For my lesson today, after we had a small discussion about the critical vocabulary that Costikyan talked about in his article that we were assigned to read the previous week, and after we have all established a good meaning for each piece of vocab, we looked at a key stage one educational game from the BBC Bitesize website.

But before I explain the game, I’ll list the vocabulary and the definitions that me and my group have prepared from the session before.

Interaction;
Interaction is the choice you make in a game that can alter its outcome.

Goals;
Goals create a purposeful/progressive interaction.

Struggle;
Struggle brings the feeling of achievement.

Structure;
Structure dictates our behaviour in a game.

Endogenous Meaning;
In context of the game things are meaningful, however outside of the game they’re meaningless.

Putting a key stage one game against these definitions; I will talk about it.

This game was 2D and 3D shapes, it’s a math game for KS1 students that are going into their math exams sometime in the future and are looking to get some revision done in a really fast and fun way.

Interaction;

The interaction with this game was very limited, you were limited to choosing to play the game, as a start, and then you were given the option to choose a difficulty, out of normal, hard and very hard. When you’re actually in the game you are given a choice out of 3 shapes, a scientist requests one shape of the three and gives a vague clue as to what shape you’re supposed to give him, for example; “A shape with four sides”, if you select the correct shape then your character will do a happy looking animation, however if you get the wrong shape then the scientist will be electrocuted and the shapes will reset.

The interaction is not only brought back by it’s limitedness, however it’s also brought down by the lack of feedback that it produces for the player, a KS1 child will be playing this game and getting questions wrong and not know why he was getting them wrong.

There are only two outcomes of your actions, you can choose a shape and get it right, or you can get it wrong. It lacks variety in outcomes, however because it’s a KS1 game, anything remarkable might not necessarily be needed.

Goals;

The goal of the game is to go through five questions while choosing the right answers along the way and in the end you will get to see an ending animation where the scientist finally builds his robot and your character and the scientist rejoice in your success.

I suppose the other goal of this game is to learn about shapes, but since you’re not really told why you’re right or wrong, because of a lack of feedback, it’s pretty hard to reach even that goal of the game.

Struggle;

The struggle in this game lies in it’s difficulty, it’s not a hard game however some KS1 students may find it hard to answer the questions correctly.

There are thee difficulties, Normal, Hard and Very hard, and in each difficulty the questions are about different types of subjects related to 2D and 3D shapes, hard asks some things about 3D shapes and very hard asks about symmetry in shapes.

Though the difficulty varies between each mode, the chance of you failing at the game are still none; you still get to choose from only three shapes and no matter how many times you fail to get the questions right then, you will still stay in the game and advance through the game. So technically, the difficulty doesn’t really increase; you don’t even get teleported back to the first question if you lose from the 5th.

Structure;

The structure of the game is very simple and limited, there is a very limited amount of things you could do in the actual game, you can either click a shape and then get it right or wrong, which is pretty boring, and believe it or not the amusing animations will get boring eventually.

However, there are a couple of buttons at the top of the screen that you can press to change the volume, get tips or leave the game.

Endogenous Meaning;

There is no endogenous meaning in the game, unless you include the shapes that you have to select to give to the scientist and then there is the robot that you build at the end which is in fact your primary goal, however other than that there is nothing in this game that means anything to reality or anything extremely significant to the game.

I suppose you get knowledge out of the game, however that’s hardly enough.

Overall evaluation;

This game lacks a decent goal as well as a decent and versatile structure which would allow the player to do as many things as they want to do. There is barely any struggle for the player to achieve his goal, the only thing holding him or her back is his own intellect and as much as I love a whole two different outcomes of the players’ interactivity, I’m just not pleased with it over all.

However, since it’s a KS1 learning game for children aged 4-7 maybe, then it’s acceptable. But it doesn’t excuse the fact that the game itself is a massive bore, adults should enjoy children’s learning games too!