Exemplar Study: Gender Identity Education with Game as Motivation Mechanism
Overview
I started my capstone in August 2019 with a focus on gender identity. Being LGBTQ+ can be hard from time to time facing mismatches of belief, behaviors, and practices with the gender and sexuality majority of the society. Meanwhile, people of binary genders may also face self-doubts in their own identity gender-wise and sometimes experience misunderstanding of how to approach people of other genders. My project thus is to design a way for people to educate themselves and others and have a better understanding of the concept of gender identity.
Design Space
The current design proposal for my project stems from an idea of toolkits consisting of three parts: “Who Are We” — Introducing basic ideas of gender and different models and categories of gender identities to foster learning about gender identity, “Inside Out” — Games and tools for people to externalize their own gender identity and expressions through expression or visualization, and “Future Me” — Tools for people to imagine, visualize, or craft how they would like to be in the future with a core of self-assertion.
While doing this project, previously I used my research as my design — i.e. I saw the toolkit implemented in my design research coversation as an early version of prototype. However, even though the design looks effective in the research activity — people generally have a richer understanding of the concept of gender identity — it’s tricky to motivate people to learn and explore when there’s only them left with the design alone without me being the facilitator. So this exemplar study’s main goal is to see how game can be a facilitator in the design for self or group learning.
Exemplar Study
The game selected here as inspiration is Sky: Children of the Light.
Sky: Children of the Light is a game developed by thatgamecompany. It creates a world where people, as the children of the light, have the power to fly.
1. Fantasy and Curiosity Created by Appealing Visual Design and Thoughtful Rules and Goal:
In the game, users control their character to collect lost spirits and stars in order to be able to fly longer and farther. There are seven gates in the game for people to go, with each gate being a world of adventure connected to one another. Even though there’s an endpoint of the game, which is the last gate, that’s not the ultimate goal, the character will be reborn after they reached the final scene. The achievements and items they gained in the game will still stay in their inventory even after the reborn. If there’s an ultimate goal, is to collect more items (e.g. cosmetics) and unlock more interaction (e.g. expressions).
Sky has a really consistent and appealing visual design as shown below in the pictures. It constructs a world of imagination. The rendering of the scene resembles reality but the feel of it created by the design brings people to an immersive and pleasing experience. If this can be used for educational purposes, users can feel unconsciously engaged in the experience and absorb the knowledge and world view embedded in the game.
Visuals, rules, and goals are essential features for the interactivity of a game [Thornton et al., 90]. For game-based learning, engaging visuals can greatly affect the fantasy of the game design which can “ lead to greater interest on the part of the student as well as increased efficiency of learning.” [Pevic, et al.]
Inspirations for my project:
Sky shows how engaging a game could be by creating appealing visuals and implementing rules and goals to a degree which provides enough fantasy and curiosity for the gameplay.
2. Education through embedded value: There are tons of embedded values in the gameplay — respect for elders, the importance of culture inheritance, social connection, and support, etc. For example, every expression users would unlock is only through talking with an ancestor spirit/elder as shown below. Respecting culture roots and learning from the elders are deeply implemented throughout the game
If these values mentioned above need to be perceived through interaction with the game or other players, there are also other aspects of the game that contain knowledge that is more tangible, for example, the concept of constellations. In the gameplay, constellations serve as a way of mapping the journey, the development of your friendship, and a roadmap of gained skills. Players then would unconsciously construct the knowledge and perception of constellations.
Inspirations for my project:
For learning gender identity, there are concepts that are more tangible and descriptive — different categories of gender identity and their meanings, and values are hard to convey through traditional teaching-learning activities — how shoule people respect other people’s identity, how does . Game design then can introduce the content by creating related game content — e.g. tokens, cards, or even tribes of interactive NPCs representing the belief and practice of an identity, and desired value through rules of interaction and goal with symbolic meaning s— e.g. collecting all the tokens of different identity to unlock a final triumph to convey the idea of inclusivity.
3. Challenge and development of social interaction:
As players go through the journey, other players will also show up if you are in the same gate. The friend system is unique in Sky since it doesn’t allow people to message at the first sight. Players can only use the expressions they collected on the journey to communicate. To unlock more interactive communication, players would cost “candles” which can be seen as the currency in the game.
Inspirations for my project:
This is inspirational for how to educate people to interact with people of different gender identities. In a gameplay, people of different gender identities may have different powers or collectibles with symbolic meanings in real life. If we want to facilitate a certain behaviors among people, rules of interaction of that symbolic meaning can be designed to set up constraints and conditions for two players to interact. For example, to befriend with others, one must have collect tokens of all gender identity. If one token is missing or tossed, people cannot befriend with others. This is to show that acceptance and acknowledgement is the corner stone of maintaining relationship with others.
4. Open-ended adventurous gameplay and freedom of exploration facilitating constructive learning: As a game on mobile platforms (currently only available on Android and iOS), it has a giant worldview. There’s a certain structure for the gameplay, i.e. the order of the gates. However, players may freely explore different world behind the gate without strictly follow the order. Spirits and other game components might show up in random locations which may unlock unexpected branches to exlore.
According to [Pivec, et al.] “adventure games use intrinsic motivation”. Sky as an adventure game provides people with complex microworlds with certain problems in it. Enjoyment is strongly related to the learning activity. Due to the complexity of the world built in the game, the learning process is non-linear. The complexity of the world provides rich opportunity to learn in a construtivist way.
Reference
Pivec, M., Dziabenko, O., & Schinnerl, I. (2003, July). Aspects of game-based learning. In 3rd International Conference on Knowledge Management, Graz, Austria (pp. 216–225).
