The Lightbox | Filament Games

Dr. Matt Marino in a WSU classroom discussion

Q&A With Matt Marino

Dr. Matthew Marino took the time to answer some questions about himself, Universal Design for Learning, and technology in special education. Matt is Assistant Professor of Special Education at Washington State University and is currently contributing his expertise to Filament's GILS and GIPS games. Turns out he's also a cheese enthusiast.

EM: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be such a key figure in special education?

MM: I don’t really consider myself a “key figure” but I would say that I’m making a unique contribution to special education. For years students with special needs were taught in self-contained classrooms and excluded from general education courses. Now, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act stipulates that students with special education needs are included in general education classrooms to the greatest extent possible. This means that teachers need to consider instruction and assessment options for a diverse range of students including students with disabilities, struggling readers, English language learners, and students who are gifted.

My background is distinctive because I have a diverse range of teaching experiences ranging from alternative high school settings for students with special education needs to teaching general education science, technology, and social studies in an inclusive general education middle school. I also was a learning specialist for college students with disabilities and a professional development center coordinator at the University of Connecticut. Those experiences, combined with my degrees in special education, general education, and pre-veterinary animal science, give me a different perspective than the majority of my colleagues in special education.

EM: What's your history with video games, in and out of an educational context?

MM: Now you’re making me feel old. My first video game console was the Atari 2600 with the wood veneer finish. I was probably in 3^rd grade. Back in those days we had games like Pac-Man, Pitfall, and Space Invaders. I can remember my mom giving me a hard time because I used to break a lot of joysticks and we didn’t have the money to replace them… or maybe she just told me that to get me to stop playing! More recently, I’ve been playing Kinect Adventures with my daughter and Forza 3 with my wife. Red Dead Redemption is one of my favorites and I just started playing L.A. Noire.

As for games in education, throughout my career I found that technology-based learning experiences, especially video games, were extremely engaging for all students, including those with special needs. The problem was that most games did not include evidence-based instruction practices. The work I am doing with Filament Games is so exciting because we have an unprecedented opportunity to develop video games that meet the unique learning needs of ALL students both in and outside of the classroom.

EM: You're collaborating with Filament on a number of projects: the U.S. Department of Education-funded (and STEM Challenge-winning!) You Make Me Sick, the pilot game in our Game-enhanced Life Science (GILS) suite, and the National Science Foundation-supported Prisoner of Echo, which is the first in a series of Game-enhanced Physical Science (GIPS) games. Can you talk a little about your history with Filament and your essential role in developing these games?

MM: I met Dan Norton about two years ago and he introduced me to Dan White. There was a natural synergy among us and we decided to use our respective talents to put together some really cutting edge grant proposals. Apparently other people were as excited about the projects as we are since several of them were funded. I was responsible for articulating the need for the project, education design aspects of the games and the research design to determine their efficacy. It has been a ton of work but we’re getting closer to our objectives and always improving. Having a partnership like this really benefits everyone, especially students and teachers.

EM: We're building Universal Design for Learning concepts into each of these games in order to support and engage different kinds of learners. Can you explain UDL in a nutshell?

MM: UDL is a framework for designing educational environments that are accessible to a broad range of students. David Rose and Jenna Gravel presented a useful analogy that I’ll summarize here. UDL is the educational equivalent to a Global Positioning System. The GPS presents the user with navigation options like all highway travel, scenic byways, stop for a burger, find a hotel, etc. in order to reach the final destination in a way that is most meaningful and efficient to the traveler.

With UDL, the learning objectives are the final destination. We include a number of options in every video game so that the learner can choose their path to reach the learning goals. For example, we include narrative overlays of all of the text so that students who struggle with reading can hear complex vocabulary read to them. This minimizes the cognitive load students must expend decoding and comprehending text. Other students can disable the audio and read it for themselves. UDL is based on three core principles that are designed to stimulate different areas of the brain and enhance learning. You can learn more about it at http://cast.org/udl/index.html.

EM: I've been reading some statistics. 73% of students with disabilities score below basic in eighth grade science, and 64% score below basic in math, compared with 38% and 23% of their peers. It seems like there's really a wedge driven into the achievement gap between kids with disabilities and their fellow students in middle school, specifically. What causes this?

MM: I’ll address this by talking about students with specific learning disabilities because they represent the largest category of students who receive special education services. One of the problems we’ve had for the last 35 years in special education is what’s called the severe discrepancy model of eligibility determination. In many states students have to demonstrate a large difference between their cognitive ability, which is typically measured by an IQ test, and their academic performance, which is measured with one of a few common norm referenced or criteria referenced assessments. Essentially it is a “wait to fail” model. Once the students are significantly behind their peers we go through a process to determine if they should have an individual education program or IEP as it is called in the schools. This provides students with additional education resources. The problem is that once the students are that far behind their peers it is extremely difficult for them to catch up. We’ve begun to make changes to the severe discrepancy model with a technique called “Response to Intervention”. Unfortunately, we do not have enough data to know how to do it well or what the impact will be on special education.

Small achievement differences between students in the primary grades magnify as the students get older. In fourth grade, students go through a transition from learning to read to reading to learn. Their books also change from narrative to expository texts. By sixth grade students are expected to be able to learn from extremely complex expository science texts where more new vocabulary is introduced in the one year than in the first year of a high school foreign language class. In middle school the achievement gap between students with disabilities and their peers increases substantially because the majority of the students with learning disabilities do not have the reading capacity to learn in the same way as their peers.

It’s important to note here that a learning disability, while invisible, is not a function of students being lazy or unable to learn. fMRI scans of students’ brain patterns during reading tasks provide clear evidence that students’ with learning disabilities process text in a manner that is remarkably different from their proficient reading peers. They can learn complex concepts and vocabulary. They just need to have it taught in a different way. Video games are a logical alternative approach.

Another reason for the dramatic differences in students’ performance on the assessments is the text-based nature of the tests. Think about it this way. If you have a student who struggles with reading and you give him or her a paragraph or two of complex science or mathematics vocabulary with intentionally distracting information followed by a complicated question about the reading, the chances are extremely high that the student will not do well. That’s because the assessment is measuring students’ abilities to decode, fluently read, and comprehend the text before they can think about the question. Another issue emerges in this scenario if the response requires the student to write an answer without the aid of a computer or speech-to-text software, which is common practice on large-scale assessments like the ones in the statistics you reference. Reading and writing abilities are correlated. If students’ struggle with one they are likely to struggle with the other. Again video games are a potential solution because problem solving and demonstrating mastery of the learning objectives is an integral part of the game that does not rely on students’ reading abilities.

EM: How are UDL-based games more inclusive of students with learning disabilities (or English language learners)? How can UDL give these kids a stronger foundation to build on with later science education?

MM: UDL-based games have a number of learning scaffolds that are built in specifically for students with disabilities and English language learners. During the design process we try to anticipate as many of the learning barriers as we can. We then provide in-game workarounds for the student. For example, lets say the student is struggling to complete a task in the game. We can include an in-game expert who provides audio hints or a visual dictionary to provide essential background knowledge or a video demonstration with narrative overlays of what the student is doing, why it isn’t working, and hints about what the student might want to do next. The student can then choose the type of “just in time” assistance they need to accomplish the objective.

This is what expert teachers do. The problem is that many teachers do not have the time, resources, or in some cases the expertise to curtail instruction for the students we are targeting. So in essence we are providing them with a learning environment that has supports for all students built in at the outset. During beta testing the students help us identify all of the supports we should have added. Then by gold the objective is to have a true UDL-based game. The games are designed to provide students with essential content knowledge that the students can build on during future learning activities. In essence it anchors or contextualizes other learning. Games have so much potential because they open an entire realm of learning experiences that are unobtainable in traditional classroom environments. For example in You Make Me Sick!, players can infect a host with highly virulent bacteria. I wish we had games like that when I was in middle school. I probably wouldn’t have been thrown out of science class so much!

EM: We've been talking about UDL as it relates to teaching Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Do UDL concepts have potential in other areas of education? Why or why not?

MM: I would say it’s promising but we need more research. One of the core research questions from the Game-enhanced STEM projects we are working on relates to the types of learning scaffolds (e.g., an on-screen agent or narrative overlays of text) that are most beneficial to students. If we can identify the types of supports that lead to STEM learning, it seems reasonable that they would be transferrable to other content areas with similar cognitive demands. I’ve been really impressed with the social studies games that Filament has put together and think UDL is a natural fit for those, especially games that are geared toward secondary students and beyond.

Of course we need research to support that hypothesis. Empirical examination of the efficacy of both UDL-based video games and their effect on traditionally marginalized students is in preliminary stages. We’re probably 5-10 years from having an evidence base that will allow members of the scientific community to draw meaningful conclusions. Of course I would encourage students, their parents, and teachers to play the games and make their own decisions in the meantime. We’re making progress though and I feel fortunate to have Filament Games as a partner in this endeavor.

EM: Anything else you'd like to add/talk about?

MM: I like cheese and I always have Wisconsin teams going deep in the NCAA tournament because they are a cheese state… and that’s no joke. Play on!

A huge thanks to Dr. Matt Marino for taking the time to answer these questions.

The Future of 3D on the Web, Flash ... and Filamen...

Awhile ago Adobe announced a new set of GPU-accelerated 3D APIs within the Flash platform. Code-named "Molehill," these low-level APIs will allow ActionScript developers (like us!) to bring more advanced 3D experiences to desktop and mobile devices.

Although Adobe had already introduced APIs giving devs some simple tricks to add 3D effects like perspective and projection to 2D content with Flash Player 10, the effects were software-rendered and useless for complex, content-packed scenes. Where Flash Player 10 was capable of rendering a few thousand non-z-buffered triangles at around 30 Hz, Adobe promises Molehill will leverage hardware acceleration to deliver hundreds of thousands of z-buffered triangles at 60 Hz ... in HD. Obviously, Molehill has some system requirements: DirectX 9 for Windows machines or OpenGL 1.3 for MacOS/Linux. Mobile platforms will need OpenGL ES 2.0. For systems not quite up to the task, the SwiftShader rasterizer will provide a software solution.

You can see Molehill 3D in action (and hear more about Molehill from Flash Player's product manager, Thibault Imbert) in this video.

Adobe's decision to focus on the low-level end of things with Molehill means it won't be shipping with a 3D engine, scene building tools, physics, lighting tools, etc: a laundry list of features integrated 3D game authoring tool Unity is beloved for. A couple months back, Unity announced they'd been looking into adding a Flash Player export option to their toolkit and was moving forward with production.

This goes against my values! I won't let this pass!

The Curse of Iterative Development

During my tenure at Filament Games, I've worked on projects that have required multiple months of development to complete. LawCraft, however, was unique in that it had a tiny scope.

Actually, at the time, LawCraft was the smallest complete game Filament had yet to attempt. Your automatic assumption might be that smaller games are easier to develop, but in fact the lack of development cycles puts the team at a disadvantage. Development must be constant and furious in order to get a game out the door in three weeks, and more of the game's inevitable problems must be identified and fixed per iteration.

They say hindsight is 20/20, and they're right. We're reminded of this with every game we create. Even though game design documents and storyboards constantly guide our development, it's inevitable that we identify new ways to improve each game as we progress. It's possible to create the game we originally wanted in a given timeframe, but it's impossible to make the game we want now by the end of development. This poses a real problem to us as educational game developers: our goal of making the best possible game isn't always attainable in the time available. We find ourselves chomping at the bit for additional days so we can implement our latest ideas and make the game ever greater.

Development must end at some point, though, since we want our games to be played, and we want to move on to new and exciting projects. So what do we do? I think a great start would be to preemptively plan to make each game better than think we're going to want it to be. That is, if we've accurately guesstimated that a project will take us four weeks to develop, we're better off making it six weeks. When development kicks off, those last two weeks are intentionally left entirely open. Then, with each iteration we complete, we add very real hours of additional work and fixes. Worst case, we finish early and simply don't need the extra iterations. More likely, though, my team is guaranteed additional time for polish outside the scope of the original project; and time is without a doubt the most precious resource.

A Room With the News

One of our chief goals with Executive Command was to help the player get a sense of the scope and impact of the President’s actions.

Most Americans' only interaction with the President of the United States is via the news media, so we decided to leverage that to give the players a familiar feedback mechanism. Imagine turning on the nightly news and seeing the news anchors talk about how you are doing your job! We’ve done similar things with other games, such as Do I Have a Right?, where each turn ended with newspaper headlines about the player’s performance.

Executive Command also needed feedback between game turns and this seemed like the ideal spot for this type of news solution. Specifically, we wanted to show the President watching the nightly news on television. My immediate thought was, “when and where does the President watch television?” I couldn’t imagine the President lounging on an Oval Office couch munching pretzels and watching Dancing with the Stars, but certainly the President must have a TV somewhere in the White House.

Our games don’t usually require ultra-realistic depiction of specific details, but when it isn’t overly difficult we try to make it happen. In this case I felt it was interesting to answer my first question and show players how the President watches TV. I’m always amazed at some of the bizarre nuggets of information I learn in the process of creating games at Filament (The Dept of Homeland Security is in the process of moving their headquarters into an old psychiatric hospital; who knew?!), and in this case it was fascinating to learn more about how the First Family lives in the White House. Yes, there is a living room attached right to the President’s bedroom! It’s a pretty simple square room that the President may decorate however he or she likes, which meant we didn’t have to worry at all about the living room in our game matching the real living room in the White House.

The parquet floor and carpet were the only new assets we needed to create specifically for this room; almost everything else was repurposed from other iCivics games. We try to reuse or adapt art assets when practical, both to save time and to tie the iCivics games together with a consistent visual aesthetic. In fact, the couch, tables, bookshelves, plants and television came straight out of Do I Have a Right?.

The first challenge was to orient the room so that the player could see what the President was seeing on the TV screen. Unfortunately, we only had the couch drawn from the front, so we needed to draw the back of it. More importantly, that meant that the player would only see the back of their character’s head. I was concerned it wouldn’t be apparent that the player was looking at the President’s living room, so I added some details to help make it clear. To that end, I added the Presidential flag we built for Branches of Power and the White House emblem. It still looked a little empty, so I looked for something I could hang on the wall and discovered that there is a painting titled Avenue in the Rain that former Presidents have hung in their living room. It worked out to be a great finishing touch.

I hope that the end effect works as it should: a simple room that doesn’t distract too much from the information on the TV, but makes it clear you’re looking at the President’s den!

Ten Thousand Ideas

I started doing rough concepts for the game that would eventually become Branches of Power in late 2009. The big stumbling block was the "Issue Towers," one of the core concepts of the game. Our designer, Dan Norton, described them to me as "abstract ideas represented as buildings."

Well, that's great. How do you draw an abstract idea?

My first sketches looked more like junkpiles than coherent structures. There were buildings made of improbable materials: crates of live chickens, cactus plants, teacups, trees, busts of Plato. There were buildings derived from a function: leaning stacks of books with windows and doors cut into them for literacy, old turntables and speakers for media, sandwiches and tomatoes to represent school lunches. There were buildings that looked like they were grown out of trees. There were pyramids, pagodas, buildings that looked like someone had sawed six other buildings in half and cobbled them all back together randomly.

"Too literal," said Dan White.

"Too abstract," said Dan Norton.

You'd think this would get frustrating, but this is what concepting is all about: it's finding, as Thomas Edison once famously said, ten thousand ideas that don't work. I turned out reams of sketches. Schoolhouses made out of pencils. Banks made out of money. Pet stores on stilted bird-legs. Buildings made out of cheese, with swiss-like scatterments of round windows. Buildings with feet. Buildings with hats. Buildings that wobbled like jello. Beehive buildings. Buildings made out of giant A-B-C blocks.

"Wait", said one of the Dans. "Something like this. Modular, stacked, so we can interchange parts, let each one grow randomly."

"I like the hat idea", said the other Dan. "They should each have one unique part on top, like a....a hood ornament."

The wobbling stacks of sketches on my desk were reaching building-height themselves, it seemed. But with each new iteration, the Dans would pull out two or three sketches and say, "More like this," "This one, but more building-ey," or "I like this part. We gotta sneak that in there."

Eventually, a plan emerged. Instead of customizing the whole building, each tower would be distinguished from the others with a single part that denoted the Issue itself. The list of Issues was growing, too; when we first started, there were only five "Sample Issues" that iCivics had agreed on. Now, a few weeks later, there were twenty or so. With the Dans' approval, Rebecca and I began doing sketches of two specific sets of building parts: the generic, interchangeable "floors," and the far more detailed and specific "Hood ornaments."

We weren't done with the design; not by a long shot. We still had weeks of work to do. But we'd found our ten-thousand-and-first idea.

A Little Accuracy with Your Artistic License

Landform Detectives was one of my very first projects at Filament. The game had all kinds of interesting art and Flash issues!

We had three different artists going in three different directions with their interpretations of geological processes that JASON (understandably!) wanted to be as accurate as possible. It also seemed like no matter how many times we iterated on each animation, something visually wonky or glitchy would pop up in a single frame and we'd have to do it one more time to get it ironed out.

The really unforgettable hiccup for me, though, concerned the animation for the Mediterranean island of Santorini. I animated Santorini myself, making an informed guess as to how it would have formed. I thought it was a pretty dang good guess. Little did I know that one of the grad students working with our project content expert, Bob Ballard, happened to be one of a handful of experts in the world on the geology of Santorini.

Turned out my guess wasn't so accurate.

Working directly with the expert, though, I was able to run with it and produce an animation that was both really cool and really accurate.

So my initial pass at animating for a Filament game was a little rocky, but I had a ton of fun with it. Accurately illustrating the geological complexity of a formation like Santorini is satisfying stuff, especially when you've still got a little room for artistic interpretation to make it your own.

A Word With Catherine Templeton

When Justice Sandra Day O'Connor went looking for two outstanding individuals to act as National Coordinators for the iCivics initiative, one of the invitations she extended was to Catherine Templeton.

Ms. Templeton was recently recognized as one of the Best Lawyers in America, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that her home state of South Carolina was the first in the U.S. to accept the iCivics material as a textbook.

Last week Ms. Templeton took some time to answer some questions we had about her role with iCivics and South Carolina's adoption of the program.

EM: First of all, let's get this straight. South Carolina as a state has accepted iCivics as a middle school social studies curriculum? What exactly does that mean?

CT: In South Carolina, as in every state, there are curriculum standards that must be taught for satisfactory completion of a course. The SC Department of Education approves certain resources, traditionally textbooks, which contain the information necessary to satisfy these standards.

This past year, one South Carolina school district used iCivics games and lessons as a two-week curriculum pilot with nearly 250 middle school students. The pilot was so successful that the state has agreed to implement the curriculum in another four districts next semester. In addition, the Department of Education agreed to make iCivics a resource for certain Social Studies classes in middle school, and even high school, in South Carolina. In effect, iCivics.org has become a textbook!

EM: I understand you were invited to be a national coordinator for the project by Justice O'Connor. Could you talk a little bit about your role with iCivics and with the initiative's success in SC? Did you face any interesting challenges?

CT: Honestly, there were no challenges in South Carolina. This is a free, beneficial resource that helps our teachers because it provides lesson plans, satisfies state standards, and totally engages the students. We have an incredibly well respected Chief Justice, Jean Toal, who is behind this initiative, and a rock star teacher, Jane Brailsford, who created and implemented a pilot program in the same semester she was introduced to the games. The best idea that our group had was to create an online professional development unit for our teachers based solely on iCivics. The teachers satisfy state required training and learn about an incredible new tool that meets state standards and engages the students.

On a national level, the biggest challenge is being calm on the phone as I talk to other potential state coordinators. I tend to get so excited about the games that I overwhelm them with all the ideas and potential uses of the website.

EM: How do you feel about games as a learning tool? Have you played them? Do you think they're better at engaging certain types of student, or at teaching certain subjects?

CT: I didn't know what a "digital native" was until 12 months ago. Now, I understand that an entire generation spends 40 hours a week in front of some type of digital media. These students demand engaging, interactive curriculum that challenges them. Games are a part of their every day lives, and if we can steer some of that effort towards learning, we can influence an entire generation. iCivics games teach a critical and often neglected subject in a way that is entertaining and educational for the digital native.

EM: Games have been vilified some by news media in recent years, due to violent content, etc. The Supreme Court is deciding this year if they're even constitutionally protected in the face of California's ban on the sale of violent games to kids. With this kind of negative attention, do you think parents and educators could react unfavorably to games and interactive media stepping in alongside conventional textbooks?

CT: Some institutions might not readily accept the inevitability of digital media filling a real need in the classroom. However, on the whole, iCivics has gotten such enthusiastic acceptance because it has been well thought out and studied at every step of its development. Justice O'Connor's leadership and intelligence are so well respected that educators have confidence in the integrity and content of the iCivics resources. Everything on iCivics.org is developed together with teachers and game designers to effectively convey civics concepts through interactive media. As a non-digital native and mother of three soon-to-be middle scholars, I wish there was an online resource of games in every subject that I could trust as much as I do the value of the iCivics games.

I think it is important to note that the team of people who have created iCivics.org are doing so for a totally altruistic purpose. This has cost money and time and is being implemented almost exclusively by volunteers and donors around the country; including myself. There are no advertisements on the website and all of the resources are free and accessible. Anyone reading this who is as excited about it as I am should contact me Catherine.Templeton@icivics.org. We would be grateful to have you help in making iCivics.org an approved resource in all states.

Thanks for your time, Catherine!

A Comprehensive Case for Games in Learning

The Education Arcade was born of MIT researchers examining modern media in learning via the Games-to-Teach Project. TEA's work has included the development of several games exploring mathematics, science, history, literacy, and language, but they've also contributed a lot to the broader dialogue concerning games as an emerging force in education.

Their paper, Moving Games Forward, is a wide pan across the games landscape. It covers the gaming habits of adults as well as children, some potentially surprising numbers concerning who is playing what, and the kinds of things we're all learning organically from commercial, off-the-shelf games. Co-authored by TEA Director Eric Klopfer, Creative Director Scot Osterweil, and Katie Salen of the New School, the piece is also a crash course in the history of educational software, charting the rise and fall and rise of the medium: its initial explosion alongside the personal computer and the CD-ROM format, its apparent end at the hands of freely available web content and a black blizzard of miserably conceptualized edutainment titles, and finally the ways in which the serious games movement has set the stage for a second renaissance of software as a learning tool.

There are plenty of barriers, though, to development and adoption of new games in this seemingly bright future, and these are also discussed, along with potential ways to innovate around them. The paper draws heavily on the types of learning that occur in commercial games, through manipulation and authoring opportunities as much as illustration and simulation, and suggests how these can be integrated, directly or indirectly, into teaching and learning. The paper's ideas concerning the design of specifically educational games are optimistic but realistic. Among other things, it recognizes the need to develop learning goals and gameplay simultaneously; the only sure way to avoid shooters with math grafted on after-the-fact, or dry factoid presentations masquerading as games via limited point-click interactivity.

Moving Games Forward is easily one of the most comprehensive examinations of learning and the interactive arts to date, and a worthwhile read for anyone involved with or interested in the subject.

Assisting the dwarf beside you with his mask

Drilling Down: Ian Bogost on Drills vs. Instructio...

The paragon of edutainment failure by which all other terrible, flailing attempts to fun-up otherwise dry learning objectives are measured is the much-maligned Math Blaster, whose "gameplay" is usually described as drill or drill-and-practice. When dissecting what does or doesn't work in educational games, "drill" is usually filed as a liability. In the Math Blaster sense, this is an easy ruling to go along with.

Writer/game designer Ian Bogost wrote an article at Gamasutra last year - Persuasive Games: This Is Only A Drill - that complicates this concept of drilling in games and simulation, mostly by way of redefining what drilling within this context even is.

Drill within Bogost's article is more of the procedural variety: the stepping-through of a detailed process in a simulated scenario, theoretically preparing an individual to perform the process when actually called upon to do so. Undeniably, doing something yourself, even within the context of a simulation, is a better way to learn how to perform a task than watching someone else do it on a screen or reading an overview off of a card.

This is why, Bogost argues, Cooking Mama will better prepare you to make a meal than listening to Deltalina flirt her way through an airline safety briefing will prime you to put your life vest on correctly in the event of a water landing.

Perfect Chaos

Eco Defenders will always be one of my favorites among the games we've made. Science is often represented as a set of crystalline lenses you can hold up to the world and discern its essential underpinnings. It's a myth-breaker, an illusion-stripper, and the ultimate tool for discerning Reality As It Is. Many of our games give a nod to science as the ultimate arbiter of truth. For instance, that chart at the end of Coaster Creator literally describes the complete and total results of what just happened in that world. Those physical rules are implied to be equivalent to how the world actually works.

But that's a lie.

Coaster Creator ignores the type of material the track is made out of. It ignores wind resistance and climate conditions. It ignores the weight and movement of the passengers. It ignores the literal shape of each coaster cart. Coaster Creator omits many, many things in the name of simplicity. Coaster creator is an approximation of how a coaster might work, and nothing more.

Ultimately, all models are approximations. That's a bit of a tautology, I suppose, but only because a completely perfect model of a thing is then clearly the thing itself. But the point still stands. They're all a bundle of spinning gears, approximations, benign omissions and occasional falsehoods. Models - even scientific models - don't actually care about the Truth of things; they care about building models that are good enough to accomplish a task...and usually that task is prediction.

That's what I love about Eco Defenders. Like actual wildlife ecology, even the best-made plans are laid to waste by the sheer complexity and scope of a real, living ecosystem. We try to wipe out some creatures, desperately flail to keep others around, and bring in creatures to get rid of others...and sometimes creatures to get rid of those. Sometimes these plans work. Sometimes they fail horribly and we only find out after the fact, because the sprawling experiment that is our ecosystem is too big and beautiful to fathom.

Eco Defenders follows that theme. You can research the creatures in the little world, study their habits, diet, defenses and so on. You can design a creature that may very well be perfect for annihilating the target creature...only to find out that it sleeps at the wrong time and the two never meet. Compare this with Australia's Cane Toad Debacle and you can see why I'm proud to have designed a game that admonished scientific hubris. That's also why I love that the Eco Defenders gameplay cycle ends with a phase of "What the heck just happened?" The game emphasizes comprehension of how a complex system works rather than your power as puppet master. The complexity of the ecosystem, even in our silly little game, is large enough to overwhelm and confound the most reasonable of plans.

I consider that a unique aspect of Eco Defenders, and something I'll be proud of as a designer for the rest of my life.

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