Unlocking Games

First, an important note: This will be our last episode for a while. Brandon and I have both developed outside commitments that keep us from spending the time to do more episodes right. We might be back someday! But please enjoy this and each of our past episodes – we’re proud of each one, and […]

Released in early February, We Are Chicago is a serious game with serious goals: to put players in the shoes of a teenager amid the problems of Chicago’s South Side. As Aaron you navigate the landscape of gangs, high school, family dynamics, and a part-time job. Structured almost identically to a Telltale game, you are […]

The game is more than two years old and based on an event from the 90s, but This War of Mine still feels fresh and relevant. This War of Mine drops you in the middle of a city under siege. But you’re not a well-equipped well-trained super-soldier packing the latest gadgets. You’re a civilian, just […]

With immigration and a border wall in the news this week, it’s a good time to look at 2013’s The Migrant Trail. Released as a tie-in for Marco Williams’ documentary The Undocumented, The Migrant Trail is a browser-based game where you’re in the shoes of either an undocumented immigrant attempting to cross the Arizona border, […]

Welcome back to season two! We’re slightly shifting focus to social impact games: games that explore social issues like elections, climate change, homelessness, and immigration. Each episode will evaluate the effectiveness of a different game. What was it trying to accomplish? Did it work? Our goal isn’t to take a stance on the issues or […]

Many games put you in the role of someone else. It’s right in the name of at least one genre: Role-Playing Game. We identify with each of these avatars to varying degrees. It’s hard to feel much of a connection with Pac-Man, but Link and Chrono were much easier to map onto ourselves. What did […]

We’ve talked often before about how games can use a GUI to teach you a skill or task useful in real life. But is another angle on this idea true too? Is expertise using the buttons on a console controller transferable to actual job skills? Militaries around the world certainly seem to think so. More […]

It’s not often there’s breaking news in the world of academic articles on gaming, but a potential retraction of an article is worth talking about. A 2014 study called “Boom, Headshot! Effect of Video Game Play and Controller Type on Firing Aim and Accuracy” concluded that playing games with a gun-shaped controller, even briefly, will […]

Last week we talked about self-efficacy, particularly how it relates to the high difficulty of the Dark Souls series. But Dark Souls actually goes against lots of advice about the relationship between self-efficacy and performance. It turns out there’s also controversy about giving rewards just to build self confidence or self-efficacy. Should we all get […]

How good are you at Dark Souls? Or put another way: What’s your perception of your related self-efficacy? The Dark Souls series is hard. Really, really hard. We’re just preparing you: You’ll die often, in new and interesting ways. So why do players stick with it? In the 1970s, psychologist Albert Bandura developed four factors […]

Ben Heck’s clever customization of an Xbox One controller for one-handed use.[/caption]The word “Accessibility” might bring to mind ramps, braille, and other physical world accommodations. Those are important, but the concepts extends to games and other digital media too. Sometimes it might even be a practical market share consideration: By some measurements 20% of gamers […]

Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re looking for an escape from the post-turkey awkward conversations, check out the conclusion of our series on Discovery Learning. In our previous two episodes, we examined the positives and negatives of discovery learning. But what’s the takeaway – is it a good or bad idea? Of course it’s more complicated than […]

Discovery learning remains very popular today, BUT! All is not well in the land of self-guided education. Every time the research catches up to discovery learning and starts to question how well it works, the name changes to aliases like problem-based learning, experiential learning, constructivist learning, etc. Pure discovery learning leads to frustration and misconceptions. […]

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a 2014 all-around spooky game that doesn’t hold your hand. There’s even a note at the beginning stating that you’re on your own. You’re expected to learn as you go, figuring out not only how complex puzzles work but also sometimes the fact that you’re being confronted with a […]

Bioshock is one of the most critically lauded games of all time. Released in 2007, today it still holds a place in Metacritic’s top 25 games ever. The game’s story, all about an underwater city that fell victim to a mix of Objectivist thinking and superpowers, is still largely hailed as an unusually mature experience […]

Instead of examining one game in detail, this week the broader concept of metagaming caught our attention. From Dungeons & Dragons to Tekken to League of Legends, tons of games can be played at a meta level. There’s so much information about games out there, and whether you take it into account can make or […]

We made it to episode 10! Double digits! Released in August, No Man’s Sky was one of the most hyped new games of 2016. Promotional materials and press coverage promised 18 quintillion planets to fly your spaceship to, and innumerable things to do on and around each destination. Gamers got those 18 quintillion planets on […]

This week we concluded our three week Arstotzkan travelogue with a look at how Papers, Please handles incentives and emotional impact. The game has an unusually subtle approach to morality and choices, and avoids Mass Effect style extreme polarized choices between good and evil. How does this all tie in to incentivizing performance improvement? What […]

After our discussion of Papers, Please’s lessons in instructional design, this week we found the game’s interesting and sometimes counterintuitive applications of user experience and design principles. There’s friction in almost everything you do in this game, but why isn’t that annoying? And just how does Papers, Please handle abstracting analog objects into digital representations? […]

In Papers, Please players step into the shoes of a border control agent faced with increasingly byzantine rules to admit or deny entry into Glorious Arstotzka. Each game-day presents you with new restrictions on what paperwork to check. The difficulty ramps up slowly but surely, and by the end of the game you’re adeptly cross-referencing […]

Witness, a cooperative crime-solving mystery board game, is on our minds. In Witness, each player knows different facts about the case. Gameplay revolves around whispering clues to each other in an effort to piece everything together. It’s so clearly applicable to communications training and working in cross-functional teams that Witness doesn’t just provide lessons – […]

Super Mario Maker, a game for the Wii U, could probably support entire books about the approaches and design choices it reflects. It’s a complex level creator for classic side-scrolling Mario games. Anybody can use 72 different pieces in infinite combinations to build the Mario level of their dreams (or nightmares). Imagine being dumped into […]

Brandon introduces Pandemic Legacy and its applications of cooperative learning principles in this week’s shorter “lockpick” episode. Pandemic Legacy is a collaborative board game that takes a serialized approach to gameplay. Players work together to stop the spread of diseases around the world, and consequences of decisions made during one game carry forward to the […]

In a smaller “lockpick” episode, we take a look at the new awkwardly named game Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n. The game (available for iOS and Android) pretends to be a messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. Set in the world of the TV show Mr. Robot, you take on the role of a hacker specializing […]

This week we discuss the UX and Instructional Design potential of Gone Home, 2013’s 12th highest rated PC game on MetaCritic and the 2014 Games for Change Game of the Year. It’s also an excellent walking simulator. Gone Home is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Show Notes & Links: An Application of Bloom’s […]

In our inaugural episode, we talk about elements of Instructional Design and User Experience that caught our attention in Life Is Strange. The first episode of Life Is Strange is free to play on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Steam. Show Notes & Links: Cathy Moore’s Training Scenarios Building Expertise, by Ruth C. […]