Embedded - 420: Googly Eyes and Top Hats

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Dan White, CEO of Filament Games, spoke to us about educational games, how to make play part of learning, and simulating robots. We also discussed what makes a good (or bad) learning experience, the limits of games as educational tools, and the elements of fun. Roblox is a game platform and game creation system. Filament Games is developing a robot simulator called Roboco. Filament has many games out in the wild, check out their portfolio. If this sounds like fun, check out their careers page. Durf live streams game playing Transcript

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White, here with Christopher White. This week is all about fun and games and learning. Our guest is Dan White, CEO of Filament Games. Hi, Dan. Thanks for joining us today. It's great to be here. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met, I don't know, at a little robotics conference? Oh, fun.

So is this myself, Dan White, or is this myself, Filament Games, or both? You have 30 seconds. Go. Okay. So I'm the CEO of Filament Games, which is a company that makes learning games. We've been doing that for 17 years. And personally, I'm an avid learner and an avid rock climber and super into mindfulness. I think I probably still have 20 seconds left. Yeah, you can keep going.

So a little bit more about Filament. So we develop games for learning for all different ages, all different platforms, all different subject areas. We've touched on a very eclectic mix of different subject areas over the course of the last 17 years. And I think we're probably going to talk about some more of that later. So I'll leave it there. And I believe that my co-host Chris has an uncle named Dan White, but you are not said uncle. Not as far as I know. I try to pay attention to that sort of thing. And as far as i know uh you know i try to pay attention to that sort of thing and as far as i know i just have uh the one kid right now who's nine and uh and not in any way related there are many of us whites out there yes there are better for us yes it's not the most interesting

name but it is very prolific. We're going to start with Lightning Round, where we ask you short questions, and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we'll hold off on the follow-ups until after Lightning Round. Are you ready? Let's do it. Doom or Zork? Oh, Zork, for sure. Which is more important to a game, graphics or story?

Graphics. What's more fun to develop, games for kids, teenagers, or adults? Teenagers. Complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, no. Oh, no. This is the portfolio approach versus focus. I'm going to go with the portfolio approach because most of them are going to fail anyway. What's your favorite way to control games? Mouse and keyboard, game controllers, or touch? Definitely mouse and keyboard.

What's your favorite fictional robot? The SleepBot 5000 reads you books and scratches your head while you're trying to fall asleep. Is that a fictional robot or a real one? And if it's a real one, where do I get it? I just made it up. I'm sorry. It sounds like I've got my first customer, though, so maybe I can get to work. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Well, since we're talking about robots today, I'll make this a very human-centered tip. School of Life is a really nice resource for how to survive being a human being that I started.

I found out about this during the pandemic and thought it was super great. It's this British philosopher who has really, in many cases, very practical and somewhat controversial views on how to be a human. Things like be a little bit less ambitious, things of that nature. It's very refreshing in our culture. I think it's great. Everybody should read those books and watch those YouTube videos. I'm in favor of being less ambitious. I don't know how much less I can be, but if that's the answer, I can try. Then you're already winning at life. I think I'm actually going to change things around because I know we have one listener who is very, very excited about us talking to you.

And so Milo would like to know what advice you would give to an eight-year-old who wants to be a game designer when they grow up. Start designing games. Design as many games as you can. Design different types of games. Challenge yourself to design games that you don't even personally think are particularly interesting. Play with those game mechanics. Test them on people. Test them on your friends and on your parents. Refine them. Iterate on them. You'll find that usually your first pass at designing a game is totally broken. Something's overpowered. Some mechanic is boring or tedious. Yeah, just start making games and get a feel for what types of mechanics and play styles are interesting and feel good and which ones don't. I know Milo has already started that process. When can he start his internship with you? You know what?

Right now it's really hard to hire people. So yesterday. I think it's really hard to hire eight-year-olds. There's some laws that might get in the way. Do you recommend, before we get, while we're on this topic, do you recommend that people play a lot of games if they're into game making? Yes and no. So the yes is, you know, the,

it's like the more books you read, the better your vocabulary will be. So the more games you play, the more tools you'll have for thinking about design. On the other hand, there's, there's this thing called last game played syndrome when designers are designing a game where coincidentally, the game that they're designing will borrow a lot from the thing that is most fresh in their mind space. So I think go into it with the caveat that whatever you play or whatever you've played most recently is going to have a heavy impact on how you think about designing your next game. I bet that's true for fiction writing as well. I think it's true for everything. It happens to me a lot with music.

If I'm writing something after I've been listening to an album I really like and like, Oh, this is great. And then I listened back and Oh yeah, that's, that's just me regurgitating. Your company makes games for other people like textbook publishers and

museums and the Smithsonian and PBS. How do you design a game like that? Yeah, so designing games for different types of organizations, as you might imagine, is pretty different. So when you're working with, say, a textbook publisher, oftentimes you're very constrained by the formal learning environment and things like standards and the length of the class period, logistical things, things of that nature. Whereas you're designing for a Smithsonian or a PBS in an informal learning environment, you have a little bit more permission to play, and that's both in terms of the types of things you're teaching and then whether it's a long-form game, short-form game, and the gameplay mechanics and style.

So I don't want to say that the latter is just more fun, but sometimes that actually ends up being the case. That said, we've definitely figured out at this point how to take just about any topic or set of learning objectives and figure out how to make it engaging for users. So we love making games for all those different types of organizations. Just some organizations come with more constraints than others. But the more you design games, the more you realize that constraints actually are your friend because they help you focus in on what's most important. But trying to teach somebody something rote or mechanical, like multiplication tables, can you make that fun? It's funny because so many of the games that people think of are games that are in the drill and practice genre, which is your basic flat content topics like multiplication tables, like vocabulary.

Can you make it fun? So here's the thing. Those types of that content, that type of content is necessary because it's a foundational skill. But making a game to teach those kind of things is what I like to call the nuclear powered fly swatter. It's a little bit overkill, right? Like you honestly could just do flashcards. In fact, that's what I did when I was a kid, worked just fine. So I'm a big fan of the idea that you don't necessarily need to use a game to teach those types of things. Even though ironically, if you look at, if you sort of survey the field of game-based learning, most of the games that you'll find fall into this category, sort of drill and practice games that teach these basic skills and abilities, these foundational skills and abilities. That is part of what

Filament and I personally am endeavoring to change. I want people to start thinking about game-based learning as a tool for taking on higher order thinking and more conceptual understanding type skills. You have a video game about respect, which wasn't something that I expected. How do you teach respect? You know, so whether we're making a game about soft skills or hard skills, the methodology is pretty similar. So, you know, Filament is a company that designs learning through play. So play always has to be at the nucleus of the experience. And then the next thing is, how do we make it so that players have interesting decisions to make? And that's important regardless of whether or not you're making an educational game or a game for purely entertainment purposes. And then a lot of times that, what does that look

like? A lot of times that looks like what I like to call authentic game mechanics. So think about, let's see, a classic drill and practice game mechanic. You are solving math equations in order to win a spaceship race. So every time you get an answer right, your spaceship moves forward. If you get it wrong, it doesn't. Take that same content and make it quote-unquote authentic. Well, what you can do is you can say, well, how is math used in the real world? And if we want this to be a space-themed game, how does somebody flying an actual spaceship or an astronaut use math in order to do the amazing things that they do? And make it so that being good at math in that game space becomes the superpower and lets you do something that actually has value in the real world and inside of whatever theme you've chosen to build the game around.

So that the theme and the gameplay mechanics and the learning are not divorced. They're all the same thing. And then if you do all those things well, then at the end, the player who has mastered the game and the game mechanics has also, per se, mastered the learning objectives. Let me ask you kind of a related meta question. You sort of answered it, but what qualifies something for being a game versus an activity? comes back to that playfulness. So we've made lots of things over the years that are highly interactive, but they're not particularly playful. And I would say those things are not games. If you really break that debt, well, so what is play then? So play gives the player agency. They have agency to make decisions. Hopefully those decisions are impactful. Hopefully they're interesting. Usually impactful and interesting are difficult to

separate, which is a good thing. So I think if the player has decisions to make that are interesting and impactful, and the game mechanics give them enough of a leash to feel like the problem space is bigger than they can hold in their head at any given point in time, they will feel like they are engaging in play. And if they're engaging in play, then they will feel like they are playing a game. That's my personal definition. This is highly subjective, so your mileage may vary. If I got that right, it's having some agency, having decisions that are impactful, having a fair amount of decision space. What am I leaving out? Yeah, you nailed it.

That sounds like my job as an engineer, and I end up getting decision exhaustion. Yep. Maybe they're not very fun decisions to make because decisions are not by definition fun. I totally relate to the decision exhaustion as a CEO because I have basically two roles at Filament. to do new crazy experimental things and have things go horribly wrong. And then the other is to answer questions that other people don't want to, or make decisions about things that other people don't want to take liability for. And those usually end up being impossible decisions. There's no right answer. So yeah, just deciding, just making decisions is not inherently interesting or fun. Necessary, but not sufficient. Let's classify it that way. Well, I guess that's what I was saying was that your definition was necessary

but not sufficient. You lost what makes it fun. I mean, part of playfulness is fun, but what is fun? It's not about making decisions because I can have fun at a movie where all I'm doing is taking in information. Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of, so fun is different to different people. So for some people, it's really about the different type of identity that they get to take on in the game space. For some people, it's about the different ways that they are empowered in the game space a lot of games are empowerment fantasies so what sorts of things can you do in the game that you can't do in the real world that makes it fun um i i think another big thing is exploration exploring in games

is really fun just seeing what's around the next corner and exploring the unknown and this is a sort of indirect contrast to the real world, right? Because we usually know what's around the next corner in most places. And usually it's something not very interesting. It's gas station or something. But in games, yeah, there's always something tantalizingly just out of reach. For a lot of players, I think there's also a fun component to the idea of progression. Because in the real world, progression is often hard and tedious. But in games's always fair and doable and usually you're not that far from the next piece of progress and then this last thing is going to sound weird but learning is fun

in games in fact i would argue well so the original, so credit where credit is due, the original argument came from James Paul Gee, who's my advisor in grad school. He wrote some seminal works about game-based learning. And he posited that when you are having fun in a entertainment video game, it's probably because you're learning something new. You're getting better at the game. You're trying something you haven't tried before, you're mastering a new system. So this idea that learning is inherently dull is, I think, unfortunately, is a byproduct of the way people have been taught historically, but has nothing to do with how joyful learning inherently is. A little while ago, you mentioned learning objectives, which is one of those things I think about when i think about education and pedagogy and all of that

yeah do you have to sit down and and look at how things are taught or is it about or is it a matter of looking at the skills you want them to have and then just trying to design something fun around that. How much of this is education theory? Yeah. So education theory is useful to a point, for sure. I have a master's in education technology, and I remember reading through learning theory and being like, yep, that makes a lot of sense. Not going to reference that when I design my next video game. So there are a lot of things that are helpful in general for designing a pedagogical experience, but not particularly useful for video games in specific. That said, I think there are some things that you learn about when you study learning theory that video games without even accidentally have discovered on their own as a whole separate field that are totally related to cognition and how the human brain naturally works. So video game designers for, well, since the dawn of video games have been thinking a lot about how people learn because they needed people to learn

their games. And now there's a lot of established genres and genre tropes that make it so that learning burden is a little bit lighter because, you know, they can just assume that if you're playing a first person shooter, you've played others before and you know that you're playing a first-person shooter, you've played others before, and you know that you're going to be ducking and jumping and strafing, etc. When we're making learning games, we can't really rely on prior genre experience because we are inventing new genres all the time. Granted, we're borrowing or maybe doing genre mashups and building a certain amount of the experience off of precedent. But usually it's pretty unrecognizable to players. So even if you're an experienced gamer, when you pick up a learning game, a lot of times it's going to look totally different than anything you've ever played before. So we still have to go back to Square One in terms of the assumptions we make

about the player's literacy, gameplay literacy, and we have to, and that just places a lot more burden on the tutorialization systems. And that's where, to some extent, we can lean into the learning sciences. But I think in general, the practice that's used most frequently is just coming back to this idea of just-in-time and

on-demand, or the idea that we don't teach you something before you need it in the game. And the other bit of it is scaffolding, right? So we try to take things one concept at a time, one interface at a time, one game mechanic at a time, and build up from simple to complex. And as you probably, I mean, as most people sort of intuitively know, even if they can't articulate it out loud, a lot of the best games out there are very simple to pick up, but difficult to master. Chess is the quintessential example of this, right? You can learn the rules in 10 minutes, but then spend a lifetime trying to get good at

the game. And that's sort of the holy grail for game designers. And, you know, the design that doesn't require that much, where the player doesn't have to learn the mechanics of the game or the interface of the game, spend a lot of time learning those things, I should say, but can, through play itself, very organically learn what the game is all about across time. So you're saying threes is the perfect game? 2048. Cutes and letters. Your games usually run on the web or on PCs or actually, where do your games usually run? All over the place. So we're technically platform agnostic. We've made games for, I mean, we're making a game for the Quest 2 right now.

We've made games for custom medical hardware, tablet, web-based PC, you name it. iOS and Android? Yeah, mobile games, VR games, augmented reality games. So for us, it comes back to the practice of learning game design and then thinking about what are the unique affordances and liabilities of the particular platform that we are trying to find a target audience on or reach a target audience at. So, yeah, it's really about figuring out how we dial up, you of interactions we can leverage that you do with your hands in order to be thinking about how we can make the controls as intuitive as possible and not ask the user to do anything overly complex from an interface

perspective. So yeah, like the interface of a tablet versus two six-stop VR controllers is a wildly different design space. And then it's just a matter of really figuring out how you get the interface out of the way to the extent possible and make it as invisible and transparent as possible. Just tactically, how do you address targeting all these disparate platforms? Do you have your own engine that runs on everything? Do you work natively on the platforms that you're targeting for? Or is it a mix of things? Yeah, most of the time at this point, we're building in Unity. Every once in a while, we'll do something in Unreal.

But yeah, we don't. For the learning game space, just based on the size of the projects and the budgets, it's never really practical to sort of homebrew our own game engines. But working with custom hardware, we will often be working with an API that's developed by a client.

And the clients come to you with an idea for a game or with just learning objectives? And do they specify what hardware the games will run on? Usually the latter, yes. As far as the former, it's all over the map. We have some people who say, I want to make a game about the Alamo. And that's the extent

of the thought we've put into it. Other times they'll come with a fully fleshed out design document. And it's really more about triaging that design document into the right shape to turn it into a finished product. Has Filament made any of their own games without a client? Yeah, we've made quite a number. We made a library of middle school science games a while back. And then currently we are developing a game called Roboco, which is a game where you build robots. So it's a digital robotics game. And then there is also a version of that called Roboco Sports League, which is on the Roblox platform. So the Roboco is on PC and VR. And then Roboco Sports League is on the Roblox platform. So that's sort of the same concept, but multiplayer, where you are building

robots and then using them in sports matches with other players online. For an ancient old person, can you describe what Roblox is? Sure. So Roblox is a game engine, and it's a game playing platform. So you can get onto the Roblox engine, and you can develop your own little experiences, I think is the official term. But most of those experiences look and feel a lot like games. And you can also play other games that have been created by the community. And most of the games that are available on the platform are games that are created by,

I hesitate to say amateurs because it sounds pejorative. And there's a lot of very talented amateur game developers. But yeah, most of them are developed by people who are not game development studios. And then a growing number of experiences on the platform are developed by, let's say, organizations that have an FEIN. Oh, Federal Employment ID number? Yeah. Okay, took me a second.

As opposed to like a 12-year-old. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I have to admit that when I first heard of the Roblox, I didn't realize it was a game platform. I thought it was actually going to be like little blocks that you made robots with. Mm-hmm. Yep.

That's a common thing. Could you add that? I mean, after the head scratcher thing? It read stories too. Yes, totally. I mean, I fully anticipate that because we're making a game about robots on the Roblox platform, that that is going to cause all kinds of confusion because the vast majority of the games on the platform have nothing to do with robots at all. But come to find out, when we started building Roblox Sports League for the Roblox platform

and talking to the owner of the CEO of Roblox, part of his original vision was uh to be able to to make it so that people could build robots uh and then and then build custom robots and then and then play with each other using those robots so it's kind of cool to all these years later um to be building a game that sort of is similar to the original vision for the platform which obviously went in a very different direction. How, I mean, robots can be very educational. There's the robot operating system. There's all the trigonometry, the inverse kinematics.

What are you going to be teaching? Yeah. So that's why I love robotics because it's like the STEM superfood, right? Like you've got, yeah, you've got creativity, you've got problem solving, you've got mechanical engineering, computer engineering, programming, teamwork. So there's like this really cool soup of soft skills and hard skills in robotics. So in RoboCo, from the beginning, you're diving into a mechanical engineering space. So basically what the game does, it says, here is a problem to solve. You have to build a robot that can deliver a sandwich to a table at a restaurant,

or build a robot that can climb stairs or cross a gap, or that can dance on the dance floor at this dance club. And so you get this really funny, eclectic mix of different types of challenges, and then you have to build a custom robot. And it's sort of like the gamified, a game-based version of CAD almost, where you have this really Lego, this big Lego-like toolkit of parts, your motors and your pistons and your gears and your rods and wheels. And then of course, some just purely cosmetic fun stuff as well, because all robots need googly eyes and top hats. then yeah you build you build whatever you see fit as an engineer in order to solve that challenge and now you can also program your robots with with python as well if you want them to be

automated and now i'm sorry i got so excited talking about that that i forgot what your original oh what what are we actually teaching with that yeah so definitely the mechanical engineering definitely the the programming and the and the and the coding uh but then you know at the end of the day i feel like robocode in specific and then engineering at large is really mostly about design thinking and problem solving so that's really the crux of it. Most of your games have a STEM aspect to them. Is that intentional? Yes. So one of the great things about STEM as a learning game studio is that STEM, at the core of most STEM topics, are systems. And systems are really great. It's just low-hanging fruit for learning game design

because most games are built around some kind of system and then i think the other part of is you know the labor force needs more problem solvers and stem education is in in my view if you zoom out far enough it's really about creating creative problem solvers. And the world needs more problem solvers, more creative problem solvers. So I think that it's, I think, you know, you've seen a big push for STEM in K-12 in the last decade or so. I can't say exactly when it started, but that's what it feels like to me as I think about the last 10 to 15 years. And I think it's, I think, I think it's And I think it's great. I think there are a lot of trends in K-12 education where I'm like, is that really a great thing? But the push for STEM, I think is actually really great because there are just huge labor shortages in a lot of high-tech fields. And filling those

jobs is not only super important, I think, for our country's future and our economy, but just for the well-being of the world in general. I know someone is going to ask me why we asked about STEM, which is science, technology, engineering, and math, and didn't ask about STEAM, which adds the art in there. Yep. Why not both?

Yeah, I definitely don't see them as mutually exclusive. I think the trick is, you know, when there's an initial idea, and it's like, hey, we should do this because we should do X because X will make something better. Then immediately what usually happens is somebody says, well, that's not as inclusive as it should be. Let's also include this other thing. And not including that other thing doesn't mean that that other thing doesn't have value, because in this case, the arts absolutely have value. It's just that at a certain point, you dilute an idea enough that the original thrust of the idea becomes somewhat toothless i guess and so because it's it's you know accomplishing anything despite what i said at the outset about uh you know solve one thing or a dozen things uh accomplishing anything important really does require some modicum of focus,

right? So as soon as you add art, well, then it's a slippery slope, right? It's like, well, what about these other things? What about those other things? And it's like, what about civics? Well, is civics important? Absolutely. But at a certain point, you have to be able to say, well, the focus of this particular initiative is on these couple of things. And by virtue of being focused, we can actually get something done. So I'm all in favor of the arts and many other things that don't fall under the STEM umbrella. It's just, I think that the need for STEM, for science, technology, engineering, and math in particular, is a very particular type and shape of problem that does need to urgently be solved. I have to admit, I wondered if you were going to go in the direction of, well, the games are a form of art. Do you think they are? Oh yeah, I would definitely argue that most people on our staff would consider themselves

artists. So I would obviously never sit here and say art's not important because art is what, you know, pays my mortgage. But, yeah, the process of creating video games is incredibly artistic and art intensive. And the product, I would say is uh absolutely an artistic output there's you know famously i think it was like eber who at one point said video games are art and of course that was incredibly controversial and he just looked like a an old out of touch man who was uh you know sort of clinging to the medium that he was most familiar with and comfortable with. And I understand, I mean, believe it or not, I sort of understand where he was coming from,

because a lot of contemporary games, you look at them and you say, well, this isn't art. What is the profound message of this piece of artwork? Or what is this doing that's unique or avant-garde? Or how is this creating an emotional resonance in me as the viewer or the consumer of the art? And for some number of video games that are available on the consumer market, it's hard to answer those questions. But we're also seeing that change very rapidly and now particularly with indie games there's just so many games out there that uh that i think absolutely tickle those those art reception neurons in your brain when you consume them as as as media and i think we're just going to see that increase. In the learning games field in particular,

you know, obviously our number one objective is to educate as opposed to give somebody the experience of art. But it's very important to us that our games are aesthetically beautiful and pleasing to interact with and look at, and that they elicit interesting emotions in the player. And if those aren't sort of the hallmarks of an artistic experience, then I don't know what is. When I worked at LeapFrog making educational physical toys, we had a problem where we had to put 26 letters on everything but the baby toys. And that makes any plush toy hard and uncuddly. Are there things you find you have to do for your games that you really don't want to?

Oh, gosh. Assessment. I almost hate saying this because games are this amazing opportunity for assessment. Particularly in a more complex or sophisticated game, the user is inputting so much data into the computer. and you could absolutely draw all sorts of interesting inferences from that data whether you go full bore clickstream data analysis or just look at some basic metrics like how far did they get in the game so what's wrong with assessment there's nothing wrong with it it's just that well for one it's expensive so every dollar that we spend on assessment is a dollar that we take away from building cool new game mechanics to do the teaching.

And I guess another thing is, as I mentioned at the top of the episode, games are, learning games or otherwise, are about play. And it's hard to play when you're being assessed. It's hard to play when you feel like there are stakes, right? Let's define assess, because, I mean, to some extent, it's the score,

and part of gamification is having a score. 100%. So you're right, and I think you're touching on a really important clarification, and that is the question of what is done with that score? Does that score, is that for you to reflect on and say, I bet I can do better next time? Or is it for somebody else to reflect on and say, you should get into Harvard or not? And I think that, I mean, that's obviously a somewhat hyperbolic spectrum, but I think it's, I'm totally fine with assessments that are player-facing and that are designed to help the player get better at the game. So formative assessments that are player-facing. I'm less excited about summative facilitator or educator or adult-facing assessments that are designed to tweak some manner of intervention in a learning environment.

A couple of questions from listeners. Nathan Jones, who could have just written the whole outline for me, so he may have to have his own podcast soon, asked a question that's very related to what you're talking about. Is it possible to translate game results into course grades? And if so, under what constraints? Yeah. Yeah. So it definitely is possible. And I would say it's just as valid of a thing to do as based on any homework assignment or test that you might administer in class or project in a project-based learning curriculum. Again, it's just sort of, I think it's important to be transparent with players at the outset of the experience when you're introducing the game and say, I want you to go into this in the mindset that the product of the great things about games is that players can be risk-averse. They can experiment. They can try different things. They can intentionally do bad to see what happens. They can poke at the system because that's part of the fun. And then once you sort of establish the context that there's a grade associated with it, you sort of remove that permission to play. That makes sense. I mean, of course, I often do exactly what the game designer doesn't want me to because I want to see what happens. And we have games that are entirely about behaving poorly.

Totally, totally. And then the other thing too is we better, if we're going to use it for a grade, we really better be sure that we're interpreting the data that comes out of the game in the correct way. So if we say, for example, we see two players side by side and one of them finished a level in five minutes and the other one finished the level in 30 minutes, which one gets the better grade? Is the five-minute player the better grade because they did it faster? Or is the 30-minute player the A because they thought about the problem space more, they experimented more, they iterated more, they tried more novel solutions, they poked at the boundaries, etc.? Hard to say. That's definitely very subjective. Do you have a process of turning a learning objective or lesson into a game element? objective represents something that has utility in the real world so that if the player masters that objective then that mastery translates to some sort of value outside of the game and outside

of whatever learning environment they're in whether that's a formal learning environment or otherwise so that process is it is sort of i don't want to say utilitarian based, but we're definitely keenly interested in how does this game design result in somebody who's capable of something that they weren't before they engaged with the game. And ideally something that actually matters in the real world, or, you know, doesn't necessarily have to be something that's going to, you know to translate to a test score, but it could be something as soft as a player was inspired about a topic that they didn't previously know anything about. So maybe they didn't care about history, and then they played this game, and all of a sudden they really care about history. In a a perfect world or maybe they

could see themselves as a historian where previously they couldn't see that in a perfect world somebody plays a game and their identity changes their sense of self-efficacy changes and perhaps they even of their own volition go on like a wind-up toy, like the game is winding them up like a wind-up toy to pursue further affinity in that space. So I know this happened with me personally as a kid playing the game Civilization. I play the game Civilization, which is a game where you control, you make strategic decisions about an empire from the dawn of time to the near future. And you're playing with real civilizations, but of course you're under the real rules of history,

but you have complete agency to make your own decisions. So history plays out differently, but by the same set of rules. So over the course of doing that, you get really interested in, well, the different civilizations that are represented in the game, different empires. You get really interested in, well, the different civilizations that are represented in the game, different empires. You get really interested in the different technologies that you research in the game that allowed those civilizations to rise and fall. You get interested in the resources that they depended on and how it worked in the real world. And you sort of start to form this worldview or this paradigm that's based on the rules of civilization around conflict,

resources, diplomacy, things of that nature. And it starts to help you think like a historian, which I think is really fascinating. And then once you're starting to think that way, you're starting to want more answers about how things really happened. And then I know I'm not the only Civilization player to then go, for example, research more about the fall of the Roman Empire after my own empire collapsed from getting too big inside the game. That kind of leads me to a question that's been on my mind. Is there a level beyond which game- style learning is no longer applicable? Like graduate level mathematics.

That's not something you've seen a lot of game games done with. There's Kerbal. That's graduate level physics. Yes. Well, that's fair. That's fair. I learned a lot.

I internalized or will mechanics much better after playing Kerbal than after the class. But my question still stands. There hasn't been a lot of directed gaming around that kind of stuff, has there? That's a great question. And you're right. There is a certain point of sophistication or complexity where I don't know that a game is the right tool or vehicle. I think

it's funny because it's apropos to the earlier conversation we were having about drill and practice, where games are maybe a little bit overkill for drill and practice content. And I don't know if underkill is the right word, but they're probably, yeah, not the most efficient vehicle for teaching really, really advanced content. I mean, let's use the Kerbal analogy. Kerbal is such an awful—like, if you know nothing about rocket science, and you dive into Kerbal space program where you can build pretty much any kind of rocket ship you can imagine and then learn through trial and error what works and what doesn't,

you develop very quickly these really deep conceptual understandings of what's important in the field of rocket science and what types of decisions rocket scientists are making, what types of trade-offs they're considering. You're well-equipped to think about that problem space. Can you actually go become a rocket scientist? No, you definitely still need, you know, a lot of, a lot of, uh, higher education. But, um, I would say that you are, you are a probably a lot more interested in it than you were if you weren't interested in it before. And B, uh, even if you were interested in

it before, you're definitely now better equipped to go and pursue that higher education and learn how to become an actual rocket scientist as you are going through that degree program there are probably a lot of ideas and concepts as you as things get more complex that will land better because of that foundational experience that you had with kerbal i think it i mean in that particular example it builds some intuition that's really difficult to obtain just from doing mathematics or working problem sets. Because, you know, there's a lot with orbital mechanics, particularly where people have preconceived notions about how rockets, how space works and rockets and stuff. How gravity works. You know, I want to come back to Earth, I just point at Earth and fire.

Well, no, that's not actually how it works. That won't do anything for you. Right. Stuff like that, right? So I think that's a place where, yes, maybe you're not learning the sophisticated stuff, but you are gaining intuition, which makes the sophisticated stuff make more sense later. And if there are more opportunities for that kind of thing, I think maybe targeted kind of learning is the way to go with more advanced things. I don't know. I totally agree. And I also think that particularly when people are being introduced to a concept,

typically the way we teach it is we sort of dive right into the math itself. But people really, like the human brain really struggles with abstraction. Like at every point when you're learning something, your brain is saying, when will I use this? Why does this matter? Why do I need to know this? What's the broader context? It's like if somebody's teaching you to play a board, we probably all have this experience

where like we sit down to play a board game and somebody dives right into the nitty gritty rules. And we're like, whoa, wait, like what am I trying to, what does it mean to win in this game? Like what is my high-level objective? What actually matters? And then you're prepared to sort of dive into the details. I think you get a very similar phenomenon with game-based learning.

That actually leads back to one of Nathan's questions, which are, what are some low-cost, low-stakes ways instructors can make learning more fun for their students? And are they adaptable to individuals who need a little bit more motivation to finish a class or book they're working through? Yeah, I love that question. So my favorite recommendation for low-cost ways to integrate game-based learning in the classroom is to have the students design games. So if I'm a biology teacher, then I might have my class design games about cells. And honestly, I might keep it somewhat open-ended because I like to say our designers at Filament, nobody walks in being an expert in everything they're ever going to have to design a learning game about. They have to learn it on the job, sometimes with the help of a subject matter expert, but often just based on their own research.

And in the process of designing, thinking about how to design a play space around a subject area, you learn so much about that subject area. It's really, really hard not to learn a lot about that subject area if you're going to design play around it. So I love recommending to educators that they have students design games about the things that they want to teach. Well, as we've talked about on the show before, one of the best ways to learn, to truly learn something is to teach it. Yes, 100%. And a question from Kathleen. Can a game be good without being fun? Oh, yeah. Yeah, for sure.

I love that. Yeah, I mean, there are, even in, especially, I should say, in the entertainment game space, people play games that look like torture all the time. And it's, you know, just torturously hard games. And you're like, why are you doing this? intense satisfaction that they get from beating something that's really hard, accomplishing something that's really hard, which is interesting because people do that in the real world. But oftentimes, it's a very different skill set in order to

you know, quote unquote, beat life than it is to do well in a game that's punishingly hard. There was, so I'm reminded of a streamer who was streaming RoboCo. Isn't it a streamer called Durf, actually? He's great. I like his content. Check it out. He was streaming RoboCo and there was an early build of a level

that we were still working on it and it was ridiculously hard. It just was not fair yet and he this this poor man built a robot so basically the challenge was he had to build a robot that could fill up a cup of coffee at a coffee station then pour cream in it and then deliver it to a man on the upstairs floor of a cafe. But between there and the man was a ramp, and then at the top of the ramp was an art gallery. And you couldn't cause collateral damage by knocking over any of the artwork,

which of course was haphazardly strewn about. So it's just this really, really challenging sequence of things that you had to do in order to deliver this cup of coffee. Oh, and you couldn't spill the coffee either. So in a perfect world, we want players to, when they fail, we want them to go back and tweak their robot designs. But oftentimes what happens is you fail and then you're like, oh, let me just try again. I could probably pilot that a little bit better. And this poor, this poor, this poor derf tried it, I don't know, dozens of times. And each run, each attempt takes, you know, I don't know, more than five minutes. Like it's not a quick thing, but he was so determined to, to do it. I think specifically because it was hard. And I find that so fascinating for video games as a medium because it's very unique to the medium of gaming. Given infinite freedom, time, money, permission, whatever,

what topic would you want to make a game about or see someone make a game about? Oh man, see, that's tough because I would have said robotics, but now we're doing it. Okay, if it wasn't robotics. I mean, I don't know that this is specifically something that I would make a game about specifically because it's expensive, but I love entomology. And I think that one of the cool things about games is we can let you go places and do things that you can't do in the real world, much less the classroom. And I just love the idea of learning about entomology by being immersed in the world of bugs at their size. And maybe I'm saying this because I just recently read Michael Crichton's Micro, which is not what the game would look like. For those unfamiliar with the book, it's basically Jurassic Park with bugs. So everybody pretty much gets

eaten by a bug at some point or another. So this would be a little bit different since the learning game. But I do think uh making games about the natural world but from a perspective that you can't inhabit as a physically embodied human that is more than you know an inch tall would be very cool that would be very cool and being able to see an ant up close i mean they would be horrifying because they're well armored and they have so many legs. So many legs. But, you know, I've never really gotten to look at an ant that close, let alone as close as if they were an elephant and I was a human. Totally.

Yeah. And actually, based on what you said, I would even potentially revise the answer and say, maybe I'd have you go even smaller and make a soil science game. Because like our gut biome, there's so much we're learning about soil and how it works and all the thousands or millions of different organisms that are in, you know, a thimble of soil that are critical to the difference between healthy soil and dirt. And I bet there's some interesting systems in there that you could play with. Now, this is becoming less of an embodied third-person experience and more of probably some kind of strategy game. But, oh, I'm also a big fan of compost. I don't know if I mentioned that before.

That's probably coloring my answer here. But I think soil and soil science are super cool. I think it'd be great to make a game about, honestly, anything where there's, I guess the other thing is game, you know, it's great to make games about anything that's really practice-based. So, you know, agriculture, I think, is a hugely underserved market for game-based learning because there are a lot of people who are retiring from the field of agriculture and they have all of this institutional knowledge that they're taking with them and it's not being passed down to the next generation as much as it used to because a lot of youth who

grew up on farms are deciding not to continue the practice of farming. But um i i and i but i think the the mechanics of farming which are hyper practice based are just so well suited to uh to a video game i think that'd be i don't know why i think that would be that would be super cool to to teach farming through gaming aren't there plenty of farm simulators but those are all pretty silly yeah so there are farm simulators, but those are all pretty silly. Yeah, so there are farm simulators, but it's... Farmville. Yeah, well, there's that, which I guess I wouldn't even classify as a simulator. There's sort of like, you know, like

Stardew Valley and stuff like that, where like... Hey, now. Are you farming? Yeah, you're farming. You're going to learn some things about farming from playing Stardew Valley. Maybe there's going to be some, maybe more misconceptions. No, no, no, no. I learned on stardew valley that if you make friends with the little the little jelly people they'll build a hut in the middle of your farm and then for for for vast region you'll get better crops everyone knows this those are the mycelium

that's how it works in the real world too yeah that's exactly it no but but there you're right though there are farming simulators and those um do have. But I think what I'm picturing is a little bit more when you when you zoom out, the practice of farming is really the practice of running a business. And you're making risk tolerance decisions and you're thinking about weather and you're thinking about how much to invest and when, things of that nature. You're thinking about yields, what types of crops to grow. And I haven't seen a game that tackles farming at the strategy level. I've only seen it tackled at the, you know, we'll drive the tractor back and forth down the field level, which is probably not the most interesting or cognitively rich aspect of the practice. As you as you're saying all that i'm remembering one of the very first video games i ever played lemonade yes i was thinking i was

just about to ask go ahead ask yeah yeah lemonade stand i love it yeah but that dealt with weather and whether you had to change the budget and you had the the yeah yeah risk tolerance yes there you go i guess yeah so we're done check that box um computers have obviously improved some a little bit since say 1979 maybe a little um how much has the improvement of the way learning games or games work how much of that is dependent on the technology changing and how much of it is uh learning the the skill of game making and and having more lessons about how games work uh could you could you go back on a you know an apple 2 or commodore 64 and do some of the kinds of things you're doing now i I mean, some of the best learning games I ever played were games that were, yeah, made in the 80s.

Could we do what we do now? No. But I would say that I don't expect there to be a lot of technological advances that unlock a lot of things that we wish we could do but can't yet in the future. So when Flash became available as a learning game making tool, that unlocked a lot of new... It wasn't so much about going deeper or richer on the game mechanics, but that was a huge advent in terms of accessibility.

And then when flash died and most learning game developers switched over to engine, you know, commercial game engines like unity or unreal, um, though by that point, the, the game engine graphics systems,

all that kind of stuff, they were all... At that point, there was really nothing that we couldn't do where the bottleneck wasn't just budget as opposed to technology related. Now, we definitely have to do architectural spikes on complex mechanics all the time. For Robocop in particular, there were a bunch of... With the building system, whichocom in particular there were a bunch of with the building system which is really complex there are a bunch of things that we didn't know how to do that we had to arc spike on which is where you basically do a really concentrated sprint of programming to try to see what's possible and tackle the hairiest problems. So we still have to do those, but there are usually

answers given enough time and enough money. They're usually answers that are not bottlenecked by some sort of limitation of the technology. Now, even as I say that, I'm sure interviewing Dan 10 years from now would contradict present Dan and say that there are all sorts of cool things that changed, that unlocked new things in the learning game development space. But I don't think it's going to be so much, you know, for the entertainment game space, a lot of it is graphics, right? The graphics just keep getting better and better and better. That matters a lot less for the learning game space. I think what matters more than the game development engine or the processing power of the computers or anything like that is actually just the different new platforms that are coming online all the time.

So, you know, VR, for example, game changers, so many different types of experiences that we can make for learning games in VR that we couldn't do with mouse and keyboard interface, things of that nature. Are there topics or concepts that should not be made into games? This is still from Kathleen. And do you know this from experience or just theory? So I don't know if I would go as far as to say that there are topics that shouldn't be made into games at all, but I would definitely say there are topics that should not be made into games on particular platforms. So for example, if you come to me, Kathleen, and you say, I want to teach accounting and I want to make a VR game, I would say, you know, VR is probably not the right platform for teaching people about accounting.

I want to interject here. If you do go to a VR store and buy a game called accounting, that's not going to teach you accounting. Very different experience. Yes, indeed. So it's hard for me to imagine a topic where I would say, no way, no how on any platform would I want to take this topic on. But given the topic, I would definitely say that there are certain platforms that would be of much better service than others. So, for example, multiplayer is a huge consideration. So there are certain learning objectives where building a game on a multiplayer platform, I think, is absolutely essential because a lot of learning comes from the interactions that take place between players. We don't see a lot of those types of learning games.

That's a frontier that I hope to be pushing in the future. Most of the reason it hasn't been pushed in the past is just because multiplayer is very expensive. But gosh, I feel like this is a cop-out. I feel like I should be able to say there's a game that we wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. Well, you know, there are... Okay, if you go into history,

there are definitely some topics that are scary to take on as a game developer. Sensitive topics. So for example, one of our very first projects was a game that dealt in Native American culture and heritage. That's a scary game for us to take on as a studio in Wisconsin, because we have to acknowledge that we're so far removed from that culture and those people that if we're going to take on a subject area like that, we need probably an intense amount of immersion

and a lot of interaction with the people who represent that culture. I know at one point there was a game development studio that made a game that tried to take on slavery as a game topic. There are actually several. I can think of two different games that took on that topic, one that did it very tastefully, one that made some very questionable choices.

So, and I mentioned previously the Alamo example, that was not hypothetical. Somebody did approach us and ask us to make a game about the Alamo. And we said, well, we really want to make sure that we were representing all perspectives and not just making this a rah-rah America game. So yeah, I think sort of like societally or culturally or racially sensitive topics, should they be developed into games? It's hard to say yes or no definitively because I do think, you know, obviously I'm sitting here as somebody who has the bias that games are an incredibly powerful medium for not only teaching, but also imparting different perspectives and offering new paradigms. And so I hate to roll those things out.

I just think they have to be approached with very delicate care. Dan, I believe that's all the time we have with you. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? So when it comes to learning game development, I think most listeners probably picked up on the idea that our ideal vision for game-based learning really pushes to this, the right end of this spectrum that I will describe as a spectrum of depth and complexity, where on the left side, we have some of these more drill and practice type

experiences that we talked about in the beginning. with foundational skills on the right side, you have your 21st century skills, your soft skills, your problem solving, critical thinking, things of that nature. I think games are so uniquely suited as a medium toward that end of the spectrum. They can do the entire spectrum, but they're one of the only mediums

that can do the right end really well. And I think that's currently very fertile and unexplored territory in game-based learning. And that's part of what we're trying to explore with RoboCode and games like it, where we have these really rich, open-ended problem spaces where the player is bringing a lot of creativity and problem-sol solving to the table. And then the game sort of affords them a ton of flexibility in how they go about solving those problems. Just like in the real world, right? There are very, most problems that people solve in the professional world and the real world are very open-ended. It's not like a Scantron sheet with A, B, C, or D, right? There's a lot, a lot of different possibilities and there are trade-offs. Not only is there no right answer, but there are different right answers that have

different strengths and weaknesses. And I think that is one of the unique powers of game-based learning that I would love to see leveraged more, both in and out of schools. I think those types of games are a little bit scary to use in schools because they don't necessarily fit neatly into a typical curriculum. But I hope that they start getting used more and more and developed more and more because there's not many games like that out there. And the reason I think that's so important is that, well ironically you know make as coming from somebody who's making a game about robotics is you know just this increasing trend of machine learning and automation taking jobs away from people and so i just think it's incredibly important that people particularly in k12 but across their entire, are learning and playing with uniquely human skills.

And that's that right side of that spectrum. That's those soft skills and those 21st century skills. I think it's so important that people get a lot of time to play with those skills. And I think games are just uniquely suited to offer that. And so I really, really hope that people start embracing more of those types of games. And I think games are just uniquely suited to offer that. And so I really, really hope that people start embracing more of those types of games and start developing those types of games. Our guest has been Dan White, CEO of Filament Games. Links are in the show notes.

Thanks, Dan. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. from Dr. Seuss. Oh, the places you'll go. There is fun to be done. There are points to be scored. There are games to be won. And the magical things you can do with that ball will make you the winningest winner of all.