Is this a Game?
Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: It is July, and I am watching four children aged eight to eleven from two families wrapping their arms around large stumps of petrified wood. After the tree hugging, they feel the texture of the wood and identify its many colors. They then play a game of bingo, filling the boxes by looking for insects, birds and animals on a nearby path. Finally, they walk slowly through the entire museum, where they study documents and artifacts, and read about the history of the park and its many different inhabitants. If you remember being a child, or if you work with or have children of your own, you know that such exhibition of enthusiasm on any day, let alone one that is blistering hot during summer vacation, is absolutely not characteristic. And yet, these kids are entranced. They are driven to learn and prove their knowledge so that they can be recognized as Petrified Forest Junior Rangers. Books in hand, they approach a park ranger, who solemnly reviews and certifies their work. For most kids, this kind of program is their first real engagement with a federal official, and this particular ceremony has these kids entranced. He asks them to raise their right hand and recite the Junior Ranger oath to protect, learn and explore. After the oaths are completed, the children each receive a Petrified Forest Badge, and the ranger tells them that they only have 399 parks left to go. The game is on, and the kids are ready and planning to collect Junior Ranger Badges from every park in the country.
Figure 1.1 The Junior Ranger Program is available at 400 national parks
“Do you think the Junior Ranger Program is a game?” I ask the children, some of whom had already been acquiring badges throughout the summer. “Well, it does get me to explore like a game,” responds one boy. “Because I know I’m getting a badge, it makes me more interested in learning about the place,” his sister chimes in. The Parks Service does not call the Junior Ranger Program a game. Nor do the children treat it as mere entertainment when they are taking their ranger pledges, which they do with the utmost respect and sincerity.
Although the Junior Ranger Program may not be a game in a traditional sense, there is something about it that is game-like, gamish, or gameful. That last term comes from the game designer Jane McGonigal, referring to events or processes that employ aspects commonly associated with games. In fact, the Junior Ranger Program illustrates many of the core ideas that make gamified systems so powerful. Good gamified systems promote exploration by connecting game elements like badges or points to the process of discovery in the real world. In the case of Junior Rangers, this exploration includes the investigation of a place, its artifacts, inhabitants and history, all of which might very well be passed over, ignored or dismissed by visitors both young and old if it were not for the program.
Figure 1.2 A park ranger checks the children’s books and then engages them in the Junior Ranger oath. The children are then given badges.
A concept proposed by game designer Jane McGonigal referring to experiences that feel like a game, inspiring the feeling of play.
Figure 1.3 Hats are used to display badges from across the nation.
Exploration experienced in gamified systems is nurtured and sustained by the cooperative and competitive instincts of individuals sharing the experience. As Junior Rangers work to complete their tasks, their parents, grandparents, camp counselors or teachers take on the fundamental roles of guides and mentors, providing direction for meaningful knowledge discovery. This kind of social expansion occurs when people who are not officially playing nevertheless contribute intentionally to a game. They participate along with the player but experience the game from an entirely different perspective. The Ranger Program allows adults to act as mentors, using its playful structure to guide children towards deeper engagement with the national parks. Once children are in this exploratory mindset, adults may use the opportunity to facilitate additional moments of learning extending beyond the program itself.
Social expansion brings participants who are not considered “players” into the play experience.
Exploration promotes relationships to people and places, and to organizations trying to facilitate this engagement. Giving individuals tools to explore on their own terms is a powerful way to grow a relationship with the institution that enables this sense of agency. In the case of Junior Rangers, the freedom to go at their own pace, on their own path, stopping along the way for photographs, snacks, story-telling and unexpected surprises, creates unique and memorable narratives empowered by the beauty and history of the place, and the mission of its caretakers. At each park, visitors uncover stories of the people, animals and objects that came before them. These historic narratives combined with their own experiences enable optimal moments for reflection.
Directed guidance combines with individual freedom to create the potential for personalization, identification and recollection. This encourages the process of emergence. Emergence can be understood as the unplanned-for or unintended experiences, behaviors or dynamics that occur through the use of a system. These tend to be unique to each individual experience. Exploration and social bonding are ways that the Junior Ranger Program facilitates personal and collective stories about a park and the experiences shared there. With approximately 400 parks rewarding kids with individual badges, it builds a strong sense of emergence across the entire park system. Collecting these 400 badges also provides a motivation to travel with parents and family members across the country, visiting and discovering its parks and monuments. Given the freedom to assign their own meaning of value to badges, children can create personal narratives about each achievement and the interactions they associate with it.
The unplanned or unpredictable patterns and outcomes that occur through interaction of smaller units (like rules or object) within a system.
Junior Rangers tells us something else as well—small, well-designed systems can generate bigger games and bigger forms of engagement. Although the Junior Ranger Program may fall low on the spectrum of gamified experiences as I define them in Chapter 2, the children who participate in it from around the world use the collection of badges to create a meta-game. Meta-games emerge beyond or outside of a specific system. What is important for the game-aspect is not the badges or what they individually represent but the totality of the potential collection and the expanding sets of relationships and accomplishments. In the case of Junior Rangers, through the pursuit of the total collection, participants lead themselves and their families through a process of discovery and appreciation of individual parks and the national park system. It has the potential to be a very long meta-game, which could span across years of travel throughout the entire country.
A meta-game is a bigger game or concept that emerges through play, transcending the written or implied game structure.
GS design principle #1—bigger meaning
Small systems can generate bigger engagements. With the right design choices, individual elements can lead to bigger meanings. Collecting badges or rewards can mean significantly more if they are part of a larger system.
