Presented at the 2015 Serious Play Conference

1. Imagine you’re walking down the street at night. It’s dark, except for the occasional street lamp.
You notice a figure crawling around under one of these lamps.
You approach and ask "What are you doing?"
They reply "I'm looking for my keys."
You look around in the lamplight, then say, "I don't see any keys. Are you sure you dropped them here?"
"No,” they say, “I lost them over there", and point off out into the darkness.
Of course, your next question is "Well, if you lost them over there, why are you looking over here?“
And they answer, "Because this is where the light is.”
This parable was my first real lesson about working professionally on serious games. It came from an email,
sent to me by a client Lynn Fiellin from Yale. We were collaborating with Lynn’s team at Yale University on
creating a game called PlayForward, a behavior change game with the lofty goal of reducing HIV exposure in
at-risk teens by changing their risky behavior.
This was a few weeks into what was supposed to be a pretty short pre-production process. We were producing
prototypes for minigames to be included in the PlayForward. But Lynn was not happy. What we were designing
did not make her believe we were on the right track.

2. Her parable email continued-
“I would ask that you really closely review what we are trying
to accomplish ….make sure you are looking at where the “keys” ARE, NOT where the light is.”
What Lynn sensed was that, for our team, the light was game design. We could talk about engagement, progression, feedback, theming,
narrative. We understood that stuff. It was our wheelhouse.
Lynn’s email pushed us.

3. “I hope you understand the intent of all this. “ she continued. “You folks have been working very hard, but
I have been tasked with making sure that what we do is what we have said were going to do and that we
produce something that looks good, is fun but MOST importantly has the potential for being EFFECTIVE.”
This email was for me, an epiphany moment that traditional game design was not going to be enough to
create a this kind of game. We needed to develop other tools, processes, and approaches. The games we
were designing were fine as games. But they had to be more, they had to be transformative
Lynn’s email was followed by many conversations with her team, and a complete overhaul of our
preproductio. And it started me on a journey to establish a new process at our studio for these kinds of
games. A process that took us outside the bright light of game design for player entertainment, and into
the less explored, less illuminated world of designing for player transformation.

4. My name is Sabrina Culyba. I am a principal game designer at Schell Games, an independent studio here in
Pittsburgh, and one of my roles there is driving our process for transformational games- games designed to
change players.
Our studio doesn’t just do serious games. In fact, for the first 5 years or so of our existence we worked
primarily on entertainment - downloadable games, mmos, theme park attractions, toys. But for about 6
years, we have been working on more and more transformational games. We have about 100 people right
now and about 2/3rds of our projects are transformational experiences.
For the past 6 months, I’ve been refining & documenting our studio process into a field guide- a handbook
for design leaders at the studio on these kinds of games. If you’re a game designer or a game producer,
put onto one of these games, then you’re going to face some challenges that are different than working on
a traditional games and the field guide is meant to give you the words and tools to answer these
challenges.

5. At the heart of the field guide is what we call our Transformational Framework. It’s part design document,
part research paper, part development compass.
Its purpose is to give everyone on the team, and any partner stakeholders, a shared vision of game’s
strategy for transforming players.
These are the pieces but I’m not going to run through the full framework. Each piece here has evolved from
the problems & questions that come up during development of transformational games and I think it’s
examining these motivating questions that give the right context for the parts of the framework, so I’d like
to share some of those with you.

6. You’ll notice that we use the term “Transformational” at schell games,. We prefer this term for a couple of
reasons- one is it sidesteps the “boring” baggage often associated with things labeled “educational” or
“serious”, I prefer it because it emphasizes not the game, but what happens to the player.
In game development, we have the real world, then we have the game world. And typically we mostly care
about the player here- in the game world, and while they are playing. But in transformational games, we care
about how the player is changed outside the game- we call this transfer. And we want those changes to stick
around- not just at the moment they stop playing, but hopefully for a while- we call this persistence.
Both transfer and persistence are important when we think about transforming the player
Our goal is change. The game is a tool for that change, not an end unto itself.
Coming from entertainment game development, this is a bit of a paradigm shift. In traditional game design, we
mostly think about the player and the player state in terms of the game- we think about them in the game, we
think about them coming back to the game but in transformational game design, we have to prioritize
thinking about players outside the game because that’s where the real change exists.

7. One of the things we’ve found helpful is enumerating the different categorical ways we can transform players.
Having terms for different types of transformation helps us talk about them- about how they are similar or
different. And perhaps even more critically, it allows to reuse them. If we work with a particular type of
transformation on one game, we can talk about ways to take what was successful or not successful in that
game to apply it the next time we are targeting that type of transformation.
So what are the different ways we can change our players? Two that might be the most obvious, especially if
you’re thinking about educational games, are Knowledge and Skill.
Knowledge - The player knows something new after playing. Learning the meaning of vocabulary words would
be a knowledge transformation.
And Skill - The player can do something new or better after playing. Learning to solve algebraic equations
would be a skill transformation.
However, if you really embrace the openness term of “transformational,” a number of other broad categories
of emerge.
Physical - The player’s body is changed after playing. Players improving their resting heart rate would be an
example of a physical transformation.
Disposition - The player’s internal feelings are changed after playing. A reduction in a player’s feelings of stress
would be an example of an disposition transformation.
Behavior - The player acts in a new or changed way after playing. Players choosing healthier foods to eat after
playing your game, this is a behavior transformation.
Belief - The player’s sense of truth is changed after playing. Increasing players’ belief that human trafficking is a
big problem worth tackling with urgency, would be a belief transformation.
Relationships - The player’s social relationships are changed after playing. Getting players to have more trust in
authority figures, this would be a relationship transformation.
Identity - The player’s sense of self is changed after playing. Getting a player to describe themselves as artistic

8. To give an example, one of the minigames we designed with Yale for PlayForward had the goal of teaching kids
to say no to risky peer pressure situations.
Initially, you might think this is a game with a single transformation- a behavior transformation that the player
would choose to say no to risky situations after playing the game. But the reality of creating that behavior
change is that it is dependent and strengthened by a number of other transformations. Yale, who was our
subject matter expert for the game, understood from their knowledge of behavior change that this was a
complex transformation to achieve so we worked with them to break down this high level goal into several,
more targeted transformational goals – we ended up with 4 total - 2 skills, 1 knowledge, and 1 disposition, plus
the main behavioral goal.
Breaking down this minigame’s transformational goals in a more nuanced way had a couple of impacts. First,
this game got more complicated- what could have been a straightforward multiple choice “how should you say
no” kind of thing, ended up being a more multifaceted game. Second, we were able to target specific sub
mechanics of the game to each of these transformational goals. And we were able to connect the approach of
these mechanics more strongly to specific behavioral, cognitive, and learning theories.
We did this same detailed breakdown on each of the minigames in PlayForward and this resulted in a more
informed game design that had a much stronger potential for changing players.

9. These are the categories that we’ve identified at Schell Games. I’m not sure I’d call it the definitive breakdown-
we’ve certainly had discussions & debate about where the line is blurred between different transformational
types. These terms aren’t meant to absolutely discrete labels. The thing I really want to convey to you is that player
change isn’t a monolithic thing and you can use these terms as tools for you to think & talk about how you want to
transform your players in a more nuanced way.
So we’ve talked about types of transformation but why aren’t our players changed already? What’s stopping them
from already having been transformed.

10. Barriers are the answer to another common question you’ll face working on transformational games- what
problems do we actually have to solve to achieve our transformational goals?
To help illustrate what I mean by barriers, let’s look at one of our biggest transformational games- The World
of Lexica.

11. Lexica is an RPG style game with a high level purpose of turning middle schoolers into lifelong readers. On the
surface, the problem the game is trying to solve can be expressed pretty simply- get kids to read more. But to
really understand the problem, we had to turn it around with a powerful word- why. Why do some kids not
read that much? We had to become curious about the problem. Getting kids to read is a persistent problem
in our educational system. Most persistent problems are more complex than they initially appear. Digging into
the research about why kids don’t read revealed a lengthy list of barriers. What was interesting was some of
the most important barriers were not ones that we naively had considered to be part of the problem. Most
people on the team had assumed that reading was not cool, that kids would rather play games than read
books. So we just had to use our game to show them that reading was cool.

12. But one of the biggest barriers, we found out, was access to books- kids who have easy access to books
are more likely to become readers. Another big barrier was time available for voluntary reading and it tied
closely into another barrier- the lack of having experienced reading flow- kids who had experienced
getting absorbed and lost in a book- who experienced reading flow- were more likely to identify as
readers and read more books. Wow. Think about those two barriers and then think about being tasked
with designing an engrossing, large scale game to get kids to become lifelong readers. Every minute kids
spend playing your game is one they are definitely not spending experiencing reading flow. Okay, well at
least we understood that. But let’s keep going because there are some more barriers that are pretty
interesting- Kids don’t understand what kind of books are out there and what they might like. This is
another barrier about a lack of exposure to books. With this barrier, a rich game world that exposes them
to lots of characters and themes from a wide range of books to pique their interest starts to feel like it has
potential to make an impact. And then there’s these two- weak technical reading skills and a lack of
confidence, or feelings of self-efficacy, about their ability to read. Improving mechanical skills and
reinforcing player achievement are things that make sense to tackle with a game. I’m guessing that just
reading this list has the designer wheels turning in your head about what kinds of systems and content
you might include in your game to address these barriers. And with this list you can also see how you
might better prioritize the game systems, investing more resources in systems that have a stronger
relationship to the barriers that define your problem space.
Identifying the barriers, lets you know where your game can help and where you can be effective.
It forces you to question your assumptions about “how you can make the change happen” by asking “why
isn’t this change already happening.”

13. Lexica had 13 barriers in total that we identified. Like player transformations, we’ve found there are common categories of
barriers. It can be a useful exercise to run through this list of barrier types while thinking about your high level problem.
Depending on your domain space, you might be able to take a first guess at the relevant barriers of each type. However,
another great use of these categories is as research keywords. For example, google searching “misconceptions reading” will
reveal many sources, of varying levels of formality, that talk about misconceptions that hinder reading or learning to read.
The beautiful thing about barriers, is that, depending on your domain, there’s a good chance they’ve been studied.
Misconceptions: It’s misunderstood
Social Norms: It’s not “cool”
Relatability: It doesn’t seem approachable/relevant
Complexity: Its scope makes it overwhelming
Difficulty: It’s hard to do or understand
Motivation: It doesn’t seem worth doing
Ignorance: It’s unknown
Accessibility: It’s gated by something else (concepts, tools, time, money, wizards...)
Priority: It doesn’t seem as important as other things
(categorize some of the example barriers from lexica anecdote)
Again, I’m not saying this is the definite list of barriers, but this is our current list and we use it as a tool in our
transformational design process.
Ultimately though what you really want to vet both your barriers and your Player Transformational goals, is a subject matter
expert.

14. If you’re wondering if you should have a subject matter expert working with you in some way on your
transformational game, let me simply say yes. You should.
If you’re wondering when you should bring a subject matter expert into your process, let me say simply say
generally as early as possible.
Working with a subject matter expert at the start of pre-production can help you more quickly and accurately
identify your barriers and transformational goals. An expert during the process can help make sure your
applying research correctly and accurately representing the domain space of your game.
So, assuming you accept those recommendations, we found there are some other practical questions that
come up. How do we setup our relationship with an expert? Do we pay them? Do we meet with them once a
week, once a sprint? Do we have to listen to their opinions? Should we have them produce any of our game’s
content?
Nobody talks much about the options for structuring a subject matter expert relationship with a team and what
we’ve found is that it really does vary project to project. On PlayForward, for example, Yale was our client but
also our experts, so we were constantly meeting with them from the beginning to the end, they did have a lot
of say in the design- final say really, and well, we didn’t have to pay them- they paid us!
By contrast, one of our other projects, Waterbears, a tablet game designed as a tool to help teach systems
thinking skills, .had a different relationship with their experts, meeting with them off and on the need arose for
most of development but mostly drawing from materials from the excellent book on systems thinking that their
expert had written. Later, when the team was working on how the game would be integrated into the
classroom, they then worked with their experts to more directly assist with the creation of example lesson

15. There is no “right” answer for how to structure your SME role, but here are 4 generalized patterns, based on our
experience-
On-demand Consultant: You meet/talk occasionally, driven by the needs of the projects. In this relationship, specific
questions from development will trigger interactions with your Expert. This is sometimes paid, but if it’s infrequent or
informal enough, you might find that compensation isn’t required.
Advisor: You meet /talk on a regularly scheduled basis. This isn’t so much about input into specific questions you know
you have, but more about having an expert available as a sounding board for your direction. An advisor can provide
another perspective during your development process and bring a wealth of expertise. Because this is an ongoing
obligation, an advisor is often compensated in some way.
Reviewer: You share builds or documents with the Experts and they give their feedback. This is more of a reactionary
role. Rather than framing your direction, a reviewer validates or challenges what you are producing. Reviewers, in our
experience generally aren’t paid. Often though they might have a stake in the game- for example, they might be a
teacher interested in using the game in their classroom once it is published.
Partner: In a partner relationship your expert is working closely and regularly with the team. They are formally or
informally considered part of the extended project team. Unless they are your client, they are most likely paid- perhaps
by your client. Sometimes they might even produce some of your content or do detailed review/approvals of content
based on their expertise.
of course, sometimes you’ll need to bleed between these roles or transition from role to role over the course of the
project, but hopefully labels these help you think about the possibility space for working with SME.

16. So, we’ve established that working on a transformational game means wrestling with some pretty significant additional
questions during pre-production- And we’ve also talked about scheduling time (and perhaps doling out money) to get
input from subject matter experts. So, if you’re wondering if there’s an impact on your production, the answer, again, is
yes.
I hope we’ve already established that transformational games require a bigger pre-production effort. It takes time to
learn about the domain space of your game, to understand the transformations you will be targeting and the related
barriers, to look at the relevant research. And all this is in addition to the normal stuff you do during pre-production-
prototyping. When we reset our pre-production process on PlayForward, we ended up effectively more than doubling
our pre-production timeline- and it wasn’t because we had lost that much time going in the wrong direction- it was
because we started to understand that we had a much bigger task to tackle than we had previously thought
Another impact we’ve seen is that transformational games are more complicated explain so that everyone is on the
same page- there’s the game, then there’s what the game is trying to teach or change, then there’s how the game might
be integrated into formal learning environments, then there’s the business model for the game which often differs from
traditional entertainment games. Since there are more and diverse stakeholders in transformational games, you will have
non-subject matter experts, including yourself, trying to explain or understand the transformational aspects, AND you’ll
have non-game people trying to explain or understand the gameplay of your game.

17. One of our current transformational projects is Happy Atoms, whose high level purpose is to “demystify chemistry”. I
recall having a conversation with the project director where he shared his experience being at a conference and
overhearing someone from the studio describing Happy Atoms and making pretty broad claims about what it was going
to teach players- claims that did not line up with the current thinking on the team. This was a one of the moments he
really started to value the transformational framework, because he was able to start using it as a tool to message very
clearly what the goals of happy atoms were.
But even with the framework, this messaging takes time and attention. My point here is not that these things are
unique to transformational games- these are to some extent familiar production challenges- but in transformational
games these challenges are often more difficult and more complex, so plan and buffer accordingly.

18. Another big hit we’ve seen is in content development during production.
We really saw this on The World of Lexica. The game is certainly text heavy, with a lot of written dialog. This dialog had a lot of
masters- on the schell games side, we had writers experienced in writing narrative for games who were focused on
engagement and storytelling through the dialogue, on the client side, we had writers trained in English Language arts who
were focused on the technical language arts aspects, and we were representing character from classic literature, so the
dialogue not only had to be interesting and correctly written, it had to reflect the voice of various works of historical authors.
On top of that, some characters are from books by modern day authors, so at times the original author would also have a
voice in the process. Development of the games dialogue was no simple feat.
Further, this is a game all about reading and writing, so minor text errors, which might have been known shippables in a
different game, were considered critical bugs even late in the QA process.
You will need additional preparation and thought to generate your content.
You will need to incorporate research.
You will need to consider how content connects to assessment.
You will need to consider how content scaffolds learning.
Your content must support your transformation, in addition to being engaging.
You will have more stakeholders involved in the review process.
You will have more feedback. With more voices to consider, it will simply take longer to parse and incorporate all your
feedback.
You will have more feedback from individuals inexperienced with games. Stakeholders who are less familiar with games may
give more challenging feedback. This different perspective can be very valuable, but it can also slow agreement and approval
of game content.
You will have additional standards for your content:
You may have more rigorous qualitative standards.
You may have more rigorous factual standards.

19. A complaint you often hear leaved against serious games is that the production value isn’t there. That they don’t
seem to have the quality and depth of gameplay or narrative or visuals that you see in entertainment games. Why is
this? You hear lots of casual statements of cause. People who work on educational games are more academic and
don’t have good game production skills. They don’t understand how important “fun” is to a game. Or, these games
are constricted by the environment in which they are design to be used and sold- that if you design for the classroom,
your the standards are much lower because you just have to be more interesting than a lesson plan or a test.
So, now you’re going to lead the design on a transformational game. And you think to yourself, that’s not going to be
us. We’re going to make a kick-ass game- it’s not going to look educational, it’s going to have a really rich feature set,
it’s going to be fully animated 3d characters with completely voiced dialog, all the things that other people don’t
bother to do on transformational games- we understand, we have the game development skills, we can do it.
Let’s pretend you have two buckets of resources- one is to make a traditional entertainment game, the other is to
make a transformational game.
If we’re spending more of the transformational game’s bucket on a longer preproduction, a subject matter expert, and
a more costly content process, well, the remaining resources we have left with which to build the game- the resources
from which we draw our general game development- is obviously smaller If you’re going to try to hit the same
production value as the game portion of the entertainment game, you’re going to need more resources. Something
has to give. This is one of the reasons why we see production values dip in transformational games. Of course, some
project swing the opposite way, they do less work for the transformational aspects and really focus on the game, and
they may end up with a game that is more modestly transformational but is closer to the production value of an
entertainment game.

20. Oh, and by the way, the reality is you’re probably going to end up trying your best to do more for less, because budgets for
transformational games generally tend to be smaller than those for entertainment games.
This stuff isn’t easy. When we extended the preproduction time on PlayForward, it was painful because we knew that on
some level we were robbing game development to feed transformation. We were shifting resources to focus on things we
had less experience with and that had more unknowns. That’s scary for producers and project leaders. Ultimately we are
happy with the balance we were able to strike, but it did not come without compromises.
It may sound like I’m the harbinger of doom and gloom, But actually, understanding this really makes me value everything
that we’ve learned at Schell Games and the process we’ve collectively been able to establish for these kinds of games,
because it is this collective cumulative wisdom that helps us mitigate these production challenges. And when you hit them,
you don’t feel blindsided- it’s part of the job. If the job were easy, it wouldn’t be fun.

21. One nice thing about working on a transformational games is that it can bring a layer of objectivity and
motivation to your design. Ultimately you have a target goal and you are designing to achieve this goal, and you
have a lot of powerful constraints. The longer you work in design, the more I think you appreciate how
embracing constraints can empower your design thinking.
If these challenge don’t excite you, prepare to be frustrated and disillusioned with transformational game
development.
But let’s not forget that we are changing players, and thus, at least in some small way, changing the world, in
theory for the better.
Hopefully, if you’re working on these kinds of games, you find that as motivating and inspiring as I do.

22. So speaking of remembering that we are changing players- one of the most common questions our teams
wrestle with working on transformational games is the question of the game’s efficacy. How do we know if our
game is working?
There is an idealized standard for transformational games, and this is rigorous scientific evaluation on their
efficacy. This requires collecting data to study. So how do we collect this data?
In traditional game development we have kind of have it easy. Since we mostly care about the player in the
game, we can look directly at their actions or inactions in the game to answer the questions we really care
about:
Do players want to keep playing?
Is the game too hard anywhere?
Do player know what to do next?
Are players incentivized enough to buy our items?
Gathering the answers to these questions is pretty straightforward and it involves a familiar tool- analytics. We
track the actions and state changes of the players in the game. We can even do somewhat complex analysis of
our analytics- If we see most players complete levels 1 & 2 on the first or second try, while on average take 5
times to beat level 3, and that a higher percentage of players drop out at level 3, we can pretty strongly infer
that level 3 is too difficult and is causing players to quit.
So, can we use analytics for collecting data about transformation? For some kinds of transformation, like
knowledge and the more mechanical skills, analytics of a players performance in the game can get you the data
you need to get insight into changes in your player. If the player answers a question wrong at the start of the
level but gets it right at the end of the level, you can infer they gained some knowledge.

23. But let’s look back at what it means to be transformational-
what if your transformational goal isn’t something players can truly directly do in the game? What if your goal, for
example is a behavior transformation that that players are more likely to choose healthier snacks at lunchtime. Unless
you have some way to track your player’s actual eating habits, it’s going to be hard for your in-game analytics to tell you
how successful that transformation was.
And what if the transformation operates on a totally different time scale- for example, you want to delay your average
player’s first sexual encounter- which was one of the goals on the Yale PlayForward game. How are you going to know if
you are successful about a transformation that may not be clear until years into the future, long after the game is over?

24. Collecting this data on player transformation is not analytics, but assessment- assessment of the actual transformation that results from the game. These two things are not the
same. Analytics, you can do it better or worse, of course, but generally we as game developers are equipped to do it.
On the other hand, assessment of things like behaviors, dispositions, beliefs, identity, etc is not something most game studios are equipped to do. There are ways to do these things
but it often involves reaching outside the game- observation, interviews, performance reviews, surveys- and we don’t typically have the resources to track players outside the
game.
Of course, we can do some level of playtesting and sometimes we do informal versions of these assessment methods during our playtest.
But on top of just collecting data, rigorous evaluation involves adhering to specific formal process and standards.
So, rigorous evaluation done right is not cheap, fast, or easy. On PlayForward, Yale set out from the beginning to do a formal two year evaluation on the efficacy of the game that
involved detailed assessment of player’s change outside the game. They’re just finishing the first year of that study and the initial results will be published this fall. When we tell
people how Yale’s is studying PlayForwards’ efficacy, I’ve been surprised by the frequent incredulous reaction- you mean, you’re going to have real data about if the game works or
not? You mean, professional researchers are evaluating the game? It took a few times of getting this reaction to really understand how unusual this is. Most transformational game
projects don’t have the budget & resources set aside to do this level of assessment & evaluation.
So this creates a predicament. Our developers want to believe in the product they are creating. They want to be able to confidently stand behind any claims we make about the
game transforming players. But it’s unlikely their game is going to be the subject of a formal study. Should we give up on calling these games transformational? Should we not list
them under the educational category in the app store? Should we avoid having schools use these games? Are we making false claims?
This question can wear on your soul and it can demoralize teams. How do we deal with this issue?

25. One solution is to reframe your game’s purpose. Recently, Schell Games released our game Waterbears through GlassLab and the app store. This is a systems thinking game- but the team
was very careful not to claim that players would learn systems thinking by playing the game. Instead, the game is designed as a tool to teach systems thinking. Numerous design decisions
were made with this distinction in mind- you can play the game on your own and you will be interacting with systems thinking concepts but there’s no explanation and no reflection about
systems thinking in the game. Instead, the game is designed to be a tool for teachers to illustrate and provide hands on examples of systems thinking concepts in the classroom. And to this
end, the game has accompanying lesson plans for teachers to use and adapt. The team knew that there already was a powerful structure that could teach systems thinking- teachers.
Designing the game to be useful for teachers turned out to be a powerful framing of the project’s goal. It’s much easier to show factually that teachers say your game is useful for teaching
systems thinking than to determine if it directly improves systems thinking.
So intentionally designing for something easier to assess is one strategy.
But we don’t always want to do this. So, how can we think about evaluating the efficacy of our game if this isn’t the case.

26. Jesse Schell, our studio ceo, wrote about this in the second edition of his book Art of Game Design. He proposed 5 levels of efficacy evaluation, which I’ve
adapted here:
Instinctual Rationalization: You have some instinctive reasoning about why the game might be effective
Theory Basis: The game uses prior research as a basis for its design and how it achieves player transformation.
Expert Review & Validation: The game has the endorsement of experts who vouch for the games effectiveness.
Anecdotes and Informal Testing: The game has been informally used and there is anecdotal data about its effectiveness
Formal Research Data: The game has been formally studied and data generated that informs claims about the game’s efficacy.
Looking at these levels, one of the encouraging things is that even if we can’t do formal research, we can do 1-4. Naturally we bring our instincts to the project,
using a process like the transformational framework helps us establish a thoughtful basis in prior research and theory, integrating subject matter experts to get
their professional validation, and informal playtesting of the game or having people actually using it after publication can help us gather anecdotal feedback on
the efficacy.
So, if you’re hoping to have rigorous, scientific proof about your game’s efficacy, be prepared to spend a lot of money (or hope some researcher really wants to
do it for you) and be prepared to wait a long time. We completed PlayForward in 2012 and like I said, the first results will be published this fall, 3 years later.
If you’re willing consider other ways of evaluating efficacy within the resources of your development team, there are options. You can set yourself up for success
by using a strong, early transformational process that includes a framework similar to the one I’ve described here and brings in input from subject matter
experts.

27. So this has been some of what we’ve been learning and extracting at schell games from our collective
experience.
The field guide I’m working on covers this content and more, in greater detail. The field guide is a work
in progress but, like we do for all our projects, we are actively playtesting it.
I mentioned how our Happy Atoms project team used the transformational framework and field guide
to better communicate to people outside the team what their project was actually trying to
accomplish. But it did much more than that for the team internally. The project director working on
Happy Atoms was new to leading transformational game development and he was taking on a very
ambitious project with a digital experience as well as a physical toy component, also this project was
funded by a grant, which comes with its own special requirements. When he took on the helm of
happy atoms, we knew we had a physical toy that was compelling for talking about how molecules
form but the scope of the goals of project was a pretty nebulous – teach something- anything?- about
chemistry. They didn’t really have a client driving them. So, a challenging transformational project- the
perfect opportunity to field test the field guide. So what was the impact for the team? They used the
field guide to drive their pre-production process and it helped them figure out what they needed to
prioritize.
Just learning about the types of transformations outlined helped them understand the range of types
transformations that were possible and by looking closely on the barriers relevant to learning
chemistry, they were able to narrow their focus to a couple types of clear transformational goals and
to feel confident that their direction was going to address relevant barriers in the subject of
chemistry. This rallied the team because it felt so much more achievable. It let them cut scope in
smart ways so that they could focus on the features and content that really mattered for their specific

28. The framework from the field guide also faced an early real world test at a critical production moment on The
World of Lexica game. Lexica was originally conceived as a multiplayer, online enabled game where players would
actively play through the game story with their peers. Around the same time we were starting to formalize the
framework as a process for our studio, we also learned that Lexica wouldn’t be able to rely on internet
connectivity in schools or many homes of the student players. This clearly had big implications for the game
design- what should we do?
What we did was turn to the newly created transformational framework for Lexica.
What were we losing, transformationally, if we took out online multiplayer?
There was a barrier about the importance of addressing social norms perceptions about reading, by creating a
culture of readers. On the surface it seemed like losing the social multiplayer was going to hurt our ability to
address this barrier. However, looking more at our transformational framework as a whole, we were able to make
a strong pivot. - what if Lexica was not primarily an online social game, but a single player, episodic game?
Could we create a sort of “water cooler” real world social interaction between players through the release of
episodes over a school semester, like a tv show season? After all, one big advantage we had is that we knew
students would be surrounded for 8 hours a day with peers who all had the same tablets with the same game
installed on it. And this type of social interaction outside the game, had a better chance of bleeding over into
discussions with peers who weren’t already playing.
And, by moving to single player, we could shift the gameplay so that the player had a party, not of peers, but of
book characters. This created many more opportunities for story moments with characters and so strengthened
the ability of the game to engage players emotionally to entice them to try various books. And finally, because
the game had built in breaks between episodes, there were natural pauses provided space for players to explore
any books that piqued their interest during the game story so far. We realized we could perhaps do more for our
transformation by intentionally nudging players out of the game.

29. In sharing parts of the process we have been iterating on at Schell Games, I don’t mean to declare this is
the right way to do things or the only way to think about this problem space. But I do hope you’ve found
some of what I’ve shared useful, and that it brings a little more light in our collective search for the keys to
successfully developing games that effectively change players.

30. If you want to continue the conversation about anything I’ve shared here, you can reach me via email.
While the field guide isn’t available publicly yet, we’ve published a few early pages from the current draft on the Schell
Games blog and plan to continue doing so, and I’ll be posting these slides there as well.
Also, I’m looking to include anecdotal stories from other developers working on transformational game- if you have a
story that illustrates an insight or pitfall for developing these types of games, please get in touch.