There are many different approaches to gamification of learning content. This post outlines what we at Narrivate see as the most powerful approach, essentially creating a game world that reflects the real world, but adds interest through narrative and game mechanics. People won’t be much more motivated to play a game that follows the same story as the real world than they are by non-gamified training, so you need to add some fantasy, mystery, suspense, etc.
Then develop a relevant and interesting game economy and select game mechanics that tie the curriculum to the economy. If done well, the game play and story will also teach the learner something, as they’ll be making decisions as they play. And certainly the culture of the organization can come through in the narrative as well.
Identify the Goal, Purpose
There is no motivator quite like the feeling of purpose, and that’s where narrative plays the most important role. Some games can get away without story, and those will rely on puzzle mechanics like Bejeweled and Tetris, or dexterity-focused mechanics like timing jumps. But those types of games have little to do with real-world problem solving.
You should look to the goal and purpose of the organization and role that the learner is training for, and reflect that in narrative. I.e. if the training is for nurses, the purpose is better health outcomes and to save lives. If the training is for sales people, the purpose could be revenue growth or market domination.
Identify Resource Flows
All activity requires and produces resources, be it time, money, materials, customer satisfaction, etc. Before developing a game economy, it’s useful to think about the resources available to and required by your learners, and what outputs their work produces.
In the medical field, the inputs could be diagnostic tests, patient history and treatments. The outputs could be reduce emergency room visits, improved health outcomes.
In sales, the inputs could be marketing budgets, social media activity, blog posts and cold calls. The outputs could be web traffic, inbound leads and closed deals.
In the last example, you might notice that inbound leads are an intermediate resource that may be converted into a closed deal. So the game economy doesn’t need to be completely linear, you can make it as complex as makes sense.
Identify Resource Modifiers
These would be like powerups and can add interesting strategic decisions for learners to make. For example, maybe a learner can earn or purchase some equipment that reduces costs or improves earnings of specific resources. Or learners can use skill points to unlock skills in a skill tree that improves scoring of a scoring resource.
For example, a skill like ‘Triage Expert’ could reduce the time cost on patient cases or purchasing an ‘On-Site Lab’ could reduce the cost of running bloodwork, which is used to help solve patient cases.
Or purchasing an ‘SEO Optimization’ might improve inbound lead generation.
Identify Resource Producers
Sometimes resources can be invested in assets that generate income, which further plays into strategic decision making by players. In the case of a sales team, investment could be made into a new landing page, and that produces inbound leads. Combined with SEO Optimization, the learner would now have an even greater number of leads that can be converted into sales.
The goal is to have your learners thinking about how to improve the outcomes that map to the organizations goals by making strategic decisions in scenarios similar to what they will encounter in their everyday.
Within the game, there are a few different triggers for when resources are produced, one example being when users complete a training material.
Layout Journey, Progression
Next you want to think about how your learner will progress through the content and how they could progress through the game play. You can design this progression any where from linear, where players have little choice in how they move forward, or give them more agency. This is a balance, as more agency will make for more compelling game play, but will involve more complexity.
Progression is also important for titration, for both the curriculum (increasing difficulty) and game mechanics (to not overwhelm the player with too many choices at once).
You’ll need to think about what different power ups and equipment cost, how quickly learners earn currencies, which skills are learned before others, etc. And also the quests you’ll create to help guide the player.
Develop Narrative
Going through the above steps will actually help give you a rough framework of what your narrative will look like. Starting with a completely blank slate is challenging, but now that you’ve outlined the different ways that learners can earn and spend resources, you should have a clearer idea of what your narrative could look like.
Create a compelling storyline based on a problem or challenge that learners must overcome by using the skills and knowledge they acquire through the game.
Develop characters that are interesting an memorable, particularly your players character, who is ultimately the hero in your story
The setting should also fire up the imagination to stimulate interest and engagement, be it futuristic sci-fi or ancient Rome.
Define Theme, Curate Media
Now that you’ve started to think about the contours of the story, start collecting imagery to use throughout the game. There are really three types of images: user interface icons for buttons, icons for various resources like currencies, materials, badges, etc., and photos or illustrations for story telling.
User interface icons will already have defaults provided, but if you want to customize the theme as much as possible, you are able to upload your own interface icons. These are icons for buttons like to open leaderboard, shop, or forums or user profile.
Icons for resources would be things like gold coins, gems, logs, etc, whatever the resources you’ve defined are. These icons as well as the user interface icons are best kept to 256×256 pixels and transparent PNG’s. These types of icons can often be found in asset packs in the unity store, or from sites like Envato Elements, Adobe Stock, Unity Asset Store, etc.
Photos or illustrations are generally JPG images without transparency, and are used in the story slides, quests and level up popups. These can be found at the same sites as above, and there are often good options found for free at pixabay.com or unsplash.com
One new and powerful way for getting beautiful, low cost illustrations and photo’s is to use one of the new AI Image Generation sites like MidJourney.com or Dall-E2 at labs.openai.com
To give you an idea of the power of these image generators, the image to the right is a generated sample from prompt: “steampunk alchemist lab experiments mad scientist”