Games that Change Behaviors

One of the primary reasons educators get excited about video games is the ability of games to change player behaviors.  From an educator’s perspective, changing behaviors is one of the most difficult challenges we face when, say, we teach a course for 16 weeks at a university.

I recently started playing an iPad game (also available on the iPhone, but does not play nearly as well) called Gun Brothers.  It’s a fairly straight forward shooter, where you take on wave after wave of exceedingly stronger foes.

From smokinapps.com

Gun Brothers represents a great deal of interesting design elements that include:

  • Friend integration.  I can’t play online/co-op with friends, but what I can do is bring a friend’s character into my game instead of the generic NPC that helps you out.  This really encourages you and your friend to continue playing, because the more powerful both characters become, the easier it is to progress in the game.
  • RPG-like leveling system, but very lightweight.  You gain XP, which opens up more armor and weapons as you level-up.  Weapons have a damage stat, as well as an RPM stat that dictates how fast the weapon will fire.  Armor typically contains three stats; Offense, Defense and Speed.
  • Micro-transaction model. The game has simple currency in gold coins, but some of the items can only be purchased with ‘war bucs’.  With most micro-transaction models, I can simply enter my credit card and get x number of war bucs for a fixed dollar amount.

Now the micro-transaction model has a little bit of a twist.  If you opt not to simply enter a credit card and pay for your in-game war bucs, you can click on various advertisements for other apps, download the apps, and run them once to receive war bucs in gun brothers.  Occasionally between levels, you might receive a message “Download and install Farmville to receive 12 war bucs”.

So if you’re like me, you’re not a fan of web-based advertisements.  I can’t recall the last time I clicked on one (at least on purpose) on a website.  Yet last weekend, I sat around for 30 minutes, downloading and running all sorts of iPad apps to get my hands on some war bucs for better armor and weapons, totally changing my typical behavior when it comes to advertisements. I did actually find some good apps as well, like a real estate app and a recipe/cooking app.  Most of the other apps I simply deleted after running once for my war bucs.

What can we borrow from this model in terms of education?  Gun Brothers can be enjoyed without any war bucs, but a player’s progress would likely be much slower.  Is there a way we could ‘incentivize’ certain things in education in a similar manner, changing our students’ behaviors to engage in additional content in some way?

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