Lure of The Labyrinth Math Game

Games in education are all the new fad. Everyone is talking about how games are a new revolutionary way of teaching students in engaging, self-paced learning. However, are games really all that they are hyped up to be? Do all educational games provide an engaging way to learn? James Paul Gee discusses the characteristics of a good game in his article "Good Video Games and Good Learning". Gee studied several games and came to the conclusion that good games incorporate good gaming principles. I found the article intriguing and used it to explore Lure of The Labyrinth, an online math educational game to see how many good game qualities it has.

Gee discusses many qualities of a good game. Some of the positive characteristics that Lure of the Labyrinth has is a strong identity the player embodies, it can be customized in some ways, is interactive, and encourages risk taking.. The protagonist is a young boy whose pet is taken by a monster. The young boy follows his pet's sounds and ends up in a secret factory full of monsters and mythical creatures. As you can imagine, a young boy who loves his pet is a protagonist that many young students can relate to. Many teenagers love their pets and will be hooked into this story line. In addition, the player chooses his pet (a cat, dog, turtle etc.) and can customize his own appearance and name to an extent. This gives players a little bit of autonomy and ownership over the game. The game is interactive in that the player can explore areas (within restrictions) of the game, and can interact with other characters in the game. The last thing that I really liked is that there are very low consequences of failures. The player can keep trying to replay the same level until he/she is done practicing and is satisfied with the result. The low consequence of failure encourages risk taking, and making many attempts to succeed at learning the math.

Unfortunately, Lure of the Labyrinth left something to be desired. The longer I played, the more bored and frustrated I found myself. I asked myself, what would have made it more interesting to me? I realized that although the story line grabbed my attention at first, it soon became too much. I thought to myself, "am I reading a comic or playing a game? Let's get to the game already!" To make matters worse, although there was a long back story, the goal of the game becomes lost. Here's how it goes: the young boy loses his pet, goes to find him, goes undercover and gets a job at the factory. Then he starts doing "assignments" while he's on the job.. But how do these assignments help him find his pet? I'm not sure. And at some point a fairy asks him to plant beans in every room along the way.. Wait, what? Eventually, I found the game to just be a collection of assignments with no real goal behind them. Additionally, while each assignment was a game that obviously included some mathematical concepts, it was hard to know what concepts they were using. There were absolutely no instructions for the games, so I was left guessing as to what I need to accomplish to even pass that level. I was able to figure it out the goal and rules of one game, but the other one is still a mystery. Since I couldn't figure out the goal of that level, I was basically stuck and no new level was available to me.

Overall, I think Lure of the Labyrinth is a great concept with potential, but needs some serious tweaking. Instructions for the games would go along way in keeping the player engaged, and not get frustrated. A more cohesive story line to keep the motivation going would be great. For example, if each level was unlocking a specific tool that helps retrieve the pet, then the reason behind these assignments would be obvious. I think educational games have great potential, but not any game that incorporates some educational concepts will be successful. It needs to be an interesting game, with the educational concepts integrated in an authentic way.