We were able to get Anthony Pecorella, designer of CellCraft to answer some questions about the game, and educational game development in general.

Anthony currently works as Head of Developer Relations at Kongregate.com and has been long been an aspiring game designer, though had only casually dabbled in Flash games prior to his work on CellCraft.  He studied mathematics and computer science in undergrad and graduate school at Wake Forest University.  He's also a band geek, avid bowler, and shows a canine-like love of catching Frisbees.

Can you give us a brief history on how and why CellCraft was created?
 

CellCraft started as a project that Dr. Jed Macosko at Wake Forest University (my alma mater) wanted to start.  He thought that the cell would be a great target for a video game and found a grant program, the Digital Media & Learning Competition, that might fund it.  However, knowing little about game creation, he came to me to ask me to act as the manager of the project.  He knew me from my earlier game-based startup company at WFU (which sadly didn't take off), and at the time I had lots of extra time and said yes.  I got the job at Kongregate afterwards, but this just helped me connect with some excellent Flash developers, even if I had less time myself.  He had an original plan for the game, but it was a bit too grand of a scope (a full 3D recreation of the cell that the character would wander around in) and lacked what I felt would be truly compelling gameplay, so I convinced him to go with the real time strategy model instead.

I’ve used CellCraft as an example to people interested in educational game development, especially the decision to use well known mechanics of a given genre to reinforce a similar concept in the learning objective. For instance, most RTS games have factories, and the game explains that ribosomes are like factories and then reinforces that similarity through gameplay. Was this an intentional design decision or was is something that happened organically?

As for the genre, I think defense/RTS was almost the obvious option for a game at the scale that we were doing.  You can go different directions if you zoom in or out more, but at this level, with the cell essentially being a giant resource-management system that has to protect itself from its environment, it just made sense.  Plus it's a cool genre that I think helped keep the game especially engaging.  

If you wanted to see the true original version of CellCraft (yes, even with that name), you'd have to go back to me in 9th grade when I made a turn-based strategy game as part of a project in biology class to teach about the cell (I actually still have that game in my house!).  At that time, the metaphors of various parts of the cell acting as parts of a city started to form and I've always thought it was a great way to cast the organelles in a way that would make more sense to people.  We were more scientifically accurate in this real time version of the game than I was in 9th grade, but we wanted to keep the metaphor alive to help give a familiar framing to this rather foreign world.  When Lars was writing the tutorial slides he continued this philosophy by illustrating the metaphors very explicitly with images and animations.

How did you end up working with Lars Doucet? Was Super Energy Apocalypse partly an inspiration for creating an educational defense/RTS versus a different game genre?

You're right that Super Energy Apocalypse was a connection between CellCraft and Lars, but it actually worked the other way.  I had a design in mind for how I wanted to do CellCraft and I realized that it shared a lot with SEA.  Plus, SEA is a fantastic game and clearly had educational components, so I thought he'd be a great fit.  Much to my pleasure, especially since he was my first choice, he agreed to sign on to the project.  I didn't even realize at the time that he wrote his Master's thesis on educational game design - something that definitely benefited CellCraft's design.  

Why alien platypuses? What was the design decision behind the story?

Ah, the alien platypuses.  So, we wanted to have a narrative to the game beyond "you're a cell, try to survive", so that the player could connect more to some characters and have a more compelling reason to keep progressing through the game.  We did some brainstorming early on, including a "save the dying, diseased little girl by creating a cell to fight off the infection", but that came out far too morbid and depressing (especially if you ever lost a level).  (Little known fact: one of the characters from the early brainstorming made it into the final game - he's giving the lecture in the finale.)  We also had early talks with Maxis about possibly connecting to Spore, so this idea of space travel was suggested.  I don't recall exactly how we hit the idea of saving a species of aliens, but eventually we decided it'd be a fun twist to have them end up on Earth.  At that point, we needed a bizarre, but still cute and identifiable, Earth creature to be the alien.  The platypus just seemed like a natural choice.  :)

What kind of success has the game had? Are there people using this as a teaching tool?

The game was a huge success in our eyes from a game standpoint.  It got a daily #1 and weekly #3 (if I remember correctly) on Newgrounds and placed 3rd monthly on Kongregate.  We're actually ranked in the top 100 of all time on Kongregate, which is amazing and slightly humbling.  The game has also been played over 2,000,000 times in 180 countries, which is a very nice distribution, though admittedly not run-away for a Flash game.  I think a lot of the reason is that there's a relatively low replay value, so people didn't have much reason to keep coming back.  

Regarding schools, the game was released in the summer so it hasn't really had a chance to be tested in classrooms yet, outside of some small tests that we ran ourselves (with some strong results).  We're working on putting together a teacher packet that can be downloaded for free that includes information, plans, and a printable lab to help provide some guidance and tools on how to best use a game in the classroom - something most teachers are very unfamiliar with.  That said, we've definitely had teachers who are interested in using it and I have little doubt that it will get at least some class time this coming school year.  I'm told we even got a nod in the national AP Biology listserv.

There was some controversy among science bloggers regarding the game because one or both of the the science advisers are proponents of Intelligent Design. The game didn’t include any I.D. arguments, but didn’t particularly discuss evolution either. How much effect did your science advisers have on the direction of the educational content? Was there any result of or resolution to the controversy?

For the intelligent design vs. creationism question, I'll give you the short answer here.  If you want a much longer answer, check out our interview with another blogger here: http://newly-nerfed.net/2010/08/17/interview-the-developers-of-cellcraft/.  Our science advisors obviously had some influence on the educational content, but for the most part it was me and Lars looking through Wikipedia and talking to teachers to figure out what organelles we wanted to teach about, and then going to advisors and saying "tell us about the Golgi Body" and such.  The controversy I think was spurred entirely due to the fact that, out of quite a bit of chance, both of our advisors are Creationists/IDers.  This was not intentional, and in fact I didn't even realize one of them was at all - that's how much he kept to just pure science and left his personal beliefs out of the conversation.  I think the resolution is that the "threat" of a Creationist agenda was imagined, but we do acknowledge that if we do a sequel we will make sure to have some evolutionists on the advisory team so that people who vet our experts can be assured that mainstream science is represented.

Do you have any advice for an institution that might want to create an educational game?

Creating a good educational game is tough.  To be honest, I think I cheated a little by choosing the topic that I did - a game was fairly readily apparent for it and the topic is interesting and has fun components in it.  Teaching about a dynamic system of balances, threats, and protections lends itself well to games.  Teaching about algebra is quite a bit harder.  

The difference between "edutainment" and great educational games is, in my opinion, how well the educational components are married with the game components.  A question for your readers (who I assume are mostly gamers): how many of you know what an M-4 Carbine is?  Or what a phalanx formation layout is?  Or what the Terra Cotta Army looks like?  I could be wrong, but I'd bet a far larger percentage of gamers can answer those questions positively than non-gamers, and the reason is that games like Call of Duty and Civilization build their game rules around actual real-world information.  Their intention is not to educate, but by learning the rules of the game you end up learning something about the real world too.

This same principle can be used to teach effectively in games.  Classic "edutainment" titles often have a separation between the educational portions and the game portions.  You have to answer some questions or do well on a quiz and then you unlock a short, un-related game.  Even in a classic like Oregon Trail I think most kids (at least boys) would say that the best part of the game is the hunting or the river fording - neither of which are really the educational points of the game.

Meanwhile, CellCraft, as well as some other great educational games like Democracy II and Sim City, work on turning the teaching points of the game into the rules of the game.  In many cases, certainly in these three, it's a goal of simulation.  If the game works in some way like the real world, then playing the game becomes learning about the real world.  There are certainly other things to watch out for (in terms of pacing, content overload, etc.), but I think this is probably the most fundamental point.  However, I'm starting to ramble and I think this is probably a longer discussion in and of itself, so I'll leave it at that for now.

I guess the short version would be to think about combining the learning with the gameplay and make sure you involve gamers in the design and testing phases -  professors are very smart, but if they don't play games they aren't going to make good games.