ScribbleNauts & “Learn as you play”

So, I picked up ScribbleNauts based on the hype surrounding it. I don’t often do this, but sometimes I just give in to the prevailing winds.

I hadn’t heard much about it – or seen any game play footage. I had imagined it to be some sort of DS version of Crayon Physics. But then I heard about it’s 20k+ list of supported words and I thought that maybe it was an anagram game like Scrabble.

Turns out that I was wrong on both counts.

ScribbleNauts is basically Impossible Machine or Armadillo Run except that instead of having a UI that shows you all the possible tools you can use, you need to guess which tools are available by typing in words and hoping that they are supported.

It’s kind of like Family Feud in some ways. You make a guess that “fire hose” is a piece of equipment a fireman might hold, and if a panel of American households agrees with you, a fire hose appears in the game world.

This made me think back further to some of the social psychology research that I did way back when. I was specifically examining naively held prototypes for things like “burglary”. You’d get a group of people to fill out a survey about all the things they associated with the word “burglary” (e.g., occurs at night, at someone’s house, involves a male thief, dark clothes) and what you’d find is that there were common exemplars listed by most people ("it happens at night”) followed by a medium-long tail of exemplars only listed by a few people (“my buddy Fred got busted for burglary last week”).

What we found was that when people read a fact pattern surrounding a criminal trial, they were more likely to think a defendant was guilty when the facts matched their prototype of the crime then when the facts were less prototypical (but still met the legal definition of the crime).

Apologies for the long digression… I mostly thought of this when trying to figure out the most logical way to come up with a method of building a dictionary that could be balanced for difficulty as part of a word guessing game.

Anyhow, back to ScribbleNauts.

As an initial experience, I was a little underwhelmed. I’m just now starting to get into the core game play, which I do find enjoyable. But the road to getting there wasn’t as smooth and polished as it could have been:

• Too much frontloading of concepts. Concepts should be spaced out so that they can be learned, practiced, and mastered as part of the normal game play progression. Forcing me to learn about both core game mechanics (moving, selecting, scribbling, inspecting) and metagame concepts (puzzle vs. action modes, the “ollar” based economy) in the first 5 or so minutes of the game risks me forgetting or mislearning core concepts.
• Somewhat related is the “too many concepts at once” problem. One particular tutorial module had me learn about “trashcan”, “budget”, and “ollars” in rapid succession. Moreover, this section was NOT interactive so I was not getting reinforcement through game play.
• Billboard hints were too verbose and constantly interrupted the flow of the game. Particularly egregious was the example with the hammer and the wooden wall. I had just learned about picking up objects and if the wall had been made to look a little more fragile (a little dented, some loose boards, maybe some unsturdy wiggling) then the game could have just let me learn by exploring. If a player fails to proceed after a certain time then non-modal, specific, context sensitive hints could be provided. Instead, the visceral feel of smashing something was replaced with boring reading – reading that seemed insulting to me because it was obvious that the hammer was their to smash the door.
• I failed to fly the plane correctly several times which caused me to fail ungracefully and have to restart the tutorial module. It’s unclear why the first time a new movement mechanic was introduced that it had such a difficult to complete task associated with it. Flight should have been fun, but it ended up being frustrating.

I think it’s instructive to compare this initial experience and philosophy about what tutorials should be with another recent DS game I played: Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again. I found the first hour of game play delightful mainly because they allowed me to learn by playing – and included tutorials only as optional help hint sequences if the player felt a need to look at them.

Of course, to achieve that apparently effortless “learn as you play” experience requires a lot of attention and polish to the experience. MMA could have taken the same approach, but designed early puzzles that were confusing for first time users and left them lost and frustrated.

In my experience, what it comes down to, is really understanding deeply how the first time player sees, experiences, and interacts with your world WITHOUT much prompting. Hint text can always be added as a stop-gap, but the more elegant solution is to polish self-contained learning modules in which play concepts and mechanics are introduced via game play scenarios and not tutorial text.

• Don’t tell me to that I need to pick up an item. Leave me in a room with an item and let me figure out how to pick it up on my own.
• Don’t tell me to throw the object at something. Give me a conspicuous target that I want to bean with a dart/ball/axe.
• Don’t congratulate me with long text billboards for doing something obvious. Have the conspicuous target (a rickety chest) explode into sparkly gold pieces when I throw a ball at it.

Then focus on how to turn situational cues into hints that propel the player through the experience.

A separate, but related, issue worth considering is how complex actions are usually just made up of simpler constituent actions. If you’re finding that first time players struggle to figure out how to throw a ball at a target when they’re just dropped into the game, break down the requirements into smaller pieces that can be taught and practiced beforehand.

• Act 1: Avatar stands on left side. Cool slide that leads off screen is on the right side. Player taps stylus on right side of screen, avatar moves over, leaps on slide, slides to next Act. Player fails to tap, the slide pulses and a stylus “touch me” icon appears near the slide.
• Act 2: Avatar is on the left side facing a raised platform on the right. Player cannot climb up to the raised platform on his own. A large box is suspended in the air. The box pulses (stylus icon). Player selects box and the ground near the raised platform glows green in a box outline. Player plunks box down – and it looks like the distance between ground, top of box, and platform are easily climbable. Player taps the platform. The avatar hops up on the box, then the platform. A new slide appears and he slides to the next level.
• Act 3: Avatar is on the left side facing a workbench with a small hammer on it. There is a rickety door blocking access to another slide on the right. Player taps the hammer and places it on his avatar (avatar glows green; avatar’s hand reaches out to grab and hold object). And so on…

The idea is that you need to break down higher order actions into its constituent parts. Then you need to figure out how to design content, levels, and UI to support the learning of these higher order actions through discovery, practice, and mastery – all reinforced by enjoyable successes.

Punishment for failure is permitted (and often required) but failure must be GRACEFUL. By this I mean that the penalty should not be unduly harsh (don’t make the player feel bad; don’t make them go through a painful reload process) and the player should receive clear and actionable feedback so that he/she can try something different next time.

Wow. I didn’t expect such a freeform and unruly digression. It’s clear I’ve been away from the blog for far too long.

I’ll post more about ScribbleNauts as I move through the game. I’m also looking forward to a bunch more indie games that I’ve come across lately:

• Woosh and Waker (recently mentioned in Mike Darga’s excellent blog)
• A bunch of games listed in the latest “Best of Indie Games” article on Gamasutra.
• Canabalt.
• And more on Kongregate. I thought I had posted about it a while back, but I guess not. It looks like they have a bunch more going on in terms of social and community features that piqued my curiosity.

Day 4: Professor Layton and the Curious Village

More DS gaming today. I played a bunch more MMA today, but in the spirit of "30 in 30" switched over to Professor Layton and the Curious Village (PLCV). It's an interesting puzzle/brain teazer game that I think I'm reasonably hooked on after about 90 minutes of game play.

I'm not familiar with the IP (movies, books, graphic novels?) but my biggest complaint about the setting and characters is that for an educational game designed to appeal to both boys and girls, why does the main character have to be a boy? Why must we oblige a request simply because it was made by a "beautiful woman?" And why does the apparent love interest need to be a girl? By adding a playable sidekick (Prof. Layton obviously should be a man), why not spend a little extra $$$ and let the player choose to be either Luke or Leah (Leia)?

I'm not going to dive into a rant about sexism in games (or literature, movies, tv, etc). But what irks me in the context of PLCV is that this sexism actually limits the approachability of the game. It's meant to teach kids critical thinking, teach them interesting facts about the world, and help them see things from a different perspective. It's rather sad that girls who want to play this game need to role play as a boy in order to participate.

This major criticism aside, the game is mostly quite enjoyable. The initial pacing is reasonable (with a few exceptions) and after 90 minutes of game play it's clear that there is a lot of content to discover and there are some interesting side/mini games to be played.

Quibbles to follow:

• There was a point about 10 minutes into the game where I was presented with an overwhelming number of billboard hints that talked about the main/pause menu screen. It suffered from the classic TMI without any context. I promptly skipped through the billboards and figured I'd just learn about the features that were covered at a later point in time.
• Some puzzles seemed arbitrary in the way they evaluated answers. One specific example was where I needed to move matchsticks representing dog legs around to solve a puzzle. There were four legs on one side and the goal was to move two of the legs to the other side (side view of dog vs. top down view of dog). Well, I moved two legs from one side to the other and failed. I spent "hint coins" only to be told that I had picked the wrong two legs. Lame. The final position of the matchsticks was almost identical in the end, but I was penalized for guessing wrong when there was no way to tell which pair was the correct pair to move.
• The second main quest puzzle was a doozy. I needed a pencil and paper to work it out. I wish the game had prepared me for that eventuality -- and specifically told me that some puzzles would be easier to figure out that way.
• It was weird not to have an avatar of my character in the world. Adventure games that let you wander around by clicking on the screen have an avatar of my character. Pixel hunter games tend not to. This game straddles these two genres, and I kind of felt like I should have some presence in the game world (other than during dialog sequences).
• Stranger, is the fact that I was sometimes playing as Professor Layton and sometimes as Luke (his assistant). I'm not really sure why I would play as one vs. the other for any given puzzle.

Really, my biggest complaint is the arbitrary nature of the solution to some of the puzzles. About 20-33% of the puzzles I've solved so far seem arbitrary or require me to spend hints to help me better understand the parameters of the puzzle. I feel cheated because I need to waste guesses or spend hint coins in order to get a better explanation of a poorly worded or described puzzle.

What this game lacks, that a parent or adult educator would provide, is an arbitrator who can provide clarity when poorly worded/designed game rules confuse the player and who can award a "match point" to the player when his or her answer is correct even though the game's internal logic doesn't recognize it as such (cf. the dog leg puzzle).

Of course, a more scalable solution would be to use the power of the masses to help in these gray areas. Ideally I could post my answer to a forum of moderators who would judge whether I met the criterion or not and be awarded or rejected accordingly. But, that would be a different game.

These major complaints aside, I have had some really fun and rewarding experiences while trying to solve some of the tougher puzzles. One of the most rewarding experiences was when I "guessed" the correct answer for a puzzle, but then went back to the Puzzle Inventory later to solve it in a much more elegant way that removed any need for guess work.

One last "thinker" that occurred to me while I was playing: When should a player need to use knowledge obtained outside the game in order to solve puzzles within the game. I think back to the old Wizardry games that occasionally had text riddles to solve that required knowledge of things or words that existed outside the game world, and recall getting blocked and stumped. What's the difference between assuming the player needs to know "left from right" vs. "east from west"? The former seems quite natural. The latter assumes that the player knows which way north is and can then figure out east vs. west.

To take this one step further, should players be required to know "the sun always rises in the easy" to be able to solve a puzzle? Yes, this seems like a trivial bit of knowledge... But it would certainly have blocked progress on one of the early puzzles I needed to complete.

The way I reconciled the issue for this game was: This game was designed to teach critical thinking and educate children about things they might not already know. Would it have sucked to have to spend a hint coin to learn "the sun rises on the east?" Yep. But, within the goals of the game (teaching), it doesn't seem quite as bad as getting stuck in Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna because I had no idea what a "ziggurat" was.

Day 2: Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again!

I ended up borrowing a bunch of Nintendo DS games from a friend, knowing that I would need a steady diet of new titles to meet my "30 in 30" goals.

Coincidentally, I picked a spiritual sibling to Eets! in Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again! It's a pretty shining example in a long line of Impossible Machines meets Lemmings kinds or real time puzzle strategy games.

As much as I've raved about Super Mario Galaxy and the Paper Mario RPG, I don't really get all that jazzed up about the franchise from a "well, it's the new Mario and therefore I just need to own it" perspective. But it has been neat to see the same IP explored in various different game play genres over the years.

I found MvDK:MMA (I'll just call it MMA for short) to be an enjoyable first hour or so of game play -- and I'm looking forward to playing more. It had lots going for it and I really only had a couple of minor quibbles with it.

Basically, after the 4th board (level 1-4) I was pretty hooked and ready to dive in deep. I took a break as I was just about to get to the level 2 boss battle.

Interestingly, the game does NOT have a hint billboard system located within the game. If you want hints, you need to go to a separate "Help" location via the level-load menu. The help system is non-interactive and basically pings a "new" icon every time you are about to be introduced to a new game play concept. You can choose whether to go there and watch a mini movie or not.

I chose to dive right in as I figured that a Mario game would teach me through game play, anyhow (basically Super Mario Galaxy was one big tutorial that never really made you think "wow, I'm actually just playing a tutorial" because it was so well crafted).

I met with initial success (completed the first couple of boards), but didn't really learn some of the core concepts very well:

• Although I could move mini-Mario by nudging him, I didn't realize that I could actually direct him left vs. right.
• I could barely figure out the pink dot bridges and only through random mashings managed to get them to do what I wanted them to do.
• I could not figure out how to use springs.

But, as with Braid, the game was basically calibrated such that I could complete levels and move on without really understanding some of the deeper game play concepts. I knew that I'd want to go back and replay the level later once I figured out more of the controls and mechanics so that I could grab the extra coins and cards and achieve a higher ranking.

That said, I did quickly try out the "Help" functionality and sat through the various movies (it started with a handful and added one or two every few boards). It didn't seem as offensive as other "watch a movie" tutorials I've seen, but I'm not sure why. That said, the concepts were simple and discrete enough that I think they could have been layered on through game play -- introduce concepts through level-specific content and challenges that have hints appear if the player gets stuck.

One really nice affordance was mapping the d-pad functions to the face buttons (A = right, X = up) so that I could hold the stylus in my left hand (I'm a lefty) and scroll the map with my right hand. Kudos!

One slight complaint: The silver star (ranking in between bronze and gold) looked a lot like an empty star which kind of confused me at first and led me to believe that I hadn't achieved any star rating for some of my completed levels.

All in all, I must admit that it was kind of exciting to just be dropped into level 1-1 with no tutorial or hints and be left to just "figure out" how to play the game. I mostly got it on the first try -- but was left a little confused (some of the action occurred off screen; I didn't learn the controls correctly) and I'm wondering what the experience would have been like had I failed to finish that level and had to exit out and then find the "Help" option.

To test this out, I revisited level 1-1 using a new profile. To complete this level a player really needs only to (a) touch one Mario and (b) touch one of the pink block wall pieces. It seems unlikely that a player would fail to "touch" one of the mini-marios. I could see a situation where a player might not click the pink boxes (I failed to do this initially because I focused only on the outlined empty boxes). So, I let the time run out without touching a pink block to see what would happen.

• I actually missed it the first time (the clock went down to zero while I was looking away) and it seemed like the clock just simply reset to 300 seconds. Maybe it took a life away (I noticed I was down to x00 lives). Weird. I checked it again: Nope. The clock just reset to 300 seconds and nothing else happened.
• I paid more attention the second time through. It was hard not to. I got the "Game Over" screen with options to "Retry" or "Quit". It's hard to imagine someone failing this level after clicking around with the pen randomly for 5 minutes, but I wonder if the player shouldn't have been directed to the "Help" applet.

One aspect of the game that I haven't tried out yet is the level editor. I'd also like to try out the content distribution system that Nintendo is using. Can you just share levels with friends? Or is there a community portal where folks upload and rate levels so that players can find great user created content?

Anyhow, to sum up, I'll definitely be bringing this one along with me on my next business trip.