Serious games case study: the RPG that could save lives (original) (raw)

Getting children to cross the road safely has never been easy. In the seventies, we had David Prowse dressed up as the Green Cross Code man, desperately cashing in on the popularity of the Superman films (and Prowse's role in Star Wars, of course) to grab the attention of parka-wearing youngsters. More recently, there was the phone video ad, which showed realistic footage of a teenager's road accident seemingly recorded on a friend's mobile.

These measures have been reasonably effective. According to the Department for Transport, which has an ongoing THINK! road safety campaign, the number of children killed on Britain's roads has fallen by more than 50% since the mid-1990s. However, there is still work to be done, especially with the 'tweenager demographic: in 2008, 17 children aged between 10 and 12 were killed on roads while more than 2,500 were injured.

So how do you talk to these kids? Increasingly, the answer does not seem to be television. Over the past decade we've seen toy and fizzy drink manufacturers increasingly moving their marketing online, with ever more effective interactive offerings. Public services, charities and other benevolent organisations are learning that if you really want to engage a young audience, forget the idiot box - make them a game.

On November 19, the Department for Transport launched Code of Everand, an MMORPG designed to help children learn, and understand the importance of, safe road crossing. The fantasy-themed game takes place in the land of Everand, which is criss-crossed with 'spirit channels' - dangerous lanes of energy where monsters lurk. Players take on the role of Pathfinders who must safely traverse these lanes by looking left and right, spotting creatures and defeating them with a range of attacks and spells.

It's an ingenious device, effectively equating road crossing with the random battles that happen throughout traditional RPG environments. Players must also accrue Concentration Points, which aid in the defeat of enemies - a reference, of course, to the importance of paying attention when crossing busy streets.

Although it sounds overtly didactic, this is an impressively rich RPG in its own right. There are dozens of attacks to collect, each more effective on different types of enemy. Talking to NPCs opens up quests, just as in a standard role-playing game, and once you've completed them you earn cash which can be spent on on an array of clothing, armour and weaponry options. The inventory is impressively complex, providing a wealth of customisation possibilities, and progress is auto-saved so you can pick up the game whenever you're in front of a computer with a web browser.

Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin of Area/Code, the developer behind Code of Everand.

There's a social element too. Inhabitants can communicate with each other via a series of set conversational phrases, and can accompany each other on quests - apparently some tasks can only be completed in this way.

Based in New York, developer Area/Code is an experienced operator in the casual, social and pervasive gaming sectors. More used to working with advertising agencies and media firms on campaigns for the likes of Nike, Nokia and MTV, this is a cutting edge operation. And it has certainly taken the project seriously, as managing director Kevin Slavin explains, "A team of 27 people worked on the game, and that's not including subcontractors. It was about a one-year development period. Some of that time was spent building the game, but it's not a linear development process. The finished product reflects a lot of testing, evaluation, and iteration, all to make sure that the game does everything we want it to do."

But wouldn't it have just been easier to bung out a quick Frogger clone with the amphibian road hopper replaced by a hapless teen? Didn't they feel the need to communicate the message more explicitly? "Our underlying philosophy regarding is that good games are implicitly educational," explains Slavin. "Chess can teach you about logic, football can teach you about teamwork, real-time strategy games can teach you about planning. All games can teach you about how interactive systems behave, about succeeding through discipline and practice, and about creative problem-solving.

"The opportunity is to harness the ways that games build, influence and reinforce cognitive skills, and apply that to a particular problem or subject domain. First, the heart of the game addresses the subject. What is the player actually doing when they engage with your underlying game system? This moment-to-moment experience does the heavy lifting for pedagogical goals; they're not simply in the game's representational surface."

The aim then, is an almost unconscious assimilation of the underlying skills, and it's something we're seeing in other approaches to pedagogical gaming - for example, the experimental projects created by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Indeed, the experience of playing Everand will be hugely familiar to anyone who's experience a browser-based RPG like Pardus or Fallen Sword. And according to lead developer Frank Lantz, it is from these, and more tradition RPG titles, that the company drew inspirations, rather than from the 'serious games' sector. "We looked at a lot of the kid-focused MMOs, including RuneScape, Maple Story, Dofus and of course we are influenced by World of Warcraft and other high-end MMOs. I would also point to J-RPGs like Dragon Quest and Etrian Odyssey as influences on our turn-based battle-system."

Two weeks after the launch there were over 20,000 subscribers. Within 48 hours, users were making YouTube videos of the game (surely as reliable a barometer of approval as you're going to get these days). "What we've seen in the data is that most players spend a half-hour or so playing at any given time, most commonly when school lets out," says Slavin. "There are extremes... one kid spent over 31 hours playing in a week - we don't recommend that, but we think it speaks well to the power of games to engage players. If they are going to be playing something that much, better that it's a game that produces cognitive changes around real-world safety..."