chocolate covered broccoli

This note last modified September 21, 2022

Merely adding gameplay to a boring task won’t make it fun or effective, just like adding chocolate to broccoli won’t make it tasty. You need to your gameplay to align with and support the themes that you are trying to portray via endogenous design

For example, Review Of Trends In Serious Gaming For Education-Young found that a history game was ineffective. The game added the historical information as “interesting tidbits” on top of the game, rather than having the history be important to the gameplay itself.

transformational games need thoughtful implementation
- A transformational game# needs to properly enmesh transformational objectives with gameplay, which is a difficult task.
stealth learning
- Well designed stealth learning can avoid chocolate covered broccoli, but this may lead to players not properly associating in game learning with the real world.
educational games
- But regardless, educational games are great. I’m not talking about frog fractions (and honestly, a lot of research shows that those kinds of games are ineffective anyways), but things more along the lines of explorables.
Review Of Trends In Serious Gaming For Education-Young
- Avoid chocolate covered broccoli
Intrinsic Skill Atoms For Gameful Design
- edutainment that merely uses games to cover up distasteful parts of learning (chocolate covered broccoli) has historically failed. All activities can be motivating and enjoyable, but the system needs to be holistically created.
Interviews With Edugame Designers-Isbister
- No chocolate covered broccoli
Educational_Game_Design_Narrative-Chaima
- Why have games with narrative failed in the past to improve learning? It’s because narrative elements are unrelated to the gameplay or subject. It also makes the game longer, which should be accounted for. (tag: chocolate covered broccoli)