Fred Rogers Six Qualities For Digital Media

Your chef: Fred Rogers

Fred Rogers wore his famous sweaters as a way of saying hi to his mother while on the set.

Born in the small town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania in 1928 to James and Nancy Rogers. Fred Rogers spent much of his early life with his grandfather who fostered his interest in music.

After studying at Dartmouth, he then transferred to Rollins College to pursue his interest in music, from which he graduated at 1951. In 1952, he married Sara Joanne Byrd and had two sons, James and John.

In 1962, he then became a Presbyterian minister, receiving a Bachelor of Divinity degree.

Mister Rogers started his renowned television series: Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1968, attempting to teach his ideals and beliefs to children to foster a kinder generation, recognizing an emerging technology — television — as a “fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen”.

His television series spanned 895 episodes, each demonstrating positive characteristics in a person to children, emphasizing honesty, kindness, the importance of patience, tolerance of others, and the importance of pursuing one’s dreams.

Connected with his audience, Mister Rogers personally read and responded to every letter he received, going as far to change the way he acted on the set to accommodate for messages he received from children. After a blind child asked him to mention when he was feeding the fish because she couldn’t see them being fed, Mister Rogers would say that he was feeding the fish for each episode from then on. In another similarly fish related situation, Mister Rogers was attempting to record the sound of fish eating, but they refused to eat, while prompted to cut the recording, Mister Rogers proceeded to wait patiently, while calmly talking about the need for patience.Between 1968 and 2003, Mister Rogers was nominated for 57 awards and received 11, including the Peabody award (1993), the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Children’s series (1985), the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in a Children’s Series (1997, 1999), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2002). Outside of TV, Fred Rogers was a composer and lyricist for over 200 songs, as well as an author for various books for both children and adults such as You are Special and The Mister Rogers Parenting Book.

Mr. Rogers’ Six Ingredients

Mister Rogers was a kind soul, and attempted to impart his kind-heartedness upon his audience, creating a digital learning environment. Though primitive at the time, Mister Rogers’ programs left behind a legacy of important qualities in a digital learning medium. Recently (2017) the Fred Rogers Center uncovered some of Fred’s notes in which outlined six elements that his programming should have. These make excellent “ingredients” for our cookbook.

1. Create a sense of worth.

2. Create a sense of trust.

3. Spark curiosity.

4. Have the capacity to foster you to look and listen carefully.

5. Encourage the capacity to play.

6. Allow for moments of solitude.

I will define each, and provide examples of how they might look in interactive media.

1. Creating a Sense of Worth

Video games can help you feel a sense of worth when you finish a hard task. Games like Grim Dawn present challenging bosses, hard levels and unique rewards for completion. Defeating bosses or running through specifically marked difficult areas allow you to either progress further through the main storyline. You can see the results of your work in the characters and story. The tools you use feel powerful, and there is a bonus experience where you can level up your character. Creating a sense of worth comes tied with challenge, and the feeling of achievement.

The gameplay above, starting at 50 seconds, shows the intrinsic (winning) and extrinsic (blue ultra rare loot drops) for defeating the final boss of the game Grim Dawn.

2. Fostering a Sense of Trust

Some games are more honest than others. The best games don’t tease you or waste your time. You learn you can develop a sense of trust between players or AI, allowing for simpler games such as digitized versions of social games such as Mafia, as well as very complex nation building games such as Civilization. Having elements of trust in a game allow for more personable characters and allows for more depth in games.

3. Sparks Curiosity

Open world exploration games like Zelda bank on your curiosity to carry you through the game, by creating a comprehensive experience where as a player, whatever you see is something that you can travel to, interesting landmarks that you can see in the distance become markers for you to explore towards.

A game that does this well is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In Skyrim, there is a main storyline, but also contains an expansive world, where you are not required to follow along the main story, but are allowed to wander as you see fit. While wandering, you get to explore caves, castles, ruins, and more, in which you are rewarded with spells, weapons, crafting materials, and other in game items as well as are introduced to side quests and hidden scenes.

On the other hand, a game that does open world exploration wrong is No Man’s Sky. Marketed as a masterfully crafted procedurally generated world exploration game, where you get to survive and explore based on what you find, No Man’s Sky fails to spark the curiosity of the player past the first 30 minutes, which comes from the fact that the gameplay is stale, extremely buggy, and after the first sequence of play, the player understands there is no longer any depth in gameplay aside from laughing at the terribly generated dinosaurs.

Game Reviewer, Video Game Dunkey, talks about the flaws in No Man’s Sky (starting 1:29), and how the gameplay is stale and does not attend to the player’s curiosity in their environment.

3. Sparks Creativity

A lot of world building games depend on their ability to spark the creativity of the player to succeed as a game; games such as Minecraft and Starbound are driven mostly by a creativity aspect, shaped by a little bit of survival as an underlying pressure to build more. These games take the curiosity of the player and add a digital medium that allows the player to build whatever they wish to create going as far as to emulate physics, such as applying electronic currents and switches.

A showcase of the results of a game that sparks the creativity of its users. (Start at 19:27).

Video games that can act as an emotional outlet, reducing the stress of its players through its gameplay, either by making the player feel powerful through gameplay mechanics rather than difficulty, making the player feel as if the player is in control of the situation, intrinsically motivating the player to do better due to the fact that progression is achievable through player ability. Games such as Doom and the Witcher provide a sense of control over the situation at hand, whether it be slaying beasts or demons from hell, both provide crisp controls that allow the player to control the situation, and in conjunction with the gameplay, allows the player to act out their feelings, and play the game as an emotional outlet.

Although probably not a game that Mister Rogers would endorse due to its violence, the violent content of the game in addition to its high skill ceiling mechanics, allow the player to feel powerful and can act as an emotional outlet to reduce stress in its players. Notice how to player uses rockets to boost himself through the level to reach impressive speeds.

4. Enhancing your ability to look and listen

Puzzle games are often based on your ability to look and listen for patterns so that you can advance throughout a level. Playing puzzle games such as Portal and Uncharted forces you to look for visual, such as wall markings, and auditory, such as the dropping sound of the companion cube, clues to solve puzzles to advance to the next level. Playing these games repeatedly helps you look for clues and patterns in a real life setting albeit through non-realistic, in-game mechanics, but regardless of the lack of realism, it acts as a way for the brain to grow. In this sense, puzzle games enhance your ability to look and listen for clues in a fictional setting, but allows for more enjoyable gameplay due to the way the game forces you to observe your surroundings.

Visual and audio cues help the player understand that they are doing something correctly, such as when the platforms disappear and the sound accompanying it sounds as if something is moving. (Start time: 3:13)

5. Capacity to Play

Often in games with bosses and enemies, there exists enemies that you defeat through timing, whether by dodging slow and powerful attacks, or simply timing your movements when they’re not looking at you, ect. The application of timing in a video game leads to the idea of patience, where impatience is punished with a negative aspect of the game, whether it be losing health or failing the level. Platformers such as Salt and Sanctuary requires patience in not just jumping between platforms but in beating the bosses as well, forcing the player to be patient to wait out attacks or play slowly and cautiously to figure out the bosses’ movesets before becoming aggressive, and even then the player is punished for attempting to get too many hits in when an opening arises, instead of being patient.

The first boss from the game Salt and Sanctuary, note how the player is patient and waits for the boss to make the first move to capitalize on the opening. (Start at 1:32).

6. Moments of Solitude

A recent trend in video games is to develop with multiplayer in mind, while completely ignoring single player. However, many of the greatest games focus on the single player experience with the multiplayer as an afterthought. Games such as Mass Effect 3 and Fallout 3 deliver a superior single player experience, allowing for moments of solitude, a full immersion into the world space of the game requiring only a single player and the game itself. Games like Fallout 3 create an amazing immersive environment, leading to a flow state due to fully engrossing the player in their task, through a mix of difficulty, and in-depth story, enjoyability, and visual detail.

Although Mister Rogers was known as a television persona with a kind heart, his ideals and beliefs about TV as “this fabulous instrument of nurture” map nicely upon newer digital technologies as well.

The culmination of the elements of Mister Rogers’ ideas, ever present in the successful and beloved apps and games, can help boost a mediocre but enjoyable game to one of legendary status.