I was excited to see yesterday that the Gamestar Mechanic Beta is now open to the public, swiftly signing up and beginning to play through the first season. I first saw the game in Katie Salen’s presentation during the Serious Games Summit last March, and was immediately captivated by its premise and generally top notch production values. I highly recommend giving the game a go, whether you’re interested in games for education or even just for a bit of fun. Yes, you heard that right, this is a new standard for serious / educational / meaningful games in that it is indeed fun in its own right.

Click here to play Gamestar Mechanic

Gamestar Mechanic is a game about making games. In particular it’s designed as an immersive interactive primer in game design, no programming or art skills required. Right away you’re thrown a bunch of simple game challenges to beat, clashing egos with the other players in the arcade, learning the basic controls of the top down or side scrolling interface. It gets really interesting when you stumble upon a malfunctioning game reactor core thats about to go critical. The games are all broken and the facility will blow unless you fix it. And so the centrepeice of the experience comes into play, a big red switch that flicks you between play mode, and EDIT. You’re now able to rearrange all of a levels elements, configure enemy’s AI, set win conditions, etc All of the fundamental building blocks of game design are there, and while a veteran designer might be frustrated by the limitations of the interface, it in insanely easy to pick up and be productive with right off the bat.

An interesting aspect of its implementation is the heavy focus on narrative, something that I’d expect was a hard sell to the funding bodies, but pays off in spades. GameLab have done a terrific job of crafting the world of Factory 7. The depth of their imaginary world is immediately apparent, a completely original canon wrapped in political intrigue and quirky characters, anchored by a classical hero’s journey tale of a young “mechanic” who aspires to be a great game designer. This drives the player through the various play / edit challenges that the game presents, feeding shreds of the story in as you progress through the world’s arcades and collect new items with which to build your own levels. The balance and tuning in the game really is downright professional, and something which I could easily see becoming a hit as a cart for the DS whether people knew it was “educational” or not.

This really is a shining example of where “Serious Games” need to go. A few things that GSM gets right that others in the field should pay special attention to:
– The lessons are interwoven into the gameplay, you really do learn by experiencing the mechanics at play. After editing your first level, it completely changes the way you look at all the play challenges after that. They gently introduce elements into levels like timing, AI pattern recognition, projectiles, gravity, all these building blocks are experienced first hand by the player before they’re then thrown into their toolkit
– Even if you didn’t give two hoots about game design, this would be fun. It stands alone as an intriguing, innovative game that is smart and well balanced. I can probably count on one hand the amount of other games with any inkling of educational content that I could say the same for
– The immersion in this narrative isnt disturbed by any hard link to curriculum. This is SO key. The game makes no mention of learning anywhere, it is not being sold as an “educational” game, which removes so many barriers when it comes to uptake with students
– The aesthetic is magical, leveraging common elements from the very hip eastern / western fusion comic style, but still managing to stay different enough to avoid looking like a copy-cat. The animations, character design, coloring, music, and sound effects work harmoniously to present a world you just want to keep playing in.

I’m going back to finish off season one. Everyone should give this a shot, and send your feedback to the creators, they deserve to have a strong community behind the project to help them refine the final product.

It is my sincere hope that the project continues to get funding and is as successful financially as it is creatively.