Your Essay is in Another Castle
From the very beginning, video games were designed to make you fail.
Think about it for a second; how many times has that little Italian plumber been burned, smashed, drowned, eaten alive, and bombed?
Poor Mario.
I never thought about it as a kid, but there was a huge team of designers testing and plotting every little point in Super Mario Bros. to figure out exactly what would happen when an audience got their hands on it.
The creator of "Super Mario Bros." discusses designing the game's first level.
They knew not to make it too hard or too easy; they knew to reward the player at the end of each level with some fun music and a mysterious castle.
They knew they needed to make catchy music to keep you interested and change up the look and feel of each level so they felt fresh. They knew that you would fail and they built the game with this in mind. Ultimately, you would find the kidnapped princess and then face the ultimate failure after defeating the evil dinosaur Bowser only to discover:
“our princess is in another castle”.
Jamed Paul Gee from
'Good Games, Good Learning"
Good video games incorporate good learning principles, principles supported by current research in Cognitive Science (Gee 2003, 2004). Why? If no one could learn these games, no one would buy them—and players will not accept easy, dumbed down, or short games. At a deeper level, however, challenge and learning are a large part of what makes good video games motivating and entertaining. Humans actually enjoy learning, though sometimes in school you wouldn’t know that. (Gee)
James Paul Gee discusses connections between game systems and learning systems.
James Paul Gee discusses connections between game systems and learning systems.
