DLC. From the Oblivion horse armor to map packs to piles of hats, the existence of post-purchase addon content remains contentious in the realm of commercial gaming. But at the same time, the world of learning gaming is staring at the uncharted territory funding opportunities. The days of massive revenue from software sales in big box stores are long gone, and companies wanting to succeed with innovative learning games are peering at the commercial market and *its* innovations to see if they can be mirrored. How could DLC be engineered into a learning game environment?

Commercial games have tried a lot of solutions, but from my perspective it’s all starting to boil into a philosophy that gamers are going to have to ultimately accept: On the road to mastery of a game, players contribute several different resources into games, and skill is only one of them. I humbly suggest that there are three main factors that a player can pour into a game to succeed:

• Skill:  Reflexes, strategies, instinct and pure pwnage. This is literally how good the player is at performing the mechanics of the game. This is also the component of games that make them uniquely suited as learning engines that can transcend normal media which generally only account for….
• Knowledge:  From raid boss dance routines to 3d shooter level layouts, this is the researchable rote content that a player can absorb to get to the health pack faster, stay out of the fire, or otherwise put them into positions to exercise their skill as effectively as possible.
• Time:  Originally only hardcoded as a factor in RPG games, the design of inexorably mathematical advantage (+2 sword is better than +1 sword!) based on time spent has poured into just about every nook and cranny of gaming. WoW has levels 1-through-Magic Pants, CoD Blops has weapon unlocks for ranks accrued, and worlds like Farmville live on the passage of time and time alone as a measure of progress. With levelling systems based on participation bwing ground into just about ever genre, playtime itself has ascended into a Goal that is rewarded (Level 50 AssCreed:Bro player here! Ask me about my special festive costume unlocks!)

These obviously slosh together, of course. Research into a raid turns Time into Knowledge. The simple act of play itself turns Time into Skill. Knowledge informs use of Skill, and Skill and Knowledge can help lower the amount of Time needed to meet a goal.

So what happens when a game company decides they want their players to give them more money? Let’s ignore hats and other cosmetic, non-gameplay affecting upgrades: What can a player get that keeps the game-space fair and balanced?

• Money for Skill is…intrinsically offensive. Giving someone an ability that substitutes for Skill is a fancy way of saying “cheating”. Imagine if publishers sold aimbots or wallhacks as DLC? The fundamental act of mastery is subverted, and the game is fundamentally broken. Games can get away with some of this in either single-player or free-to-play collaborative spaces, but it’s pure poison for competitive multiplayer. Let’s hope it stays that way.
• Money for Knowledge is slightly less offensive, but is still generally a no-go. Prima Strategy guides have been around a long time, right? But this can also slide into murky territory quickly: paid DLC that provided in-game minimaps or health bars or raid-warnings would be outrageous for almost all players.
• Money for Time. Hmmm. Money…for time. This is where things start to make sense. Some players have time, and some have money, but until the first gaming generation retires, very few players have both. We have the high schoolers and undergrads pounding away at games like they were working a second job, and we have gamers with jobs (and second jobs) who want to sneak a weeknight or two for adventure. Now that time is a goal, we can actually see an inequity emerge in the player base.

Nowhere is this as obvious as in MMOs, where players will actually pay outsourced contractors (or, it seems, prisoners) for in-game currency with hard earned real-world dolars. Getting gold in these games generally isn’t hard; skill or knowledge can help, but really the main investment is time. Some players who don’t have time can (and do) opt for an illegal black market, just to stay competitive with the young and unemployed. We have money exchanged for time, whether the developers like it or not.

Some games, particularly casual games, are embracing this inequity as an opportunity. Take Spiral Knights- a game where players can easily and conveniently buy the games currency at any time. This currency actually loops back around and is spent as TIME ITSELF, with the player having to spend some every time they dive into a dungeon. This limits the advantage of “hardcore but broke” players, and empowers the “casual but willing to pay” players. This currency is also used to purchase Skill, in that you can purchase the materials necessary to craft superior armor and weaponry for yourself. Since Spiral Knights is free-to-play, and is purely a collaborative game, this is not the riot-inducing violation you might expect.

Although these rules are brought into sharpest relief in the multiplayer space for commercial games, they have deep implications for learning games, even in single player experiences. Why? Because what is a “fairness for competition” metric in multiplayer commercial gaming turns into “no learner left behind” in educational gaming.
It is, simply put, a direct violation of the mission of a serious game to not engineer every possible advantage and leverage point to help a player learn that games learning objectives or serious goals. Giving one player more advantage in a play environment to learn over another one is…an ethical lapse on the part of the designer. Pre-engineered learning inequity? Not on my watch, you brigands!

And yet…the auto-mo-bills must be paid. Can DLC work at all for learning games? I think…yes. Maybe? Yes.

I think the key is to make sure that “time spent” has NO bearing on the game-based learning mechanics other than the aforementioned “slosh”. Time can be engineered as a “Hey, stick around and learn more!” component of a game, offering incidental rewards (hats, badges, etc.), but should never be engineered either as an element that artificially stymies progress or, heaven forbid, used as an assessment metric itself.

This all of course assumes that you’re engineering a learning game large and persistent enough to even make DLC relevant. Games made for classrooms for example demand a “half-hour in-and-out” structure. It’s unlikely those kids are going to want to buy a hat for their all-too-brief stay in your little learny world.

BUT, if you are looking at longer-term, out of classroom play experiences, either as an MMO structure or possibly even an ecosystem of interconnected games, than DLC options that don’t interfere with learning objectives seem more feasable. Granting  access to new places, new ways of expressing yourself, new ways of showing off or new puzzles to experience based on the existing mechanics all turn into useful and powerful tools for asking a player to pay just a little bit more for a play experience they value.

OR, let’s just let the kids pay 10 bucks per each .1 GPA they’d like added to their in-game assessment. What could possibly go wrong?