Focusing the Purpose of Your Game - leemet16/game-design-toolkit GitHub Wiki

The Goal

Why are you creating this game? It's not just so your player can have fun; although creating a fun experience is a part of it (don't forget to have fun yourself while making it!). What you are doing is leveraging game mechanics to create an overall better learning experience for your player. There are many different paths you can take when it comes to creating your game and many different styles of games you can create; but how do you focus the purpose of your game in order to create the best learning experience possible? At the end of the day, you need to identify what players should know, but more importantly, what your players should be able to do by the end of the game.

Action Mapping

You can use action mapping to help identify these things. Read the blog linked here to learn more about this process.

Image Source: Cathy Moore

Action mapping, developed by Cathy Moore, helps us to do a number of things. It helps us to:

1. identify what the goal of your game is;
2. identify what the player needs to do in order to achieve that goal;
3. design your game's activities around these actions; and
4. determine what content the player needs to know in order to successfully complete the game's activities.

When identifying the actions the player needs to do, use verbs to describe those actions. Here is a list of common verbs that are used. An example of an action could be "sort the letters correctly into the vowel and consonant buckets". In this case, "sort" is the verb. Reading only the verb itself should give you a sense of what types of activities might be created.

Another example is as follows: Perhaps the goal of your game is to increase players' knowledge of country names. In order to achieve this goal, your players need to be able to recall country names when looking at a world map. Your game could simply consist of players identifying countries on a world map and adding some game mechanics around that to make it fun and interesting (e.g. identify as many countries as you can in 1 minute and compare your score with your friends). With the game in this example, you may not need to teach any content as the repetitive nature of the game will be the mechanism that allows learning to occur.

Identify Action, Activities, and Information!

In your teams, use this worksheet to identify:

1. the goal of your game;
2. what actions the player needs to do to meet that goal;
3. what activities you could create to make them do those actions; and
4. what information they need in order to do those activities.

The template has room for four actions; however, you could have less or more than this.

References

Cathy Moore. (n.d.) Action mapping on one page. Retrieved from http://blog.cathy-moore.com/online-learning-conference-anti-handout/