Immersion: Why So Many Educational “Games” Fail
Don’t defy user expectations if your goal is student engagement!
Earlier this year I completed a training that wanted me to believe I was role-playing conflict resolution, but what it was really doing was making me annoyed. Really annoyed.
The aesthetic of the ‘game’ tried to convince me I was supposed to be having fun, but all I was really doing was answering trick true/false questions about the motivations of straw people who were introduced to me in two sentences.
The designers of the training were trying to harness the feelings of fun associated with something else and it felt insulting. I imagine if you think for a minute you will come up with a similar experience.
These experiences fail to engage us because they are trying to be immersive, but they lack all the requirements to be so.
Immersion is the feeling a user gets that they’ve been transported into a different sense of reality. Immersive programs and games are accomplished by making a digital environment as interactive as possible and including clear reasons users should continue to engage with that environment. This can be accomplished outside of a role-playing game (though it’s certainly easier that way).
There are three main essential components to immersion:
Exigence: or clear goals (i.e. a reason to be there or doing that task).
Interactivity: this means how much a user can modify an environment in real time or interact with a dynamic system (such as AI).
Presence: or the subjective feeling a person has that they are in one environment, even though they are physically in another. This can be accomplished without full visual immersion.
Without all of these, learners will not feel immersed.
Placing someone in a digital ‘game’ environment does not increase engagement just because the medium suggests it is supposed to be immersive.
This is one of the leading reasons digital educational games fail. They tend to do things like place a student in a hastily made digital environment with a shallow story and limited ability to interact.
In those situations, there is no clear indication what that story really has anything to do with the quiz questions randomly popping up on their screen.
What we often fail to remember is that immersion isn’t a requirement for all types of game-based learning. If your content isn’t a good fit for an immersive environment, then don’t pretend it is. You have other options for that content.
If you want students to complete something that would benefit from immersion, use immersive methods. If they are completing something that doesn’t require immersion, then don’t place them in environments that are meant to be immersive.
For instance, in another post I suggested we avoid showing lecture videos within VR. Nothing about a lecture video requires immersion.
Consuming video is a passive activity and putting students in what is meant to be an immersive environment for that task defies user expectations. It also might make them motion sick as an added ‘bonus.’
In my view, VR is meant to be immersive, which means it needs interactivity and presence. The very nature of having a headset on that replaces your view of the outside world is a clear indication that it is an immersive technology.
So, do you need an immersive environment?
Here are some good questions to ask yourself to gauge if your content would benefit from immersive mediums:
Is there something students will be doing (not just needing to understand)?
Is there a reason they need to be transported to another environment to do it?
Will they be able to extensively interact with that other environment?
If you didn’t answer yes to any of these, then you should likely avoid immersive environments for that content.
If you follow the reasoning above about VR being an immersive medium, then that means VR is likely not a good choice either.