What if a game's educational objectives are about exploring rather than formally assessing? What if a game is designed to help a player form an opinion rather than be told an answer? These sound like Holy Grails for serious games, but with Career Explorer we tackled these issues head on and found out that designing around less explicit objectives actually requires a different kind of game experience.

More often than not, when you truly confront your learning objectives, you find that your game becomes a focused, fine-tuned learning machine. This goes double for classroom integration, where teachers confront a very real need to assure that their kids are learning particular things in a particular amount of time. However, the Career Explorer mission is to spur interest in young children and encourage them to make connections between the types of things they like and the types of jobs that might match their interests. If a child comes out of Career Explorer thinking that they need to have one particular job then we've failed. If they come out thinking that they might like to work a job where collaboration is important, we've succeeded.

Career Explorer is a game structure designed not to directly drill into a player a certain set of information, but to help them explore a problem space of opportunities. It's not designed to be a professional training simulator, or to teach kids how to apply for jobs and how much money they should ask for. The game simply asks, gently, again and again, "what are your interests?", and when the player answers that question through play, the game guides them toward jobs that align with those interests.

Maybe the most unique aspect of Career Explorer is that its educational game structure is on a macro scale rather than in a micro scale. The minigames are not designed to impart specific job-based information; they're meant to be activities that echo interests. The game's educational objectives are embedded in the larger system: the cycle of reward and exploration that asks players to uncover and learn about careers while granting them higher levels of achievement and upgrades to their avatar.

It has honestly been a challenge to articulate this distinction. Folks are used to seeing our products directly embed learning objectives into the most game-like environments they've ever seen. To create games that serve a smaller function inside a larger educational structure is a new strategy. However, given the unique learning objectives and the epic amount of content covered in this game, it became apparent that we'd have to pioneer some new ways of thinking about educational gaming in order to meet our goals. I couldn't be more pleased with the results.