Should educational games have pressure?

It’s a common view that an “educational game” should not have any pressure or asymmetry. When asked, many teachers say they’ll only play games in the classroom that are not competitive, or don’t test any personal attribute (“no student should feel less smart than another”). They don’t want any game with time pressure, group pressure, or any sort of pressure. If students are in groups or pairs, they don’t want every person to be doing the same tasks, as then the faster or better players will dominate that group.

At first glance, this seems reasonable.

The goal of educational games is to educate, not test, right? So nobody should ever be scored or tested individualy. Nobody should ever lose because they (individually) were simply slower or less strategical.

If the game adds time pressure, then players can’t think straight! And so, the reasoning goes, they’ll be making many wrong decisions while they would’ve made the right one given more time.

As you might expect, my view on this is different.

Let’s first get something out of the way: this is not a question of capability. Children can absolutely understand competitive games, play games with time pressure, everything.

This is also not a question of fun. Children can enjoy games with pressure. A game that is not fun if you’re not winning, a game that only makes you sad because someone else was faster, is not a good game. It has nothing to do with educational value, it’s just a failure of game design.

No, I’m afraid this is another example of the paradox of educational games. People realize that games are good for learning and children actually want to play them. However! They must be “educational”, of course! So they remove all the things that make the game good and fun, and replace it with something as neutral and dry as possible. Something that’s not much different from a regular lecture at school.

And so I want to circle back to what I’ve always stated.

Every game is educational, as long as it’s a good game.

Now let’s explore that idea a bit more, in relation to these “principles” that many believe educational games should follow.

Competitive?

Yes, some children struggle the first time they lose a game. This is normal. This is even good! If you don’t feel anything after fighting for 30 minutes and then losing a game, you are either emotionless or didn’t care about the game. Fun comes from caring. Good gameplay comes from caring.

The entire idea of games is to learn to process these things. To learn you can be sad or frustrated—but also that it’s no reason to ruin the game or attack another player. Play more games and children will get used to winning sometimes and losing other times.

Cooperative games are harder to make and to balance. They introduce just as much “possible social issues” as competitive games, because now you need to work together. Their objective or gameplay is often a bit less “natural”. The game designer has to invent some common enemy or some rules about how “the game” works against you.

Competitive games are more natural to humans. Competition is a natural instinct in all. They often mean simpler games with simpler objectives: “first to X points wins”. Competitive games also train individual skill better. You can’t just let others do all the work, you can’t lean back, you have to play for yourself.

As such, competitive games with a clear winner or loser are absolutely fine for educational games.

Then why are your games cooperative?

But Tiamo, levels 1 and 2 of this project almost exclusively contain cooperative games! Why do that when you like competitive games so much?

Yes! I explained this in another article too, but this is the summary.

• Cooperative games are very valuable. Ideally, you want a mix of cooperative and competitive games. (In a way, humans are a mix of social and invidiualistic behavior and skills.)
• I’m mostly concerned with the simultaneous turns. Those are easier to implement in a cooperative game. (It’s harder to have a game where players play against each other … but they must also act at the same time.)
  • This saves time and deals with impatient/restless gamers. Nobody has to wait for a turn. Any game is done five times as quickly.
• It saves material. If you have to print and cut the games yourself, then I want to be ruthlessly minimal about the amount of pages. If all material is shared—instead of people receiving individual cards, pawns, points, etcetera—this saves a lot of ink.
  • Additionally, it’s fine if players ruin the material. Because it’s cooperative, it doesn’t matter if everyone recognizes that bent/torn card as being the Cow, for example.
• For all the advantages of competitive games, a big disadvantage is the skill gap. Cooperative games allow more people, of more varying ages/skill, to all play together. (More on this in the next section.)
• Every base game on this website is really the absolute simplest framework for the game. On second, third, fourth games you want to move to the Upgrades. And those almost always add a competitive or turn-based variant. Which can be the clear better way to play.

I personally love really tight, interactive, cutthroat competitive board games. If you’ve tried any of my Pandaqi games, you know they usually involve loads of player interaction in a tight space, where a single nasty move can petrify many opponents. Wonderful!

All my life, however, I’ve mostly been surrounded by playing groups that only want cooperative games. I come from a really large family, so basically everything becomes a collaboration or team-based effort by nature. I also only play video games if I can do it local multiplayer. (The LEGO games are great for this.) As such, I’ve always had a nice blend of both worlds and know where their strengths and weaknesses lie.

Individual differences?

I just finished writing an article (for my regular blog) about how much I hate poker. If played casually, there is obviously no real money involved, and some parts are “house ruled” to be kinder to players. This means it just becomes a lottery where nobody really cares about losing or winning chips.

I’ll say it again: fun comes from caring, and learning comes from overcoming obstacles.

A game is more fun if players really care about winning, because they want to beat the other players. Because they want to prove they’re better at maths than their friend. Because there’s an interesting challenge and it feels rewarding to overcome it. This is a natural competitive instinct, often portrayed as bad, but games harness it for good.

If the game tries to be too “fair” or “neutral”, then it’s not a game anymore. It’s just a simulation, winning is random chance. You have to reward certain actions and punish others, otherwise no difference can be made and no progress can made to the objective. And thus, no game can be played or won.

If the game tries not to judge players by personal attributes (such as “who knows more”), then it’s not a game anymore. To determine who won (or lost), you need some threshold. And that threshold will always, directly or indirectly, reflect how well players did (individually or as a whole). Even if you try to hide it, children will just invent it themselves. “Yes we all won together, but I clearly did MOST OF THE WORK! Peter did nothing!”

Natural competitive instinct, remember?

You might say “it doesn’t matter how quickly you do it, just that you place the right shapes at the right places!” The children will simply whisper to each other that it’s really about “who is fastest!”

What about skill mismatch?

Sure, there might be a mismatch between player skill. In most cases, though, children see this as a challenge. And they will rise to it. The bigger the gap, the larger the obstacle, the faster the learning.

It is, again, mostly the adults that will complain about “balance” and “skill gap” and expect the game to take it away. Or they’ll call it a terrible game.

This gap in skill must be really huge for it to become a problem. If so, I wrote another article about how to deal with this. The summary? “Let the weakest player play the game as intended, give stronger players handicaps.”

A game is most fun if it’s really tight all the way through. That makes people care the most, that leads to risky actions and major relief if things went right. So it’s absolutely fine to adjust a game to level the playing field. But it should still be a game where those who play best win. A game that tests you on some personal attributes, even if it’s just “how well can you think a few steps ahead”.

What about bad behavior?

So yes, games should put pressure on individual attributes and skills. That’s what they are. That’s where the actual fun and the actual learning comes from.

Again, if a child does have an issue with this, play more games to normalize it. The games are there to learn to accept some players are better at things than you are. To accept making mistakes and learning from it. And to do so in an environment that’s fun and has no consequences—as opposed to making those major mistakes, or throwing a tantrum, when you’re 20 years old and start your first job.

What about domineering players? In cooperative games, you can have gamers that “take over the table”. They try to make all decisions for the group, control everything, etcetera. We’ve found a solution for this long ago: make clear that everyone still chooses and executes their individual actions. The rest of the group can give advice and discuss, of course, but in the end the individual players make the final call on their action.

If a player still tries to dominate or cheat, this falls under the banner of “bad social behavior”. Games are, again, a great way to spot and correct this. There are many unwritten social rules in our society. Morally questionable things to do. Many such behaviors jump out perfectly when you play a game, cooperative or not. If children can learn not to break those social rules after playing a few games, that sounds like a great plan.

All in all, I believe it’s never a good idea to assume bad behavior and then modify the environment to make it less likely. Ignoring any games because they might lead to the fastest thinker dominating the group, means creating a problem to maybe solve an imaginary problem. You’re putting a lot of stress and restrictions on yourself. While the best thing you can do to actually prevent the behavior, is to let everyone play all sorts of games, and normalize everything that comes with it. Let the bad behavior appear if it wants to—and then everyone gets a good real life lesson as to why it’s bad.

I understand this is more “risky”, which people don’t like. People want control. People don’t want to put in the effort of providing a varied set of games. Or risking a child who is sad about losing or struggles to understand the rules. They’d rather just pick some educational game that is completely gray and non-descript, but will surely not lead to any social problems. Or fun. Or learning.

I say: let it go, let it goooo, can’t hold it back anymo—

I am serious, though. Release control. Lose any wrong assumptions. Let kids play games, let kids fall and get up again, let kids fight it out amongst themselves if needed, and see how they blossom.

This project tries its darnest to create good games, with engaging themes, simple rules, and a focus on practicing useful skills. It tries really hard to encourage cooperation, to reward good sportsmanship, to slowly introduce players to the idea of turns/losing/competition.

In the end, however, we must remember that children are not our slaves or little robots. We can’t and shouldn’t want to control them. No ruleset can prevent a child from cheating or ruining a game if they really wish to, no ruleset can prevent a game from sometimes testing a skill or trait a child lacks severely, no ruleset is ever truly “fair”. Even Chess has one player who takes the first move.

(Time) Pressure?

This might seem the most reasonable of “requirements” for educational games. No time or speed pressure.

Because, well, when in a hurry and stressed, you don’t do your best thinking. Won’t this just teach children to think erratically? Won’t this stop children from thinking through an entire problem and learning from that?

No, and here’s why.

Reason #1: Real life has a time pressure and stress at all times. In real life, you might only take a split second to calculate or check something. Games help you get used to that and act more correctly within it.

I am not interested in teaching someone how to do something they’ll never have to or get to do in practice. Having to make “good enough” decisions under all sorts of constraints? Hey! That sounds like daily life!

Reason #2: If you remove any pressure (or randomness), as alluded to in the previous section, it stops being a game.

One of the most hated types of games (by avid board gamers) is one where you can perfectly calculate what’s going to happen. What’s the game anymore? The person who is willing to think longer and put it in more effort, will always win the game. Because all information is available and you can make no mistakes. (More on this in the next section.)

Games quickly stop being fun if it’s testing something you know you can do perfectly. Because you get the time and space to do that, and you can check if you were right. And then you do it, and, unsurprisingly, the thing you predicted happens 100% of the time.

It’s the issue of “superficial knowledge” versus “deep knowledge” again. The issue of “facts/memorization” versus “systems”. The best games build intuition and experience with a system. The more you build that, the better your moves will be. But you can never just perfectly calculate all your moves ahead of time. There is no 100% certainty, and taking longer to think will not actually help you.

Reason #3: Almost all board gamers naturally add an extra phase to the game: the afterparty. After finishing the game, we talk about what we did and what we should’ve done better. We ask others why on earth they made THAT move. We might reveal secret information that changes the understanding others had of the game. We might ask if players liked it or if they want to try a different upgrade/expansion/rule and why.

This is that very important second step in learning that people often forget. The feedback. It’s not “practice makes perfect”, it’s “perfect practice makes perfect”. And the only way to improve how you practice, is by reflecting on what you just did and giving yourself feedback.

I believe this phase should be required!

After playing a game, talk about it. Talk about what went wrong and why. Reflect on that. Laught about silly moves. Reveal that super important card you’d been holding onto all that time.

This way, you can keep the (time) pressure that made players do stupid things … and then they will realize and learn from it during the afterparty. Making mistakes is absolutely fine, because you’ll discuss them when the game is over. (And sometimes during the game, if the structure allows it.)

Every game is a distribution problem

In the end, it all comes down to this. I wrote an article on my game studio blog a while back with this realization, and I’ve only seen it confirmed even more since then.

Every game is a distribution problem.

Every game is fun and a challenge because you have to do a task that isn’t easy and straightforward to do. Because there’s this gap. Because your attention can’t be in two places at once.

Because you only have 1 pawn, but to win you need to control 2 territories. Because you want to get 10 points, but you may only play 1 card per time.

The resources players have are always less than what’s needed to win. And so, every turn, you must figure out how to distribute that. Which card to play of my limited options? Where to attack? Where to move my pawn, out of all the spaces? Where to put my attention?

Which of these other players to attack, to prevent them from winning? There are 3 other players—and I can only attack 1 of them per turn!

Every game is a distribution problem.

• Competitive games add this automatically, because there are multiple other players to worry about. (And limited resources that are NOT shared.)
• Cooperative games do this by distributing workload across players. You have to discuss and make a plan so that other players do the things (on their turn) that you can’t do yourself.
• You can’t use all skills in a game, nor can you use a single one. Any game will require a number of them, in different amounts, at different times. A game asks you: “So you have all these nice skills? Well, the rules only allow you to use these two. Make the best of it.” If you were allowed all skills and resources, any game would be a walk in the park!
• Games with pressure, such as a timer or scarceness, are great for this too. You want to make perfect moves, but you only have 30 seconds! So you must distribute your limited time and actions.

If games were perfectly fair or calculable, or didn’t test individual skills under unique constraints, they would simply not be games.

If games are not a distribution problem, then it’s not a game. It’s a task. It’s three homework assignments in a trench coat.

Or as someone close to me once said about a game they disliked immensely: “If every decision is obvious, then what’s the point?”

Conclusion

I guess what I’m really saying, is that removing all these aspects from “educational games” just means you actually miss out on the best and most educational games of them all.

If you believe educational games should follow such restrictions, that is fine. This project has more than enough that will still satisfy that, especially in the first levels. I am not some omnipotent being who knows it all; I merely give my views and solutions on all this, from many years of playing games, making games, and trying to teach stuff to others.

I simply believe you’d be giving yourself a lot of work and made-up restrictions. While missing out on the best games. The games that provide both the real fun and the real learning experiences, be it in mental skills or social skills.

As always, the term “educational games” is a misnomer. Any game is educational. Trying to make it “more educational”, usually makes it “not a game”.

I hope this was interesting to read and helps educators (parents/teachers) make more informed decisions before they play another educational game.