User interfaces (UIs), Heads Up Displays (HUDs), quest logs, mini maps, objective markers, skill trees, character stat trackers… all these game elements (and more!) can be considered different ways of visualizing progress within a game. These visualizations can serve many purposes, including orienting players to their position in the game’s world or story and affording players a sense of achievement as they complete objectives and challenges the game offers. These are vitally important functions because, when operating in a digital world whose rules are not always the same as our own, at any given moment the player likely knows only the information the game makes a point to share with them. The digital classroom is much the same, demanding we be as explicit as possible with information in the absence of more informal ways of sharing it. Especially in the absence of traditional grading schemes, some of the easiest data points to lose track of in an online learning environment are indications of progress - both a sense of orientation within the course’s material and a sense of having grown or achieved something within the course. So which kinds of progress information can be useful or motivating for students, and how can we best keep students informed and aware of their progress in your class? Here are some of the ways games keep players in the know about their progress.
Orienting players to worlds and objectives
In games as in learning, knowing where you’ve been and where you’re going helps you appreciate where you are. In order to orient players to the game and what they can and should do within it, most games include a User Interface (UI) of some sort which organizes and communicates this information. This can include both graphics overlaid over the gameplay (a Heads Up Display, or “HUD”) and menus which pause and separate us from the gameplay. Let’s consider a few progress-tracking interface elements that help players stay oriented in the game:
Maps of the world. Maps are especially important in nonlinear open-world games where the shape of the world does not inherently guide a player through the world in an intended order. While classes are rarely structured as nonlinear, it can never hurt to provide students with a map of the content, their location within that map, and an intended or suggested order to work through that content. This is a purpose often - but not always! - served by a syllabus. Consider, for example, what information (if any) your syllabus gives about why it proceeds through its content in the order it does. Though instructors often put lots of thought into how the topics in a course are ordered and how the assignments and materials for each session connect, these thought processes are rarely conveyed on the syllabus. Giving students a way to peek behind this curtain can help them organize and orient themselves in the material. Consider also giving students more abstract maps of how a week or a unit within your course is structured - perhaps Monday is review from last week, Wednesday is the introduction of new material, and Friday involves applying new material to practical situations. Understanding the general rhythms of your course can help orient students just as much as understanding content-specific transitions and connections.
Quest logs and active quests. A little more abstractly, games can orient players to what they can and should be doing through the use of quest logs. Quest logs are centralized lists of tasks or missions players can or should complete; in addition to reminding players of which quests are available to them, quest logs often collate information about how to complete each quest, what level or set of skills the quest might require, and why each quest is necessary or important. In games which give players choices about whether and when to complete certain tasks, quest logs help players keep track of their options and make educated decisions about what to do next. Though quest logs are often tucked away in popup menus within games, many games include the player’s “active quest” as a permanent element of the User Interface, reminding them of their current objective and any optional sub-objectives they can complete. Consider if there are ways to include something like this “active quest” element somewhere students will check - perhaps recap the major milestones and assignments in a given week using a scheduled weekly announcement, or reserve an area on your course homepage to be repeatedly updated with the new objectives for each unit.
Maps of meaningful choices. Most abstractly of all, games have found clever ways to map sets of meaningful choices that they present to players. For example, in roleplaying games produced by the developer Bioware, players make important decisions that affect the outcome of in-game events by choosing certain dialogue options during conversations. Over the years, Bioware has experimented with different ways of communicating to players the importance and potential consequences of the choices they are making. This has primarily involved visually organizing and labelling certain dialogue options. For example, dialogue options that will advance the conversation are placed on the right side of the dialogue “wheel,” while options that will allow the player to get more information are placed on the wheel’s left side. Certain dialogue choices are marked with colors and graphics that give information about them - blue text might indicate a pacifistic resolution to a conversation, while red text indicates the option may include violence. Especially in cases where students are actively making decisions about your course - which final project option to pick, or which topic to choose for their essay - consider making explicit as much information you can about the potential affordances and consequences of those choices. For example, in the case of final projects, consider outlining for students how the work for each option may differ - does one require more historical research, while another requires gathering field data? Does one demand the advancement of one well-developed idea versus several cursory ones? Giving students this data can not only help them make meaningful choices, but also reflect on the choices they’ve made after the fact.
Signalling achievement and personal development
In the absence of traditional grading schemes, finding creative ways to signal students’ achievement and progress has become more important than ever as a motivating factor. One of the things games are best at is motivating us to play them - considering games are totally optional to play, a lot of people spend a lot of time on them! Here’s a few ways games motivate players by reminding them of their progress:
Achievements. Most obviously, a sense of progress and achievement can be conveyed in a course in the same way it is in games, namely through “achievements,” public badges which acknowledge the player reaching a milestone or achieving a feat in-game. Though some achievements are awarded for doing things mandatory to complete the game, they often recognize and reward players going above and beyond mandatory gameplay, whether that means experimenting with new choices or playstyles, completing the game faster or more skillfully than is strictly required, going out of their way to experience all the game has to offer, or even just sticking with the game longer than is typical. Achievements can be a great way to both inspire students to move beyond the mandatory and help them recognize and appreciate the many different ways they engage with your course.
Progress bars and non-evaluated stats. Even in the absence of formalized achievements recognizing certain behaviors or actions, you’d be surprised how often and how easily players invent informal achievements for themselves based on what they find motivating about the game. Given access to data and statistics about their gameplay, players will frequently invent their own achievements or challenges to complete. For example, many games give players access to “completion percentages” - indications of what percentage of the game’s content they have completed. This has led to the phenomenon of “completionists” - players who are motivated to experience everything a game has to offer and will play until they have “100 percented” a game (i.e. completed 100% of what the game has to offer, as measured by the game.) Players being able to tell how long it took them to beat a game has inspired some to become “speedrunners” - players who compete against others (or even just themselves!) to complete a game as quickly as possible. While certain kinds of information about students’ engagement with your course might seem superfluous because it doesn’t feed into their grade performance, giving students information like this can give them the opportunity to independently develop motivations, goals, and challenges within the framework of the course.
[Curious about speedrunning and how it might apply to your course? Check out our previous post on speedrunning and pedagogy!]
Skill trees. Another common way to measure a player’s growth over the course of a game is through explicit visualizations of their stats and capabilities. In roleplaying games, which definitionally involve players improving their characters gradually and uniquely over the course of the game, this often takes the form of a “skill tree” - a branching chart which shows which skills and attributes players have earned through their hard work, and allows them to choose new skills and attributes each time they earn the opportunity to. Skill trees serve many simultaneous purposes. First, they give players a visual indicator of progress and growth - while at first many parts of the chart are greyed out and inaccessible, over the course of the game players will gain access to more and more of it, their character’s growth reflected in the increasing colorfulness and accessibility of more parts of the tree. Second, skill trees help players recognize the ways in which skills are connected and build upon one another. Skill trees are often structured such that players initially have very few choices about what skills and attributes to acquire, and must unlock small, simple prerequisite skills before they gain the option of unlocking more complex and powerful skills. As players revisit the skill tree over and over throughout the game, they develop a better sense of which skills they want and need to succeed and which lower-level skills they need to develop to get there. Finally, skill trees give players a map of meaningful choices (like we talked about in section two), which has the effect of giving players greater motivation to earn lower-level skills in order to access particular higher-level skills they want.
How you can help students visualize progress in your online course
Interested in adding some visualizations of progress to your online course? Here are a few ideas to get you started:
Class skill tree. Create a visual “skill tree” that illustrates the skills they’re learning in your course, how they build on one another, and - if applicable - how choosing to pursue different sets of skills within the class will result in different outcomes and further skills being available to them. You might consider allowing students to choose from several “tracks” within the class that require slightly different skills to be mastered - for example, different “tracks” within an English course which trains students pursuing graduate study in the academic conventions of the discipline, and offers an alternative route for students interested in English as a supplement or compliment to their main studies, training them instead on cross-discipline applications like the medical humanities.
Student-generated achievements. Point students to where info is stored and then ask them to come up with a non-grade-oriented, measurable goal for a unit - something like responding more than is required to other students’ discussion posts, or re-doing a particular practice assignment until they can do it successfully in under a certain amount of time. You might give students a few ideas or specific “achievements” to choose from and then gradually require students to set their own goals. Ask students to publicly declare the achievement they’re aiming for and give the achievement a name that can be used coursewide to indicate that particular achievement. When students meet their goals, be sure to make their acquisition of these “achievements” widely visible somewhere in the class’s LMS environment - bragging rights are a big part of what makes such achievements motivating! Avoid attaching achievements to grades, as this undoes their power to help students think beyond point values and letter grades.
This page was created by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning's "gameLab," which works to develop innovative pedagogy and digital tools inspired by games and game design. For more information on the Learning Lab and its goals, visit its website.