Our Mission

Filament Games is a game production studio dedicated to creating next generation learning games that combine best practices in commercial game development with key concepts in the learning sciences. Filament's core directive is to create educational experiences that spark inspiration through interactive exploration and discovery. Secondarily, we seek to help teachers and parents excite their kids about learning, track their progress, and assess their performance.

Our DNA

Filament's 12 person development team represents expertise in game design, programming, art, sound, quality assurance, and the learning sciences. The titles in our portfolio, including both 3D Torque games and 2D Flash games, cover a diversity of STEM, literacy, and civics education topics. Every game we make is subject to an extremely high standard of quality, extending to often overlooked areas like accessibility, usability, efficacy, and visual/auditory fidelity.

Our Clientele

Filament's recent clients include National Geographic’s The JASON Project, Florida Virtual School, the University of Wisconsin, the Smithsonian Institution, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's iCivics Inc. We are also proud to have received grant funding from the MacArthur, Kauffman, Annenberg, and National Science Foundations.

Our Methodology

When we make a game, we always start by identifying the core learning objectives. Based on those objectives, we design custom-tailored gameplay mechanics, or "verbs": actions the player can take in the game environment that scaffold them from understanding the learning objectives to internalizing them, and finally, to demonstrating them. Second, we design an identity for the player that empowers them to become invested in those verbs.

Our Philosophy

We have been iterating on our core design/pedagogic philosophies since day one, but the tenets below represent a few central themes that have persisted across the years:

• All games are learning games...most just don't teach anything of value in the real world.
• Games are not a good fit for all learning goals. Good games leverage the affordances of digital interactions (e.g. teaching tacit knowledge) and avoid the weaknesses (e.g. natural language processing).
• Learning is naturally pleasurable. There is no reason to awkwardly sandwich learning content between mechanics designed solely to be "fun" or otherwise divorced from learning objectives.
• Good games embrace experimentation and, by extension, failure. They prioritize inquiry over right versus wrong.
• Rather than focus on content, good learning games focus on building problem spaces in which content has authentic utility.