#discovery-based learning

In The Witness, players learn intricate game mechanics through a carefully-scaffolded series of puzzles. At first, there might be only one path through the puzzle, forcing the player to connect a particular symbol to the properties of that path. A second puzzle in the sequence might offer a few possibilities, allowing players to confirm or refute their theories about the puzzle’s rules. From there, things escalate quickly—all without words.

There’s a whole subgenre of celebrated games that relish in their reticence. In this talk, “Vow of Silence,” Hamish Todd deconstructs the design decisions in these games and urges his students to eschew tutorials and explanations in their designs. Instead, to preserve the joy of discovery, they should carefully structure their activities so that players will learn what they need to learn through play.

Meanwhile, over in education research, one top citation has the foreboding title “Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based experiential and inquiry-based teaching.” The authors review the experimental literature and find, on balance, that direct instruction reliably delivers better test scores than minimally-guided alternatives.

There’s plenty to quibble with in this paper (and there are plenty of rebuttals). For instance, it focuses on total novices—maybe discovery-based learning triumphs with more expertise. From game design, we’ve learned that we can’t just naively remove all explicit guidance: we must carefully mold players’ interactions to implicitly provide that guidance. Maybe the minimally-guided experiments in that paper didn’t do that.

And so on.

I shared this paper at a meetup of educational game developers at this year’s Game Developer Conference, and they looked at me like I was from another planet. Alex Peake suggested: okay, fine, maybe the test scores are better with heavy guidance, but who cares? As a game designer, what I care about is: do they finish the game? Are they going to play my next one?

The game developers are optimizing for joy, empowerment, discovery. Yes, they’d like players to thoroughly understand the game’s mechanics, but that’s a secondary goal. The game designers are not asking the same question as the education researchers.

For example, in The Witness, players can skip several whole areas of the game and still reach its ending. This escape valve allows a frustrated player to proceed to an area they might find more interesting—prioritizing joy, empowerment, and discovery over completeness. Maybe they’ll return to the incomplete areas later; after all, the game is cleverly designed so that players will absolutely know they skipped some spots. Perhaps that’s pressure enough.

This idea seems to connect to one Jenova Chen explored in his master’s thesis: games should try to keep players in “flow,” balancing challenge and ability. Jenova argued that we should give players more fluid control of the challenge they take on, so that they can manage their own position relative to their own intellectual “sweet spot.”

Maybe the same idea applies for players steering towards their emotional “sweet spots.” If we minimize mandatory explicit guidance, we let player decide how much they’d like to pursue the joy of discovery. Maybe some players will choose to access a tutorial before taking control in an activity. That’s fine. This decision is more about emotional investment and curiosity than it is about challenge—a different kind of “flow” to maintain.

What happens when instructional design asks the same question as game design? I think Chaim Gingold’s Earth Primer is our best answer to date.

In this digital book, each bifold features an interactive geological simulation on one side, and explanatory prompts on the other side. According to their own emotional flow, students can choose to engage with the explicit questions the book poses, or they can explore the simulations freely themselves. They’re in control, guided by their own sense of joy and discovery.

Perhaps not everyone who reads the book would do as well on a geology test afterwards as they would if they’d been given a lecture… but I bet they’re much more likely to read Chaim’s next book. When and how should we choose to optimize for that in our designs instead of for test scores?

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Hmelo-Silver, C. E., Duncan, R. G., & Chinn, C. A. (2007). Scaffolding and achievement in problem-based and inquiry learning: A response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006). Educational psychologist, 42(2), 99-107.

Kuhn, D. (2007). Is direct instruction an answer to the right question?. Educational psychologist, 42(2), 109-113.

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.