The study of game design is, to a significant degree, the study of education. Much as the joy of gameplay lies in the sensation of learning and practicing, the skill of creating that joy in others is similar to that of teaching or directing. Whether fostering that joy for its own sake or for imparting vital knowledge, whichever the ultimate goal the methods remain the same – or, at any rate, quite similar.
In both cases, one of the most important things to remember is that information is stored, parsed, and recalled relative to other information. If you’re teaching someone basic arithmetic, explaining that 3 x 3 is the same thing as 3 + 3 + 3 won’t be very helpful until they understand what 3 + 3 means – and explaining 33 similarly won’t be helpful until they understand what 3 x 3 means. These examples are fairly obvious and hierarchical, but these connections of understanding extend in many directions, some of them quite surprising – for example, maybe learning 3 x 3 helps the student internalize the odd ‘th’ construct in the spelling of the number “three”, or leads them to curious rumination on the holy trinity or literary rule of threes. All of these ideas get tangled together, cross-referenced, confused and conjoined, slowly sinking deeper into the mind of a person to shape how they understand the world.
When a game is teaching itself to a player, then, strict attention must be paid to the sequence of information. If you provide information about an ability but no opportunity to use it in a practical application immediately, the player will likely have forgotten about it by the time the perfect opportunity to deploy it happens by. All too often I’ve had a game tell me about an ability that is either unavailable or impractical at the time, only to have it become required for progress hours later, long after I’ve forgotten it’s even an option. Skills the player needs to understand must be taught in proximity to the circumstances that require their comprehension – because, again, we only gain knowledge in relation to the knowledge we have already.
This method of understanding is both a tremendous strength and a terrifying weakness. Using this proximate symbolic understand we can make huge inspired leaps, connect seemingly disparate ideas and turn them something unexpected and profound – we can dream of spiral staircases and intuit the shape of the building blocks of life. However, it comes at a cost: As we learn more and more about the world, as our understanding grows denser and more interconnected, it also becomes more and more inert, stagnant – no new information can be added to the structure without changing its architecture, so any new information gets disregarded unless it conforms to that which is already known.
This is why debunking information is so often a Sisyphean pursuit: The misinformation being debunked and the information debunking that misinformation are understood and interpreted separately, but in relation to one another. When one is dependent on the other, any partial recall will only remember the misinformation part, since its debunking has that as prerequisite for being understood. Moreover, if the original misinformation accords with a person’s world-view, it will be retained and the debunking discarded – whereas if the original information does not accord with their world-view it will be discarded with any debunking information alongside it. Thus, debunking information only tends to be of interest to two sorts of people: Those receptive to the embedded misinformation, who do not retain the debunking, and those who love debunking for its own sake, who aren’t of any use to anyone.
While I would argue that all of this ought to be within the domain of the game designer’s understanding, I’ve seen many examples of designers who clearly do not understand this, as evidenced by their careless embrace of misinformation and motivated reasoning. Even being perfectly aware of this dynamic does not protect you from it. The only defense is regular pruning of preconceptions, biases, and dearly-held beliefs, of certainties and axioms and assumptions.
The mind is a garden, and if you let it become too overgrown with tangled vine and root then it will become a place where no sunlight will ever reach, where no new thing can ever grow again – full of life but dead to the world.