The phrase "educational gaming" is just slightly distasteful, summoning images of staid classroom typing tests. But as the unique power of games gains wider recognition in the 21st century, the opportunities for creative developers who want to make purposeful interactive entertainment is exploding.
UK-based independent studio Preloaded has been around for 11 years, founded mainly to do design and graphics work for web clients. But its first commission was a Flash game, and close to five years ago Preloaded made the decision to transform into a game studio.
Creative director Phil Stuart tells Gamasutra the studio has eschewed traditional "advergaming" projects, disliking the usual experience of receiving rigid assignments from ad execs without gaming knowledge. Instead, Preloaded has focused on work with broadcasters, charities and galleries, positioning itself as a developer of "casual games on any platform, fun games with purpose."
"Every game is a direct response to a learning or community objective," says Stuart. "Sometimes it's advertising, sometimes it's disseminating information, and sometimes it's outreach." Past clients have included London's Science Museum, Channel 4 and others whose mandate is more education and less commercial.
Currently the studio develops about 50 percent of its projects using Flash and the other half with Unity, which it expects to use more of. "We're really excited about Unity; it allows us to bring games from a single codebase, and the casual games market is all about multiplatform."
When the Tate Liverpool gallery was planning its art exhibition exploring Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, it saw an opportunity to extend the experience and make it tangible through games. Further, Alice in Wonderland games with real learning objectives would better be able to receive funding.
Thus Preloaded's Wondermind, a collection of games and interactive movies dealing with basic neuroscience concepts in child development, was born thanks to the backing of the philanthropic Wellcome Trust.
Wondermind is accessible and snappily engaging, with a painterly aesthetic that captures the beauty and whimsy of Carroll's fictional world. Though it's available to play online, it is also part of the Tate's current Alice in Wonderland exhibit.
"The most important thing was that the science comes through," Stuart explains. "Any game that we make needs some educational validity."
The opportunity -- or, more accurately, the necessity -- of working with field specialists is part of what makes work at Preloaded inspiring and fun, says Stuart. The team has worked with Egyptologists, astrophysicists, philosophers and many more in the development of its game projects. This time, Preloaded worked closely with Michelle de Hann, a reader in developmental cognitive neuroscience at the UCL Institute of Child Health.
"She became our content expert on the project," says Stuart, describing how de Hann's expertise helped the team narrow the Wondermind games' focus to four concepts: plasticity, spacial cognition, memory and language. De Hann broke out key bullet points of how she'd describe each core concept to an 8-12 year-old (the game's main intended audience), and Preloaded modeled its game systems from there.
"We had this approach ... trying to reduce things down to their simplest parts, and trying to match the content directly to the mechanic," says Stuart. "To be able to win the game you have to understand the science that underpins it. By playing the game, you're learning about the principles we're trying to convey."
Nonetheless, Stuart says the studio tries to stay away from being defined as an "educational game studio," remaining passionate about its creative freedom and the ability to develop unique IP guided and led by the principles of conveying information.
Museums, NGOs and broadcasters are primarily concerned with the content, not the game itself, so that allows a studio like Preloaded a lot of creative latitude. "There's a real symbiotic, collaborative relationship," he explains. "We're making the games we want to make, and I'm very proud of the fact we're making games that are more than just fun."
In the past year Preloaded has decided to focus only on these kinds of creative learning and messaging games, and the climate for such opportunities has been "amazing," says Stuart.
"Games as a medium for delivering information and education has been completely legitimized," he adds. "Games are just amazing at explaining complex things in a fun, simple way. That's the thing we hang onto all the time. "
