[00:00:01]
Narrator: You’re listening to the Fizzics Ed Podcast. For hundreds of ideas, free experiments and more, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. And now, here’s your host, Ben Newsome.

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Ben Newsome: Yes, welcome again for another Fizzics Ed Podcast. This week we are hanging out with someone incredibly interesting. We’re hanging out with Richard Durham, who is a Curriculum Development Manager for the University of Auckland. Now, his role is to provide strategic guidance and decision-making in relation to curriculum development and learning design for the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Auckland. Now, here’s the thing: he likes to do gaming. Now, real gaming—serious games, the board games, all the real physical games that we might have grown up with as kids and, more importantly, you can design for, well, learning. And in this chat, we’re going to be talking with Richard about what makes a game a good game versus a bad game, what makes learning actually work well in a physical game environment. Now, this is a science podcast, a STEM podcast. Think about this chat in terms of how you might be able to relate what Richard’s been doing into teaching kids science. Really fascinating chat, and this is going to be part one of a two-part series around physical games and STEM. Let’s dive in.

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Narrator: This is the Fizzics Ed Podcast, for all about science, edtech, and more. To see 100 fun free experiments you can do with your class, go to fizzicseducation.com.au. That’s fizzics spelled F-I-double-Z-I-C-S, and click 100 free experiments.

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Ben Newsome: Richard, welcome to the Fizzics Ed Podcast.

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Richard Durham: Thank you. I’m excited to be in this nether space of ones and zeroes that we’ve got here.

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Ben Newsome: It is a nether space of ones and zeroes. I agree. I’ve always talked about the ones and zeroes coming down some form of cable or across the distance and beyond, but no, I’ve never thought of it that way. But welcome, welcome to this chat. I mean, we’ve only been hanging out for a little while, but I must say, what you get to do is quite interesting. So other people haven’t hung out with you yet, so Richard, tell us, what do you do?

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Richard Durham: People wear a lot of hats these days. During the day, most of the time, I’m working as a curriculum development manager at the University of Auckland in the Faculty of Creative Arts and Industries. And a lot of that’s about improving the teaching and learning that we’re doing in our faculty, and I’ve got an education background, of course, taught science for a decade or so and then moved into the learning design space and tried to get back into academia because private industry is, as you may know, a little bit soul-sucking. So I’ve always, along for the ride with that, has been this love of game design and game development and the way that people think and learn. And games were always such an interesting parallel because they’re so engaging on levels that other mediums just can’t match. And I say that for me personally because, of course, people will be up in arms if they say, “Well, books are incredibly entertaining,” and you’d be right, but there’s something about a game and the interaction which makes it an even more immersive or more deep kind of engagement for me myself, right? And I’ve always loved the parallels between that and learning and the way that we get engaged with something that’s quite interactive and the way that we learn through those interactions, which is very much in the way that when we try to design educational environments, we’re looking at curriculum—the definition of curriculum, these strung-together teaching environments and teaching activities—that that’s exactly what a game is as well, right? And Raph Koster is the one who’s quoted the most as saying—and I’m paraphrasing here—that when you’re playing, you’re learning. Like, when you’re playing a game, the fun part is the learning, right? And that’s a pithy quote, for sure, but it’s a really good one when trying to draw the parallels between what games do and what teaching and learning do. And so it’s been along for the ride for me for these 20-odd years where I work a lot in physical games, tabletop games, board games, theatrical games, games that take up parks where we’re activating street spaces for families and kids to get together with a group called Wild Streets here in Auckland in New Zealand, where I am. And we run large events where there’s people running around museums and doing scavenger hunts and these kind of things. And I just—I love the sociality of that. But I’ve always tried to design my teaching experiences and try to talk to people when it comes to education in a way where we’re talking about it in a playful and a gameful way. And it seems like a very whimsical thing to have kind of a life mission to make the world more playful and gameful in our learning environments, but you know, you take the little battles and try and win them, and then it’s very fulfilling, I find.

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Ben Newsome: What I love what you’re doing is it goes through a gamut of different types of games. I mean, I was just thinking just then, I could imagine being in front of a cohort of teachers going, “Righto, so we’re going to talk about game design or games for kids,” and I kind of wonder what would be conjured in people’s minds when you say games for kids?

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Richard Durham: When they say games for kids, when I hear that even, my body revolts a little bit. I’m like, “What do you mean?” Games are for everyone. We often think of games for kids, and the teachers do it—teachers do it especially. Well, it depends on the teacher. If you’re talking with primary teachers, a lot of them are really good at this. Like, really good at games for kids because they’re activating—I mean, they’re looking at the value of just in everything from the motor skills to the social development. But a lot of grown-ups—and I’m going to call them grown-ups instead of adults here—but older people who are thinking about games for kids are often thinking about what they did for a pastime for games, right? And they’re thinking more maybe roll a die and move along a little board and nothing consequential happens except maybe you get to the end first. Or they’re thinking of games for kids that are just little puzzles or memory, right? And they’re thinking little skill challenges like that, but they’re not thinking of something that holds the attention or is engaging for anybody over the age of five or six. And so I reject that notion. I recognise that there’s games you can master as an adult and so they’re no longer interesting anymore because the skills that you’re engaging are already well-developed. But it’s more than just challenge, you know? Challenge of your skills and that growth of those skills is only one angle on why something or why a game can be engaging or immersive. And so a game for kids—what is that? That is, you know, lollipops and colours and bright things. They may think it’s the theme, but yeah, it’s games for kids, gah!

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Ben Newsome: And that’s the thing. We’re talking about learning design in lots of different ways and when it comes down to gaming, gaming is simply just a way of either expressing knowledge, passing on knowledge, or assimilating that knowledge in a way that’s meaningful for the kids to kind of—or adults, or grown-ups, or any version of the person that has a heartbeat can learn. So I guess if you sort of had some students and you wanted to create a game that was going to be meaningful and contextual in some way that the students could go, “You know what, this works,” or if you’ve got a bunch of teachers or frankly the public, what is a game? What are the threads of a game that go, “You know what, that actually works,” as opposed to—the word for my mind is not the right word—almost transactional, the way of like, I roll the die and I move forward six spaces, and then I roll the die and I move forward five spaces. There’s not much to it, really. So what makes a good game, I guess is what I’m asking?

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Richard Durham: How long’s a piece of string here?

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Ben Newsome: Pretty long.

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Richard Durham: Yeah. What a good game is is going to be up for the artists to debate. But what I can say is why a bad game might be a bad game in that regard, like the ones you described where you’re just rolling the die. And you’ve got a separate question here, which we could also address, which is the what makes one good as a teaching tool, right? And then there’s even another question, which is what makes a game a good environment for learning to happen, instead of as a teaching tool. Because there are many of those as well. Like, I think the one that’s probably most seminal at the moment is Minecraft, for instance, and games like that, which are literal environments where people are doing things and creating. A lot of constructivist activity is happening in that. But the first foremost bit that I would say as a point of difference is agency. When you’re talking about a game like Candyland, for instance, which is the really concrete example of pull a card, move to that coloured space and keep going and it’s random and you win, hooray. The only skill you’re testing is whether you could recognise the colours and follow the rules and take turns, which is why it’s a kids’ game because you’ve got to develop this turn-taking skill. But you’re not making any choices. So a lot of the games where you want to instruct are really looking at the interactive systems that are in place. That’s one of the concepts. So if you don’t have any agency in a game to make decisions, experience the results—I don’t want to say failure because it’s only a failure because you had some sort of intended goal that you weren’t able to reach. But if you’re able to interact with the system, see the results, and then adjust your course, you have something where you can learn from it. And the only difference between a simulation—what we would commonly call a simulation then—and a game is that in the game we have a goal, right? And we do have a goal where failure is a thing because the simulation isn’t going the direction we wanted it to, for instance. So for instance, if I was just examining the gas laws, I could have a little easy simulator that shows that when I’m increasing the pressure, what happens, and other things like that. But why do I care? And so you start layering in more layers to the experience of a game. And a good game—a better game, I should say—is one where there’s kind of a narrative impetus, right? There’s a story, there’s a purpose outside of, “Hey, here’s a simulation,” right? I mean, the Boyle’s gas laws, good for that, right? There it is, it’s an example. And I could have that little simulator and not do anything with it and not have a goal. If my goal could be quite rote, it might be like, “Make the pressure in this system equal a certain value,” but why am I doing that? And answering these questions of “But why? But why?” is where you’re trying to connect to the learner. That’s where you’re trying to say, “Well, why?” And this goes back to classic learning design of saying, “Well, why does it matter to me? What is in it for me? Do I have a grander purpose through which I am interacting with this system?” And in a game, I don’t necessarily mean to say you need to have fictional narratives over the course of every game, but what I mean is that winning is often that narrative, right? Just winning in the competition of a game. Even a cooperative game, you want to beat the game as a team. So that risk of overall failure states is, and competition perhaps, is a good narrative. And so you may want to look at how the narrative of a game feeds into the mechanics of a game, which are the mechanics are the—very simply, they’re the mechanisms, I know I’m defining a term with the term, but they’re the things that happen, the interactions that happen in the game.

[00:11:29]
Ben Newsome: Well, I was just wondering, because when it comes to interactions, I mean, they could be complex or they could be rather simple. But does that necessarily affect what we’re trying to learn? The reason I’m thinking about that is thinking, well, for example, cell processes. There’s a lot of stuff going on in there. I mean, at middle high school, you learn about the 10 main things that are inside a cell. Yes, there’s more to it, but that’ll do for now. And then there’s bits moving around, proteins and things. But when you sort of add it up, it’s quite a complex object. Gamifying—creating, you know, “Make the cell divide,” whatever it is, there’s your objective. Does a game have to be complex to represent a complex idea, or is it smarter to create a simple thing that represents a complex idea?

[00:12:19]
Richard Durham: Yes and. It depends on what your goal is, right? Like the idea that all models are flawed, but some are useful. And a game being a model that you’ve turned into a simulation, which you’ve turned into a game through interaction and failure states and goals. If you’ve got a really complex system, but you have a simple concept about that complex system that you want to illustrate or get people to understand, make a simple game. And just understand that that simple game is a model of one aspect of a larger, complex system. And this goes down to just general learning design in your curriculum. Like, if you tried to teach a complex system all at once without breaking it down into component chunks, you’re going to meet a lot of resistance, there’s going to be failure. So with games, it’s the same thing. It’s choosing what things you’re trying to model and then saying, “Well, how do we build off of that?” Digital games are very good at being able to say, “Let’s make tutorials and scaffolding people who are playing a game into the game’s systems,” and you can end up with a very complex game. It would be the same process of teaching in that regard, where you start with a simple concept that is something they can latch onto, build into the complexity of the game. And it goes when you’re even teaching a game—a lot of board games, for instance, there’s a whole school of thought on what’s a good way of teaching a board game. And a lot of it is the same thing: Here’s the concept, who are you, what are you trying to do, why are you trying to do it, and why is that hard? And with that simple high concept, you can then introduce the first system and the first thing the players need to do, like, “Oh, you’ll have this hand of cards. These cards represent your actions you can take.” It’s like, “Okay, cool. This is how I do stuff.” And then you may say, “Well, why am I doing stuff? What’s the goal?” And you keep going into the concepts.

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Ben Newsome: That’s the thing. Us as consumers, so to speak, can go and buy a thing off the shelf. We can have it ordered in, dropped to your door, and you’ve got yourself a game. And of course, we can learn the rules of the game and some games are great, some are less great, and you work it out and you then share, “Hey, you really should try this game out,” and people then buy the next game. But that’s just using someone else’s thought processes that created the game. And I kind of feel like as educators, it’d be nice if we created our own games. And I know because you work in this space a lot, I was just wondering, have you seen some great examples of educators who have taken this idea on board so well? They’ve created some really amazing physical games—not the digital stuff. The digital stuff’s fine, but just thinking from the physical space for now—that you go, “You know what, that just worked. It sang to the students, it sang to the concept.” What have you seen out there that really is worth as an example?

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Richard Durham: Again, there’s a lot of range here. Genius Games—GeniusGames.org is a link you could get. John Coveyou, he designs science-oriented board games that try to represent fairly complex systems like Cytosis or games about building atoms, games about periodic tables and things like this. And those games are fun first, so they’re meant to be engaging games using the authentic vocabulary of the discipline. And he knows—I mean, he’s got a background in science education, so he’s trying to be as real as possible while also using hobby game mechanics to represent the system. Of course, it’s a model. So it’s not like you’re saying, “I’m going to use these games and that’s the only thing you’ll ever need to do as part of the education. Play this game and you’ll be an expert in the periodic table.” Because also the periodic table is what, right? It’s not functional in its own; it’s a categorisation tool. So Cytosis, for instance, is one he’s got. It’s a game about cell biology. That game is, again, it’s a complicated game, it’s a competitive game. You’d want to wrap it into your overall curriculum though if you were ever to try to use this. As you’re talking about air-dropping a board game in, you’re using someone else’s system. And you either take a game as a whole and say, “Well, we’re going to use this. How can we use it in the classroom setting?” And the biggest problem that a lot of teachers have with using games off the shelf in their classrooms are that they don’t fit the time scale, the player count is too hard—you need like 20 copies to fit your class, or at least a half a dozen copies. You need to teach them how to play the game and then pull out all of the material from the science. So there’s a lot of time restrictions here. So I advocate for a lot more in classroom settings, a lot more games that are simple. Simple, simple little games that illustrate those simple concepts. Or ones that represent so vastly complex systems that we don’t try to model them; we just model complexity. And this would be a whole genre of games like Matrix games, for instance. And Matrix games, where they are very loosely class-sized games or down to six people where you are modelling a lot more societal kind of questions, where groups of people will represent one role, for instance, right? And then another table will represent a different role—a model UN kind of thing fits in this a little bit, right? And then you set up some scenario. There’s a game master, that’s usually the teacher, and they’re running the students through a scenario, setting up the scenario. And then the students just manipulate the scenario, right? They take turns and they talk about what they are trying to do, etc. But it’s a very social game. And when it comes to hard science concepts, you find that that doesn’t necessarily blend very well. But you could examine the sociological kind of concerns around science, right? Scientific debates, for instance, and use that—or even historical ones about like palaeontology, for instance. You could be looking at why certain scientists decided that they were going to rush the discovery of particular dinosaurs and they would make mistakes on what kind of dinosaur they were discovering. That wasn’t a real dinosaur; they just assembled the bones wrong or claimed that there was a discovery. What kind of pressures are there on scientists again to produce results? These are not hard concept sciences; this is about science in society kind of questions. But when it comes to the hard concepts, again, Genius Games is pretty good. A lot of them are just going to be simple, skill-based, right? I have yet to see this nut cracked on a way that you can box up and produce to people and to ship a game which plays in 30 minutes and is also representing a complex system of interactions. You can get whole kinds of books on simple games you can play about flooding or games about building models of atoms. But again, those are not the kind of games that I’m necessarily talking about. Though the games—like really if you want to integrate these kind of things into your curriculum, some of the considerations you’ll have is, A, am I iterating fast enough with my students? Are we playing this game for a week, for instance? You need to set that time aside and say, “Okay, we’re going to play it. You’re going to learn it today. Tomorrow, we’re going to play it again. And then we’re going to play it again the day after,” etc. And what are you learning about that? You’ve got to really place it in the context. Or you need to be able to say, “We’re going to set aside the time at the end of the year or the beginning of the year when we’re introducing a concept, and we’re just going to use this game not as a way of demonstrating mastery,” because games are really good at feedback. And therefore, you’re really good at saying, “Well, if I understand that this concept—it means I’m doing well in the game,” right? And that’s more for the kind of simulation games where they’re more accurate to the concepts you’re getting across. But a lot of the board games, for instance, you might use in a classroom are going to be for introducing the concepts and introducing how these systems interrelate so that when you’re getting into describing the detail and explaining and the rest of your curriculum, they have something to latch onto. So basically using it as—in the way that any kind of experiential learning is there—you give them a shared experience. You can then use that as a touchstone to reflect back onto over the next couple of weeks while you’re covering a topic, and then maybe revisit it at the end and see how their understanding of the mechanisms are perhaps imperfect. So you can look at the game and you can say, “Okay, this is a model. How is this model flawed?” because they are, right? It’s a game. So because every model’s imperfect, you can then analyse that and say, “Well, how might you change this game? What is one aspect you might change it to make it a more accurate model or represent a different aspect of the real situation more accurately?” And then you get into more of the game design as the teaching method.

[00:21:12]
Ben Newsome: I love that because I literally did this class four days ago. Not a game—it wasn’t a game, but it does describe the idea of kids critiquing a physical model. I love getting those solar system models that you get from a local shop and you pay 15, 20 bucks and they generally frankly suck. But that’s great! It’s like, “Kids, this is the best thing that you could possibly use because I want you to pick on everything.” And in this case, this particular model I’ve got is great. The only thing that actually is a tick is it’s representing Sol—the Sun—and our eight planets going around. I go, “The one thing that’s good is it’s missing Pluto because we’re talking about planets,” and they go, “That’s great. Now tell me why Pluto’s missing,” and the kids get to tell me about that too. I once ran a class—I mean, I don’t even know how long we banged on about it because it was time to go, “Kids, it’s time for lunch”—but we filled whiteboards with just this simple $15-20 device, just with so much stuff that was wrong. And the kids actually demonstrated far more about what they truly knew than me going, “Can everyone listen? Now we say Mercury, now we say Venus, now we say Earth,” and we move on. It was like, “No, no, no, I want you to tear this apart. Wreck it.”

[00:22:19]
Richard Durham: Yeah. It’s really empowering, isn’t it, for a kid? Especially if they want to critique “the man,” you know? And they’d be right if it’s a model, there’s a representation of a model, they can absolutely do that. I’m still sore about Pluto, though. And what really gets me and what I’m interested in is that goes back to that science and society kind of topic of, well, why do some planets—planetoids, excuse me—make the cut and others not make the cut? And you can talk about the different classification systems, who gets to make those decisions and why they make those decisions. There’s reasoning behind it. The International Astronomical Union—the IAU—let’s write letters to them.

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Ben Newsome: But I actually do have—as a green shirt—I do have this. I have a “Back in my day, I had nine planets” shirt. It’s a real thing. I actually have that as a shirt. But anyway, the idea of where I was going with this is that I could totally see that once kids have a rough—they don’t need a mastery of a particular physical game, but they understand the concepts of the concept as opposed to the game. You could then use the game mechanics alone to do the learning, let alone playing the game. Playing the game is meant to reinforce what’s good and what’s bad about the concept it’s trying to represent. So I don’t know, what is better: kids creating games that represent a concept and they try as best as possible to make it fun and, more importantly, representative of the topic? Or are they better off looking at off-the-shelf games and picking on them?

[00:23:45]
Richard Durham: I would say yes and to those. But in terms of the depth, if you’ve got a certain level of mastery of it, you should absolutely be making more of the games. And in fact, making and then critiquing your own games is even the full circle, isn’t it? Because then you can say, “Okay, we’re going to play some of these off-the-shelf games,” which I think is an important component to this because a lot of those are going to be thinking about gameplay in ways the students may not have been exposed to yet, and so it can broaden their literacy of gameplay mechanisms. The idea of things like worker placement, for instance—they may be like, “What’s that?” And it’s shorthand for taking an action in a space that is limited, and so there’s a scarcity of people who can take this action in the game. And you might say, “Well, why would I do that? What are some things that are actually like that when you’re modelling?” That there’s, you know, limited space and whoever gets there first wins, like, I don’t know, particular electron shells? And when you’re making that decision about what mechanisms to include in the game, you’re doing it related to the actual interactions you’re modelling and then later you can then critique that to say, “Okay, well maybe I would change that mechanism based on what I’m trying to model.” Like maybe you’re abstracting it away because you don’t need—that’s why you get like hands of cards don’t really represent anything, right? They’re just a hand of cards. But you may say, “Well, it’s not abstracted anymore. Let’s implement new mechanisms to it.” And the students might end up getting more complicated games on their own.

[00:25:13]
Ben Newsome: So I’m going to ask an unfair question, generally because it just popped into my head. If you had to list your top three games—I’ve given you three rather than one—top three games of all time, which is really unfair because you know a lot of them. I know this one’s going to ramble for a bit while you collect your thoughts, none of this is actually ever planned. But I was just thinking, there are all these different ways, and let’s make it a little bit easier because of course there are great games for certain different audiences and all the rest. But if we had to just say a high school audience, so that at least targets it a little bit. High school audience of any culture that seems to—you know what, it just works, no matter who I put this in front of or every time I’ve heard they’ve used it, this thing works.

[00:26:02]
Richard Durham: That was unfair. Okay, no, it’s unfair, but I like that it’s unfair. Every game is putting artificial obstructions in front. I would say Dungeons and Dragons, and I’m saying that and I’m using that specific example because it’s well-known. But I’m going to more generally say role-playing games because they are both a really crunchy mechanism that you can use in the modelling, but also really high on the embodiment of the player as a character. Because it’s so much more steeped in just imagination than it is the rules of play, you can explore a lot of different concepts. And any time I put it down in front of people, high school students especially, it just works. It just works. And the thing is, if I was trying to put that in the context of a science classroom, I maybe wouldn’t use role-playing games, right? But you didn’t ask that question, did you? If I was looking at other types of games that I really like in that same vein, there’s a genre of games—but I’ll pick an example called Watch the Skies, which is a megagame. And a megagame is kind of like a Matrix game which I mentioned earlier, but with more structure to it. And a megagame is a game that’s played with like 60 people and you get some people who have very specific roles where you could be like the scientist of Brazil, the head scientist of Brazil, and one person’s the president of Brazil and so on and so forth. And you’ve got some scenario like aliens are invading and who knows, right? But it becomes a big day-long event. And you can look these things up—Watch the Skies—you can easily Google that one, find a great playthrough from Shut Up & Sit Down where they kind of show their experience in almost a documentary style, and it’s really popularised the genre for people who would never have been exposed to megagames before, which is great. If it comes to a board game, because I do love me some board games, it would be—again, I’m a very social player, so I like things like the Game of Thrones: The Iron Throne. That’s one of my favourite board games to introduce to people. It’s kind of like Cosmic Encounter but rethemed to Game of Thrones. And Cosmic Encounter is a game from the ’70s where it’s a very wild game of making temporary alliances like you would in Game of Thrones, and then the best part about it for me is that you can have multiple winners. So if you both reach the win condition at the same round of play, you all win. So in the end you can, if you’re playing with five people, four of you could win and one of you could lose, right? Or three of you win, two of you lose, etc. Just matters if you’re all able to reach the same goal at the same time. And as such, the dynamics in play are a lot more interesting than just a straight head-to-head competition with other players. And so that’s why I quite like about that.

[00:28:54]
Ben Newsome: What’s really interesting is that regardless of the type of a game that you’ve mentioned, there’s still some themes that come through regardless. You talk about win conditions, you talk about the structure and the results and the rules, the number of players involved who can actually feasibly play the game at the same time. So I suppose there really are constraints by nature of the beast of actually having people try and interact around a thing. But I guess at the same point, there’s also those open expansive things that exist in the digital world where they suddenly just become—you can do whatever you want. A bit hard to do. But I do love the fact that you mentioned Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, I did do D&D once upon a time as a kid, and it was so—don’t say that regretfully—no, it’s enthralling, it’s great! What I didn’t realise, because as a kid I just did not know just how much that just a couple of, really just some paper and some dice rolling around could transport you. And isn’t that the point when we kind of look at these things? Isn’t that the point? If you’re that immersed and you lose your time and, “Oh gosh, it’s 5 o’clock, I’ve got to go home,” or whatever it is, that means you’re actually actively engaged in the concept. And isn’t that the point of what we’re trying to do with the learners in the first place, is to engage the student or the person or whatever it may be?

[00:30:03]
Richard Durham: Yes and. Again, I’m obviously using rubbish improv phrases like “yes and” because theatre and that kind of fun that you get from the immersion is one way of having engagement with your things. The challenges as well, losing yourself in it. If you’re talking about that kind of flow state that people talk about a lot when they talk about games, I’m not so sure that I would say that’s the be-all and end-all of games is that that engagement is it. Because the flow state—because I don’t like where it ends. Usually the flow state discussion usually moves into this idea of people who play the game and don’t want to stop playing the game. And that’s not what games are actually about. That’s a different mechanism that people are triggering in your brain to make you do things that you don’t want to be doing anymore, like the actual dopamine release and that there’s a bit of a misnomer here—not misnomer, but this misguided idea that games are what are releasing that pleasure, and it’s releasing dopamine. That’s not actually the case. Gambling might do that, but you might be consciously saying, “I don’t want to be doing this anymore, I don’t want to be doing this anymore,” but you can’t help yourself. You feel compelled to do it. That’s a toxic game. And the games are not doing that necessarily. The games themselves are engaging for other reasons, like a book. I mean, do you see a lot of people who are like, “I can’t put the book down, I can’t stop, I need to go to counselling for a book”? I’m sorry, that’s a very serious issue actually, not for books, but you know, addictions. The idea though of games as flow are just one angle of it. So what I’m getting at is that sometimes it’s a curiosity that people really like about the game, sometimes it’s the challenge, right? And overcoming that challenge. And flow state usually gets into this idea of your skills are being just overreached so that you’re succeeding maybe 80% of the time. And that’s a good number I like to use because where the best learning—making air quotes—is happening, you’re getting about 75-80% of the successes, which means you’re just growing, growing, growing. And if you can keep people in that lane of challenge to the skill they currently have, then they will keep getting better and enjoy it because they’re feeling challenged. That would be the flow. But how do you say that you’re in that flow state when you’re doing exploration? If you’re just like going on a bushwalk and you’re peeking under rocks and things, you know, it’s a different use of the term. Like it still may fit in the psychological profile, but it’s not the way people talk about flow. So that’s why I’m wondering when we look at games, we’re not just looking at like keep playing, keep playing, engagement, engagement, engagement. The value of games goes far beyond that in terms of like they are representative models, they are systems. We can think in an ecological sense of like how everything relates to everything else. And that’s a power that shouldn’t be overlooked, although often is because we’re looking at ways “how can we hook learners, how can we hook them?” One final point on that, it’s almost trite now to say it because people talk about how schools are like a poorly designed game because you walk in, you’re told what to do, you have very clear, perhaps sometimes clear, objectives, you either succeed or you fail. And then you get your scores back, and that’s a game, and it’s just like a game except it’s a completely horrible game because very few people like it. There are people who really love that. And those are the kind of people who love that sense of challenge and feedback and they just say, “Well, there’s the skill, there’s the maths problem, there’s the whatever I want to understand it,” and find in that, the subject then is what’s intrinsically interesting to them. But the format around it is not. And yet I say that at the same time that games like Trivial Pursuit are really popular. People like to know things, they like to quiz themselves, but the stakes are totally different in our schools. And the stakes are very high in our schools, so when you’re asking these trivia games, the high-stakes quizzes or quizzes for points that determine your future and success and failure, it’s not a well-designed game.

[00:41:15]
Ben Newsome: It’s funny you mentioned Trivial Pursuit. My dad’s been banned from playing Trivial Pursuit with the family because he’s too bloody good at it. Maybe that’s what he was doing. Not my family—the extended family. But anyway, circling all this back, you’re heavily involved in learning design and you love games, clearly passionate about it, let alone more than the average person. So if you had people involved wanting to start using physical games with—I could say students, but frankly anyone—in a way to teach concepts, whatever it might be, what would be the first steps for them to take?

[00:41:58]
Richard Durham: The first step I always recommend to people is to play some more games. Like increase the literacy because then you’re more likely to encounter games that might fit your discipline, and you may be like, “That’s a good science teaching game. I could use that concept. Let me implement that.” Or you might see games where there’s particular mechanisms at play where you say, “I might be able to design a classroom activity that utilises that little mechanism. That might be fun.” For instance, there was a little rock cycle game, right? Where more of an activity where you’re going around making a charm bracelet that represents this story of a rock. And you’re rolling some dice and seeing what the outcome is at every particular station to see whether it experienced a lot of heat and pressure. “Oh, okay, I’m going to go over here to the metamorphic station now,” and you add a little bead onto the end. But this idea of having a rock with some characteristics that therefore might affect that die roll that then determine which station you go to—because maybe its current heat and pressure is quite high, so if you add just a little bit more, it’s going to melt and there it goes, it’s going to become an igneous rock later. Like this kind of mechanism that you’re designing into this activity might have been inspired by a game you played, right? And this is one that I actually ran years ago was this classroom charm bracelet because then they can look at the history of their rock on their wrist, right? And that’s a bit fun for other reasons than just the challenge or the experiment. They can look at it and say, “I have this little artefact that I’ve created and it’s this story.”

Frequently Asked Questions

What defines a game as a good tool for learning?

A good educational game prioritises agency, allowing players to make meaningful choices rather than following a predetermined path. When a learner interacts with a game’s system, experiences the results of their decisions, and adjusts their strategy, they are actively learning through trial and error within a safe, simulated environment.

How do games differ from simple simulations?

While both are models of systems, a game introduces a specific goal and the possibility of failure. A simulation might demonstrate how gas laws work, but a game provides a narrative or competitive reason to care about the outcome, such as maintaining system pressure to achieve a specific mission objective.

Can physical games represent complex scientific concepts?

Yes. Simple games can effectively model specific aspects of a larger system. For example, “worker placement” mechanics can simulate limited resources in a biological system, such as nutrient availability or space in an ecosystem. The key is to choose which part of the system to model accurately while abstracting others for playability.

Why is critiquing a game model useful for students?

No model is perfect. By having students identify what a game or physical model gets “wrong” about a scientific concept—such as an inaccurate solar system scale—they demonstrate a deeper level of mastery than they might through passive listening. It encourages them to think critically about how information is represented.

Is the “flow state” the most important part of game-based learning?

While being deeply engaged is beneficial, the real value lies in system analysis. A well-designed game keeps players in a “lane” where they succeed approximately 80% of the time, providing enough challenge to foster growth and skill development without causing frustration or disengagement.

Extra thought ideas to consider

The Narrative of Winning

Winning isn’t just about competition; it serves as the narrative impetus for the entire experience. Whether cooperative or competitive, the goal provides the “why” that connects the learner to the mechanics of the subject matter, making the curriculum feel more purposeful.

Scaffolding Complexity through Games

Just as digital games use tutorials to lead players into complex systems, physical games in the classroom can start with simple mechanics. Educators can gradually layer in more authentic scientific vocabulary and interactions as the students’ understanding of the underlying model evolves.

Discussion points summarised from the FizzicsEd Podcast podcast, verified and edited by Ben Newsome CF