The “Learnification” of Gaming
July 7, 2022
Roblox is the only example I can think of when I was a child that was open world with endless possibilities, as limited as it was in 2008, it was still a great opportunity for interaction and creativity
—20-something Roblox developer
The “gamification of learning” is a common theme in education and edtech, but as we observe the emerging metaverse at Dubit, we’re thinking about the “learnification of gaming.”
“Gamification of learning” leverages game design features and mechanics to deliver a curriculum in a playful way. By contrast, today teens and even tweens are creating games and experiences around the ideas, subjects, characters, stories, and brands that inspire them on the interactive platforms that are integral to their daily lives.
On proto-metaverse gaming platforms like Minecraft, Fortnite Creative, and especially Roblox, young people are deeply engaged with coding and creative development. They’re intrinsically motivated to turn their ideas into immersive playable games, social spaces, and even learning experiences.
Some create for their own satisfaction, happy just to make a working game or immersive experience. Others share their work narrowly, with a few friends or family. Many offer up their creations on global platforms. A small percentage even become young entrepreneurs, making money and building the foundation of a career. At Dubit, an increasing number of the developers in our metaverse studio are young adults who began making games as teens.
One role model for the “learnification of gaming” is Michael Sayman, once Facebook’s youngest employee. In the introduction to his book App Kid, the story of his self-education as a teen developer, Sayman writes: “Since middle school, I’ve probably spent 40 hours a week building websites and making apps – roughly 30,000 hours – and I still don’t consider myself an expert, let alone a master. I’ll always be learning and that’s what I love about my job. I code because I lose track of time when I’m doing it —I’m never bored. If I were, a lifetime of hours could never make me great.”
Inspiration drives innovation
Dubit surveyed a number of young Roblox developers about how they got started with coding and game design.
Some create the content that they would want to consume. One developer told us, “Whatever I would want to play myself is the type of game that I would make.” Another said: “I just make something I know I’d have fun playing with my friends.” It’s an iterative process—learning through playing helps young developers understand what kinds of features are most engaging and in what contexts, which they then incorporate into their own builds.
Dubit often refers to Roblox as the “YouTube of games.” With over 40 million titles made by everyone from kids to professional studios, the platform has near-infinite models that new developers can use to spark their learning or reimagination. And fittingly, young developers look to online videos, where game-makers share tools and techniques to solve design problems.
One young developer told us, “I take inspiration from other experiences that I like/that are popular, and utilize that in my own original idea.” Another echoed that, “I use a lot of reference images when building, but it’s all unique with an incredible amount of inspiration!”
There are also toolkits on Roblox’s developer website, not to mention myriad YouTube tutorials. One creator described his path: “I started with the basics on Roblox’s ‘Learn Roblox’ section of their Developer websites, creating a small number of simple experiences based on the tutorials provided (with my own modifications). Following these to a point where I felt relatively comfortable, I utilized what I learned in order to make a simple rhythm/dancing game, which became my first game on Roblox.”
Many emerging creators seek communities to share expertise or build together. To support and connect independent game builders, Roblox created a Team Create feature, which one respondent said “allows us to work very quickly without a lot of the technical issues that other platforms and software development runs into.“ The platform itself serves as a convening place for collaboration: “I’m part of a variety of communities on Roblox that were needing a virtual environment to share ideas, roleplay or have fun.“
Roblox uses its own coding language, but as developers master it, they often want to learn to build for other platforms. Several Dubit builders have also taught themselves Unity and Unreal; one who was looking to expand explained that “No developer should limit their abilities.“
From game-builder to team member
Teaching oneself to create games, whether independently or with others, is a great start toward becoming a professional, but it takes more than programming know-how to build a career.
As Dubit has expanded its team, we’ve found a great symbiosis in hiring young, substantially self-taught developers. We get experienced programmers who are platform natives, with a deep understanding of what they and other gamers want. Our hires are then exposed to a 20-year-old game-design company’s experience in teamwork and business development—invaluable for those that would like to set up their own studio in future.
One young programmer praised the benefit of gaining both “software development ideas and practices as well as client communications.” Another spoke of learning “a variety of things that can make a game good or bad, in both experiencing it, and releasing it to the public.“
Placed on a team that demands varied skills to meet its goals, each member is exposed to new elements of the business. One respondent said he’d “learned many key tools & techniques in programming, both in Roblox specifically, as well as in general programming, as well as further improving myself in some project workflow types.”
Transforming the workplace
The coronavirus pandemic drastically changed every workplace, but the game industry may have been best positioned to manage disruption. The tools of game-building don’t require teams to be co-located, and young game designers were already used to working from home.
As much as young people’s home-grown skills sustained the games business during COVID, there’s no question that they will equally transform the workplace going forward. Many who now work for us (and other game firms) will go on to form their own game companies. They’ll take their training with them, around motivation and mindset, even ethics, as one of my colleagues put it.
They’ll put their generational twist on things, though, based on a lifetime of playing games. “Experiencing & building virtual worlds from a young age,” one developer wrote, “has helped me realize what I would prefer to do/see most in the metaverse, in both a professional and personal sense.”
According to Yonatan Raz-Fridman, CEO of Supersocial: “We need to reevaluate what it means to make all of these technologies available to young people who can actually build businesses in their bedrooms when they’re 15. The type of experiences or work environments that a 16-or-17-year-old would create in a platform like Roblox [is] very different than what a 35-plus-year-old is going to create.”
Improving virtual environments will surely play a role in these new collaborative designs, such as the ability for a team to manipulate three-dimensional representations of spaces and products, whether they are in one place or far apart. While we often think of gaming as competitive, metaverse games are just as often collaborative and almost always social. We think emerging workplaces will be the same, with multi-disciplinary teams combining toward a stronger whole.
After extended on-and-off isolation and distance schooling, we are hopeful that the teens and young adults who passed their lockdowns in self-guided, intrinsically-driven learning will emerge from the pandemic with their motivation and engagement intact. We’re eager to see how a cohort of entrepreneurial creators, buoyed by the “learnification of gaming,” breaks forth, ready to build new worlds–in physical space and within the metaverse.
David Kleeman is Senior Vice President of Global Trends for Dubit, a metaverse studio and consultancy. He is a 35-year children’s media veteran – a strategist, analyst, author and speaker, connecting ideas and people in media, education, research and child development.