed her own insights into the audiences beyond the
player. Barbara Chamberlin – who read an early rough draft and became
an encouraging cheerleader, and whose own work was an early inspiration
for the Framework. drew davidson – who was everlastingly patient while i
worked on this book and never missed a chance to ask me how it was
going. Kate Gigliotti-Gordon – who helped me navigate the rules of
grammar and punctuation. Yotam Haimberg – for putting the original
Framework through its paces on Happy Atoms, resulting in several additions
and iterations, as well as his feedback on subsequent drafts of this book and
for contributing a developer story. Jessica Hammer – whose enthusiasm to
use the book with her students helped motivate the book’s completion, who
reviewed several drafts and provided insightful comments, and who
contributed a developer story from her own design work. Brad King (and
ETC Press) – for providing a publishing platform that supports works like this.
Michal Ksiazkiewicz – who has led several projects using the Framework,
providing feedback along the way, and who contributed a developer story.
Brooke Morrill – who has shepherded many Transformational games into
existence at Schell Games, and who contributed especially to the grant and
research information, including a developer story. Shawn Patton – for his
successful final hour typo hunting. Jason Pratt – for his contribution of a
developer story and his invaluable proofreading. Anna Roberts – for her
insight into human-centered and collaborative design, for her hours and
hours of feedback and review of book chapters, and for always reminding
me about the power of getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Jesse Schell – for being a generous mentor, the first advocate of the term
“transformational,” and for creating the kind of studio where this work could
be explored. Emily Treat – for her contribution of a developer story.
Why this book?
I wrote this book to contribute something to the
development process of Transformational games. It outlines
the Transformational Framework, a pre-production tool
that originally arose at Schell Games to empower teams
working on these kinds of games. The book explains the
pieces of this process and provides supporting strategies
and insights.
The primary intended audience of this book is experienced
video game developers moving from entertainmentfocused
games to Transformational games, particularly
individuals in leadership and design roles. It’s also intended
reading for clients and partners working on
Transformational games.
Students and those new to game development will also
benefit from reading; however, this book does not focus on
how to design good gameplay. (In my opinion, you won’t
find a better introduction to that topic than Jesse Schell’s Art
of Game Design.)
In this book, I am implicitly referring to video games
whenever I use the term “game,” though other forms of
games, or game-like experiences, with transformational
aspirations may find the Framework to be relevant as well.
The Transformational Framework is a model. It is not a set
of absolute rules or perfect answers to the challenges of
creating Transformational games. As the saying goes, “All
models are wrong, but some are useful.” (Thank you, George
Box.)
If I could reach back in time and give myself a tool for my
own early Transformational game projects, it would be this
book. I hope it proves useful for you.
- Sabrina Culyba
6
Defining the Problem
What do we mean by “Transformational games?”
Why do we need a “framework” anyway?
Game Development Primer
A brief overview of the game development process.
If you are new to game development, please read this section.
Experienced game developers can skim or skip.
The Transformational Framework
Your guide to the Framework and how to use it
Appendix
Endnotes and references
Framework Overview
High-Level Purpose
Audience & Context
Player Transformations
Barriers
Domain Concepts
Expert Resources
Prior Works
Assessment Plan
Production Considerations
Notes on production planning
for Transformational games
5
Defining the Problem
Introduction
Trans·for·ma·tion·al
/ tran(t)sf r māSH( )n( )l/
Many games – including mainstream games
intended primarily as entertainment – can trigger
transformational experiences that change players.
If any game has the potential to be
transformational, what specific games are we
referring to when we use the term
“Transformational games?”
The challenge facing game developers in this
space is not whether or not game experiences
have the potential to transform players. The
challenge is designing a game, from the ground
up, to achieve a particular intended
transformation. In this book, we use
“Transformational” with a capital “T” to refer to
games created with this specific intention.
Let’s start by examining further what
characterizes a Transformational game. Then
we’ll look at some of the challenges faced by
teams working on these games and why the
Transformational Framework was created.
7
For references on
the transformative
power of games,
see Appendix A.
-INTRO-
We use the term “Transformational” to refer to games designed
with the intention to change players in some way. In further
defining Transformational games, it can help to start from the
familiar space of entertainment games.
In typical entertainment games, we focus on the
player inside the game world. We use our game design
tools to direct the player’s attention and behavior inside the
game. The game is its own reality, and what matters is how the
player engages with that reality. Our purpose is typically to
design a game that is appealing enough to draw players in,
clear enough to understand how to play, and deep enough to
encourage sustained engagement in the game. Playing an
entertainment game may cause a change in players beyond
the game, but that change is incidental and not our focus as
designers. Of course, players do change while inside an
entertainment game – they learn skills and change their
behavior to meet the game’s challenges – but these changes
revolve around their interaction with the game itself.
In Transformational games, we focus on the
player beyond the game. For Transformational games, if
the player changes inside the game – for example, changes
behavior or gains a skill – but this change only manifests inside
the game, then we have not succeeded. Our goal is for the
player to demonstrate this change outside the game context.
We call this application of player change from the game world
to the real world transfer.
Likewise, if the player exhibits a change while still engaging
with the game but these changes disappear once the game
experience ends, then we have not succeeded. Our goal is to
create change that is not dependent on the player continuing
to play the game. We call this aspect persistence.
Entertainment vs
Transformational
The Three Hallmarks of a Transformational Game:
INTENTION
The game is
purposefully
designed to
create a
specific change.
TRANSFER
The change
extends into the
real world.
PERSISTENCE
The change
remains after
the game is
over.
9
Transformational Games are
those games developed with
the intention of changing
players in a specific way that
transfers and ppersists beyond
the game.
-INTRO-
Some Examples of
Transformational Games
Happy Atoms
Developer: Schell Games
This tablet game, paired with a physical toy,
is designed to demystify chemistry by giving
players a hands-on way to explore the
structure of molecules and their applications.
DragonBox Algebra 12+
Developer: DragonBox
This puzzle game is designed to teach
children the concepts of basic algebra.
Harness Heroes
Developer: Simcoach Games
This mobile game about fall protection was
designed as part of the larger Simcoach Skill
Arcade suite to inspire and connect youth to
relevant career paths in American industries
where skill gaps are common.
Duolingo
Developer: Duolingo
This game-styled language learning platform
was created with the goal of allowing
anyone to learn a new language.
At Risk
Developer: Kognito
This role-play simulation aims to increase
awareness, reduce stigma, and facilitate
conversations related to mental illness.
Bury Me, My Love
Developer: The Pixel Hunt/Figs/ARTE France
This instant messaging adventure game aims
to give players empathy and insight into the
experience of Syrian refugees.
© 2018 Kognito LLC
Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa)
Developer: Upper One Games, E-Line Media
This puzzle platformer aims to showcase and
cultivate interest in the culture and folklore of
the Iñupiat Native Alaskan people.
This list is only a tiny sampling of Transformational games.
The games listed here cover many different topics, gameplay genres, and
audiences. They come from a variety of developers, each with their own
unique development process, but each was developed with the intention
of transforming players.
For links to each
of these games,
see Appendix B.
11
PlayForward®: Elm City Stories
Developer: play2PREVENT®, Schell Games
This tablet game aims to reduce HIV
exposure in at-risk teens by changing
their skills, knowledge, and behaviors
around risky situations.
Phone Story
Developer: Molleindustria
This collection of four minigames aims to
provoke the player’s reflection on the
hidden negative human cost in mobile
phone manufacturing.
SuperBetter
Developer: SuperBetter
This game-like tool was created to help
players build up their personal resilience
to overcome challenges and reach
personal goals.
Re-Mission
Developer: Hopelab, Realtime Associates
This series of games was designed
specifically for kids with cancer to
boost their self-efficacy and improve
their treatment adherence.
The End
Developer: Preloaded
This web-game for teens was designed
to make death easier to deal with by
prompting reflection on questions about
life and mortality.
Zombies, Run!
Developer: Six to Start & Naomi Alderman
This audio adventure game was created
to motivate players to run and exercise.
Win the White House
Developer: Filament Games, iCivics
This game is designed to introduce
players to the process and strategy
behind the American presidential election.
-INTRO-
A few examples of commercial games adapted for
transformational purposes beyond their original intent.
Minecraft
Developer: Mojang
Adapted for many subjects
Gone Home
Developer: Fullbright
Adapted to teach English language arts skills
Assassin’s Creed
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Adapted to teach and explore history
What about an entertainment game that a teacher adapts for
their classroom setting? Or a game through which players can
develop incidental real-world skills, such as using math to figure
out optimal character builds in a role-playing game? It’s
certainly valuable to learn from these examples.
Adaptation takes what is already created and tries to reharness
it for a different purpose than what was originally
intended. This can be a powerful strategy for anyone seeking
to transform players through games. One benefit is the ability to
choose from the most popular games, so that we can have
confidence in the game’s engagement. There’s probably no
stronger recent example of this potential than the game of
Minecraft, which has been adapted for all sorts of
transformational purposes.
Adaptation does have its limitations, however. We often can’t
change the content or function of a digital game. Instead, any
inaccuracies, omissions, or distracting, unrelated mechanics
have to be addressed by structure outside the game, such as
curricular materials. Further, there are many topics that
conventional entertainment games rarely touch upon.
We should not just rely on sifting through entertainment games,
looking for something with enough structure and flexibility to be
adapted for a transformational purpose.
By combining the game design process with a
transformational design process, we can address
limitations that result from adaptation and
support the goals of transformation inherently in
the experience we create.
Intentionally Designed vs.
Adaptated
13
For resources on
adapting games,
see Appendix C.
It’s noteworthy that two of the examples to the left (both Assassin’s Creed
and Minecraft) have released game editions specifically developed for
education after communities formed around the use of those games for
transformational purposes.
For more info
related to these
examples,
see Appendix D.
-INTRO-
“Transformational” is meant to be an inclusive term that can
apply to any game where the intention is to change the player.
Here are a number of other game terms that also typically
classify as Transformational games:
• Educational Games/Learning Games
These labels are usually applied to games targeting students,
often children, both in and out of a classroom setting.
• Serious Games
This generally catch-all term is used in many different
contexts for any game that has a real-world purpose
beyond entertainment.
• Training Simulations/Simulation-based Learning
Frequently used in reference to programs that train
employees on technical skills, industry procedures, or social
interactions through simulation and role-play.
• Behavior Change Games
This term seems to be used most often in games initiated in
part as research, particularly around health-related
behaviors.
• Games for Health
As the name suggests, this term refers to games aimed at
improving health-related behaviors and outcomes
• Impact Games/Social Good Games/Games for Change
These games are often trying to raise awareness about a
societal issue or cause.
• Empathy Games
This term is sometimes applied to games that focus less on
game mechanics and more on storytelling. They are often
centered around evoking an emotional response in players.
• Citizen Science/Crowdsourcing Games
These are games that allow the masses to contribute to
real-world research or data analysis by encoding the tasks
into a game.
Flavors of
Transformational
15
-INTRO-
Labels
Have
Baggage
To some, it might seem silly or even counter-productive to
promote “Transformational” as the term of choice when there
are already more generally accepted terms – notably
“Educational“ or “Serious.“ However, the labels we use can
influence our thinking and the thinking of others.
“Serious Games” implies an emphasis on the tone of the game
experience. Although it may make investing in such games
more palatable to anyone still nervous about supporting the
use of “games” in training, healthcare, or schools, it holds us
hostage to the misguided idea that learning and selfbetterment
must be tedious or boring work. Playfulness,
surprise, delight, fantasy, humor, etc. can all play a powerful
role in transformative experiences. We don’t have to be serious
for games to provide meaning beyond fun.
The phrase “Educational Games” narrows our view of the kinds
of topics we can tackle and the audiences we can reach
through these games. The word “educational” bends thoughts
toward skills and knowledge normally connected with formal
education – math, science, reading, language. Through these
existing strong associations, the label “educational” discourages
connections to the broader human experience – topics like
socioemotional skills, religious beliefs, social justice, perspective
taking, mental & physical health, cultural heritage, etc. It also
tends to focus our attention on younger audiences who exist
inside a traditional classroom setting.
“Transformational” calls out a game’s emphasis
on creating player change rather than its topic,
tone, or audience. Player change can take many forms
and target many different audiences. As you read this book, try
embracing the use of the term “Transformational” and see if it
opens up possibilities in your thinking about what we could do
with our medium.
Labels Can
Transform Thinking
17
-INTRO-
HHow will we
really know if
this works?
There are so
many
stakeholders!
What’s more
important: the
fun or the
learning?
I don’t know
anything about
this stuff!
Our client
doesn’t
understand
games!
Shouldn’t we
be talking to
an expert?
Overheard on
Transformational
Games
Our priorities
seem to
keep
shifting…
What if people
love our game but
it doesn’t work?
What if our game
works but no one
wants to play it?
What actually
matters for
success?
How do we get
our game to the
people that
really need it?
What’s really
critical to include
in the game?
What should we
be doing
differently from
entertainment
game dev?
Isn’t there some
research out there
we should be
looking at?
I don’t feel like I
can contribute to
changing players....
Wow, this is a lot of
content to
integrate in our
game…
How do we get
teachers to adopt
our game?
What claims can
we really make
about our game’s
impact?
I don’t understand
some of our
design decisions…
How should we
work with our
subject-matter
expert?
If you’ve previously worked on a Transformational game, you
probably recognize many of the statements to the left. If you
will be working on a Transformational game for the first time,
take a moment to read over these sentiments. These are some
of the frustrations and insecurities that are experienced by
teams working on these games.
Teams embarking on Transformational games for
the first time may be blind to the new challenges
they will face. Your team will encounter unfamiliar
challenges when working on Transformational games. You
may be working with content you don’t fully understand. You
will struggle with balancing the desire to iterate towards the
most fun player experience and the need to create a game
that effectively changes players. You will likely find unusual and
surprising constraints that your design must accommodate but
that may not be obvious at the start of development. These
issues and more create tension about priorities and success
when working on these games.
The first step to empowering you and your team during
development is to expect the extra challenges you will face.
This foreknowledge will not necessarily eliminate these
challenges, but you and your team can face them with the
confidence that when these problems arise, it is not because
you are doing something wrong, but, in fact, because you are
struggling with what many teams face when working on these
kinds of games.
The Challenges
You Will Face
19
-INTRO-
Knowing to expect these challenges helps teams cope when
they appear, but what we really want to do is get ahead of
these problems so that we can mitigate or avoid them.
Many frustrations on Transformational games
stem from failing to establish a shared vision of
the design problem with stakeholders and team
members. In entertainment game development, there is an
industry mindset that the sooner you have something playable,
the sooner you can start iterating on what’s fun. In
Transformational games, before you dive into game
development, you should set aside some time for you and your
team to gain a deep, shared understanding of your design
problem. Your problem is not just making a fun game. It is also
making a game that transforms players in a specific way. Not
just any fun game will do and also not just any transformation
will do.
Creating and protecting space to deeply
understand your design problem is not always
easy, and, for many teams, it is new. It can be
especially hard for teams coming from traditional
entertainment games. You’re experienced developers, so you
know how to make a good game, right? But how experienced
are you at teaching teens to make better life choices? Or
designing for teachers to integrate your game into their
classrooms? You and your team have to first accept that your
existing game development process and experience might not
be enough.
Games (and this goes especially for Transformational games)
are often created under constrained deadlines and budgets.
Under these conditions, it can be difficult to commit time for this
sort of work when resources are already limited.
This work will require time and effort, but the
benefit is a team that is more prepared for their
journey together.
Create Space to
Define the Problem
21
Stop for Wisdom
Think of the development of your game as setting out to
climb a tall mountain. The Transformational Framework
process is a sort of basecamp – stop here with your team to
learn more about the terrain ahead and make sure you
have the supplies you need. Your journey will still have
unknowns and risks, but the preparation you do here will
help your team to know what to expect and make it safely
to the top.
-INTRO-
IT’S DANGEROUS
TO GO ALONE!
TAKE THIS.
Throughout this book,
you’ll see this medallion
used to represent the
Transformational
Framework.
So how do you set about creating a shared vision of your
transformational design problem? If you believe you need to
set aside time for this effort, how should you spend this time?
What questions do you need to answer? What conversations
do you need to have? What research do you need to do?
There’s no perfect, complete, or right answer to these
questions, but the Transformational Framework is a model you
can use as a springboard for your own process.
The Framework is, at its core, a set of exploratory
questions covering eight critical topics for
Transformational games. It includes an evolving shared
vocabulary and taxonomy for these topics so that you, your
team, and your stakeholders can work together with a
common language. This Framework guide also includes some
tips, warnings, and best practices for working on
Transformational games.
The Framework was created with insight from
some of those who have gone before you and
wrestled with some of the same challenges you
are likely to face. The Framework grew out of work at
Schell Games, a studio that has worked on a variety of
Transformational games for over a decade. Many teams at
Schell Games have used the Transformational Framework in
some form or another since 2013. It has also been used by
student teams at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology
Center. The Framework is intended to be a distillation of lessons
learned from these prior efforts and experiences.
The Framework is open for adoption, adaptation,
and evolution. This book is intended to serve as a
standalone introduction to the Transformational Framework for
all people involved in the game development process: team
leaders and other team members, as well as clients, experts,
and other partners. It is offered, not as a rigid ruleset, but as an
evolving template for teams to integrate into their unique
process and circumstances.
Use This Framework to
Jumpstart
23
-INTRO-
25
Game Development Primer
If you’re new to game development,
check out the game development primer
in the next section before continuing to the
Transformational Framework.
Where to Go Next:
Framework Overview
To start learning about the
Transformational Framework, jump ahead
to the Framework Overview Chapter
-DEVPRIMER--OVERVIEW-
Game
Development
Primer
Side Quest
The video game industry is a relatively young and
diverse industry. There’s no one model that
perfectly captures how games are developed.
There are, however, some common practices,
concepts, and realities with which most who’ve
worked in games are familiar.
If you’re new to game development (or “game
dev” as you might hear it called), this primer will
not make you an expert, but it will expose you to
some important game development concepts.
If you are a client, teacher, subject-matter expert,
or other non-game dev partner working with a
game development team (“dev team”), this primer
aims to arm you with the lingo and high-level
knowledge you need to keep up in conversations
with the dev team.
Experienced devs might find it useful to skim this
section to understand what kinds of concepts
would be helpful for your partners to understand
about game development.
.
27
-DEVPRIMER-
SHIP
QA
PRODUCTION
CONCEPT
PRE-PRODUCTION
BETA
ALPHA
PRE-ALPHA
The Inciting Idea
Early Planning and
Building Prototypes
Building of the Core
Game Structure
Basic Shape of
Game is Complete
Final Polish
Testing
Release
The game development process can be messy and diverse in
practice, but at the high level it typically has five phases:
1. Concept
The idea of the game is first being imagined. Sometimes this
stage includes a pitch process where the game idea is
presented to key decision-makers and funders. At this point, the
team might be quite small and may not include the people who
will actually work on the game production.
2. Pre-production
The initial proving ground for the game concept and
production plan. Often this period involves a lot of exploration
and iteration, including creating playable prototypes of key
technology, mechanics, or content. At this point, the team is
likely to be a subset of the eventual full team. Some preproductions
end with a “greenlight” pitch, where a project is
either given the go-ahead or shelved.
3. Production
The full team is brought on board to build the game. Often
production is broken into stages:
• Pre-Alpha: This is the period when the core pieces of the
game start to take shape. During this time, prototyping is still
very common and big shifts can occur as early ideas about
the game direction are tested and explored.
• Alpha: The core game works but not all features are
complete. Content is usually incomplete, and it is likely that
some significant changes and iteration will be desirable.
• Beta: The game is largely functionally complete and content
is representative of the quantity and quality that will be in
the final game. At this point, the focus is on polishing what is
in the game, rather than adding new elements or making
significant changes.
4. QA (Quality Assurance)
This stage is dedicated to testing the game rigorously and fixing
any problems (bugs) that are found.
5. Ship (Publish)
The game is released. This often is not the end of work as
ongoing support, game updates, and community interaction
may continue after this point.
The Game
Development Process
29
This is where
creating the
Transformational
Framework is the
most useful.
Transformational
games often
start with a realworld
need to be
addressed,
rather than a
game concept.
-DEVPRIMER-
White Box
A screenshot for a white box prototype of a level in
I Expect You To Die by Schell Games
Paper Prototype
A cardboard mockup of a level in the virtual reality game
I Expect You To Die by Schell Games
If there is one value critical to game design and
development, it is iteration. Iteration is the practice of
building something, testing it, evaluating its results, making
changes, and testing again. Game developers know that the
first version of any game or game system is often confusing,
broken, and generally not fun. It is only through iteration that
great games can be developed.
Playtesting is the engine of iteration in game
development. Playtesting is putting prototypes or the game
itself in front of players, observing their reaction, and using
these observations to make development decisions. Good
game development uses playtests early and often.
Prototyping is the art of building just enough to
test an idea. A prototype is a mockup or simplified version of
an idea. Game development uses prototypes to iterate more
quickly by building something quick and dirty to test. Here are a
few terms that refer to specialized types of prototypes:
• Paper Prototype: This is a non-digital prototype. It is by far
the cheapest way to prototype. (Note that it doesn’t have
to actually use paper!)
E.g., A team is creating an avatar customization system for their
game and wondering which items would most excite players.
They could create a paper prototype of their concepts and have
a playtest where players create a paper doll version of an avatar
to see what items are most popular with players.
• White Box: A term used for a mock-up of part of a game
using simplified objects.
E.g., A team is working on a first-person shooter. They create a
white box of each level with unfinished models to playtest ideas
before deciding on final level layouts.
• Sandbox: A tool that allows developers to quickly change
and test settings in order to prototype portions of the game.
E.g., A team is working on a role-playing game where lots of
different battles need to be designed. They build a sandbox tool
that allows their designers to quickly prototype different
combinations of enemies.
• Vertical Slice: A playable version of a complete section of
the game that demonstrates the target final look and feel.
This kind of “prototype” is most like production and so
requires more resources. It’s typically used to confirm (or
“greenlight”) the full production plan of a game.
Iteration, Playtests,
& Prototypes
31
For an illustrative
account of real
game iteration,
see Appendix E.
For more on
playtesting,
see Appendix F.
-DEVPRIMER-
Video game development is an interdisciplinary
endeavor. It has a wide range of team sizes, from solo “indie”
developers to teams with hundreds of people. Here are some
of the roles commonly found on game dev teams:
• Artists: These team members can encompass a very diverse set of talents,
from concept art to 3D modeling to animation to lighting and special effects.
• Audio Designers: These team members are responsible for the audio
experience of the game, including sound effects, voice over, and music.
• Engineers: These team members write the code that brings the game to
life. Engineers tackle the challenging programming and hardware
problems that must be solved to enable a great game experience.
• Game Designers: These team members are responsible for the player’s
experience. With input from team and playtesting, designers make
decisions about the game features and ensure that the team has clear
understanding of what they are building. Designers often fill specialized
content roles such as Level Designer or Writer.
• Producers: These team members could be thought of as the team’s
shepherds. A producer ensures the team stays on target to deliver a
finished, quality product within the time and resources available. They
handle team needs, wrangle the schedule, and often serve as liaison to
clients and publishers.
• UX Designers: This role (User Experience) is responsible for the design of the
interfaces in the game. They focus on how the player interacts with the
game as well as how they receive feedback.
• Quality Assurance: These team members provide testing for the game.
They work with the team to create test plans and then run the game
through these tests, documenting any issues they discover so that the team
can address them.
• Marketing: Often a huge portion of game budgets on blockbuster games,
marketing is responsible for getting the word out about the game and
driving sales. This may include creating additional assets like trailers, press
releases, etc. It can also include attending trade shows, participating in
festivals, posting on social media, and making commercial announcements.
• Community Manager: Some game teams have members dedicated to
cultivating the game’s player community. This could mean responding to
comments through sales channels, moderating game forums, running
special in-game events, or reaching out to players through social media.
• Publisher: Indie developers and independent studios may self-publish,
meaning they fund and market the games they make themselves. Other
games are made in partnership with a publisher, who often largely funds
the game and may take on a large part of the marketing. Depending on
the arrangement with the developer, publishers can have more or less of
an active influence over the design of the game.
On small teams, some of these roles may be handled by the
same person while on big teams, some may be split into even
more specialized divisions.
Game
Development Teams
33
Though these are common roles on developer teams,
the exact titles, specializations, and hierarchies of each
varies across the game development industry.
Design
Production
Audio
Art
Engineering
QA
Publishing
Marketing
Community
Management
UX Design
-DEVPRIMER-
Innovative
Features
Lots of
Systems
Content
Heavy
Multiple
Platforms
Multiplayer
LEVELS,
ANIMATION,
NARRATIVE,
VOICE OVER,
ETC.
Game production is about managing risk. Video games are
complex systems, often pursuing new, unique experiences or
pushing the limits of the latest technology. Central to
understanding risk in game production is this question: How
many unknowns remain for you to solve? An unknown can
range from a technical problem to details of the game design.
Unknowns represent risk along all three main components of
video game production: Scope, Schedule, and Budget.
Scope describes the work required to develop the game.
Predicting the scope of a full game or one of its features isn’t an
exact science, but here are some generalities:
• New, innovative features that are very unique to your
game can have unclear costs. The cost of a feature is a
factor of both what it takes to build the feature initially plus
the iteration it takes to get it feeling great. New, unique
features increase the risk that your team will need to iterate
quite a bit to figure out the details of how those features
should work for players. Sometimes a small feature that
requires a lot of iteration can end up being more work than
a big feature with a very clear implementation.
• The more systems you have in your game, the bigger the
scope. More systems means more stuff to build. More
systems also means more interactions between systems,
with more opportunities for complex edge cases and bugs. It
also means more functionality to explain to the player which
impacts both tutorials (on-boarding) and playtesting.
• Content can balloon scope significantly, especially if you
plan to rely on extensive writing, animation, or voice acting.
Some problems in game development are known
to significantly increase scope. There are some
problems that are nearly always particularly thorny to tackle in
game development. Here are two examples:
• Launch on multiple hardware platforms: Although a lot of
progress has been made on tools that help teams build the
same game for multiple platforms (e.g., Android, iPhone, PC,
web, etc), it is still true that each additional platform you
support will come with unique problems to solve.
• Include multiplayer: Allowing players to interact with one
another can extend the game experience, but it also
requires significant technical systems and can add a lot of
complexity to the game’s design and testing.
Scoping
Your Game
35
-DEVPRIMER-
• Bigger Than Expected
• The Marketing Budget Matters
$
Game Schedules
Game Budgets
• Frontload Unknowns
• Built Around Milestones
• Often Change Through Development
Game schedules are often designed to front-load
creative and technical risks. The iterative development
process is, in part, a way the industry has developed to mitigate
risk by encouraging teams to build quickly towards a playable
game and then continue playtesting throughout development
to ensure they are heading in a good direction. One strategy is
to build the parts of the game with the most unknowns first, so
that there is time to iterate on these parts.
Most game schedules use some form of milestones that act as
checkpoints on how the game development is progressing. This
typically involves an in-progress build of the game showing a
targeted set of features and content. Although teams may
outline a full schedule of milestones at the start of the project,
keep in mind that, due to the iterative nature of game
development, it’s not uncommon for the details of milestone
deliveries to change as the game evolves.
Game budgets are bigger than you think. Many
people new to game development are surprised at the cost.
Remember, reflecting on scope and risk as discussed so far, the
budget has to cover the final game and every iteration of the
game that you’ll throw away before you figure out that final
version. Want a cheaper game?
• Go 2D. 3D content is typically (though not always) more
expensive to author and iterate with than 2D games
because of the added complexity of world design,
animation, navigation, technical performance, etc.
• Remix mechanics from existing games. Scope is more
predictable and usually smaller if you already know exactly
how the game should work. By mimicking parts of an
existing game, in whole or in part, you can reduce the risk of
scope ballooning from iteration, and thus reduce cost. Most
games incorporate mechanics and pieces of design from
prior games, but very closely copying a full game is called
“cloning” and is generally frowned upon.
Want a blockbuster game? Your marketing
budget matters. One unexpectedly large part of
blockbuster game budgets is marketing, which can be as big
as (if not bigger than) the development budget.
Schedules
& Budgets
37
-DEVPRIMER-
“Everyone” is not a target audience. Your dev team
will likely ask you to define a target audience. It’s common for
clients to answer “we’d like it to be for everyone.” This is not a
realistic target audience. A target audience helps your team
make better design decisions by establishing their most
important players. This audience is usually distinguished by
attributes like age, gender, motivation, lifestyle, and gameplay
preferences. Setting a target audience does not mean that
other players are necessarily excluded.
It’s not always obvious what things are hard
(expensive) versus easy (cheap.) Ask! It can be
surprising which features can be easily added and which
would be quite difficult. It can depend on the expertise of your
particular team or the details of the existing game systems. If
you are a client or partner, don’t assume something is easy or
hard. Talk to your dev team and ask questions. Focus on
expressing the motivation for your request. What problem are
you trying to solve? Often focusing on the problem, instead of a
specific solution, can allow a development team to come up
with a creative (and in-scope) way to address the concern.
Unknown requirements or constraints create
development risk and friction. Teams don’t like to be
surprised by unexpected requirements or feel like they are
working under unknown rules. Take time to gather and
honestly communicate constraints or requirements as soon as
you are aware of them. Some examples:
• An upcoming demo requirement: There are resource costs
to preparing an in-progress game build to show well at a
demo. Don’t surprise your dev team with a last minute
request. Give them enough notice to prepare.
• Key stakeholder requirement or trigger: For example, if
you know that an important stakeholder really dislikes a
particular animal and the use of that animal might impact
their approval of the game, let your dev team know. (It
sounds silly, but this kind of thing really does happen.)
Remember, it is okay and even expected for the occasional
schedule change or new requirement to pop up. Keep these to
a minimum and communicate them as soon as possible so your
dev team has time to make adjustments and alert you to
potential implications to scope, schedule, or budget.
What Developers
Want You To Know
Psst!
Part of managing risk is making cuts. You will almost
definitely need to cut scope at some point in development, and
that means making a call to remove a game system or trim
your content. The further you are in your development
schedule, the more risky it is to be working on features where
you are uncertain what it will take to make them good enough.
Consider cutting these features in favor of applying more
resources to make the other parts of the game stronger and
more polished. It’s almost always better to cut proactively and
intentionally than to find yourself just running out of time or
going over budget at the end.
Have a clear, short chain of approval. Make sure
everyone on it makes time to see the game at
critical milestones. Every project benefits when it is clear
who sets approvals and whose feedback has highest priority.
Developers want clarity on when something is approved or not.
They want to know who has final say on a feature. Take time
to map out this approvals hierarchy at the start of the project
and make sure that your schedule includes in-progress
milestones where everyone, including the highest-level decision
maker, will review the game and provide feedback. Set a
single person who is responsible for ensuring these reviews
happen and who is gathering this feedback and facilitating
these approvals.
Late feedback is the worst feedback. Experienced
developers will expect to get both positive and negative
feedback. Be professionally polite, but also honest about what
you like and don’t like about the game. Expect to occasionally
get pushback on feedback, either because your development
team has a particular recommendation as developers, or
because limited resources simply don’t allow every piece of
feedback to be addressed.
You’ll need to pick your battles. If you’re a client or partner with
many internal voices, it’s often a good idea to get some internal
consensus on feedback before passing it along to the
development team. But the absolute most important rule to
follow with feedback is to provide it in a timely manner. The
worst situation for everyone is when feedback is given and it’s
too late to make changes without serious repercussions.
39
-DEVPRIMER-
41
The
Transformational
Framework
Overview of the
Transformational
Framework
What’s in the
Framework and how
should it be used?
The Transformational Framework is a process
grounded in an intersecting set of exploratory
questions intended to help teams build a shared
vision of their design problem. Its purpose is to help
you and your team ask (and answer!) both broad
and deep questions about your transformational
goals and how those goals might be
accomplished through your game.
The Framework is intended as a pre-production
tool, used before you make design decisions about
your game experience. It will continue to inform
your game development throughout production.
There are eight pieces to the Transformational
Framework. This first chapter gives a high-level
overview of the entire Framework and how to
approach it. Then each piece of the Framework is
covered in detail in the following chapters.
43
-OVERVIEW-
Each piece of the Framework connects back to the common
challenges experienced when developing Transformational
games.
• High-Level Purpose: The big-picture goal that is motivating
your game’s development
• Audience & Context: A deep look at the usage ecosystem
for the game, beyond traditional target player
demographics
• Player Transformations: The most important ways you
want your players to be different after playing your game
• Barriers: An understanding of those things that stand in the
way of your purpose and how you want to change your
players
• Domain Concepts: The facts, procedures, stories, etc., that
your game experience needs to embody in order to change
your players
• Expert Resources: The people, books, etc., that you consider
authoritative sources of insight and feedback on your
domain
• Prior Works: The case studies and research that you are
using as references for your transformational design
strategy
• Assessment Plan: How you and others will decide if your
game is effective
The pieces of the Framework are interconnected.
Although presented here in a specific order, developing your
Transformational Framework is not a linear endeavor. The
parts of the Framework inform each other, so plan on revisiting
pieces throughout your process.
Think of the Transformational Framework as an
outline for your team to fill in. This book covers the
Transformational Framework as a general process for any
Transformational game. Use it as a guide to create a tailored
transformational framework for your specific game. In this
book, “the Framework” refers to the process itself, while “your
framework“ refers to your results of undertaking the process.
What’s in the
Framework?
45
-OVERVIEW-
THE
TRANSFORMATIONAL
FRAMEWORK
- 1 Read
through the full Framework guide before
starting. There are eight interconnected pieces to the
Framework that inform each other. You often can’t talk about
one piece without referring to another. Additionally, the closing
chapter on production considerations for Transformational
games is also quite important to read and digest.
- 2 Buy-in
matters. Your Framework should reflect a shared
vision between everyone working on the game. It will take time
to complete and will work best when you are able to bring all
decision-making stakeholders into the process. Before doing so,
spend time explaining what the Transformational Framework is
and why it is valuable. (Hopefully you can use this book as one
tool for this purpose.)
If team members or partners join your project later in
development, after your framework is complete, getting their
buy-in still matters. Make sure you share your framework with
them and take time to address their questions or suggestions.
- 3 Tackle
the Framework as early as possible. The best
time to undertake the Framework process is in pre-production
before you’ve made many decisions. Everything from platform
to art needs, and especially the game design, should be
informed by your transformational framework. If you are
already in the middle of development, it’s not too late to benefit
from the Framework, although the process will likely challenge
some of the assumptions and decisions you’ve made so far.
- 4 The
Framework is a tool to augment your preproduction
– not replace it. Other standard preproduction
tasks also still apply, such as proving out your tech
pipeline, building gameplay prototypes, establishing your art
style, creating a solid production schedule, etc.
Tips for
Using the Framework
- 5 Document
your Framework. Although a written
document is not the primary goal of the Transformational
Framework process, do document your framework. There is
significant value in the process itself, and you will find that you
and your team internalize much of what you decide and
discover along the way. But it is also beneficial to document
your decisions and discoveries – for your future self to refer
back to throughout development and evaluate your success,
and also so that new team members or outsiders can
understand what guided your design.
- 6 Keep
your Framework in mind throughout
production. The Framework process is most directly useful in
pre-production when many of your foundational design
decisions are being made. However, it continues to be
applicable throughout production. It is a lens you should use to
make decisions on everything from what features to cut to the
kind of feedback to give to players during gameplay.
- 7 Be
flexible when working through the Framework.
The Framework pieces are presented in a specific order, but
you may find that a different order works for you. It is also
normal to revisit pieces as you establish your Framework. If you
find your team is stuck on a piece, consider jumping to a
different one. For each project, you will find some pieces are
more important or take more time, while other pieces may be
less relevant or can be addressed very quickly.
- 8 Your
framework is not an end unto itself. The
questions you will explore as part of the Transformational
Framework can be challenging. Don’t expect to reach perfect
answers in which you are 100% confident. You may find
yourself needing to move forward with development while
unknowns and uncertainties still remain. That is OK. Sometimes
you are not looking for a “right” answer, but your answer – one
that will help you and your team move forward with aligned
vision and purpose. And remember, you are not chained to the
decisions you make in pre-production.
47
-OVERVIEW-
In 2011, Schell Games started its first big
Transformational game with Yale University's
play2PREVENT® lab: PlayForward®, a game to
reduce HIV exposure in teens by reducing their
risky behavior. We started this project at Schell as we often
did – with quick protoyping. But we soon realized that the
visions of our development team and client partners were
misaligned. We took a step back and spent some time trying to
create a better shared definition of the problem we were
trying to solve. We created ‘playbooks’ with Yale for each highlevel
skill or behavior we were trying to change. Each of these
playbooks outlined our shared understanding of that behavior,
our theory of how to change it, and how the game would
implement that theory. These documents were the forerunners
of the Transformational Framework.
That experience awoke a realization in me that we needed to
develop a strategic approach to the Schell Games studio
process for these kinds of games. I took what we’d learned
from PlayForward and created a template called
“Transformational Goals” to be used on the next
Transformational project. It only had a few pieces of the
eventual Framework – purpose, transformational goals, and
supporting research.
The next project happened to be World of Lexica, an ambitious
tablet game with the goal to encourage lifelong reading in
middle-schoolers. The game had already been in development
for a year, but there was a general feeling on the team that
they didn’t understand how the game they were building
would achieve the intended transformational effect. So, even
though the project was well underway, we decided to try out
our new Transformational Goals process. We enlisted our client
as a partner in this process, and the time we all spent in this
design process strengthened the final game.
This first application of this process within Schell Games was a
great learning experience. We gathered up a long list of “big
questions” that we felt it would be important for our
development team and our client to answer.
Developer Story
The Framework’s Evolution
From these questions emerged additional pieces of the
Framework: the concept of barriers and the idea of more
extensively defining the audience and context of the game, as
well as assessment planning and strategies for incorporating
expert resources and prior works.
After Lexica, I continued to experiment with applying this
process to game projects. It made pitches clearer and
production goals easier to define. These experiences convinced
me that a templated process like this was extremely beneficial
to Transformational game projects and something that should
be done early in a project’s life cycle, before big design
decisions are made. It was at this point that the name
“Transformational Framework” started to stick.
In 2014, I started an outline of a guide that eventually led to this
book. My goal was to share the Framework in an instructional
way with a wider audience of developers so that it could
continue to evolve. I wanted to include not just the idea of the
Framework pieces, but also supportive insights, strategies, and
vocabulary to help teams work through the Framework.
To that end, I enlisted another ongoing project at Schell Games,
Happy Atoms, to try using the Framework and this guide in their
development. The Happy Atoms project director, Yotam
Haimberg, embraced the Framework. He and his team
provided feedback regularly about their experience. It was
from this feedback that the last piece of the Framework was
added – Key Concepts, which later become Domain Concepts.
Since then, other projects at Schell Games have used the
Framework and evolving drafts of this book as an aide for their
pre-production process. It has also been applied at Carnegie
Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center for graduate work
on a number of Transformational games.
The Framework pieces themselves have stayed fairly steady
since 2015, but the book has grown significantly beyond what I
initially imagined. It’s exciting to be able to share it with more
teams and support the world-changing potential of
Transformational games.
49
Sabrina Culyba
Author
-OVERVIEW-
Question
#1
51
Why is it
important
that your
game
transform
players?
High-Level
Purpose
Why is it important
that your game
transform players?
There are a number of desired outcomes that
tend to drive game development: creative
expression, profit, and acclaim are all common
motivators for entertainment games. Most games
hope to accomplish one or more of these
outcomes. Transformational games add another –
player transformation. ‘Add’ is truly the right word
because many Transformational games are also
trying to make money, get recognized, or fulfill an
artistic vision.
Transforming players is hard. You and your team
should have a clear, shared understanding of the
big-picture impact you are trying to achieve with
your game by transforming players. This is your
High-Level Purpose.
53
-HIGH-LEVELPURPOSE-
Alignment
Inspiration
Direction
A clear purpose provides several benefits for your team.
Agreeing on your purpose is an important early
exercise in aligning vision in your team. In order to
effectively use your purpose for design decisions, you will need
agreement on the purpose within your team and among your
key stakeholders. Ideally, everyone who will have influence
over the design direction of your project should be able to
quickly state the High-Level Purpose.
A purpose provides inspiration for the hard work
of developing a Transformational game. Generally
humans like to feel like their work and struggle is meaningful.
And it is very likely that your team will, at times, struggle. Making
games is hard. Making a Transformational game is even
harder. To persevere through these struggles, it will help your
team to have a shared sense of why their work matters. The
High-Level Purpose should evoke this value.
Your purpose is a directional compass for your
design decisions. Everything else about the game, including
all the other pieces of your Transformational Framework may
shift as your process unfolds and you continue to refine your
approach. But your High-Level Purpose should remain
consistent as the true north for where you are headed with
your impact.
Direction and alignment help keep your team
moving together toward the right goal, while
inspiration helps provide momentum.
The Importance
of Purpose
55
-HIGH-LEVELPURPOSE-
A Good Purpose Is
• Focused on Impact, Not Product
• Concise & Memorable
• Supports Alignment for Your Team
To establish your high-level purpose, gather your team and any
other key stakeholders to discuss the big-picture impact you
want your Transformational game to have. Ask yourselves:
Why is it important that our game transform players? If you are
working with a client or partner that has a vision statement or
mission statement, consider this as a starting point for your
purpose.
Focus on the meaningful impact you want to
make, not on the game. Remember, in most cases your
purpose is independent of the fact that you are making a
game. A game is a medium, a tool, a strategy, a means to an
end – that end is your purpose. Your purpose is not about the
experience you are making — it is about why you are making
that experience. If you find yourself writing a purpose that
starts with “Make a game that…”, try cutting that first part
completely and focusing on what comes after.
Make your purpose memorable. Everyone on the team
should be able to quickly recite your purpose. To this end, keep
your purpose concise. Consider placing it prominently in your
design documents and presentations so that everyone is
constantly reminded why you are making your game. This
helps the purpose continue to inspire your team and keep
everyone aligned on the common goal.
Remember that your purpose is for your team.
Spend time getting the wording right for your team and
stakeholders. Once you reach a place where it feels like
everyone can repeat and nod along with your purpose
statement, you’ve reached alignment. Do not get too bogged
down in making it self-explanatory to all outsiders.
A clear, memorable purpose will help your entire
team better contribute to the rest of the
Framework process as well as the actual design
and development of your game.
Establishing
Your Purpose
57
-HIGH-LEVELPURPOSE-
PlayForward®: Elm City Stories (2012)
Purpose: Reduce HIV Exposure in At-risk Teens
Schell Games worked on PlayForward in partnership with
Yale School of Medicine’s play2PREVENT® Lab and Digitalmill.
Yale came to the project with the goal of showing that a
game could be used to reduce HIV exposure in at-risk teens.
This big-picture intent continued to be the primary guidepost
for the motivation for the project, even as the team delved
deeply into the specific behavior changes the game would try
to engender in players.
The World of Lexica (2015)
Purpose: Create Life-long Readers
Lexica was developed by Schell Games as part of a tabletbased
curriculum initiative by Amplify. It was an expansive
RPG-style tablet game that featured many books and
minigames about reading skills. Though books and literacy
were part of the game’s early concept, when the team
pushed on the inspirational why of the Transformational
nature of the game, the purpose of instilling in players a lifelong
identity as a “reader” came to light.
Happy Atoms (2016)
Purpose: Demystify Chemistry
Long before Happy Atoms existed as a digital game, it started
as a physical prototype of a new kind of molecule building set
that was the brainchild of Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games.
Jesse believed that there must be some way to make
chemistry less mysterious and more intuitive for learners. This
goal to demystify chemistry became the development team’s
high-level purpose.
Developer Story
Three Purpose Examples
These are high-level purpose statements used by the teams
of Transformational games developed at Schell Games.
Happy Atoms
““Demystify Chemistry”
The World of Lexica
”Create Lifelong Readers”
© play2PREVENT®
PlayForward®: Elm City Stories
“Reduce HIV Exposure in At-risk Teens”
-HIGH-LEVELPURPOSE-
59
Many teams working on Transformational games mistake
knowing their purpose for understanding their design problem.
Here is a typical scenario.
Client: We want to make a game that helps kids learn
physics.
Team: Okay, a physics game, right? Here is a design for a
game where the puzzles are all based on real physics and
you manipulate physics properties to solve the puzzles. And,
this is similar to this other game that is popular with your
demographic.
Client: Sounds great! Let’s build it.
Both sides of this conversation have agreed on their high-level
purpose – help kids learn physics – and both have failed to give
attention to why kids struggle with physics or what they really
mean by “learn physics”.
Consequently their design concept, while featuring physics, is
not built on a foundational theory of how the gameplay will
successfully change players. Because they have short-circuited
the important questions represented by the rest of the
Framework by leaping to a solution from their purpose, the
result is likely to be a game shallowly themed around physics
that has little to offer in terms of deep engagement with their
purpose and is not successful at changing players.
Do not design directly from your purpose. Instead,
use your purpose to guide the creation of the rest
of your transformational framework and use
your full framework to guide your design.
A Purpose
Is Not Enough
61
!
-HIGH-LEVELPURPOSE-
Question
#2
63
What is the
ecosystem in
which your
game must
create
change?
Audience & Context
What is the ecosystem in
which your game must
create change?
Your Audience consists of the people you want to
play, support, or use your game. This is always
important to identify for a game but has additional
implications for a Transformational game.
The Context is the environment in which your
game will be played. This includes not only where,
when, and how the game will be played, but also
the social context of the player and other
stakeholders. All of these elements can impact the
effectiveness of your game.
Together the Audience and Context make up the
ecosystem in which your game must create
change.
65
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
The typical game development approach to target audience
focuses on understanding what will appeal to that audience
based on demographic and play style factors
Defining your player audience is always important for a game.
In standard game development, we usually call this the “target
audience.” It is typically defined primarily by:
• Basic Demographics such as age, gender, location, and
education level
• Play Style: game genre preferences and play motivation
Here are some examples of typical target audiences:
• 30-35 year-old women who are casual gamers
• 6-8 year-old kids who enjoy sandbox games
• 15-25 year-old hardcore male players who play competitive
games
• 2-4 year-old children who play tablet games with their
parents
(Note that gender tends to be simplified into genericized
stereotypes of male and female when it is used for the
purposes of defining the demographic of target audiences.)
Standard game development is often focused on
understanding what will appeal to an audience.
Basic demographic stats help to guide content along axis of
tone, maturity, and theme, while examining gaming style helps
decide what kind of game mechanics and play patterns the
target audience might expect or desire. There are (much
debated) relationships between certain demographic stats and
certain gaming styles. Developers sometimes first pick a
demographic and then choose a game style they think will
appeal to that demographic, or first come up with a game and
then try to market to the demographic that they believe will
enjoy the type of gameplay in their game.
Transformational games have the additional
challenge of understanding how to affect change
in the audience. In order to do this, we have to go beyond
what we normally consider critical to know about our target
audience and the context that surrounds them. It’s important to
recognize that this is in addition to understanding demographics
and play style, because, of course, appealing to an audience is
the first step to having them play a game that might transform
them.
Target Audience
Is the Start
67
For references
on play style
taxonomies, see
Appendix G.
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
Comparison for
Assessing Impact
Understanding
Transformational Gap
Understanding How to
Meet Players as They Come
ENTER
The most critical additional angle to consider
about your audience is their initial state – how
they come to your game relative to the change
you are trying to achieve. Your goal is to change players.
Change necessarily implies moving from a starting condition to
a new condition. How do you expect players to come to the
game, in terms of your game’s transformational purpose and
topic?
E.g., You are designing a game to help students struggling with
geometry. What is your audience’s expected familiarity and skill level in
geometry when they start playing your game? What can you assume
they already know? What experiences, feelings, knowledge or other
intersections with geometry should you expect in your audience?
Understanding initial state helps you meet your
players as they are when they start your game
experience. Understanding initial state helps you design for
your player’s entry into your game. If your game starts out
assuming prior knowledge or experience that your players do
not have, you may leave them behind. If your game fails to
present your topic in a way that is approachable for your
audience, they may decide your game is not for them.
Initial state gives you a sense of the
transformational gap your game might address.
Understanding the delta between the initial state and the
intended transformed state gives you a sense of how much
content you will need in your game as well as how you might
need to scaffold that content to help the player reach that
state.
Initial state is important when assessing your
game’s impact. Showing change requires comparing an
end state to a starting state. By exploring and documenting
your audience’s initial state, you create a snapshot of your
audience before your game that can be useful for measuring
impact after.
Initial State is deeply connected to other parts of the
Framework, particularly your Player Transformations, Barriers,
Domain Concepts, and Assessment. You will probably need to
iterate on your exploration into your audience’s initial state in
tandem with your development of these other Framework
pieces.
Your Audience’s
Initial State
69
This is highly
connected to
Barriers.
This is highly
connected to
Domain
Concepts.
This is highly
connected to
Assessment.
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
Intrinsic
Interest
External
Pressures
Personal
Goals
The second critical expanded view of your
audience is their transformational motivation –
does your audience want to be transformed?
Transformational motivation is distinct from play motivation. It
has to do with your audience’s relationship to your high-level
purpose and your game’s domain.
Your audience may have no transformational motivation. They
may be completely disconnected or at odds with your highlevel
purpose. However, often there are connections such as:
• Meeting external pressures: There are forces outside your
audience applying pressure on them to change, but your
audience is not necessarily aligned with these forces.
E.g., Earning a passing grade for a required class in which the
player has little personal interest
• Reaching personal goals: Your audience has personal goals
that are motivating them to change, though they may not
be interested so much in the change itself.
E.g., Completing training that supports the player’s growth and
success in their chosen profession
• Supporting intrinsic interest & identity: Your audience is
innately interested in your game’s topic, purpose, or their
own transformation .
E.g., Learning more about a subject the player self-identifies as
enjoyable or meaningful to them
Understanding transformational motivation will
inform how directly you can approach your highlevel
purpose and topic. Will your players be turned-off if
they detect your intent? In this case, perhaps your game should
be a “headfake” where players don’t realize they are supposed
to be learning or changing. Or would knowing your game’s
transformational intent increase your player’s buy-in?
Transformational motivation helps you
understand where you should focus your design.
If your players are personally motivated to transform, you may
invest more development effort in game structures that help
them see their transformational progress (such as badges or
stats.) On the other hand, if your players are not motivated by
your transformational purpose, it’s even more important to
connect with their motivation in some other way. This often
involves doubling down on fulfilling their existing play style
preferences with your game’s mechanics.
Your Audience’s
Transformational Motivation
71
For more on
supporting
feedback for
self-motivated
players,
see Pg. 207.
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
Social
Connections
AccessSocioeconomic
Status
Related
Content
Formalized
Structures
Cultural
Norms
$
OK
Here are some additional angles on understanding your
audience based on the context that surrounds them. You may
notice overlap between these concepts. This list is not meant to
be exhaustive or definitive but offers lenses on the context
around audiences that are valuable for your team to explore.
• Socioeconomic Status (SES): This includes the player’s
economic standing and education level. SES impacts
behavior, disposition, knowledge, health, and many other
aspects of life. You can also expand SES to look at the
community in which the player lives, with implications for
other items on this list like access and social connections.
• Access: What sort of technology and resources does your
audience have access to? Where and when will they be
able to logistically play your game? How will their access
impact their ability to follow through with transformations
such as behavior changes?
• Cultural Norms: If you are designing for a particular region
or cultural group, adoption and impact of your game may
depend on it fitting into the social norms of that group.
“Cultural norms” refers to symbols, beliefs, language,
behavioral patterns, social hierarchies, traditions, etc. This
includes understanding what is taboo or offensive to your
players or their communities.
• Related Content: What else is your audience interacting
with related to your purpose? Are they taking related
classes? Watching related media? How will your game fit in?
How can your game complement (and be complemented
by) these other experiences and resources?
• Social Connections: Social relationships play an important
role in influencing behavior, beliefs, and identities. Take time
to understand the social relationships that are important to
your players so you can decide how, if at all, your game will
interact with those connections. You may decide to leverage
them, or find that you need to overcome them.
• Formalized Structures: Will your game be used within a
formalized structure such as a school or community
organization? How will this influence both your players’
potential transformations as well as how your game is
accessed or perceived? Are there rules or integration
requirements you need to understand to be successful? Will
a moderator such as a teacher be interacting with your
players? If so, what is their role in your players’
transformations or otherwise facilitating your game?
Additional Components
of Context
73
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
Often in Transformational games there are a
number of stakeholder parties who are not
directly playing the game but whose voices and
concerns are important to consider.
• Parents: If your game is targeting minors, you should
consider the role of parents or other adult guardians. They
may serve as gatekeepers to the game, so you may need to
appeal to them in order to access your target players. In
general, parents want to keep their kids safe and feel like
they are successful as parents. Consider how your game
could be perceived as helping or hindering these goals.
• Client or Funders: These are the people who commissioned
your game or who support it financially. They may be
genuinely invested in the transformational outcome of your
game, but they may also be interested in its critical reception
and financial success.
• Researchers: If you are working on a game in partnership
with a university or through a grant funder, you may find
yourself working with researchers who plan to study your
game and its impact on players. Researchers are usually
interested in publishing academic papers on their work.
• Schools and School Districts: These entities are effective
gatekeepers to the classroom for many educational games.
When they are determining what educational material they
purchase, they are often concerned with, or beholden to,
educational standards and assessments. And often those
schools with the most need have the least access to funding
and technology resources.
• Teachers: If your game is intended for use in the classroom,
then you are partnering, directly or indirectly, with teachers.
They have needs related to getting buy-in from their
administration, integrating your game into their lesson plans,
and also managing their classroom logistically.
Audiences
Beyond Players
75
Schools &
Districts
Teachers
Parents Client or
Funder
Researchers
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
Common
Stakeholder Concerns
• Health Safety: My kid is going to be safe from
physical and emotional harm while playing this
game, right? Do I need to worry about bullying or
predation by other players?
• Moral Safety: My kid’s not going to be exposed to
something I disapprove of in this game, right?
• Guilt Free: I’m not going to feel like a bad parent
by letting my kids play this, right?
• Vetted: Is this game good? Show me some entity I
trust and respect vouching for it.
• Help Me: How is this going to help me with my role
as a parent?
Parents
Clients &
Funders
• Funding: Will working with you on this game help
me get my own research funded?
• Data: Will I be able to get clean data out of this
game that I can use for analysis and publication?
• Adaptability: Will I be able to change things in the
game later and then gather more data?
• Publishing: I must be able to publish my findings. If I
work with you, are you willing to keep the data we
collect out of the public sphere until I publish?
Researchers
• Responsibility: If those at the top of our
organization knew how much this game cost to
develop, would they think the money well spent?
• PR: Will this game show well and make us look
good? We’re not going to have any PR snafus with
this game’s content, are we?
• Strategy: Will this game complement our overall
strategy of success? (Impact, Sales…)
• Proof: How can we prove the effectiveness of this
game so we can make confident claims?
77
• Rules Fit: Our school has many layers of rules we
must follow that control what we can use or buy. Will
this game qualify?
• Happy Parents: When kids show their parents this
game, we won’t get any angry phone calls or emails,
right?
• IT Integration: We only have brand X devices and
our wi-fi is limited. Will this game work for us?
• Easy Support: We have limited IT staff. How easy is
this game to maintain and update?
• Standards Alignment: Does this game meet the
curriculum standards we have to follow?
• Assessment: Our funding is tied to our students’
performance. Will this game show results that align
with our student assessment goals? How easy is it to
see reports of these results?
Teachers
Schools
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT•
Good Guidance: I want examples on how to
integrate this into my classroom. Do you have any?
• Unlockability: I have my own schedule and very
limited classroom time. Will this game let me easily
skip to particular content?
• Classroom Management: I need to be able to
monitor and focus a group of students. What
features of this game will help me with those
challenges?
• Assessment: I need to know if my students are doing
well or if they are stuck. Can the game help me
measure student mastery? I also need to get data
out of this game and integrated into my grading
process. How easy will that be?
• Drill Support: Some skills I teach fundamentally
require repetitious practice. Could this game make
this kind of practice less boring for my students?
• Cost Structure: Do I need to pay per student? Is the
price point high enough that I’ll need to fill out
paperwork to make a special purchase request?
My team and I were tasked with
developing transformational games for
early adolescent girls in rural Ethiopia.
While we were collaborating with local
experts, our game design team was not
familiar with Ethiopian girl culture. That
meant we needed to spend a lot of time
listening before making design decisions.
During our research phase, we discovered that girls had a
culture of sharing games. Girls told us that when they went to
visit family in other towns, they were obligated to teach local
girls any new games that they’d learned. This was an
opportunity for our games to spread naturally, and for girls to
feel a sense of ownership of the games they were playing.
At the same time, this created a new problem. If we were
distributing the games, we could provide any materials needed
to play. If girls were teaching each other, though, game
materials couldn’t be centrally distributed. Girls would need to
be able to share game materials with each other as peers.
Developer Story
Designing for Rural Ethiopia
Our audience was early adolescent girls
living in the city of Adis Abeba and the
rural province of Amhara in Ethiopia.
Find references related for this
developer story in Appendix H.
79
We also considered how girls might teach each other the game
rules. While we produced written versions of our game rules
that girls could copy, we assumed that our games would
primarily be taught orally. That meant creating mnemonics and
songs to go along with our written rules.
These choices wouldn’t be appropriate in every context, but for
the girls we were working with, shareable and reproducible
games were key!
Jessica Hammer
Assistant Professor
Carnegie Mellon University
A trio of two-sided rocks could be
substituted for a 6-sided die. Girls could
create these easily with found materials.
Taken together, these two
insights changed our
approach to the games
we were designing. We
realized that all our games
needed to be playable
with free, locally available
materials. We observed
what physical materials
girls already played with,
and we collaborated with
girls to identify what
other materials they had
access to. Instead of
creating beautiful physical
parts for our game, we
designed game pieces
that could be copied by
girls using seeds, string,
cardboard, plastic bags,
tin can lids, and flat stones.
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
Persona Profiles
Artifacts: Photo Diaries,
Collages, etc.
Fly-on-the-Wall
Observation/Shadowing
How can you get such a broad and nuanced understanding of
your player audience and the context around them? Leverage
the disciplines of Human-Centered Design (HCD) and
Participatory Design (also known as Co-Design). Both of these
design approaches offer techniques to more deeply
understand your audience & context. Here are just a few ideas:
Create a persona profile of a prototypical
audience member. Start by outlining the things you’d
ideally know about your audience to inform your design: their
goals, priorities, concerns, patterns, attitudes, etc. Identify any
gaps in your knowledge. Use surveys, interviews, observations,
and artifacts to address these gaps.
E.g., You are designing a game for training new city employees. You
create a persona profile for a fictional “Robin Newhire,” and include
details (such as her prior work experience, expectations for her new
job, and her home life) that reflect the majority of new hires. You help
vet these details through surveys and interviews of real city
employees. When making design decisions, your team considers how
it would be received by Robin.
Invite your audience to create their own artifacts
such as photo diaries or collages. To capture your
audience’s authentic context and sense of self, ask them to
create their own cultural documentation such as photo diaries,
collages, or personal stories. Then ask them to tell you in their
own words about what they made. Pay attention to what is
important to them, what details they focus on, the words they
use, and their emotional connection to each piece.
E.g., You are designing a game to promote civic engagement in high
schoolers. You might ask a group of students to collect photos that
capture the impact of government on themselves and their family.
You could then have them present their photos and talk about them. In
this way, you learn about their existing knowledge, dispositions, and
relationships to government, in their own words and images.
Observe your audience in their real world context.
You can learn a lot by directly observing your audience in their
context. How do they behave? How do they talk and interact
with others? What are their patterns? Where do they get stuck
or have problems? What choices do they make? (Of course,
don’t intrude on the personal privacy of your audience without
their permission!)
E.g., You are designing a game to improve communication patterns
between parents and young children. You might chose to observe
parent/child groups in settings such as playgrounds or restaurants.
Useful
Techniques
81
For references
on HumanCentered
Design,
see Appendix I.
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
It can be tempting to make assumptions about your target
audience. Sometimes these assumptions even come from
relevant personal experience with that audience. But do not
rely solely on these assumptions when starting your process.
Too often this leads to a false sense of confidence that you
understand your audience’s motivations, initial state, and
context. This in turn can hamper your design decisions by
obscuring problems to solve or pulling your focus based on
mistaken priorities.
Vet what you think you know about your
audience with actual members of that audience.
This is why human-centered design and participatory design
are so critical to establishing a clear picture of your audience
and context. These strategies bring your audience into the
process so what you learn has an innate authenticity to it.
Beware of convincing yourself that you are a
good enough proxy for your target audience.
Invest time in clearly establishing your true target audience.
Make sure to capture what sets them apart. Understanding this
and believing this matters is a bulwark against the temptation
to simply fall back on yourself and your team as proxies for that
audience.
Invest in figuring out how to access your target
audience. The temptation to rely on yourself as a proxy for
the audience can be particularly great if it’s difficult to access
your target audience. Finding or creating a channel of access
to your audience can help prevent falling into this trap.
Honestly acknowledge when you are using a
proxy for your target audience. It’s not realistic to have
access to your authentic audience at every moment. There will
certainly be moments when you’ll need to make decisions or
playtest your ideas without your audience. Try to stay aware of
these moments and have a plan on how you’ll follow up with
your target audience eventually.
* Even if you are making a game where you are legitimately a
member of the target audience, question your assumptions and seek
out input from others to figure out what is unique to your personal
experience and what of your personal perspective is generally shared
by your audience as a whole.
You Are Not
Your Target Audience*
83
!
-AUDIENCE&CONTEXT-
Question
#3
85
How should
players be
different after
playing your
game?
Player
Transformations
How should players be
different after playing
your game?
The heart of transformational success is how your
game changes players.
If your high-level purpose is your inspirational why,
your Player Transformations are your focused
what. They outline the specific ways you intend
your player to be changed by your game
experience in order to achieve your purpose.
It’s important to recognize that transformation isn’t
just about players learning new facts or skills.
There are many other ways to transform players
and often, to meet your purpose, your game must
change players along several different axes.
Player transformations, in outlining the specific
intended impact of your game, also provide a
beginning blueprint for how you will assess your
game and determine your transformational
success.
87
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
Expand Beyond
Learning Objectives
Describe Player Change
From Initial State
CREATE
EVALUATE
ANALYZE
APPLY
UNDERSTAND
REMEMBER
Like your high-level purpose, player transformations are
independent of the fact that you are making a game. They are
not about what the player will do in the game. They are the
specific ways the player will be changed by your game that
will transfer and persist beyond the game experience.
.Player Transformations describe changes from
your player’s initial state. As we covered in the previous
chapter, the player’s initial state is how they come to your
game – what they already know, think, feel, do, etc. Player
transformations implicitly build from this initial state.
Player Transformations are an expanded form of
learning objectives. If you are familiar with education or
educational games, you’ve probably heard the terms learning
objectives or learning goals.
Learning objectives are often based on Bloom’s Taxonomy,
which describes a hierarchal progression of six levels of skills
that represent learning: Remembering, Understanding,
Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating. Bloom’s
Taxonomy is a powerful tool for describing a player’s mastery
of solicited performance of a skill or area of knowledge.
Becoming familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy is very valuable for
working in education and for working with specific types of
player transformations. Good learning objectives, like good
player transformations, are specific, measurable, and playercentered.
However, Bloom’s Taxonomy doesn’t directly
represent a number of other ways we can change players,
such as behavior, choices, feelings, sense of identity, or physical
changes.
Ultimately, “learning” is not always sufficient to describe the
ways we want to change players and may bias our focus
towards mastery of facts and skills, when transformations can
cover a much broader spectrum of impact.
What Are Player
Transformations?
89
For references
on Bloom’s
Taxonomy,
see Appendix J.
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
Player Transformation is multifaceted and can
cover a broad spectrum of impact on players.
Teams starting out on Transformational games tend to focus
primarily on the knowledge and skill aspects of player change.
These are the types of transformations that usually fall within
traditional learning objectives:
• Knowledge: The player knows something new.
E.g., Player can recall the meaning of vocabulary words
• Skill: The player can do something new.
E.g., Player can solve algebraic equations
However, changing humans often means changing more than
what they know or can do. Here are a number of other broad
categories of transformation that are worth considering for
your game:
• Physical: The player’s body is changed.
E.g., Player has a lower resting heart rate
• Disposition: The player’s feelings are changed.
E.g., Player feels more positively about people of non-binary
gender identities
• Experience: The player’s personal anecdotes are changed.
E.g., Player has experienced what it’s like to deal with discrimination
based on skin color
• Behavior: The player acts in a new way.
E.g., Player chooses healthier foods to eat
• Belief: The player’s sense of truth is changed.
E.g., Player believes that human trafficking is a big problem worth
tackling with urgency
• Relationships: The player’s social relationships are changed.
E.g., Player has more trust in community police
• Identity: The player’s sense of self is changed.
E.g., Player starts to describe themselves as “artistic”
• Society: The world around the player is changed.
E.g., The overall voter turnout increases in a community
This list is not mean to be exhaustive or definitive. Divisions
between the types here are debatable. The purpose of these
categories of transformation is to initiate conversation about
the specific and varied ways players can be transformed. Use
this list to help your team think about how you want to
transform your own players in a more nuanced way.
Types
of Transformation
91
KNOWLEDGE
the player knows something new
Facts
Information
Recalli
SKILL
the player can do something new
Abilities
Technique
Application
Dexterity
PHYSICAL
the player’s body is changed
Health
Biometrics
Performance
DISPOSITION
the player’s feelings are changed
Attitudes
Feelings
Motivations
EXPERIENCE
the player’s personal story is changed
Exposure
Perspective
Reference Point
Familiarity
BEHAVIOR
the player acts in a different way
Habits
Actions
Choices
RELATIONSHIPS
the player’s social interactions are changed
Connections
Communication
Status
BELIEF
the player’s sense of truth is altered
Perceptions
Worldview
Opinion
IDENTITY
the player’s sense of self is changed
Labels
Associations
Values
SOCIETY
the world around the player is changed
Community
Environment
Culture
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
Guidance
for Assessment
Strategies for Approaching
Your Purpose
If your true “goal” is your high-level purpose, why do you need
player transformations?
Player transformations outline your specific
strategy for pursuing your high-level purpose.
While your high-level purpose should be inspirational, this often
means it’s not very practical. Although it can motivate your
team, it likely won’t provide much in the way of concrete
guidance for what to build. There are likely to be many
potential ways you could approach any given high-level
purpose. Player transformations become your game’s specific
approach and provide much more targeted guidance on the
impact your game plans to make on players, which in turn
informs the implementation and content for your game.
Player transformations are a blueprint to help you
and others define how to assess the
transformational success of your game. They are
fundamentally tied to the evaluation of your game as
Transformational. As they describe how you intend your
players to be different after they play your game, they can be
used to drive the design of assessments to measure these
changes.
Why
Transformations Matter
93
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
Happy Atoms began as a concept for a
new type of molecular modeling system –
one where magnetic connections would give kids an intuitive
sense of how atoms bond together and where computer vision
technology would enable first-hand exploration of the
molecular world without any prior knowledge about chemistry.
This big picture vision drove the definition of our high-level
purpose: Demystify Chemistry.
information that players would be able to recite after playing
the game. What the Transformational Framework did,
particularly the list of transformation types, was give our team
the language to consider other approaches. Knowledge was
important, but it wasn’t really the heart of what we were trying
to do. Realizing this allowed us to de-emphasize knowledge to
elevate a different angle on transformation – Belief.
This shift created a sense of ownership of our transformation
that led to the team opening up to changing their own beliefs
about chemistry. I had a background in chemistry but most of
the rest of team had stories of their own struggles with
chemistry from grade school. We cultivated a culture where
we all tried to leave negative associations or insecurities with
chemistry behind and simply be open to curiosity about how
chemistry permeated the world around us. Members of the
team would bring up questions like “Why does water remove
some stains but not others?” I would try to explain or find the
answer. This curiosity-driven attitude shift on our team was
exactly what we realized we needed to create for our players.
Find references for this
developer story in Appendix K.
Developer Story
Transformations with Happy Atoms
Happy Atoms combined a physical
modeling system with a digital game
to enable players to explore the world
of molecular chemistry.
When we first set out to
define our player
transformations, knowledge
transformations were the
obvious choice because the
experience we were
making was about
chemistry and science –
that’s about facts, right?
There was a desire to stuff
the experience with
95
Our belief transformation eventually
led to one of our core experience
pillars: Cultivate Curiosity.
something entirely new to discover that would circumvent
players’ existing biases against chemistry and would change
their underlying assumptions about how the world works.
We debated for a bit on if our primary transformation should
be one of identity. Were we trying to get players to see
themselves more as someone who found chemistry to be
approachable? Asking these questions helped us focus further.
We weren’t trying to change kids so that they liked chemistry
more necessarily (though we suspected that would come
along naturally). We wanted players to understand how
chemistry permeates the world around them. So our
transformation was less about “who am I” and more about
“how do I see the world.”
Player transformations gave us the language we needed to
talk about how we wanted to make Happy Atoms. It allowed
us to be more intentional in our approach by giving us a way to
break down how we wanted to change players to really
understand our shared transformational goals as a team.
Ultimately our primary belief transformations became one of
three experience pillars during development – one that is a
direct answer to our high-level purpose:
Demystify chemistry by cultivating curiosity!
Yotam Haimberg
Project Director, Happy Atoms
Many people go into chemistry
assuming it’s mostly about math,
because it’s often taught with an
emphasis on calculations. And not
many kids learn chemistry early
enough to see it as a base
worldview on how things work.
Instead we tend to adopt
physical processes or biological
processes as our core model of
what drives phenomenon
around us. Chemistry is so much
about what you can’t see. We
realized our approach had to be
reintroducing chemistry as
Happy Atoms was supported in part by the Institute of Education Sciences,
U.S. Department of Education, through the Small Business Innovation
Research (SBIR) program contract ED-IES-15-C-0025 to Schell Games.
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
2. Focus on a Central
Transformation
1. Imagine Player
Impact On Purpose
3. Define Supporting
Transformations
How do you get from your high-level purpose to a list of player
transformations? Here are some key questions to ask:
• What central change in individual players would impact
your purpose in a significant way? This question will
probably lead you to a central transformation of a type that
tends toward something externally observable, such as a
skill change, behavior change, or physical change.
E.g., Your high-level purpose is to improve urban air quality. You
consider what specific changes in individual players could impact
air quality. Based on your audience and expert input, you decide to
focus on players reducing usage of personal automobiles.
• Can your central change be made more specific in
strategy? Sometimes your first pass on a central player
change is quite broad in terms of how it might manifest.
Leverage the other aspects of your Transformational
Framework to help you focus your approach.
E.g., Continuing the urban air quality game example, you realize
there are lots of approaches to reducing personal automobile
usage – car pooling, public transit, etc. You decide to focus on
increasing player usage of bikes in place of cars. This decision is
informed by your subject-matter experts and looking at other
complementary initiatives undertaken in many cities.
• What are the underlying player transformations that
contribute to the central change? Usually, your central
player transformation is dependent on other connected
transformations. A behavior may be dependent on
knowledge or identity. A relationship may be dependent on
belief and disposition. A skill may be dependent on
knowledge and experience. Again, you will use the pieces of
the Transformational Framework to help reveal these
important transformation connections and help you decide
which are the most important to include in the list of
transformations you will pursue.
E.g., For your urban air quality game, your supporting
transformations include players being able to perform basic bike
maintenance, players demonstrating basic bike safety while riding,
players self-identifying as someone who would commute by bike,
and players understanding the positive impact biking has on
themselves and their community.
Choosing Player
Transformations
97
The best
Framework tools
for this are:
Audience &
Context,
Expert Resources,
Prior Works,
and Domain
Concepts.
The best
Framework tools
for this are:
Barriers and
Prior Works
(specifically
research).
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
A Good Transformation Is
• Centered on the Player
• Assessable & Achievable
• Framed Against Initial State
REC
INITIAL STATE
Like any piece of your Framework, you’ll want to iterate on
your player transformations so that they are as useful to your
team as possible. Here are some general guidelines on writing
good player transformations:
Clearly center your player transformations on the
player. Include the player as the subject of each statement.
Avoid referencing your game or the player’s actions in the
game as part of your player transformations. Be specific about
the verb that represents your targeted change in the player
after the game is over. Beware of relying on generic verbs like
“know” or “learn.”
Before: Learn how to change a bike tire.
After: The player can successfully change a bike tire.
Make sure your player transformations feel
assessable and achievable. These statements are how
you and others will measure your game’s transformational
success, so make sure it seems plausible that you could achieve
them. If a particular transformation seems like a stretch to
achieve, considering either cutting it or looking for a more
approachable underlying transformation to target instead.
As you decide on the wording for your transformations,
consider how you would assess each transformation. You don’t
need to be so specific as to enumerate content in each
statement, but you do want to imply a realistic scope of
change..
Before: The player knows Spanish.
After: The player can introduce themselves in spoken Spanish.
Frame your player transformations in contrast to
your audience’s initial state. Remember, change is
relative. Revisit your audience’s initial state and consider
including words like “more”, “less”, “increased”, or “decreased” to
acknowledge that your game’s impact may be more about
moving the needle on a player change than absolutely defining
the player’s post-game state.
Before: The player loves reading.
After: The player has increased positive feelings about reading.
.
Writing Your
Player Transformations
99
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
It might seem obvious to state that player transformation is the
goal of a Transformational game. And yet, even teams who
agree with this statement often end up neglecting the
transformational aspects of their game development while
focusing on the engagement aspects. Why? Because
engagement is something that game developers and the game
industry are used to iterating on and optimizing for.
Transforming players is a new, additional way to think about
success. Without intentional effort, developers focus on what
they already know. Additionally, engagement is something
developers understand how to observe during gameplay and
through analytics. It is usually more straightforward to measure
if players like your game or how far they got in your game
than to measure how they have been changed by your game
in ways that extend beyond their play experience.
Here are a couple of ways this can manifest:
Your iteration focuses primarily on understanding
and meeting engagement feedback, rather than
transformational feedback. Like every part of your
game, its transformational impact will need iteration. You won’t
get it right the first time. If you aren’t playtesting and iterating on
how your game transforms your players, you probably aren’t
owning the sentiment that transformation is the goal.
Transformational success is discussed primarily as
a factor of how players complete the game. Players
completing your game is not necessarily a sign of
transformation. If your approach to evaluating your
transformational success is primarily player progress in your
game, you probably aren’t spending enough time thinking
specifically about how the player themselves will be
transformed.
Your goal is not to make a game, it’s to transform
players – your game is the medium you are using
to achieve this goal.
Losing Sight
of the Obvious
101
!
-TRANSFORMATIONS-
Question
#4
Why aren’t
your players
already
transformed?
103
Barriers
Why aren’t your
players already
transformed?
The way you frame and understand a problem
strongly influences the answers you reach. So it’s
important to step back and make sure you
understand what problem you are really trying to
solve.
Barriers are that real problem. They are what
stands in the way of your players’ transformation
and the achievement of your High-Level Purpose.
Understanding your barriers will help to focus your
design strategy for your Transformational game.
105
-BARRIERS-
Initial
Player State
Barriers
Transformed
Player State
Barriers are things that prevent or hinder your audience’s
transformation and the achievement of your high-level
purpose. They are tightly informed by a deep understanding of
the audience and context. Another related term sometimes
used in design circles is pain points.
Here are a few hypothetical examples:
• In making a game for teachers to use in 10th grade
chemistry classrooms to impact student engagement in
related careers, you discover that one barrier is that many
students are 2 or more years behind in their math skills and
so struggle with any chemistry activities that involve math.
You might decide that addressing this barrier of math is just
as important (if not more) as directly addressing attitudes
around chemistry.
• In making a game to impact the spread of an STD in teens,
you discover one barrier is that your audience has
misconceptions about how prevalent this STD is in their peer
group and so underestimates their own risk.
• In making a game to improve the eating habits of a
particular population, you discover that this population tends
to live in communities with no nearby grocery store and
therefore limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables. This is
a barrier that will hinder your player’s eating habits, even if
your game teaches them about nutrition or motivates them
to eat well. Can your game help your players in the face of
this barrier?
Each of these barriers reflects something that stands between
who your players are when they encounter your game and
who you want them to be after the game experience is over.
The path from the player’s initial state to their
transformed state goes through your barriers.
The Barriers
Are the Way
107
-BARRIERS-
Opportunities
for Impact
Gameplay Idea
Catalysts
Barriers illuminate the problems your game design should
potentially target to support your players’ transformation.
Barriers identify gaps in existing support for your
purpose where there is opportunity for your game
to create impact. By articulating these barriers, you can
then discuss the effect those barriers have on your player’s
transformational potential and how your game will (or won’t)
try to impact that effect. This is not just about understanding
what the most prominent barriers are; it is also about
considering what your game can effectively address. Deciding
not to address a barrier can be just as empowering as deciding
to address one. By limiting your focus, you can leverage your
time and resources to make a stronger impact on a few
barriers, rather than being stretched thin by trying to address
them all.
Barriers are catalysts for gameplay ideas because
they highlight problems and conflicts related to
your purpose. These problems and conflicts can create a
strong basis for game mechanics and narrative. Think through
what would have to change about your audience, or the world
around your audience, for a barrier to be overcome. Then
consider how the game could support or represent that same
change through mechanics.
E.g., You want to tackle the barrier of access to grocery stores in the
example of the nutrition game mentioned on the last page. One
strategy might be to include a system in the game that helps players
gain knowledge of which healthy foods last the longest under which
conditions even if their shopping trips are infrequent due to access.
This could help your audience choose these foods during their own
real-world shopping trips. Another strategy could be to introduce the
player to fresh foods that are relatively easy to grow in containers at
home. And a still different strategy could be educating players on how
to advocate for better public transit or city planning in their community
to make grocery access more equitable.
Barriers sit at the intersection of the real-world
struggle for your purpose and the potential
impact of your game mechanics. Because of this,
iterating on your barriers will typically correspond with iteration
on your player transformations.
Why
Barriers Matter
109
-BARRIERS-
Your barriers will be largely unique to your purpose, player
transformations, and audience. However, there are common
themes that arise across even very different projects. Here is a
list of barrier “types” to consider for your game:
• Motivation: It doesn’t align strongly to your audience’s wants
or needs
E.g., lack of interest could be a barrier in understanding of history
events
• Relevance: It seems distant or disconnected from your
audience
E.g., distance from the impact of a social justice issue could be a
barrier in generating activism
• Social Norms: Your audience has taboos or biases that
interfere with their transformation
E.g., social norms about gender roles can be a barrier to equal
rights for women in some cultures
• Access: Your audience lacks resources or is blocked from
resources that are needed to be transformed
E.g., lack of regular access to healthcare could be a barrier to
improving patient self-advocacy skills
• Ability: It requires practiced skill your audience lacks
E.g., pronunciation of unfamiliar speech sounds can be a barrier to
foreign language fluency
• Complexity: It overwhelms your audience in its scope
E.g., the complex nature of medical surgeries could be a barrier to
preventing errors that impact patient safety
• Unfamiliarity: Your audience isn’t aware of something or
only minimally aware of it
E.g., the invisible nature of atoms could be a barrier to
understanding chemistry
• Misconceptions: Your audience actively believes something
that isn’t true
E.g., misconceptions about what items can be recycled could be a
barrier to effective recycling in a community
• Fear: There’s a (perceived or actual) risk or danger that
prevents your audience from being transformed
E.g., apprehension about a positive diagnosis could be a barrier to
improving STD testing rates
This list of barrier types is not meant to be exhaustive and
definitive, but it is a useful starting point. It can be a helpful
exercise to run through this list while thinking about your highlevel
purpose and your audience & context.
Types
of Barriers
111
Relevance
It feels disconnected
Misconceptions
It’s misunderstood
Social Norms
It’s taboo or “not cool”
Motivation
It doesn’t seem worth doing
Ability
It’s difficult for the player
Complexity
It’s overwhelming
Unfamiliarity
It’s unknown or little known
Access
It’s gated (by money, time…)
Fear
It’s scary or risky
-BARRIERS-
There is a natural inclination to start coming up with a list of
barriers based on your existing understanding of the problem.
This is a fine starting point. It can serve to document your own
assumptions. But the real work of barriers involves going
beyond your existing knowledge by reaching beyond yourself.
Pursue expertise and research. Draw on subject-matter
resources, including your client and other experts. Look for
existing academic research on the barriers to your purpose
that exist for your audience.
During this process, use the list of barrier types as keywords
in discussions and searches. For example, researching
“misconceptions reading” will help find sources that talk about
misconceptions that hinder reading or learning to read.
Engage with your audience. Barriers are often tightly
connected to aspects of your audience & context. As with
defining your audience, you can use human-centered design
and participatory design strategies to learn more about your
audience:
• Observe them in a real-world setting to witness barriers
firsthand.
• Hold a focus group to talk to them directly and understand
what barriers they themselves have identified.
• Involve them in co-design exercises and, in doing so, learn
what barriers they prioritize in their designs and how they
approach addressing them.
As you explore barriers, be open to the
unexpected. Sometimes the most important
barriers are also the most surprising.
Don’t Assume
You Know
For references
on Humancentered
Design,
see Appendix I.
113
!
-BARRIERS-
The World of Lexica was an RPG-style
tablet-based game developed by Schell
Games in 2015 in partnership with Amplify.
with a high-level purpose of turning middle
schoolers into lifelong readers. To really
understand the problem, we had to turn it around with a
powerful word – why? Why do some kids not read that much?
We had to become curious about the problem.
Getting kids to read is a persistent problem in education and
most persistent problems are more complex than they initially
appear. Digging into the research about why kids don’t read
revealed a lengthy list of barriers. What was interesting was
some of the most important barriers were not ones that we
had naively considered to be part of the problem. Most people
on the team had assumed that reading was not cool and that
kids today had so many more options that they would rather
do other things like play games. So, we just had to use our
game to show them that reading was cool.
But one of the biggest barriers was simply access to books.
Another high-impact barrier was time available for voluntary
reading and it tied closely into another important barrier:
exposure to a variety of books allowing kids to find at least one
book or genre that they enjoyed. These three barriers ended
up influencing the play pattern we designed. The game was
broken into episodes that would be released gradually by
players’ schools. Each episode introduced the player to
characters and passages from a variety of books. Since the
game was bundled with an e-book reader and free books, the
design intent was that the time between episodes left space for
players to check out any books from that episode that had
piqued their interest. Additional gameplay features also
provided light bonuses to players for their reading exploration.
Altogether we identified 13 barriers. We didn’t address all of
them directly in our design, but our awareness of them
definitely influenced our direction and decisions.
Developer Story
The Barriers of Lexica
Sabrina Culyba
Transformational Designer
The World of Lexica
115
The World of Lexica - Identified Barriers
• Weak technical reading skills such as syntax,
vocabulary, fluency
• Not given enough time for voluntary reading
• Do not know a book (or type of books) that is
personally enjoyable/meaningful
• Have never experienced “Reading flow”
• Lack prior knowledge and context to understand
value/enjoy certain books
• Don’t believe reading to be relevant to them
• Lack confidence (feelings of self-efficacy) about
reading
• Do not see themselves as “readers”
• Believe they cannot get better at reading or cannot
become a “reader”
• Have negative social norm perceptions about
reading: No one does it; Not cool; Boring
• Lack access to reading material, particularly books
• Other things demand their attention more than
reading
• Have had a negative experience with reading such
as non-autonomous reading with heavy emphasis
on worksheets, essays, etc.; or lack of permission to
abandon a book that is not enjoyable
Knowing our barriers helped us understand how the
features in The World of Lexica game could impact our
players’ lifelong relationship with reading.
Find references for this
developer story in Appendix L.
-BARRIERS-
Scaffold Over
Or Around
Attack
Directly
Acknowledge
But Set Aside
Constrain
Your Audience
You may identify more barriers than you can fully
address within the scope of your game. That is OK.
Not all barriers make sense to try to address directly through
your game, though all barriers are worth knowing. Even if you
could address every barrier, you have limited resources during
game development that will require you to be selective. For
each barrier that you identify, decide if:
Your game will address it, by…
• Trying to eliminate it
E.g., The barrier is a misconception – your game prominently
features and dispels this misconception
• Trying to scaffold over or around it
E.g., The barrier is a cultural norm which makes talking about
your topic taboo – your game uses a metaphor and fantasy
theming to avoid triggering these feelings of breaking a taboo
Your game won’t address it, by…
• Using it to constrain your audience further
E.g., The barrier is access to resources – you decide that
although some of your initial target audience may not have
access, you still feel like you can best make progress towards
your purpose by accepting that your audience will be limited to
those with access
• Acknowledging it but focusing on other barriers
E.g., The barrier is unfamiliarity with subject-matter information.
You decide focusing on this barrier is not in-scope for your
team, instead allowing that structures outside your game (such
as classroom instruction) will need to address this barrier while
your game supports other barriers such as motivation.
Through discussion with stakeholders and
subject-matter experts, and research into your
audience, prioritize the barriers and pick a subset
to focus on in your game. To do this, balance which
barriers feel most important to tackle for your audience with
how well you can address these barriers through the medium
of a game. You may identify multiple barriers for one player
transformation or a barrier that impacts multiple
transformations. Exploring barriers may very likely even lead
you to revisit your list of player transformations.
Choosing Your
Barrier Battles
117
-BARRIERS-
Question
#5
What is
essential to
include in the
game to
transform
your players?
119
Domain
Concepts
What is essential to
include in the game to
transform your players?
Transformational games typically deal with
specific subjects, such as “algebra” or “history” or
“racism.” We call this the domain of the game. Most
domains are too broad or deep to fully
encapsulate in a single game. Just knowing the
domain doesn’t offer much guidance on what
actually needs to be in your game.
Any domain can be broken down into subdomains,
but what is really helpful is to drill more
granularly into your Domain Concepts. These are
individual facts, narratives, processes, terms, etc.
that are contained within your domain. Domain
concepts often become the basis for a
Transformational game’s content and mechanics.
There is a relationship between the number and
complexity of concepts you want to include in
your game and the scope of game necessary to
present those concepts. Creating a mapping of
your domain concepts allows you to specify the
bits of your domain that you believe must be
embodied in some way in the game in order to
achieve your player transformations.
121
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
DOMAIN
Sub-Domain
Concept
Sub-Domain
Sub-Domain
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
ConceptConcept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Sub-Domain
Sub-Domain
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Sub-Domain
Concept
Sub-Domain
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept
Concept Concept
Concept
Concept
The domain of your game is the subject matter
your game covers. This is determined by your high-level
purpose, player transformations, and barriers. Some examples
of domains include physics, nutrition, civic engagement,
language, fitness, etc. It’s not uncommon to hear someone refer
to the domain of a Transformational game as shorthand for
what the game is – for example “a language game”, or a
“math game”, etc. Of course, if you look closer at any domain,
you will find that it can be broken down further into more
specific sub-domains, for example, a German language game
or a geometry game.
Your game will most likely not be able to
thoroughly and exhaustively cover everything
within your domain. It is also likely that your team
members and other stakeholders have a varying
understanding of what’s in your domain and what matters
within it.
E.g., You are working on a language game with player transformations
related to learning Japanese and improving Japanese fluency. You
might think that obviously your game will need to cover Japanese
vocabulary. But what kind of vocabulary? Are there particular
language interactions you are trying to support? Are you going to
focus on listening, speaking, reading, writing, or all four? Will you cover
specific topics? For example, will you include vocabulary on foods?
What about baking? What about medicine? How much grammar will
you include? Will you cover any aspects of Japanese culture?
Japanese has formal and informal ways of speaking – will you cover
both? What about including additional language learning strategies like
teaching players how to look up words in a Japanese dictionary?
These are all concepts that could conceivably have a place in a game
with a purpose to improve Japanese fluency. And, of course, there
are many other possibilities.
You will need to identify the parts of your domain
that you believe you need to impart to your
players to support their transformation. The first step
is to break your domain down into concepts. Once you have
built a shared sense of what is within your domain, you can
start to determine the most critical pieces to embody and
incorporate into your game design.
The Need to Go
Beyond Domain
123
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
“Concepts” is an abstract word and accordingly
encompasses a wide variety of ideas from within
a domain. In its most concrete forms, “concept” is often
reduced to things like facts, definitions, or processes. As you
explore your domain consider these, but also include a broader
view of concepts. Here are some categories of concepts to
prime your thinking:
• Factual: data, definitions, people, places, things, and events
E.g., The order and attributes of the eight planets in the solar system
• Semiotic: conventions such as categories, symbols, and
terminology
E.g., The symbols that represent the eight planets in the solar system
• Procedural: step-by-step, rules, techniques, and patterns
E.g., How to calculate the distance of a planet using geometry
• Explanations: cause-and-effect, principles, and analysis
E.g., The cause of the orbit speed of each planet in solar system
• Narratives: stories, themes, and anecdotes
E.g., The story of the discovery of Uranus
• Affects: atmosphere, setting, relationships, emotions, and
mindsets
E.g., The historical tension of scientific discovery and religious entities
• Practice: experience, role-play, and firsthand memories
E.g., Actual practice locating planets in the night sky
As with transformation types and barrier types, this list is not
intended to be exhaustive or definitive. It is not important to
label your domain concepts as a particular type or that they fit
neatly into this list. The goal of this list is to help you and your
team document the concepts that matter for your purposes by
broadening your perception of what might count as a concept.
Types
of Concepts
For references
on how games
embody
concepts, see
Appendix M.
125
PROCEDURAL
EXPLANATIONS
NARRATIVES
AFFECTS
PRACTICE
FACTUAL
SEMIOTIC
A
1. -
2. -
3. A
B
“
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
In vs Out
What are your boundaries?
Key vs Peripheral
What must remain on the main path?
The primary benefit of establishing your domain concepts is
determining what your game will include and exclude about
your domain. Here are two ways to talk about this coverage:
Define boundaries between what’s in and what’s
out. Every concept that you want to convey to your players
will need to be supported in some way by your game design
and the game content you develop. Each will require some
level of your time and attention. Look for areas of your domain
that you can completely cut from your sphere of attention. Be
sure to articulate with your team why that boundary exists.
E.g.., You are working on a game with the domain of human biology.
You decide that your game is intentionally not going to include any
references to the body’s lymphatic or nervous systems. This allows you
to focus your resources on representing other aspects of human
biology you wish to tackle.
Distinguish between what is key and what is
peripheral. Key concepts are what you believe players must
engage with strongly in order to be effectively transformed in a
way that transfers to the real world. Players aren’t going to
remember every fact, idea, or experience in your game. Your
central concepts should be those things that you want to stick
with every player. Thus these should become inspiration for
game systems and content that will be on the main path of
your game – something that players engage with repeatedly
with significant impact on their play experience.
In contrast, peripheral concepts are those that you feel do
support your player transformations but may not be critical.
These may then translate into side content in your game that
not every player will engage with or that players only engage
with briefly. When it comes time to cut the scope of your game
systems or your content, be wary of cutting what is key.
Instead, look to your peripheral concepts to see what can be
moved from “peripheral but in” to simply “out.”
E.g., You are working on a game with the domain of the works of
Shakespeare. You decide to include some domain concepts on four of
his most famous plays, but you choose the plot of one, Hamlet, as your
key content. This means the most emphasized content in your game
will be about Hamlet. As development continues, you find you need to
trim your scope. You keep the Hamlet content and cut one of the
other three plays completely. You decide to frame the content related
to the two remaining peripheral plays as comparisons and contrasts to
Hamlet, so that the focus always stays on your chosen key concepts.
In vs Out,
Key vs Peripheral
127
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
An example early concept map for a science literacy game
based on the domain of chemistry.
To build your understanding of the concepts your
domain encompasses, leverage sources that
already attempt to break down your domain. For
most domains, there will be multiple sources who have created
variations of concept lists. It can take a little time to sift through
various sources, but it can also be a huge boost if you find a
source that provides a conceptual breakdown that feels good
for your purposes. Some sources to explore are:
• Experts who have a deep background in your domain
• Books about your domain, particularly textbooks or books
designed to give an overview of the domain to non-experts
• Educational standards such as Common Core or Next
Generation Science Standards
• Course Syllabi which may offer a breakdown of topics
covered during the course
• Assessments and Certifications which often provide public
listings of the concepts they cover
Consider making a visual map of your domain
concepts. You can document your domain concepts in a
text-only format by generating a list, however, it can also be
useful to take a visual approach that allows you to indicate
relationships between sub-domains and concepts. A useful tool
for doing so is to create a concept map. Concept maps are an
approach to breaking down a top-level concept into a visual
tree of subtopics. Their key features are:
• A hierarchal structure where the broadest part of the
concept is at the top of the tree and the sub-topics tend to
get more specific as depth increases.
• Sub-topics are connected through cross-links that indicate
a relationship between the them.
As you build out your map of concepts, you may struggle with
how granular to go. There is no perfect answer to this question.
Go as granular as you need to be able to clarify your game’s
coverage of concepts and a general sense of the content you’ll
need to create to support them. You may find that you need to
go more granular as development progresses.
Mapping Out Your
Domain Concepts
129
Concept maps
were developed
by Joseph
Novak. For
references
working with
concept maps,
see Appendix O.
For more on
educational
standards,
see Appendix N.
More about
experts
in the next
chapter, Expert
Resources.
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
Water Bears1 is a mobile puzzle game developed
by Schell Games, designed to help teach systems
thinking in middle school classrooms. In order to be
financially viable for the studio, it also needed to stand on its
own as an engaging game in the App Store. Oh, and it also
needed to be built with a small team on a tight timeline. What
else is new?
Water Bears uses puzzle
mechanics to create hands-on
demonstrations of systems
thinking concepts.
Developer Story
The Domain of Water Bears
was going to be to teach such a complex and amorphous
subject. We knew we needed a way to map systems thinking
concepts onto our game, but we were having trouble even
understanding what all of the parts of the domain were.
Among the various reference materials we had collected was
a book2 our subject-matter expert was working on. Tucked
into the back of this book, all the way in Appendix D, were a set
of “Systems Thinking Concept Cards”, meant to be cut out and
referenced as bite-sized explanations of various components
of systems thinking. These cards were the key to wrapping our
own heads around systems thinking, and they were the perfect
landscape on which to draw our domain concept map.
As we started to break down our domain and figure out how it
fit with our game, we realized we had another problem. The
puzzles and mechanics in Water Bears do a great job of
embodying systems thinking concepts, but they don’t teach
those concepts at all. We knew that just pasting some
explanations next to each puzzle wasn’t going to be effective
(players don’t read!), but we didn’t have the scope to do a
much deeper integration, and we weren’t sure it would be
effective if we did.
1-2 Find references for this
developer story in Appendix P.
Luckily, a prototype of the core
mechanic had already been built. It
was even created with systems
thinking in mind and in collaboration
with a subject-matter expert, but by
a different team. Our new team
needed to get up to speed quickly, so
we connected with the subjectmatter
expert ourselves and tried to
absorb all the written material we
could find. The more we learned, the
more we realized just how hard it
131
Water Bears’ systems thinking
Skills Mastery page
large, abstract systems of
the modern world. Our
domain concepts map
ended up being broad but
shallow, connecting many
different systems thinking
concepts to puzzles in the
game, but not diving into
any deep explanations. We
provided lesson plans and
level guides to teachers,
though, to help guide them
with relating the game to
the subject matter.
At this point we stumbled on a key insight: Our game shouldn’t
be trying to “teach” systems thinking! Teachers can do that so
much better! Instead, our game can be a tool for teachers to
use, giving students hands-on experience with systems thinking
concepts, which is a real need for a subject that deals with the
There was one big roadblock left. The way game mechanics
are introduced in a puzzle game can be critical to player onboarding
and a sense of progression, so the order of our levels
and level packs had to be carefully constructed to meet those
needs. Our domain concept map didn’t match that structure
directly, though. To address this, we ended up creating a skills
mastery system that worked in parallel to the natural
progression of the game. Each time a player completes a
puzzle, they level up in the skills (i.e., systems thinking concepts)
related to that puzzle. Players can see their progress on each
skill on a dedicated skills-mastery page that includes a very
brief descriptions for each concept, derived directly from the
Systems Thinking Concept Cards we had discovered in
Appendix D.
By mapping out the landscape of systems-thinking domain
concepts and putting it just under the surface of an otherwise
delightful puzzle game, we tried to give both students and
teachers exactly what they need to unlock understanding of
a difficult subject.
Jason Pratt
Project Director, Water Bears
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
Shared Understanding
Of Domain
Preview of
Content Scope
Coverage
Expectations
Creating a map of your domain concepts for your game
provides several key benefits for your team.
It facilitates a shared domain understanding with
your team and stakeholders. You may have noticed
that one of the themes of the Framework is the idea that
having a shared vocabulary is vital to collaborative problem
solving. There are many ways to divvy up a particular domain
into sub-domains and concepts. Creating your concept map is
not about establishing the one true breakdown. It is about
establishing a shared breakdown with your team – one that
allows you to discuss your domain with the level of granularity
needed to talk about what is essential.
It gives you a preview of the scope of domain
concepts you will need to embody in your game.
Even before you list out every individual fact or process step
that must be included in the game, your concept map will help
you gut check the quantity and complexity of the content you
plan to fit into your game and your gameplay experience. This
is essentially answering the question of how much game you
need to build, with how many different systems and how much
unique content you must design. You should be able to look at
your concept map and believe that you can convey the key
concepts well in the game you are designing given the
resources you have available to you.
It sets expectations about what your game will
cover. Your concept map outlines visibly what should be in
the game, what should be core to the game vs what is
ancillary, and should include documentation on your reasoning
for these decisions. This helps you respond to feedback from
both internal stakeholders during development, as well as
external users or critics upon release. You will almost certainly
get feedback asking for something to be added to or removed
from your game. Your concept map allows you to reflect on
this feedback, to say it was an intentional decision (hopefully)
and to explain why.
Why Mapping Domain
Concepts Matters
133
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
Looking at what is marked as in, can you handle the
scope it implies for content and game systems?
Is there anything you are including that might be too
difficult for your team, or risk causing your team a
major distraction?
Is there anything you could cut based on your
understanding of your audience’s initial state?
Looking at what is marked as out, is there anything
that important stakeholders will strongly miss? Can
you justify its exclusion?
Are there any points of tension across boundaries of
what’s in and out?
Looking at what you’ve decided is key, if players
only took these concepts from your game, would
you consider that a success?
Looking at what you’ve decided is peripheral, do
you believe each item adds tangible value? Could
you ship if you had to cut all of them completely?
Consider each of your player transformations and
barriers – have you included the domain concepts
necessary to address each one? Do you need to
revisit these pieces of your framework?
Does anything on your map surprise you?
Questions to Ask:
Once you have a sense of the landscape of your domain, you
can start making decisions about boundaries and main path.
If you have created a visual map of your domain, you can use
dotted lines to show boundaries and color variation to
differentiate key verses peripheral concepts.
For each decision, articulate your whys: Why is something in or
out? Why is something key or peripheral? To do so, consider the
following tools:
• Cross-reference with audience’s initial state: If you expect
most of your players to come to your game with certain
prior knowledge, perhaps you can leave these concepts out
of your game, or treat them only as peripheral. On the other
hand, it may be that you find some portions of your
audience are missing some prerequisite concepts that aren’t
exactly part of your domain but are necessary for
successful interactions with your domain concepts.
• Leverage your player transformations and barriers: Go
through your list of player transformations and discuss what
specific concepts of your domain need to be absorbed by
your players to achieve that transformation. Do the same
with your barriers. Each of these may give you slightly
different insights into what is essential and why.
• Look for connections that cross your boundaries: What is
out that might cause tension because it’s tightly connected
to something that’s in? Does it belong in? Or is there
something that is currently in that perhaps should be out?
• Avoid “cans of worms”: Some topics in a domain are
particularly hard to take on. They might be controversial.
They might be very complex. They might highlight other
domain content you are not including. Take on these difficult
topics with eyes open… or, drop them completely.
• Consider stakeholder audience expectations: There may
be aspects of your domain that you should include, not
because you feel it is essential, but because you know that
some stakeholders will be put off if they don’t see it.
Vetting Your
Concept Decisions
135
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
How do your domain concepts give you a sense of your
game’s scope? The answer is that, while it can’t do so with
complete certainty, it can give you a quick back-of-theenvelope
sense of how big your game experience will need to
be.
For each concept you are considering as “in,”
evaluate its scale and potential development
burden. In other words, how much content will your team
need to develop to successfully embody that concept? What
are your initial thoughts on how to embody that concept
through game content? Do you have the resources available to
create that content?
Let’s take a very simple example as an illustration:
Your central domain concepts include a set of about 100 new
vocabulary words you’d like players to be able to recall after
playing your game. For each of these 100 words, you’ll need at
least one game moment where players will engage with this
content in a way that is memorable enough to persist and
transfer beyond the game. If you’re contemplating a game
design with levels, think about how many words it might make
sense to introduce in a single level – this gives you a sense of
how many levels you might need. Also consider simply the rate
of words over time. If you introduce just 1 word a minute, your
game will be at least an hour and half long.
These are just quick calculations, of course, but they can help
you understand if your domain concept decisions are
reasonable or too ambitious. And they can push you towards
or away from certain approaches based on the resources you
have for development. You could design a game where each
of these 100 interactions is a hand-crafted, unique branching
character dialogue. Or you could design a game where the
words are presented dynamically inside a re-playable game
structure such as a puzzle. For each of these approaches, there
are trade-offs in terms of the quality of the player’s interaction
with the domain concepts and the development costs required.
Consider the
Impact to Scope
137
!
-DOMAINCONCEPTS-
Question
#6
Who knows
what you
don’t know
you don’t
know?
139
Expert
Resources
Who knows what
you don’t know
you don’t know?
It’s unlikely that you and everyone on your team
has a deep, professional background in your
game’s domain, how to represent it, and how to
teach it. To help your navigate your game’s
domain, you should establish your Expert
Resources. One of the most helpful form of expert
resource you can involve in your process is a live
person who takes on the role of your SubjectMatter
Expert (SME).
Finding an SME typically requires seeking
connections in communities beyond the discipline
of game development. It also requires developing
strategies for embedding your SME into your
process. Of course, there will be overhead in
integrating an SME into your work, especially
someone who may be unfamiliar with games or
who comes from a very different discipline
background. However, a good SME partnership
will provide significant positive influences on your
design and can be critical for transformational
success.
141
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
Product
Advocate
ExpertiseCredibility
Subject-Matter
Perspective
Interpret
Feedback
References
You should have a subject-matter expert working
with you in some way on your Transformational
game.
You should bring a subject-matter expert into
your process as early as possible.
Working with a subject-matter expert at the start of preproduction
can help you more quickly and accurately establish
your Transformational Framework.
SMEs serve multiple purposes:
• Credibility: An SME can signal to external audiences that
your game has been vetted.
• Expertise: An SME can bring a deep understanding of the
domain concepts, including relevant barriers.
• Reference: An SME can provide a rich knowledge of the
literature and prior work you should review. They can point
you quickly to quality subject-matter references you can
leverage to inform your design.
• Subject-Matter Perspective: An SME can be strong voice
on behalf of the subject-matter content and/or pedagogy
represented in your game*.
• Product Advocate: An SME can provide support and
promotion of your game to their own communities.
• Interpretation: An SME can provide a filter to interpret
feedback from other experts & stakeholders, as well as
results from testing.
Your SME does not have to be a person. You might also use
reference materials as a way to get SME input into your project
when you don’t have access to a person.
*YOU should also champion these things but your attention will necessarily be
split with the player experience around issues of gameplay and engagement.
The Value
of Experts
143
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
Teams are often unsure of how they should be using SMEs –
how often they should be talking to them, whether or not they
need to be paid, and how much weight their feedback should
have. There is no single answer, but here are four generalized
patterns:
• Consultant: This is someone you bring in one time or ondemand
as needed. You might meet with them in-person
early in the design process to get an initial dump of
information about the domain, or you might get their
occasional input throughout development. In this role, your
expert is typically providing input in direct response to
questions you pose to them. Many experts are generous
about sharing their expertise through informal consultation,
even if you can’t provide compensation.
• Reviewer: This is someone you are asking to look at your
documents or game builds in detail and provide feedback
on them based on their expertise. You might only ask them
to do this once, or you might ask them to do so on an
ongoing basis. They might not be compensated directly but
they are often stakeholders with some kind of vested
interest in your game’s development.
• Advisor: This is someone with whom you have regularly
scheduled interactions through development. In this role,
experts often serve as a sounding board for key design
decisions and milestones. This role is likely to be
compensated.
• Partner: This is someone who is working closely with your
team. They interact with the team regularly and are
involved in ongoing discussions and decisions about the
game’s development. In this role, experts may be actually
producing documents or even game content. Experts
serving in this role are almost always compensated in some
way for their work.
You may find you need to blend between these roles or
transition your SME from role to role over the course of your
project:
Structuring
the SME Role
145
Less Responsibility
More Responsibility
The Consultant
On-Demand Advice on Specific Questions
• Need-driven communication
• Infrequent or informal interactions
• Compensation might not be needed
The Reviewer
Feedback on Progress Milestones
• Responds to builds or documents
• Validates or challenges what you produce
• Might not be paid but might be a
stakeholder
The Partner
Part of the Team
• Close working relationship
• Formally or Informally part of the team
• Most likely paid (sometimes by your client)
• May produce some content
The Advisor
Regular Open-Ended Discussions
• Regularly scheduled interactions
• Sounding board for direction and
subject-matter questions
• More likely to be compensated
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
Leverage
Team’s
Network
Find the
Thought
Leaders
Reach Out
to Schools &
Universities
Seek out
Communities
of Practice
Look to Other
Intervention
Programs
Okay, you’re convinced you need a Subject-Matter Expert and
you have some ideas about the role you’d like them to play
with your team, but how should you go about finding one?
Here are some channels you can use to seek and find your
SME:
Take advantage of the team’s network. A personal
connection is a powerful way to recruit an SME. Ask your team
and other stakeholders to reach out through their personal
networks.
Reach out to thought leaders. Find out who the thought
leaders are in your domain space by looking at authors of key
publications, well-known speakers, or prominent, respected
voices in social media channels. Highly visible thought leaders
may be too busy to work with you directly, but they are often
well-connected and might be able to point you to someone
else.
Seek out the domain’s community of practice.
Where do people in your domain space engage with each
other for professional development? Look for online
communities and key conferences where you could share a
solicitation for collaboration.
Reach out to local schools & universities. Teachers
can make great SMEs because they have practice explaining
their domain to others. And if your game is meant to be used by
a student audience or is meant to be used in a classroom
setting with teacher facilitation, then working with a teacher
can give you useful insights into your Audience & Context. At
the university level, you may find SMEs who are researchers
focused on learning or teaching your subject matter, which can
be a beneficial perspective.
Look at other initiatives. Look for other people who are
also tackling your high-level purpose through other intervention
programs. For example, if your game’s purpose is to reduce
smoking in teens, then consider working with individuals who
run smoking cessation programs for teens in your community.
These programs may already be connected to strong expert
resources.
Channels for
Finding an Expert
147
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
An Ideal SME
• Is available as needed
• Can be supported within project
resources
• Can provide the range or depth of
expertise needed
• Can be a bridge to non-experts
• On-board with game approach
• Can collaborate well
Like any working relationship, you’re looking for
more in an SME than expertise. When considering a
potential SME, take these additional factors into account:
• What is their availability? Do they have time to commit to
your project at the level and frequency that you need? Be
clear about the model of relationship you are looking for –
Consultant, Reviewer, Advisor, or Partner – and the time
commitment it would involve.
• What are their needs? What do they need to stay
motivated in their involvement? Are they professionally
motivated? Do they require compensation? Do they want
any formal recognition of their role? Can they convince their
organization or institution that collaborating with your team
is a good idea?
• Can they cover the breadth and depth you need? Make
sure your potential SME has the range or depth of expertise
you need. Or that they can guide you to that depth or
breadth through their familiarity and connections in the
subject-matter space.
• Can they bridge the gap between expert and nonexpert?
It’s really helpful if your SME has experience and skill
at breaking down the subject matter with a level of clarity
and simplicity that makes it accessible to non-experts. This
will help your SME communicate with your team. And it will
enable your SME to better advise you on how to effectively
reach your player audience.
• Are they open to (or better yet, excited by) a game
approach? Your SME doesn’t need to be a gamer, but if
you’re looking for more than an one-time consultant, it helps
if they are supportive of the idea of creating a game for
your purpose.
• Will they be good collaborators? Transformational games
inevitably involve compromise between the game
experience and the subject matter. Beware of SMEs who
consider everything in their subject matter to be sacred.
They may struggle to accept accommodations to the
subject-matter material due to the game medium, player
experience, or available resources.
In a similar vein, an SME who wants to contribute heavily to
the game design but doesn’t respect your expertise in this
area (or their own limitations) can also lead to friction.
What
to Look For
149
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
These mistakes boil down to effectively one thing: Not using an
SME to inform your pre-production and early design.
Mistake #1: Not having an SME. This can happen when your
timeline is short or you don’t have the funds. Or if you think you
can just learn the material yourself. Generally speaking, this is a
bad idea that at best leaves you focusing on the wrong things,
and at worst leaves you just plain getting things wrong.
Mistake #2: Getting an SME too late. Your SME is most valuable
as a foundational tool to inform your design early in your
process, not just a rubber stamp at the end to validate what
you’ve built. The outcome here can end up the same as not
having an SME at all, except that you’ll find out what you got
wrong in time to do something about it, provided you have the
resources and flexibility to make changes.
Mistake #3: Overlooking the need for multiple SMEs. You
need an SME with expertise in your domain topic. However, you
might also benefit from an SME who is familiar with the
audience or context in which your game will be played, or
someone with a background in learning science, instructional
design, behavioral theory, or other disciplines that relate to
teaching and changing people.
Mistake #4: Defaulting to the client as the SME. Sometimes on
client-based Transformational games, the client has a
background in the subject matter. This can be a great asset to
a team but it also comes with risks. Clients serving as SMEs are,
by definition, doing at least double duty in their role on a project.
This can create confusing priorities for everyone, so take care
in this scenario. Be sure to identify exactly who on the client side
will be serving as the primary SME. Take the time to discuss the
parameters of their role. Honestly consider what’s needed in an
SME for your game. You may find that your client isn’t available
enough for your SME needs, or that their expertise doesn’t
actually cover what you require. It can be awkward to suggest
bringing in an additional SME when working with an expert
client, but sometimes it is necessary.
Even if you can’t find someone who can give an
ongoing commitment, make every effort to at
least get a 1-2 hour conversation with someone
deeply knowledgeable on the relevant topic(s).
Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Some Common
Mistakes With SMEs
151
!
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
- 1 Listen
respectfully. Even if your SME has no official
approval role on your team, you should treat their input
seriously, listen respectfully, and work to build consensus with
them on how the gameplay reflects the subject matter and
supports the player transformation. If your SME feels like their
advice falls on deaf ears, they are less likely to provide
thoughtful information and feedback next time.
- 2 Share
your design approach. Remember that it is likely
your SME may be unfamiliar with games and that their primary
role is to promote the subject-matter focus of the game. If you
decide that you will not or cannot take their suggestions, make
sure you spend the time to share with them your reasoning for
your design choices in an accessible way so that they can
understand your approach to the player experience and the
realities of the resources available to your team. Not only can
this help keep them engaged, it can give them better context
for their future feedback.
- 3 Fewer
design docs, more show & tell. If you want SME
feedback on your game design approach, don’t rely on sharing
design documentation meant for the development team. This
form of documentation is often not accessible for nondevelopers.
Instead, use narrative-based scenarios paired with
visuals to help make the connection between gameplay and
the subject-matter material it is supposed to embody. If you
have a working prototype, consider having your SME observe
a playtest so that they can really see how players engage with
the material through the game.
Tips for Working
With SMEs
- 4 Do
not rely on SMEs for game development
questions. Your SME is not a game designer. They are not
responsible for the quality of the player experience – You are.
Don’t expect them to be able to answer questions related to
pacing, engagement, or gameplay. Don’t expect them to value
these things higher than the elements of the game that
represent their expertise. Sometimes SMEs themselves may try
to take on the role of a game designer. This can be especially
tricky to navigate if your SME has a partner role or is your client.
Respect each other’s input in all areas, but also respect each
other’s unique areas of expertise and leverage them.
- 5 Remember
that all domains have schools of
thought. Biases and prioritization differences exist in nearly all
domains. Politics also exists in places you might never expect.
Keep this in mind as you talk with experts. Make an effort to
understand the specific perspectives of your SMEs and other
stakeholders. If you find multiple key stakeholders with
divergent priorities and approaches, consider establishing the
‘official’ approach for your game. Document these decisions so
your team and subject-matter partners can reference them
through development.
- 6 Be
sensitive to triggers when soliciting feedback.
Terminology matters – your SME will care if you are using the
vocabulary of their domain incorrectly. Factual accuracy
matters – your SME will care if your content directly or indirectly
says something that isn’t true about their domain. Authenticity
matters – your SME will care if you represent the culture of their
domain incorrectly. If you’re sharing a game build or
documentation, be aware that these details can be a
distraction for SMEs, even if you express that the content is
temporary or in-progress.
153
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
DDEV
SPEAK
“Can we talk about how the
theoretical framework for the
relevant key mediators is
informed by theories on selfefficacy
and social norms
related to chemistry? Also, I
don’t see how this explains the
nuances of covalent bonding.”
Watch out for:
• Academic jargon
• Subject-matter jargon
“So at the end of this sprint,
we’ll have a playable
prototype with all the basic
functionality of an endless
runner. We’ll be using a white
boxed environment, mocked
up in Unity. We’ll share the
GDD with you via g-drive.“
Watch out for:
• Game dev jargon
• Game references
• Tech jargon
SME
SPEAK
Because Transformational games often involve collaborations
between game developers and non-game developers,
subject-matter experts and non-subject-matter experts, part of
preparing to work on the Framework is taking some time to
share knowledge across these discipline boundaries.
Before you really dig into working with your SME (or client!),
make sure you take some time to do a cultural exchange
between your development team and these non-game
industry stakeholders. The purpose of this exchange is for each
side to share enough information about their respective
disciplines to enable everyone to talk comfortably to one
another without feeling lost in jargon.
It‘s important for your dev team to gain at least a
high-level understanding of the subject matter.
• What are the big concepts that this domain is built on? What
domain-specific vocabulary is common when discussing the
subject matter?
• Who or what are the subject-matter expert resources that
represent the core information about the subject matter and
reflect your SME’s approach to the topic?
• What are the most critical reference materials your team
should actually acquire and consume?
Solicit this information from your SMEs and engage with it
seriously. It’s not necessary to make it your goal to become an
expert yourself in the domain space, but you do need to be
able to feel comfortable around the language.
Your client or SME may be new to game
development, so share some grounding
information about the game dev process.
• Share the Game Development Primer in this book, being
sure to call out what does (or doesn’t) apply to your
particular process
• Clarify what feedback process will be used to incorporate
comments from the client.
• For experts that will be involved as an advisor or a partner, it
can be especially helpful to suggest some games for them
to play on their own that might serve as good references for
your project.
Engage in
Cultural Exchange
155
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
Another outcome of this
exercise was a building of
trust. We understood Dr.
Mohan's vision, and she gained
confidence in our
development process. Even
though it was impossible for us
to "catch up" on med school,
we learned enough to
understand how content
created by our SME can fit
into a point-and-click mystery
adventure that aims to
emotionally engage nongamers,
some of whom went
as far as telling us they're
"morally opposed to games" in
a survey we conducted.
Night Shift asks players to take on the role
of a small town doctor in a narrativedriven
point-and-click adventure game.
Developer Story
Night Shift’s SME
1-2 Find references for this
developer story in Appendix Q.
From the day the Night Shift1 project presented
itself at Schell Games as a game to change how
ER doctors think and make decisions, we realized
that close collaboration with a subject-matter
expert would be essential to its success. We knew
nothing about making games for doctors, let alone one trying
to simulate an actual work shift at an Emergency Room.
Fortunately, we got very lucky. Dr. Deepika Mohan was our
client, and the recipient of the grant that allowed Night Shift to
be created. Most importantly though, she was dedicated to be
part of our team and support the development in any way she
could. The fact that Dr. Mohan lived and worked in the same
city as our team meant we could meet face-to-face as often
as felt necessary, and it made all the difference.
The first step to our successful partnership was to establish a
common language. We set up a meeting in which we used a
draft copy of this very book to present to her how we, as
game developers, think about bringing about change in the
player. From her end, we learned a bit about the behavioral
science theory behind her research, and basics of triaging
trauma patients.
157
Night Shift drew heavily from our subjectmatter
expert to understand what would
engage the game’s expert audience and how
to represent medical content within the game.
The other important facet of this dev-SME relationship was our
focus on playtesting. Even with all the knowledge sharing, we
realized that the real test will be to put our game prototype in
front of actual medical staff, watch them play, and listen to
what they have to say about it. It became quickly and vividly
apparent that we had a LOT to learn about our target
audience. Again, Dr. Mohan found ways to greatly help on this
quest. She was able to consistently provide us with time, space,
and volunteers to do this with, and went as far as creating a
survey filled with Likert scale questions akin to those given to
pilot audiences of TV shows to measure playtesters’
engagement. We didn't like it. Our design minds reeled at the
thought of judging a game like you would a TV show, but we
trusted our SME and went along with it. The data we gathered
ended up not only helping us to identify that engagement with
our story was a problem, but also gave us a solid metric for
gauging improvement when we took steps to remedy this.
This project concluded successfully, and was tested in a trial
that indicated that doctors who played Night Shift showed
significant improvement in trauma patient triage performance
when compared to those given reading materials2. We
continue to work with Dr. Mohan on follow-up projects, and
benefit from her expertise.
Michal Ksiazkiewicz
Project Director, Night Shift
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National
Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under award
number DP2 LM012339.c
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
Books
Papers
Websites
Videos
Robots
(okay, not really robots)
In addition to seeking out an individual as an SME,
it is a good idea to select a small body of vetted,
relevant media resources that cover your subject
matter. Create a media list of books, websites, and/or videos.
Encourage your team to consume the items on the list. These
media expert resources are helpful because they are precurated
media about your domain. This means that someone
else spent time and effort collecting a finite list of concepts,
examples, best practices, etc. about your domain and
presenting it in a coherent, linear manner. These sources are
available at all times for your entire team. You can use them to
help catch up new team members, or as reference when your
SME is not available. Leveraging them as reference will make it
easier to communicate with your SME.
Again, don’t neglect the multiple aspects of your domain and
audience. For example, if you are working on a game to
change investment behavior in middle-class adults, your list of
expert resources might include a book on investment, some
research papers on middle-class investment behavior, and an
investment documentary.
A human SME can be a great boon to a project but sometimes
it’s hard to find someone who can integrate with your team in
the role you need or want. If this is the case, put special
emphasis on identifying your short list of expert media
resources for your team. Seek expert recommendations for the
best materials. A book or paper recommendation might be
something an expert can pass along to you quickly, even if they
are not available to take on a larger role with your project.
The Benefit of
Non-Human Resources
159
Some of
these resources
may overlap
with your
Prior Works,
covered in the
next chapter.
-EXPERTRESOURCES-
Question
#7
What can you
learn from
what others
have done?
161
Prior
Works
What can you
learn from what
others have done?
It is valuable to your team, and to the
advancement of Transformational games on the
whole, to learn from the Prior Works of others.
Doing so allows your team to build up from prior
successes, adapt from prior failures, and to benefit
from prior exploration and thinking into your
design space.
Keep in mind that your design space includes both
the realm of games and the realm of
transformation. In that vein, “prior work” here is
used as a broad term to include other
interventions (games or otherwise) as well as
research that connects to other pieces of your
transformational framework such as your
purpose, transformations, audience, barriers, etc.
163
-PRIORWORKS-
MadeBefore
Studied
Things
Others
Have Made
Things Others
Have Studied
Not Studied
NotMadeBefore
Prior works are references you can use to inform
your game’s transformational approach.
Entertainment game development often draws inspiration from
prior works. For example, you might use images from a movie
to express the look and feel you’re aiming for in your game. Or
you might refer to a particular set of mechanics in a published
game to illustrate how your own game’s system will work.
These kinds of gameplay and aesthetic references are also
useful in Transformational game development. But for the
purposes of your transformational framework, prior work here
is intended to be references for your game’s transformational
aspects, giving a preview into two important questions:
• What could your implementation look like?
• Is your implementation likely to work?
Some prior works are things others have made.
The most obvious prior work is something that looks very much
like what you’re trying to do – a game with a similar
transformational purpose. However, games are not the only
medium used to try to transform people. Prior works can also
include films, books, courses, and more. These works help
illustrate what implementation approaches are possible.
Some prior works are things others have studied.
Another category of prior work for Transformational games is
what others have researched about the space of your
transformational problem. This could include research on things
others have made, but also broader research on your problem
space itself – barriers, transformations, the domain, the
audience, etc. These works help reveal things that are known
about your transformational problem space, and they give
insight into which implementation approaches might be more
or less effective.
Prior works illuminate your transformational
problem space by looking at what others before
you have built or learned in that space.
What are
Prior Works?
165
-PRIORWORKS-
Ready-Made Prototypes
Efficacy Indicators
Vetted Insights
If you leverage prior works well, they represent some measure
of work that you no longer have to do yourself.
Prior works can serve as ready-made prototypes.
Think of prior works (especially those where someone else built
a working, testable thing) as something you can engage with
as you might your own prototyping process. Prototypes are
effectively implementation experiments – what if it worked like
this? Take this mindset when examining prior works. Look at
what they did, what worked, what didn’t, what conclusions
others drew about the work, and use this to inform your own
steps forward. Remember, prior works do not have to be
games and they can be used to inform more than the game
design approach. For example, you can look at what data a
prior work collected as insight into what data you might want
to collect about your game and its impact.
Prior works can offer indicators for the potential
effectiveness of a particular approach. A major
question for Transformational games is: Will they work? Looking
at works built by others will allow you to see reaction to their
impact – is there any evidence it works or any conclusions as to
why or why not? Likewise, looking at research work allows you
to benefit from the conclusions that others have already drawn
from running experiments in your domain space. For example,
research might show that introducing domain concepts in a
certain particular order leads to stronger comprehension.
Prior works can offer vetted insights into your
transformational problem space. The
Transformational Framework process is itself a kind of map of
your design problem space. It is documentation of your team’s
understanding of this space: who the audience is, what the
barriers are, how players must be transformed, what matters in
the domain concepts, etc. Prior works represent someone else’s
exploration around some of these same questions. That is why
previous chapters have referenced research and expert
resources as methods of exploring pieces of the Framework.
You have limited time to build your understanding of your
problem space. You will be judged by others who are already
very familiar to the space. Prior works help you quickly
understand what others already know and leverage thinking
that has been vetted by a larger community of stakeholders. If
you’re stuck understanding your problem or what approach to
take, prior works can help.
The Value
of Prior Works
167
-PRIORWORKS-
Let’s further break down the landscape of prior works to get a
fuller view of the spectrum it encompasses.
Related Interventions: Things Others Have Made
“Intervention” is a term that is used in some circles to talk about
specific programs designed to change people. A related
intervention is a product or experience that in some ways
tackles the same purpose, player transformations, domain, or
audience as your game. As the field of Transformational games
grows, increasingly there may be an existing game intervention
you can reference. But remember that when it comes to your
high-level purpose, a game represents only one strategy.
Consider interventions in other mediums, for example:
• A class experience with a teacher and peer group
• Other media such as films, books, or audio
• A self-paced program with materials that individuals
progress through on their own
• An entertainment game adapted as an intervention
Supporting Research: Things Others Have Studied
Research refers to published theory based on rigorous
experiments and analysis, conducted by trained researchers
and vetted through a process which includes peer review.
Research is undertaken for four basic reasons:
• Description: Collect data on a phenomena, often with the
goal of being able to articulate generalities
E.g., Research to measure the number of unique words that
14-year-olds use in their daily online discourse
• Prediction: Attempt to predict the results of one phenomena
from the observations of another
E.g., Research that seeks to predict the long-term academic
success of students based on their pre-K attendance
• Control: Attempt to change one phenomena through the
manipulation of another
E.g., Research to test if exposure to a particular Transformational
game results in the intended behavior change
• Explanation: Attempt to definitively establish the cause(s) of
a phenomena through the use of rigorous controls
E.g., Research into the efficacy of a particular medicine through a
trial that includes comparison to a placebo
Relevant supporting research can include general research into
your domain or research on related interventions.
.
Types of
Prior Work
169
Other Games
Adapted as
Interventions
Other Game
Interventions
Interventions in
Other Mediums
Research on Related
Interventions
General Research
Application
Theory
Related
Interventions
Supporting
Research
-PRIORWORKS-
What are the structures and features of the
intervention?
What insights can you glean about the design
decisions for the intervention and what informed
these decisions?
What domain content is embedded in the
intervention and how is this content presented?
How long, how often, and under what
circumstances does the intervention’s audience
interact with the intervention?
What assumptions does it seem the intervention
makes about the audience? Are they accurate?
What efficacy claims does the intervention make
and how does it demonstrate its efficacy, if at all?
If the intervention assesses impact on players, what
data does it use to do so and how is this data
collected and presented?
What critiques, positive or negative, have been
made of the intervention? (Include reviews by
players AND non-player stakeholders)
How does the medium of the intervention influence
what you can take away for your game?
Questions to Ask:
Consult with your expert resources and stakeholder audiences
to identify interventions that are worth examining. Look for
organizations whose purpose aligns to your own and see what
interventions they support or recommend.
Here are several techniques you can use to leverage related
interventions, games or otherwise, as prior works:
• Direct Review: Personally play, participate, observe, or
otherwise directly experience the intervention.
• Playtest: Run a playtest with your audience using the
intervention and see for yourself how it works. This very
practical technique is often overlooked by teams, who focus
only on getting something of their own up for playtesting.
• Post-Mortems: Sometimes projects will publish reflective
insight into their design rationale, success, and failures. These
post-mortem reports might even include that project’s own
supporting research, or other materials similar to the pieces
of the Transformational Framework, which you can
examine for relevance to your own work.
• 3rd Party Review: It’s possible a related intervention has
been studied and you can use this research to glean
takeaways for your team. Even if a prior work has not been
formally studied, you may be able to find some informal or
anecdotal insight into its approach and efficacy, such as
reviews or personal stories from experts and stakeholders. If
you can’t find existing quality reviews, you might ask
someone with expertise related to your domain and
audience to undertake a review on your behalf.
• Interview or Consult: You can also contact the developers
or researchers directly to ask them questions about how
their interventions or playtests went, the lessons they
learned, or their thoughts on future work that might build on
what they did.
You are not looking at related interventions
primarily to mimic their implementation. You are
seeking to understand the decisions and strategies
employed by someone else tackling your purpose,
in order to inform your own approach.
Using Related
Interventions
171
-PRIORWORKSFor
some
example reviews
of related
interventions,
see Appendix R.
TITLE
AUTHOR(S)
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
METHODS
RESULTS
DISCUSSION
REFERENCES
PUBLICATION INFO
What is the
reputation of the
authors and publisher
in this area of
research?
How was the
study set up? How
was the data
collected?
Does the background
presented show a
strong understanding
of the prior work
leading to this
research?
What conclusions
have the authors
drawn?
Does the data
seem to support
the authors’
conclusions?
Are there
referenced papers
that you should be
reading too?
What are the
implications of the
conclusions, given
assumptions and
limitations of the
research?
Is the key research
question relevant
to your own work?
Most research papers follow the same general
format. Understanding this format will help you quickly parse
through papers to find ones relevant to you:
• Authors: Most papers will have more than one author.
Often the first author is the project lead or largest contributor. In
some cases the last author is the senior researcher who heads the
lab where the research was done.
• Publication Information: Year published and publisher.
Online publications may also include a citation count, showing how
many other papers have cited this paper.
• Abstract: A summary of the research question and results.
Most online access portals for papers will allow you to read a
paper’s abstract even if the full paper is behind a paywall.
However, don’t base your work on the abstract alone. If the title
and abstract seem promising, get a copy of the full paper to make
sure you understand the full picture of the research.
• Introduction: Background information on the research.
This should include important prior works and the key research
question motivating the research work represented by the paper.
• Methods: Details on how the research was conducted,.
This will include information like how participants were recruited or
specific questions asked.
• Results: The actual data from the research.
• Discussion: Interpretation of the results.
The authors’ conclusions based on the data collected. This may
posit larger implications and suggest directions for future research.
• References: Citations for works referenced by the paper.
Look for indicators of the study’s overall quality.
Just because something is presented in a research paper
format does not mean it meets the standards of quality
research. Watch out for:
• Conflict of interest: Who funded the research? Are there
competing interests on the part of the funders, authors, or
publisher? The existence of a conflict doesn’t automatically
discredit a study but it indicates the need for extra scrutiny.
• Irreputable publisher: Some for-profit journals engage in
pay-to-publish practices with questionable vetting of papers.
• Specious Conclusions: The paper should clearly connect the
actual data collected to the conclusions reached, making
clear any assumptions and limitations. Check on the sample
size used in the study and look for indications that the results
have been replicated.
What’s in a
Research Paper?
173
-PRIORWORKSFor
more on
reading research
papers, see
Appendix S.
Using unreliable sources to advise decisions
can have real consequences! During one of my
graduate programs, we ran a preschool practicum program in
which we based our classroom procedures on evidencebased
practice. Parents would ask us why their child acted
differently at school than at home, and it usually came down to
the different strategies used across settings. For example, one
Developer Story
Lessons Learned in Research
1-5 Find references for this
developer story in Appendix T.
“Evidence-based
practice” describes
interventions that
are supported by
solid data.
parent reported giving a 5-year-old child a
5-minute time-out every time he threw a
tantrum because they read about that
strategy on a parenting website.
Unfortunately, the child was throwing
tantrums to get out of doing things that he
didn’t want to do. Not only did the time-out
not work, but it was actually making the
tantrums worse! Digging into additional resources surrounding
that time-out recommendation would’ve saved the parents
and child a lot of unnecessary frustration.
Having low-effort access to research online can be both a
blessing and a curse, so it’s essential to question the
trustworthiness of sources and information. A good source is
reputable, peer-reviewed, and holds quality of methods,
results, and conclusions in the highest regard. Examining the
connection between the data collected and the conclusions
drawn is essential. Headlines and titles can be attentiongrabbing,
but it’s important to check the original source for
accuracy. The goal is to find and use evidence-based practice
to inform decisions. “Evidence-based practice” describes the
process of selecting interventions that are supported by solid
data. This can be difficult because it requires high-quality
studies that take time to plan, conduct, and disseminate. It's
worth the effort, though, because it increases the likelihood of
achieving a desired outcome because it draws on scientific
knowledge rather than pseudoscience and ineffective (or
potentially harmful) strategies.
At Schell Games, when we’re deciding how we want our
game experience to transform the player, we aim to use
evidence-based practice to inspire game mechanics. It’s not a
silver bullet that guarantees success, but it is a strategy that
175
gives us the highest likelihood of it. We look for good sources,
and evaluating them typically requires a bit of digging. Some
“journals” might look legitimate, but their goal may be to make
money rather than disseminate good data. These predatory
journal practices can lead to false or faux findings that are
Brooke Morrill, PhD
Director of Education
Schell Games
At Schell Games,
when we’re deciding
how we want our
game experience to
transform the
player, we aim to
use evidence-based
practice to inspire
game mechanics.
regarded journals. More recently though, the lab and its
director have come under fire for using very questionable
methods to obtain results that would garner positive media
coverage5. Fortunately, my work was not based on theirs and
my studies and conclusions were unaffected, but what if it had
been? Or, what if our studio had incorporated one of these illfated
interventions into a transformational game? Not only
would the transformation likely not be achieved, but the results
could be potentially harmful to the player.
Whether new data and conclusions arise or poorly conducted
studies fall away, it’s important to remain in touch with the
research you use so that you can respond if something like this
happens. This challenge of balancing rigor, practicality, and
potential curveballs shouldn’t be underestimated; it can be
difficult! Healthy doses of skepticism and flexibility about
sources, data, conclusions, and the ever-changing nature of
scientific research will go a long way.
published quickly in a highly accessible
way (including even fake papers
inspired by well-known sci-fi movies1.)
Unfortunately, even reputable, peerreviewed
sources can be fallible. My
dissertation work focused on improving
children’s dietary decisions2. A research
group that came up in my literature
review, the Cornell Food and Brand lab,
was well-known for simple dietary
interventions (e.g., using smaller plates3,
making unhealthy choices harder to
reach4, etc.) with big results, earning
accolades and being published in highly
-PRIORWORKS-
Check
Citations
ConferencesSMEs
Online
Databases
Follow
Select Work
Lit
Reviews
SEARCH
”
Finding your supporting research can be a struggle, especially
when using broad search tools like Google. Here are some
more targeted approaches you can use:
• Your subject-matter expert: Start here. Your SME may be
able to point you towards key research they are already
familiar with that intersects with their expertise. This is a
great way to jumpstart your search.
• Consider conferences: Many research communities hold
conferences. Consider attending a conference to see what
research is prominent in the community. These conferences
often publish conference proceedings, which is a written
record of the presented research. You might also look at
who keynotes at conferences. These individuals may be
thought leaders who have published important research.
• Look for literature reviews: These are secondary sources
that review, aggregate and draw conclusions or patterns
from research articles. This might be an academic book or
sometimes might even be in the form of popular non-fiction.
• Search online databases: There are a number of research
publication databases online. Often these online databases
may share parts of an abstract or conclusions of papers for
free, but may charge to see the full text. If you have access
to a university through a subject-matter expert or another
key stakeholder, their institution may have a subscription to
one or more of these databases. Alternatively, sometimes
authors will share their papers on their own professional
websites or, if you email and ask nicely, they may be willing
to send you the full text for free.
• Check citations: Once you have at least one paper or book
reference, follow its citations to find additional research.
Most papers include an introduction that summarizes the
relevant prior literature about their topic, and all academic
papers will include citations at the end. Use these to find
additional works.
• Follow a particular expert’s line of research: If you find out
about a particular thought leader in the field, check out their
online CV or publication history. Look at both what other
research they reference and the history of their own
research. You can also reach out to invite them to
participate in your work as an SME.
Gathering
Research
177
For some
example online
sources of
research,
see Appendix U.
-PRIORWORKS-
SME’s
Recommendation
Long-Standing
Research
Actionable
Application
Recent
Research
Pick a
Perspective
It’s not realistic to hold up all related research as critical prior
works to influence your design. You will need to pick a few
sources that you will particularly rely on. Additionally, the validity
of research may change over time. Sometimes past studies are
invalidated after their results fail to be found reproducible.
Sometimes a more nuanced understanding comes into
acceptance over time. Filter your research influences, looking
for a handful that provide a mix of these attributes:
• Your SME’s recommendation: Find out what research is
most important to your SME. Consider this research for your
supporting research. Your SME is an important collaborator
and elevating what they find most valuable is beneficial to
aligning your perspectives.
• Well-cited, long-standing research: Critically important
research tends to be referenced a lot by others in the field
over a long time. Some online databases include citation
count as a stat on papers – this is the number of other
papers that cite that paper. Be aware, however, that a
paper might be cited even if the citing paper disagrees with
the conclusions of the original paper. Survey these citing
papers, particularly the more recent ones, to see if they
support the original paper or diverge from its conclusions.
• Recent research: Research fields change over time as new
research is done. Consider more recent research as a way
of keeping you connected to recent advancements.
• Actionable application: In narrowing your supporting
research, identify what about the research you might be
able to apply to your work. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking
the subject of the research has to look like the thing you’re
building – e.g., a game. Often research can be applied
through other parts of your transformational framework,
giving you insights into barriers, your audience, etc.
• Pick a perspective: Not all the research you find will agree.
Don’t get stuck trying to select “The Right” research. Just
make sure the research you are using is reasonably vetted
and reflects a perspective that you and your team are
excited to leverage together.
Filtering
Supporting Research
179
-PRIORWORKS-
Learning
Theory
How People Learn
Behaviorism
Theory
How People Act
Based On Conditions
Social Cognitive
Theory
How People Learn
By Observing Others
Cognitive
Theory
How People Think
Developmental
Theory
How People Learn
& Behave As They Age
Constructivist
Theory
How People Learn via
Personal Experience
Instructional
Theory
How to Help
People Learn
Motivational
Theory
Why People Choose to
Do What They Do
If you’re new to academic research, it’s easy to get a little lost in
the lingo. The world of academic research, even just around
learning and behavior, is broad and deep. It’s way beyond the
scope of this book to truly illuminate this complex field.
However, there are clusters of theory that often seem to come
up when looking at research to inform Transformational
games, and it is helpful to at least be aware of them. Here are
some, along with brief layman’s summaries of their meaning:
• Learning Theory: How people learn. This umbrella term is
often inclusive of a broad range of theoretical schools of
thought, including behavioral, cognitive, social, constructivist,
and developmental theories.
• Behaviorism Theory: How people act based on conditions
and situations. These theories build from core ideas that
behavior is driven by conditions before or after the behavior.
• Social Cognitive Theory: How people learn by observing
others. These theories focus on how individuals learn by
imitating others based on social context.
• Cognitive Theory: How people think. These theories build
from the core idea that internal mental processes drive
learning and behavior.
• Developmental Theory: How people learn and behave as
they age and grow. These theories are built on the idea that
people mature through distinct stages that are
characterized by distinct behavioral, psychological, and
physical differences.
• Constructivist Theory: How people learn via personal
experience. These theories build from the core idea that
people create their own understanding of the world
through experience and reflection.
• Instructional Theory: How to help people learn and
develop. These theories try to give guidance on how best to
design material to scaffold and support learning.
• Motivational Theory: Why people choose to do what they
do. These theories try to illuminate what drives an individual’s
actions, desires, and needs.
Keep in mind that these theoretical schools overlap and in some
cases compete with one another, and that these terms may
mean different things to different people.
Schools of Theory
in Research
181
-PRIORWORKS-
Mediating
Variables
11. Our goal is a game, X, that
changes the result, Y.
X Y
Z
Cause Result
Moderating
Variable
Alternate Routes
Conditions & Knobs
X Y
Z
Cause Result
Mediating
Variable
Moderating
Variables
A common struggle for Transformational games can be trying
to change something that is hard to measure. Another is figuring
out what will impact your transformational success, including
both choices you can make in your design that might make it
more effective, and also factors outside your control that might
influence the outcome. Research can speak to these questions
with mediating and moderating variables:
• Mediating variables attempt to explain why a result occurs
by highlighting an intermediate factor that explains the result.
E.g., Education level (X) is predictive of salary (Y). It does not actually
determine one’s salary, but it does often determine your job (Z),
which in turn determines salary.
• Moderating variables highlight conditions which change the
strength of a relationship between cause and result.
Moderating variables can be qualitative attributes like
gender, or quantitative, such as varying costs or rewards.
E.g., Years' experience (X) is often directly related to salary (Y) but
may be moderated by gender (Z) such that women see a lower
gain in salary for years' experience than men.
You can use these research outcomes in useful ways such as:
• Target mediating variables as player transformations.
E.g., In designing a smoking cessation game, research points you to
a mediating variable: belief in one’s own ability to quit (“selfefficacy”).
Targeting this belief might be a more fruitful direction
than the targeting the smoking behavior directly.
• Use mediating variables to assess impact that is hard to
observe or measure.
E.g., You are developing a game to increase female representation
in tech industries by targeting 5th graders. You’d have to wait 8-12
years to see your players’ actual careers. Instead you might look to
research for a mediating variable, such as self-efficacy, intent, etc.
that you could test for immediately.
• Cater to a moderating variable through features in order
to take advantage of its impact.
E.g., You are working on a fitness game. You find research on the
moderating impact of having an exercise buddy on sticking with a
fitness goal. You may decide to prioritize social game features to
take advantage of this relationship to strengthen your impact.
• Use moderating variables to narrow your focus.
E.g., In developing a physics game, you find research that skill in
basic algebra has a moderating effect on students’ achievement in
physics. Accounting for this may not be within your resources, so
you may decide to restrict your target audience to students with a
certain minimum level of algebra mastery.
Using Research:
Mediating vs Moderating
183
-PRIORWORKS-
Question
#8
How will you
measure your
game’s
impact?
185
Assessment
Plan
How will you
measure your
game’s impact?
When working on a Transformational game,
eventually you will face the question: “How well
does it work?” Creating an Assessment Plan for
answering this question will help your team iterate
on the game during development and make
claims about the game’s efficacy once it’s on the
market.
After your game is released, many other
stakeholders will also be asking this question as
they decide if your game meets their needs. Some
stakeholders, and your players themselves, may
be interested in assessment for a slightly different
reason – to understand their own growth and
change facilitated by your game.
Assessment can be complex, time consuming, and
expensive. To leverage assessment well, you
should be thinking about your assessment plan
early so that you can account for logistics and
stakeholder needs, and so you can use
assessment to iterate to the transformational
impact you are targeting.
187
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
Guides
Iteration
Powers Feedback
On Player
Documents
Impact
The value of assessment is multifaceted: it is valuable both
during development and after release; it is valuable in regards
to what it can tell us about individual players, as well as what it
can tell us about the game itself.
Assessment allows you to iterate on the game’s
transformational design. Most game developers would
not dream of releasing a game without regular playtesting of
its mechanics, player engagement, and usability. Similarly, when
working on a Transformational game, we should playtest for
transformation. To do so requires some form of assessment.
Assessment powers feedback on the player’s
transformation. Your stakeholders and your players
themselves will often want to see evidence of transformational
progress. In order to display this progress as feedback, you will
need to in some way assess players or surface information that
allows your audience to infer an assessment for themselves.
Understanding how to assess your player transformations will
inform how you design your game’s feedback systems – both
what data you track and how you present that data.
Assessment documents your game’s impact.
Anyone making a decision to purchase or use your game
based on its transformational potential will be looking for
documented proof that your game works. Of course, it’s quite
possible that assessment shows your game doesn’t work
entirely as intended. That can be tough to discover but is still
valuable to you and others. Future Transformational game
developers may look to your game as a prior work for their
own game, and assessment will inform what these future
developers can learn from your efforts.
In this chapter, we’ll refer to assessment for the game’s sake as
evaluation of the game’s efficacy and assessment of players
as assessing player transformation. These two angles on
assessment are intimately linked – in order to evaluate the
efficacy of a game, you’ll often need to focus on assessing
player transformation.
Why
Assessment Matters
189
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There are a range of indicators that can be used to evaluate a
game’s efficacy. Some are more difficult than others to
achieve. What follows are five potential levels of efficacy
evaluation:
• LEVEL 1: Instinctual Rationalization: You have
some internal reasoning about why the game might be
effective. A gut feeling about what should work is not
without merit, as instinct can be connected to deeply
synthesized experience and expertise. But it’s also true that
instinct can sometimes lead us astray. Going beyond instinct
is the rationale behind applying a process like this
Framework.
• LEVEL 2: Theory Basis: The game uses research and
references as a basis for its design and how it achieves
player transformation. This is essentially connecting your
design to the other pieces of the Transformational
Framework. It involves making design decisions that are
informed by research and deep thinking on how your target
transformation could be facilitated by the game’s design.
• LEVEL 3: Expert Validation: The game has the
endorsement of experts who vouch for the game’s
effectiveness. Again, if you’re following the
Transformational Framework, you should already have
experts involved in your process who can provide this
validation both during development and after release.
• LEVEL 4: Informal Data: The game has been informally
tested, and there is anecdotal data about its efficacy.
Achieving this level is the focus of the rest of this chapter. If
you are working on a Transformational game, you should
be pursuing this level throughout development and using
preliminary results to inform iteration.
• LEVEL 5: Formal Research Data: The game has been
formally studied, and an evaluation of its efficacy has
been published. This is the holy grail for Transformational
games but happens relatively rarely, as it requires both
significant time and money. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to
achieve this bar, and, even if you do, you most likely will not
get results you can use to fold back into your own product
for at least 2-5 years. If you do achieve this level and publish
your results, you are (to me) a hero to the field, regardless of
the outcomes of your study. We all learn from shared
successes and failures.
Levels of
Evaluating Efficacy
These levels of
efficacy are
modified from
Jesse Schell’s
book, The Art of
Game Design –
see Appendix V.
191
LEVEL 1
Instinctual Rationalization
LEVEL 3
Expert Validation
LEVEL 4
Informal Data
LEVEL 5
Formal Research Data
LEVEL 2
Theory Basis
Levels 2 through 4 are included within the focus of
the Transformational Framework.
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
What data will
show our player
transformation?
?
How can we
effectively
measure transfer
and persistence?
Assuming that you’re aiming for Level 4 in evaluating your
game’s efficacy, you will need to wrestle with how to assess
player transformation. Let’s reflect again on our definition of a
Transformational game – a game designed with the intention
of changing players in a specific way that transfers and persists
beyond the game. So when we talk about assessment,
whether our focus is on the game or the player, we are really
talking about variations on three core questions:
• Does the game change players in the intended ways?
• How far does that change transfer beyond the game?
• How long does that change persist?
In standard game development, we are accustomed to using
analytics and playtests to gather data about a game’s usability
or engagement. Both tools are also useful for transformational
games but come with these extra challenges:
It’s sometimes not obvious what data you need to
collect to show player transformation. If you want to
know if a level in your game is too hard, you can track analytics
about player performance in that level or ask for player
feedback during a playtest. There is an art to analyzing this
data to make good design decisions but it is often relatively
straightforward to decide what data you need. In contrast, it
may be less clear what data you need to collect to assess
player transformation, transfer, and persistence. For example, if
one of your player transformations is to improve the ability to
withstand peer pressure, what data should you collect to show
this transformation?
Additional resources are required to collect data
that shows transfer and persistence. Often the data
you will want to collect, particularly to evaluate transfer and
persistence, cannot be collected inside the game or during an
in-person playtest. How can you show transfer if you don’t
evaluate players in the real world? How can you show
persistence if you don’t collect data on players after the game
is over? Game development teams often don’t have
experience with collecting data on players outside the game.
If you are not thinking about your game’s assessment needs
early in development, then you may find that your in-game
structures do not support determining if a player
transformation is happening and that you don’t have the
resources in place to do the out-of-game work necessary.
What Makes
Assessment Hard
193
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An overly simplistic approach to player assessment is to treat
questions about the player’s transformational progress as a
derivative of game content progression – e.g., if the player
completes this level, then they understand concept X, or if the
player makes this choice in the game, then they understand the
value of this choice in real life. Beware this strategy.
Player progression in the game is usually not
enough by itself to make claims about player
transformation. Players can often brute force or stumble
through game content without truly being transformed by it.
Sometimes gameplay incentives can drive player behavior
while in the game, but fail to change player behavior in the real
world or after the game is over.
Does this mean progression in the game is useless? No. It is
immensely helpful to be able to say that if the player has
completed these parts of the game, then a certain level of
transformation can be assumed. However, you can only
support these claims after completing assessment that shows
this correlation. To do this, use other assessment techniques to
evaluate the transformational impact on players while also
tracking their progression in your game. Look for a strong
correlation between progression and transformation.
E.g., You are developing a game to change players’ attitudes towards
immigrants. You run a trial with your game that looks at pre- and postgame
surveys to measure players’ attitudes. You also track how much
of the game players complete. You find that players that complete at
least 2/3 of your game have, on average, a significant change in their
attitudes. You can use this testing as positive data that supports claims
about player transformation based on progression alone.
It’s worth noting that not all of your players will be transformed,
even when you see strong positive results overall across a
group of players. Be honest about the strength of the
transformation you have observed and the level of proof you
have collected to confirm that transformation. No one (who is
reasonable) expects your game to work to the same extent for
every single player.
Progress Alone
Isn’t Proof
195
!
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
In-Game
Analytics
Observations
in Real World
Survey
Stakeholders
Survey
Player
Test
Player
Player
Stakeholder
There are many techniques you can use to collect the data
needed for assessment. Here are a few to consider.
• Track player actions in the game: This can be a strong
choice for knowledge or skill transformations that can be
clearly demonstrated by the player engaging with the
game mechanics. It’s often the easiest method to execute
because it can piggy-back off of game analytics, which is a
common game development practice. However, this is a
weaker option when it comes to transformations such as
belief, disposition, or behavior. The validity of this assessment
can be limited by the fidelity of the game to the real-world
context. It is difficult to get the same feeling of stakes in a
game as in real life, and it is easy for game mechanics to
bias player behavior. For these reasons, players may
perform differently in a game than they would in real life.
Additionally, tracking in-game actions alone can’t
demonstrate transfer and persistence.
• Observe player actions in the real world: This is powerful
because it can clearly show transfer and persistence.
However, you often don’t have a way to track what your
players do outside your game. This is even more difficult in
school settings where privacy concerns can shut down
ongoing data collection inside or outside a game.
• Survey player intention and disposition: Sometimes you
can’t directly observe behavioral change in players. In these
cases, you can ask players to report how they intend to
behave or how they feel about something. These selfreported
responses can sometimes be considered a
predictor of future behavior.
• Survey stakeholder impressions: Rather than ask players
directly about their transformation, you can survey key
stakeholders such as teachers and parents. Since these
stakeholders are also often gatekeepers for your game’s
adoption, understanding how they perceive your game’s
impact on your players can be very valuable.
• Test the player: Rather than simply observing players, you
can prompt them to perform some task or complete a test
that gives data about their transformed state. In some cases,
there may be an existing, widely accepted test you can use
to assess your players, such as an accreditation exam. One
benefit of using 3rd party assessments is the potential to
compare your players’ results directly with that of non-
players.
Example Assessment
Techniques
197
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Questions to Consider
• How will you recognize player
transformation?
• What techniques and metrics will
you leverage?
• Do you have access to your
authentic audience & context?
The following few pages cover some tips on planning for
assessment to inform development, not formal research. This is
assessment that is similar to the kind of playtesting that occurs
during standard game development.
Start creating your assessment plan by leveraging other pieces
of your Framework to answer these questions:
• How will you recognize your player transformations?
How will you really know if a player has been transformed
in those ways? What do you need to observe and what
data do you need to collect to convince yourself and others?
E.g., You’re working on a game with a player transformation to
change behavior around texting and driving in teenagers.
Realistically, how could you observe your audience for this change
in behavior?
• What techniques and metrics do your SME and prior
works suggest you leverage? Talk to your SME about how
they would recommend assessing your target
transformations. Look at the assessment practices of prior
works. Since it’s likely your game is going to be compared to
these other interventions, it may especially benefit you to be
able to compare along the same axes, leveraging similar
data and methods.
E.g., Your game’s transformational intent is to improve science lab
skills in students. Could you leverage existing classroom instruction
and evaluation methods to use as comparison and assessment for
your game’s impact?
• Do you have access to your authentic audience? What’s
special about your actual target audience, and will you be
able to playtest your game and assessment with them?
E.g., You’re working on a game for refugee children ages 8-12
years old. You can certainly test with non-refugee kids of your
target age, but your assessment data may not be relevant.
• Do you have access to your authentic context? Can you
access/simulate this context for your assessment efforts?
If your game’s intended context is very specific, it’s best if
you can do your assessment within this context.
E.g., You’re creating a game to be used by teachers in a classroom
setting. Will you be able to get teachers to test using your game in
their class during development? Will those classrooms be typical of
the ones where you eventually hope your game is played?
Formulating An
Assessment Plan
199
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
Assessment Plan
What’s inside:
Key questions to answer
Participant recruitment plan
PII policies & practices
Schedule of assessment efforts
Data to be collected
Data collection process
Plan for baseline data
Your assessment plan should include the following:
• What questions you are trying to answer about the game
and the player: Have your key questions defined so you can
sanity check both the data you’re collecting as well as your
plan for analyzing that data to obtain the answers.
• How your test players will be recruited: It can be
legitimately hard to find people to playtest your game. How
will you find people who represent your audience? Will you
compensate them in some way?
• How you will handle personally identifying information
(PII): Depending on the age of your audience, the data you
are collecting, or how your data will be used, your handling
of PII may be regulated by law, so planning for how you
handle your players’ PII can be a big deal. Define your
approach to PII and other privacy considerations based on
requirements, then think about how your process will need
to be set up to meet the goals of that approach.
• Where in your schedule you will dedicate resources to
assessment development: Good assessment takes more
time and effort than many people think. Establish when in
your development schedule you’ll be focusing on
assessment. Make sure you include time to test your data
pipeline.
• What data you will track: Justify the data you plan to use
to show transformation by leveraging established norms
from other prior works and input from your SMEs. Consider
also tracking data on any factors you suspect may
moderate your game’s impact. If it would be too difficult to
directly gather needed data, consider modifying your
transformations or look for a mediating variable you can
measure instead.
• How that data will be collected: For the data you need in
order to show transformation, how will you gather this
data? Think about the resources (time, money, technology,
etc.) you need to execute this collection of data and also
analysis of the data. Be realistic, given your resources.
• Where baseline data will come from: An important part of
your assessment plan will be to assess players before they
play your game so that you can show change. Do you
already have baseline data available to you? If not, how will
you collect it?
What’s in an
Assessment Plan
201
Refer back to
mediating and
moderating
variables on
Pg. 182.
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
Half the Sky Movement (HTSM) asked Games for
Change to produce a suite of games on a range of
concepts related to female empowerment and
gender equality. HTSM is a multimedia initiative inspired by
and in collaboration with Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn,
authors of the best-selling book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression
into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The resulting portfolio
included 3 mobile phone games, a Facebook game, and 10
mobile apps addressing topics such as education, healthcare,
economic empowerment, and gender-based violence.
From the start we designed these games with a theory basis,
incorporating subject-matter experts across all domains who
helped determine appropriate audiences, impact goals,
messaging and content. As the design evolved into game
mechanics, we coordinated with evaluators to refine our
assessment plans. Funding was provided by USAID, who looks to
formal evaluation and assessment to demonstrate efficacy in the
programs they support. Therefore a portion of our funding was
allocated specifically for evaluation. The team understood that it
would not be possible to evaluate the entire portfolio.
Assessment can be costly and we had a fixed budget so we
would have to narrow our focus to just one of our games. With
one shot at demonstrating efficacy, we were very thoughtful
about planning our evaluation efforts.
To determine which game to evaluate and how to prepare for
that evaluation, we considered the challenges we would face:
The target audiences included non-English speakers and others
with low or no literacy. We would need to employ translators
throughout the testing process to work around language
barriers, and use images and conversation-based testing
formats to mitigate literacy constraints. Audiences had limited
access to technology so we needed to provide the appropriate
technology on the ground while testing in remote locations. The
games covered a range of topics, with content embedded in
layers of levels, making it challenging for evaluators to access
and understand all the content within some of the games. Some
games targeted immediate transformation and others longerterm
behavior change. We had to consider what measurements
were possible within our year-long testing timeframe.
Developer Story
Assessing Half the Sky
1Find references for this
developer story in Appendix W.
203
9-Minutes was executive
produced by Games for
Change and Show of Force,
developed by Mudlark Studios
and published by e-Line Media.
the short-term indicators of transformation around pregnancy
health also were indicators for longer behavior change and
saw this as a way to conduct a short-term evaluation (< 1 year)
that could demonstrate longer-term implications.
Of all the games in the portfolio, 9-Minutes was also likely to
produce the clearest indicators for assessment since it targeted
only one specific topic. Our evaluators and SMEs helped us
understand the research and determine what indicators for
success in pregnancy health looked like. They identified 14 key
messages from the game that could be tied to the trackable
indicators (e.g., “drink more water”) and helped us create a
testing format that would address each one.
With our narrowed focus and game content mapped to
indicators, we proceeded – only to discover another challenge:
some participants were hesitant to engage with the mobile
devices used for testing. They seemed to be nervous about
breaking the phones, or struggling with how to use them. So,
we had to rely even more on our evaluators to familiarize
participants with the technology and help them feel
comfortable during the testing process. We were grateful for
the evaluators’ support and, in the end, the assessment results
successfully demonstrated measurable positive shifts in
knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intentions toward safe
pregnancy and actions following exposure to the game1.
Emily Treat
Experience Strategy Director, Mad*Pow
Former VP Lab Services, Games for Change
Ultimately, we selected 9-Minutes, a game
about healthy pregnancy behaviors, for
assessment. The game is a simple, 9-level
mobile beat-matching game designed
specifically for audiences in Kenya and India.
One reason this game was favored was
because the topic of maternal health itself
was considered to be the most far-reaching,
with impact on many other social and
socioeconomic forms of gender-based
oppression. The topic of maternal health also
came backed with lots of research and
behavior theories to which we could
connect our assessment. We found many of
This evaluation was supported by the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID). The FHI 360-managed C-Change
project supported the development of the 9-Minutes mobile game.
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
Just like your game itself, your assessment plan will require
iteration. Before you launch your full user test to assess your
game, playtest your assessment plan on a small scale and
iterate based on what you observe.
1. Test a preview of your analysis.
Start with the end goal. Collecting all the data in the world is
worthless if you aren’t prepared to learn something from it.
Try this experiment: Generate a fake report that has charts,
graphs, feedback, or conclusions you would ideally be able to
create from your assessment efforts. Playtest this report. Is it
digestible to others? What about the process of performing that
analysis? Do you have a process in place that will realistically
handle the amount of data you’ll be collecting?
2. Test your data format.
As you experiment with the end-product of your data, you will
also have to confront how your data is formatted. Your data
format impacts whether your data is human-readable without
tools, as well as how easy it is to analyze. You may find you can
simplify your analysis tasks by making some small tweaks to the
format of your data. Start by generating a small amount of
example data in your format. Then run this fake data through
your planned analysis. Is the format easy to work with? Does it
allow the level of connections and cross-referencing you need
to understand individual data points in the context of a larger
picture?
3. Test your data collection methods.
It’s not uncommon to find that your first pass at data collection is
not getting you the information you want or need. You may
realize that you’re missing some data due to a breakdown in
your process, that your survey questions are biasing your
responses, or that there’s an edge case you aren’t tracking. Run
a test where you complete the full loop of collecting data and
trying to use that data to draw conclusions. Look for places to
make improvements.
Good assessment takes more resources than most
teams expect. Invest in these small preliminary tests and
some time to iterate based on the results. This will help you get
the most out of your larger assessment effort. As you playtest
your assessment plan, also update your assessment schedule
and allocated resources based on what you learn.
Test
Your Plan
205
!
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
How can I best focus my own efforts?
What are my strengths?
What are my weaknesses?
What parts of the game are particularly
effective or relevant to me?
What is my progress?
What milestones have I achieved?
How far to my next milestone?
How does my time and effort in the game
correlate to my progress?
What is the real-world connection?
What’s the noticeable impact on my realworld
life?
How can I expect to measure up according
to metrics outside the game?
How do I compare to others?
Some Questions
Self-Motivated
Players Ask:
So far, we’ve primarily been considering assessment as a tool
for you to show your game’s efficacy. Assessment can also be
an important part of the game experience for the player
themselves.
If your players are coming to your game because
they have a personal stake in their own
transformation, they may be particularly
interested in assessment as a feature. You may even
want to specifically think about assessment as a form of
motivation for your players that may strengthen the impact of
your transformation. This assessment feedback generally
wants to be formative, providing ongoing feedback to the
player throughout play. It also wants to complement and help
sustain their internal motivation.
There is a well-known, respected body of work around
motivation called Self-Determination Theory or SDT. SDT says
that sustained intrinsic motivation requires a sense of
competency, autonomy, and relatedness. Your assessment
features should support these needs. Here are some questions
your self-motivated players may be looking to have answered
with your assessment feature:
• How can I focus my own efforts? (Autonomy)
Where are my strengths (things I already excel at) and
where are my weaknesses (things I could choose to
strengthen)? What parts of the game are particularly
effective or relevant for me personally?
• What is my progress? (Mastery)
What milestones have I achieved? How far do I have to go
for the next milestone? How does my time and effort relate
to my rate of progress?
• What is the real-world connection? (Relatedness)
How does my in-game progress connect to impact on my
real-world life? How does my in-game progress relate to
real-world assessments by which I might be judged? How
does my progress compare to others?
Assessment as a
Feature for the Player
207
For more on Self-
Determination
Theory (a theory
every game
designer should
be familiar with)
see Appendix X.
-ASSESSMENTPLAN-
Coach
Judge
“Great job
on….”
“Let me
help you
with…”
“My verdict on
your performance
is…”
“Your rank
is…”
Stakeholder
Roles
Other stakeholders outside the player may also be interested in
assessment as a feature of your game. You can divide these
into two main roles – the Coach and the Judge. Note that some
stakeholders (for example, teachers) may take on both of these
roles.
The “Coach” Stakeholder Role
This is a stakeholder outside the player who has an interest in
helping the player transform. This person wants to be able to
use your assessment feature in a formative way to give
relevant feedback and encouragement to the player. Here are
some specific questions they may be looking to have
answered:
• Where can I help? Where is the player getting stuck? What
are their misconceptions, hang-ups, or common mistakes?
• What can I celebrate? What milestones has the player
achieved? What transformational progress can I help the
player practice, show-off, or reflect on?
The “Judge” Stakeholder Role
This is a stakeholder outside the player who needs to evaluate
the player. This person wants to be able to use your assessment
feature in a summative way to quickly and accurately rank,
rate, pass, fail, or otherwise judge the player. Here are some
specific questions they may be looking to have answered:
• What is the overall mastery level of this player? What can
I expect from this player in the real world? How can I relate
the player’s mastery level to external metrics such as
standards?
• How does this player compare to others? How does this
player’s skills or status compare to that of other individuals?
Assessment as a
Feature for Others
209
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How will you
measure your
game’s impact?
What can you learn
from what others
have done?
Who knows what
you don’t know you
don’t know?
What is essential to
include in the game
to transform your
players?
Why aren’t your
players already
transformed?
How should players
be different after
playing your game?
What is the
ecosystem in which
your game must
create change?
Why is it important
that your game
transform players?
211
For more resources on using the Transformational
Framework with your teams, visit
www.transformationalframework.com
THE
TRANSFORMATIONAL
FRAMEWORK
213
Where to Go Next:
Production Considerations
Read the next chapter for some insights
into the ways that production can be
impacted when working on
Transformational games.
Framework Overview Review
Now that you’ve reached the end of the
Transformational Framework, take a
moment to return to the Framework
Overview chapter and review the tips
there for using the Framework. In
particular, keep in mind that the
Framework is a non-linear tool whose
pieces intersect and inform each other as
you answer each of the eight questions.
-OVERVIEW-
-PRODUCTION-
Production
Considerations
There’s really no way around it: given two games
of similar size and production value, a
Transformational game has more moving parts,
more stakeholders, and more metrics for success
to hit than a similarly scoped game that is
developed purely for entertainment.
For those involved in the scheduling and
management of a Transformational game,
it’s important to recognize the potential
impact of this challenge and be ready to rise to
the occasion. This chapter covers a number of
production considerations you should keep in mind
when planning for your Transformational game
development.
215
-PRODUCTION-
Extended Timeline
Additional Resources
Preparing Partners
It should be clear by now that Transformational games require
additional effort during the pre-production period of
development as compared to entertainment-only games.
Your pre-production timeline will need to be
extended. Since the Transformational Framework process
should be well underway – or better yet, complete – before
your team digs into prototyping game concepts, this work will
necessarily extend the duration of your pre-production period.
It can be quite difficult to convince some teams and
stakeholders that this additional time in the schedule is
necessary. Take creating this space very seriously though, as it
is your best defense against a major false start, which could be
more costly to your schedule.
Completing the Framework may require
increasing the funding and human resources you
allocate to pre-production. You may need to spend
funds to pay your subject-matter expert or purchase access to
research papers. You will also need to dedicate human
resources to drive the legwork that informs your Framework,
including:
• Observing and researching your audience & context
• Soliciting and building SME relationships
• Finding and evaluating relevant prior works
• Developing a working understanding of the domain space
• Developing the format and structures for assessment
All of this work takes time and relevant expertise to do well.
Consider dedicating a team member to this as your team’s
“Transformational Designer.”
You may need to spend time preparing partners
for game development. Clients and stakeholders of
Transformational games can often be newcomers to games
and the game development process. This creates a need for
pre-production to also serve as a time for knowledge sharing
from your team to partner stakeholders about what to expect
during development and how to be a more effective partner.
Additional Demands
For Pre-Production
217
The Game Dev
Primer chapter
was included to
help with this
process.
-PRODUCTION-
It will require more effort to keep messaging
aligned. If you work on many team projects, you’ve probably
had the experience of overhearing your manager or client
describe a product in progress to someone else and thought,
“wait, that’s not what we’re doing” or “that’s totally changed
now” or “we shouldn’t be promising that.” This is a classic
warning sign that not everyone’s visions are aligned.
Keeping everyone on the same page is even more important
on Transformational games. There's the game and then there’s
what the game is trying to teach or change. Since there are
likely to be more numerous and diverse stakeholders for your
game, you will likely have non-subject-matter experts, including
yourself, trying to explain or understand the transformational
intent and domain content, and you’ll have non-game people
trying to explain or understand the gameplay of your game.
You should expect to dedicate more of your attention in
keeping everyone up to date and on message to avoid making
claims that aren’t true or setting incorrect expectations. The
good news is that, if you invest time in the Transformational
Framework, you will have a solid tool for the whole team for
this purpose.
You will have more stakeholders involved in the
content generation and review process. With more
voices in your review process, it will simply take longer to parse
and incorporate all feedback. You may also have more
feedback from individuals inexperienced with games.
Stakeholders who are less familiar with games or game
development may give more challenging feedback. These
different perspectives can be very valuable, but it can also slow
generation and approval of game content.
Keep in mind that your experts will probably not be able to
generate game content directly as this is not their area of
expertise. If your SMEs are generating any of your content,
expect to need to apply some developer resources to
incorporate this content into the game, both in terms of
adapting it for a game experience and in terms of technical
integration.
Additional Demands
For Production
Your content will need to be playtested and
iterated for more than engagement. Not only does
your content need to support your game experience, it also has
to successfully contribute to the player’s transformation. This
means you might need to continue to iterate on content that
playtests well for player engagement but doesn’t seem to be
achieving the transformational impact. You’ll need to apply
playtesting resources to determine if this is true.
You will have additional standards for your
content and mistakes will be more critical. The
stakes are much higher for the content representing your
domain in the game. Entertaining dialogue is nice, unless it
trades too heavily on style and confuses the key takeaways for
the player. A typo is just a typo until it teaches your players the
wrong spelling of a vocabulary word. A design decision made
for the benefit of the game’s engagement may seem like the
best decision, until you find that it alienates key stakeholders
because it is not authentic to the domain content of your game.
Educators’ use of your game is largely dependent
on the support you provide. If you want your game to
be used in a classroom setting and you don’t provide quality,
active support for your game (including creating
accompanying materials) you may struggle to gain adoption
with educator stakeholders. There are exceptions, of course, as
evidenced by entertainment games that have been adapted
by teachers for transformational purposes beyond their intent.
However this relies on dedicated teachers doing the heavy
lifting of developing and promoting a model for classroom
integration. In general, if you want your game to be in the
classroom, budget time and resources for creating curricular
content in addition to the game.
Releasing updates that address content errors is
more important. Because there are often stricter
qualitative and factual standards for Transformational games,
there may be higher pressure to fix even “minor” content bugs
that crop up after release.
219
This is a lot, but with
the right plan,
you can do it!
-PRODUCTION-
The reality is that often the amount of money is much less
for Transformational projects, and that commercial games
often also have a substantial marketing budget.
Pretend you have two equal buckets of resources – one is to
make a traditional entertainment game, the other is to make
a Transformational game. A Transformational game requires
applying resources in additional ways – necessarily eating
away at the resources for the core game.
Core Game
Development
Pre-production
Core Game
Development
Pre-production
Expert Consultation
Content Overhead
Total Game
Budget
Entertainment Only
Total Game
Budget
Transformational
Entertainment Only Transformational
Marketing
Budget
A complaint you often hear levied against Transformational
games is that the production value isn’t there. These games
seem to struggle to reach the level of quality that we often see
in entertainment games.
You will hear lots of theories about why this is. Sometimes you
will hear individuals claim that many people who work on
educational games don’t have good enough game production
skills. Sometimes people will theorize that the academics who
work on these games don’t understand how important the
“fun” is to a game. You might also hear that these games are
constricted by the environment in which they are designed to
be used and sold – that if you design for the classroom, you are
limited in what you can do, or worse, that these games
intentionally aim for a lower standard because they just have
to be more interesting than a lesson plan or a test.
So, now it’s your turn to lead a Transformational game project.
And you think to yourself, that’s not going to be us. We’re going
to make a juicy game. It’s not going to have that educational
feel. It’s going to have a really rich feature set, it’s going to have
fully animated characters with completely voiced dialogue. It’s
going to be “fun first” – all the things that other people who
don’t know any better don’t bother to do on these kinds of
games, right?
You will soon encounter one of the most common real reasons
that Transformational games often suffer in production value:
They are underfunded.
Developers working on Transformational games
will typically find themselves tackling a bigger
problem, with more facets, and more
stakeholders, but with less money. In this scenario,
something will necessarily have to give. You will have to make
decisions on where to apply resources. Some of the resources
that would have been solely applied to developing for
engagement should be applied to tackling your
transformational design problem. This is why it’s so important to
have good, open, up-front conversations about priorities with
your partners and team.
Doing More…
With Less
221
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Resource Costs
For Application
Sharing
Funds
Reporting
Requirements
Waiting
Periods
Research
Requirements
Grant
Application
$
APPROVED
If you will be working with grant-based funding for your game,
be aware that this can impact your development in a number
of ways:
Applying for grants requires significant resources.
Writing a competitive grant requires a great deal of work that
ideally involves a dedicated grant writer and the project’s lead
designer. You’ll want to start at least a month prior to the due
date – significantly longer if you need to court partners for your
grant. If this is your first time writing a grant, strongly consider
working with a grant writer or partnering with someone who
has been through the process before.
You may be required to split the grant money.
Grants often require partnerships with researchers and
subject-matter experts. In some cases the parent institution of
these partners will also require a cut of the grant funding in
exchange for their support and credibility.
Be prepared to wait. Projects funded by grants will likely
experience periods of budget and schedule uncertainty as you
wait months to hear back from potential funders.
Be sure you understand and plan for the grant’s
reporting requirements. For many grants, regular
progress reports must be written and submitted during
development in order to continue to receive funding. These
typically involve a narrative about the project progress thus far
and plans for the next segment of work. This requires additional
overhead during the project. Often grants have a final report
requirement that is much more comprehensive than progress
reports written along the way. It is helpful to have someone on
the team monitoring what was promised in the grant to ensure
that the project is fulfilling those promises.
Some grants come with formal research
requirements. A formal research study has many
requirements beyond the game industry’s playtesting standard.
This may include restrictions on how you handle data, and
guidelines for testing with human test subjects, including
submitting your research plan for approval to an Institutional
Review Board (IRB) and restrictions on who can interact with
test subjects or their data. It will likely take additional overhead
to meet these requirements and will likely also require setting
aside funds to specifically support this research.
The Impact of
Grant Funding
223
-PRODUCTION-
In an ideal world, you’d get more resources to work on a
Transformational game, but in the real world, you often get less.
In fact, often clients interested in Transformational games have
very limited budgets, resulting in necessarily small projects. How
can you set yourself up for success ? Here are a few tips:
- 1 Don’t
Skip the Framework Process… NO REALLY.
On a small project, there is even more pressure to immediately
start building. However, committing even a day or two up front
to work through the Framework process can save time and
frustration later. One way or another, the questions
represented by the Transformational Framework will need to
be answered. Skipping the process just means you will stumble
through those answers as development unfolds. This increases
the chance of false starts and major realignments that come
from not establishing a strong shared vision of the design
problem before starting to build your game experience.
- 2 Take
the time to walk any stakeholders with
responsibilities in the design process through the
Transformational Framework. No one likes to feel like
everyone else is following a plan while they are out of the loop.
Make sure you talk to design stakeholders early about the
Framework’s process and vocabulary.
- 3 Kickoff
the project with an extended, in-person
work session with the development team, subjectmatter
experts, and other stakeholders. On short
projects, you can’t afford to slowly build up a working
relationship. You really have to jumpstart it with early, intense
face time. Get in the same room for 1-2 days of discussions.
Make this the time when you collectively agree on the pieces of
your Framework.
- 4 Have
a plan for getting timely feedback and stick
to it. A slow feedback turnaround time can especially impact
a very short project. Also, make sure you have the appropriate
people to vet domain content at the appropriate milestones.
Tips for Production On
Small Projects
- 5 Narrow
your transformational scope. Pick as few
barriers to tackle as possible and choose very targeted player
transformations. Keep the boundaries of your domain concepts
as small and well-defined as possible, and limit the number of
key concepts. The more you narrow your scope, the more you
can absolutely focus on nailing your player transformation.
- 6 Make
it a priority to establish a single, clear,
domain authority source. This could be a person or a
book or something else, but having a clear, dominant domain
authority agreed upon early will streamline your process for
content related to the domain material.
- 7 Consider
design strategies that can serve you
particularly well on small projects:
• Prioritize transformation-to-genre match: Look for a
strong natural alignment of your mechanics to your domain
concepts or you will end up spending additional resources
trying to shoehorn together the gameplay and
transformation.
• Innovate on zero to one things: With a short timeline, you
need to pick your battles. Consider working with wellestablished
game genres and mechanics as long as they
can support your transformational goals.
• Design for sharing: Small projects almost always lack
funding for marketing. If your high-level purpose involves
creating a societal change and your marketing budget is
small, spend design time on ways your game could motivate
players to share the game with others.
• Make choices that require less tailored content: If your
design requires a lot of hand-crafted content to be a
satisfying experience, you may be setting your team up for
crunch or failure at the end of the project. Content on
Transformational projects is more costly. Set a design
direction that needs less hand-authored content to reduce
the burden on your team and increase the odds that you’ll
finish well. Less content really can be more – but your design
must embrace this constraint.
225
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227
AppendixEndnotes & References
- A References
on the Transformative Power of Games
• Whitton, Nicola. Digital Games and Learning: Research and Theory. Routledge, 2014.
• McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can
Change the World. Penguin Books, 2011.
• Toppo, Greg. The Game Believes in You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids
Smarter.
St. Martin's Press, 2015.
• Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.
St. Martin's Griffin, 2007.
- B Official
Links for
Example Transformational Games
• At Risk. Kognito, kognito.com/products/at-risk-for-college-students
• Bury Me, My Love. ARTE, burymemylove.arte.tv
• DragonBox Algebra 12+. DragonBox, https://dragonbox.com/products/algebra-12
• Duolingo. Duolingo, www.duolingo.com
• Happy Atoms. Schell Games, happyatoms.com
• Harness Heroes. Simcoach Games, www.simcoachgames.com/harness-hero
• Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa). E-Line Media, neveralonegame.com/
• Phone Story. Molleindustria, www.phonestory.org
• PlayForward. play2PREVENT, www.play2prevent.org/our-games/playforward-series
• Re-Mission. Hopelab, www.hopelab.org/projects/re-mission
• SuperBetter. SuperBetter, www.superbetter.com
• The End. Preloaded, preloaded.com/work/channel-4-education-end
• Win the White House. iCivics, www.icivics.org/games/win-white-house
• Zombies, Run!. Six to Start, zombiesrungame.com
- C References
on Adapting Games for Transformation
• Farber, Matthew. Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group
Teaches with Games. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2018.
• Darvasi, Paul. “Ludic Learning.” Ludic Learning, www.ludiclearning.org
• Isaacs, Steve. “Games and Learning.” Games and Learning,
gamesandlearning1.blogspot.com
- D More
on Example Adapted Games
Assassin’s Creed
• Assassin’s Creed. Ubisoft Entertainment, assassinscreed.ubisoft.com.
• Reparaz, Mikel. “Assassin’s Creed Origins – Discovery Tour Available Now as
Free Download.” Ubisoft, Feb. 20 2018, news.ubisoft.com/article/assassins-creed-
origins-discovery-tour-available-now-as-free-download.
• Green, Nate. “Teaching the American Revolution with Assassins Creed III.” Social
Media in Education, Feb. 27 2013, socmeded.blogspot.com/2013/10/yes-i-played-
assassins-creed-iii-in.html.
• de Rochefort, Simone. “Assassin’s Creed Origins’ Discovery Tour lets the beauty
of Egypt shine.” Polygon, Feb. 14 2018,
www.polygon.com/2018/2/14/17008318/assassins-creed-origins-discovery-tour-
impressions.
Gone Home
• Gone Home. The Fullbright Company, gonehome.game.
• Farber, Matthew. “Gone Home: A Video Game as a Tool for Teaching Critical
Thinking Skills.” KQED, Jan. 16 2015, www.kqed.org/mindshift/38968/gone-home-
a-video-game-as-a-tool-for-teaching-critical-thinking.
• Darvasi, Paul. “Gone Home Lesson 1: Writes of Passage, Annotating a Foyer and
Screenshot Citations.” Ludic Learning, March 29 2014,
www.ludiclearning.org/2014/03/29/annotating-the-foyer-towards-a-close-
playing-of-gone-home.
Minecraft
• Minecraft. Mojang, minecraft.net.
• Minecraft Education Edition. Mojang, education.minecraft.net
• Murray, Jacqui. “Minecraft in the Classroom Teaches Reading and More.”
TeachHUB, www.teachhub.com/minecraft-classroom-teaches-reading-writing-
problem-solving.
• Gallagher, Colin, editor. An Educator's Guide to Using Minecraft in the
Classroom: Ideas, inspiration, and student projects for teachers. Peachpit Press,
2014.
- E A
Real-World Example of Game Iteration
• Vollmer, Asher. Wohlwend, Greg. “The Rip-offs & Making Our Original Game.”
Threes, asherv.com/threes/threemails/.
The mobile puzzle game Threes (2014) was a big hit when released. With that
success came many copy-cats who were able to very quickly clone the complete
Threes game. In responding to these copy-cats, the creators published a blog post
detailing the extensive iteration they went through to arrive at their final design. It is
a great window into the art and subtlety of iteration.
229
-APPX.-
- F More
on Playtesting
• Playtesting Workshops. Playtesting Workshops, playtestingworkshops.com.
• Chamberlin, Barbara. “Trying Very Hard to Make Games That Don't Stink: User
Testing at the NMSU Learning Games Lab.” NewMexicoStateU Channel,
YouTube, 11 Nov. 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx6lpeaUPSc.
• Patton, Shawn. “The Definitive Guide to Playtest Questions.” Schell Games Blog,
Schell Games, April 27 2017, http://www.schellgames.com/blog/insights/the-
definitive-guide-to-playtest-questions.
- G Example
Play Style Taxonomies
Bartle Taxonomy of Player Types
A classification of players based on their preferred actions in a game: Killers,
Achievers, Explorers, and Socializers.
• Kumar, Janaki, et al. “Bartle’s Player Types for Gamification.” The Interaction
Design Foundation, July 2018, www.interaction-
design.org/literature/article/bartle-s-player-types-for-gamification.
• Bartle, Richard. "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who suit MUDs.“
1996.
VandenBerghe’s 5 Domains of Play
Based on psychology’s “Big Five” model of personality traits: Openness to new
experiences, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism
(OCEAN).
• VandenBerghe, Jason. “The Five Domains of Play.” Dark Lorde, 2012.
www.darklorde.com/the-five-domains-of-play.
• VandenBerghe, Jason. “The 5 Domains of Play: Applying Psychology's Big 5
Motivation Domains to Games.” GDC, 2012.
www.gdcvault.com/play/1015595/The-5-Domains-of-Play.
Quantic Foundry’s Gamer Motivation Profile
A gamer motivation model driven by data collected from players that posits six
main motivation groups: Action, Social, Immersion, Creativity, Mastery, and
Achievement.
• Yee, Nick. “Our Gaming Motivation Data Distilled into a 20-Minute Talk.”
Quantic Foundry, 2016. quanticfoundry.com/2016/04/07/gdc-talk.
- H References
for “Designing for Rural Ethiopia”
• Hammer, Jessica. “Jessica Hammer.“ Jessica Hammer, replayable.net.
• Hammer, Jessica. “G4C13: Stronger Together: Helping Ethiopian Girls Help
Themselves” Games for Change, You Tube, July 2 2013,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fWeNLbFk9E.
• Johnson, Jason. “In Ethiopia, One Game Design Professor Believes that Young
Girls Hold the Key.” Kill Screen, July 3, 2013, killscreen.com/articles/ethiopia-one-
game-design-professor-believes-young-girls-hold-key.
- I References
on Human-Centered Design
• IDEO.org. The Field Guide to Human-Centered Design. IDEO.org / Design Kit, 2015.
• LUMA Institute. Innovating for People Handbook of Human-Centered Design
Methods. LUMA Institute, 2012.
- J References
on Bloom’s Taxonomy
• Bloom Benjamin. et al. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of
Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. 1956.
• Krathwohl, David R. A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy: An Overview. Theory Into
Practice 41(4), 2002, pp. 212-218.
• Bloom's taxonomy. Wikipedia, wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy.
- K References
for “Transformations with Happy Atoms”
• Happy Atoms. Schell Games, happyatoms.com.
- L References
for “The Barriers of Lexica”
• The World of Lexica. Schell Games, schellgames.com/games/the-world-of-lexica.
- M More
on How Games Embody Concepts
• Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and
Literacy. St. Martin's Griffin, 2007.
• Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games. The MIT Press, 2007.
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231
- N More
on Educational Standards
Academic standards are benchmarks that define what students should know and
be able to do at specified grade levels. It is not uncommon for Transformational
game stakeholders to desire to hit these standards, because application to
standards is one way teachers and school districts make decisions about what tools
to use in their classrooms. Here are some example standards well-known in the U.S.
in 2018:
• Common Core Standards. Common Core State Standards Initiative,
www.corestandards.org.
Typically in the U.S. when people talk generally about “standards” they are
referring to the Common Core State Standards Initiative. The Common Core
provides a proposed unified outline of what students should learn in the domains
of Mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA). The Common Core standards
were largely adopted by states in the U.S. but are considered controversial
politically and socially in some circles.
• Next Generation Science Standards: For States, By States. NGSS Lead States,
www.nextgenscience.org.
• CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards. Computer Science Teachers
Association, www.csteachers.org/page/standards.
- O More
on Concept Maps
• Novak, Joseph D. Cañas, Alberto. J. “The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and
How to Construct and Use Them.”, Technical Report IHMC CmapTools 2006-01
Rev 01-2008, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, 2008.
- P References
for “The Domain of Water Bears”
1. Water Bears. Schell Games, waterbearsgame.com.
2. Tekinbaş, Katie Salen. Gresalfi, Melissa. Peppler, Kylie. Santo, Rafi. Gaming the
System: Designing with Gamestar Mechanic, The MIT Press, 2014.
mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-system
- Q References
for “Night Shift’s SME”
1. Night Shift. Schell Games, schellgames.com/games/night-shift.
2. Mohan Deepika, Farris Coreen, Fischhoff Baruch, Rosengart Matthew R, Angus
Derek C, Yealy Donald M et al.. Efficacy of educational video game versus
traditional educational apps at improving physician decision making in
trauma triage: randomized controlled trial. BMJ 2017; 359 (doi: BMJ
2017;359:j5416)
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233
- R Example
Reviews of Related Interventions
• What Works Clearinghouse (WWC): ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc
This site maintained by IES at the US Dept of Education reviews the existing research
on different programs, products, practices, and policies in education.
- S More
on Reading Research Papers
• Raff, Jennifer. “How to read and understand a scientific article.” Violent
Metaphors, 2014. violentmetaphors.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/how-to-read-
and-understand-a-scientific-article.pdf.
• “RAND's Standards for High-Quality Research and Analysis.” RAND.
www.rand.org/about/standards/standards_high.html.
- T References
for “Lessons Learned in Research”
1. Redd, Nola Taylor. Fake science paper about “Star Trek” and warp 10 was
accepted by ‘predatory journals.’ Space.com, Feb. 13 2018. space.com/39672-
fake-star-trek-science-paper-published.html.
2. Morrill, Brooke A., Madden, Gregory J., Wengreen, Heidi J., Fargo, Jamison D., Aquilar,
Sheryl S. “A randomized-controlled trial of the Food Dudes program: Tangible
rewards are more effective than social rewards for increasing short- and longterm
fruit and vegetable consumption.” Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and
Dietetics, vol. 116, no. 4, 2016, pp. 618–629., doi:10.1016/j.jand.2015.07.001.
Morrill, Brooke A., Madden, Gregory J., Wengreen, Heidi J. “The FIT game: A lowcost
approach to increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in school.”
Preventive Medicine, , vol. 68, 2014, pp. 76–79., doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2014.04.015.
Morrill, Brooke A., Madden, Gregory J., Wengreen, Heidi J., Aquilar, Sheryl S.,
Desjardins, E. Anne. “Gamification of Dietary Decision-Making in an ElementarySchool
Cafeteria.” PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 4, Sept. 2014,
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0093872.
3. Wansink, Brian, & van Ittersum, Koert. “The visual illusions of food: Why plates,
bowls, and spoons can bias consumption volume. “ The FASEB Journal, 20, A618,
2016. doi:10.1096/fasebj.20.4.A618-c.
4. Painter, James E, et al. “How Visibility and Convenience Influence Candy
Consumption.” Appetite, vol. 38, no. 3, 2002, pp. 237–238.,
doi:10.1006/appe.2002.0485.
5. Newburger, Emma, and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs. “New Controversies Emerge
Surrounding Cornell Professor's Fundraiser and Studies.” The Cornell Daily Sun, 5
Mar. 2018, cornellsun.com/2018/03/05/new-controversies-emerge-surrounding-
cornell-professors-fundraiser-and-studies/.
- U Some
Online Sources for Research Papers
• PLOS ONE: journals.plos.org/plosone
A multidisciplinary open-access journal, PLOS ONE publishes primary research
(including interdisciplinary and replication studies as well as negative results)
based on high ethical standards as well the rigor of the methodology and
conclusions reported.
• Google Scholar: scholar.google.com
A central search for scholarly literature that includes many disciplines and
sources (articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions) from academic
publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web
sites.
• Research Gate: researchgate.net
A social network for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer
questions, and find collaborators.
- V Basis
for Levels of Efficacy
Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Second Edition.
A K Peters Ltd, 2018., p. 509.
- W References
for “Assessing Half the Sky”
1. Games For Change. “‘9 Minutes’ Mobile Game Evaluation Demonstrates
Positive Change for Pregnant Women.” Games For Change, 1 Mar. 2013,
gamesforchange.org/blog/2013/03/01/9-minutes-mobile-game-evaluation-
demonstrates-positive-change-for-pregnant-women.
- X More
on Self-Determination Theory
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is one of the most important theories of human
behavior of which designers working on games, and particularly Transformational
games, should be aware. There are many, many resources out there on SDT, but
here are a select two that are foundational for work in Transformational game
design:
• Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan. “Self-Determination Theory: A
Macrotheory of Human Motivation, Development, and Health.” Canadian
Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, vol. 49, no. 3, 2008, pp. 182–185.,
doi:10.1037/a0012801.
• Niemiec, Christopher P., and Richard M. Ryan. “Autonomy, Competence, and
Relatedness in the Classroom.” School Field, vol. 7, no. 2, 2009, pp. 133–144.,
doi:10.1177/1477878509104318.
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235
About
The ETC Press was founded in 2005 under the direction of Dr.
Drew Davidson, the Director of Carnegie Mellon University’s
Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), as an academic, digital-first
(but not digital only), open-access publishing imprint.
What does all that mean? The ETC Press publishes academic and
trade books and singles, textbooks, academic journals, and
conference proceedings that focus on issues revolving around
entertainment technologies as they are applied across a variety of
fields. Our authors come from a range of fields: some are traditional
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What ties them all together is their ability to write about the impact
of emerging technologies and its significance in society.
In keeping with that mission, the ETC Press uses emerging
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publisher, to distribute our e-books and print books through all the
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Instead, each printed copy is created upon purchase.
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ETC Press
Carnegie Mellon University
237
The
Transformational
Framework
provided creative direction and management for projects as well
as helped the studio establish and refine design best practices,
particularly for transformational experiences such as educational
games.
Her game credits include Disney’s Pixie Hollow Online MMO (2009),
Interbots’ Let’s Make Shapes! (2010), SeaWorld’s Race for the
Beach experience (2011), Interbots’ Touch & Say (2011),
Play2PREVENT’s PlayForward (2012), Amplify’s The World of Lexica
(2014) and Planet Planners (2014), the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG
Aquarium companion app (2017), and Schell Games’ HoloLAB
Champions (2018).
Sabrina has been a speaker and workshop leader at a number of
conferences, including the Games for Change Festival, Serious Play,
and Meaningful Play. She has a penchant for getting involved in
game jams, including organizing Transformational game jams as
well as a long-standing involvement with Global Game Jam, where
she currently coordinates Regional Organizers all over the world.
Sabrina lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – a lovely city which you
should definitely visit. She’d be especially glad to hear from you if
you’d like to talk about collaborating on a Transformational project,
running a Transformational game jam, or sharing the
Transformational Framework through a workshop with your team.
She sincerely hopes this book will help you create something that
you’re proud of that will help change the world.
Let her know if it did: heyosabrina@gmail.com
About
The Author
Sabrina Haskell Culyba is
an independent designer
with experience on a wide
range of products including
games, theme park rides,
animatronics, and toys.
Sabrina worked at Schell
Games for over a decade,
where she honed her
interest and expertise in
Transformational games.
In her role as a Principal
Designer at Schell, she
www.transformationalframework.com