Vivian Tan plans to release content-creation tools to a small developer group within a year, building toward a modular ecosystem where niche math topics like Calculus Land get their own worlds. She argues that too many options overwhelm users, citing Minecraft's simpler approach, and prioritizes intrinsic motivation over badges and points because children should play for fun, not rewards.
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First of all, it's really cool that you're teaching math as a game, and you basically can teach anything through a game. Also, cool reference to Hitchhiker's Guide. And my question is, you mentioned that you were moving towards people actually building their own games for a specific thing.
Yes.
How are you integrating that with your current platform, Math Breakers, if it's actually what's happening?
So that's a very good question. That is one of our long-term goals, but right now it's really trying to figure out how feasible it is and how many people will want to create their own content. So I am a huge fan of content creation, but I also know the potential downfalls of that, I should say. Like, I was— I was all over Second Life when it came out. I was like, oh my God, it's 3D, it's virtually free. Whereas if I wanted to do something like that, you know, on my own, I, you know, lacking millions of dollars to develop a platform, I can't. It's really hard for the indie game developer to create something as immersive as an open world. But Second Life was great. It's still great, in my opinion, as a place for people to create things. But I think when you give your users this blank canvas and say, hey, just run with it, there are too many options. Most people get frustrated. And then you end up with a very small group of hardcore users who build. But then they don't make up— they probably don't make up enough of your user base to have a great impact. And that's why I think Minecraft was great because it was— it created a simple enough interface so that you got kids as young as, I'm guessing, 4 building stuff. And that was really cool. So for us, we're not— we're not quite sure yet. if we want to build an authoring tool that— because that would be— that could be a startup of its own, to be frank, building an authoring tool in Math Breakers where kids can come in and start kind of Lego-ing pieces together, because that's gonna be a very big step. Alternatively, we're thinking, what if we just put our assets up on the Unity Asset Store? That's where what we're using for building the game and letting programmers and developers who are already familiar with the technology to come and design their own things. But one possibility we're looking at is dividing the game into modules where— it pretty much already exists like that where you walk up to a group of monsters and you have to use say, addition or multiplication to defeat them. So that could be standalone. So if you could just create different modules and kind of drop them into the game, that's also a possibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just a comment on that. I think it would be really awesome to open source it and actually people creating their own courses and people downloading them, for example, for a very specific thing because math is really extensive. It makes sense and just having one central creator of that game would be, I think, really difficult.
Yeah, that's really true.
Specific niches, like I create, I don't know, advanced calculus in something specific, then people can download my part of the game.
That's exactly what I like to hear, and I think that's the direction I personally hope we go in. Really, it's just a matter of feasibility at this moment. So my— our goal for the next year is to start rolling out something along those lines, releasing the content to maybe a smaller group of developers and say, hey, if we just give you the tools, build what you want and we'll integrate it back into the world itself. The current version of the game is closed world. You go through through a linear set of levels, but what we eventually want is like a big World of Warcraft style world where you can go into different pockets. You might have Calculus Land right here and then Multiplication Land over there, and if you cross over into the wrong zone without being at that level, then you get killed— or sorry, no killing in this game. It's a kid's game. No killing. It's funny, we can't say weapons, we say gadgets. And like in the video you see all these kids and they're screaming and you're like, oh, what's the best part of Math Breakers? And they start screaming weapons and then you have to do a retake. But anyways, no killing. But you get defeated. You get defeated and then, you know, you have to come back to your zone and start over again or that incentivizes you to power up. But if we have something like that and you could go on and create your advanced calculus world and then we all want to get on our math ships and make our way over there because that's where all the cool kids are.
Right.
Right, back there. So do you guys provide any incentives for the kids to want to play the game?
Meaning like, or do you leave that to the teachers? Like, oh, the first one to finish this level gets like a piece of candy or something like that?
So that's a really good question too because now we're getting into the area of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. There's— gamification has been really big for the past few years. And we looked at a lot of other math games that aim to teach, but they reward the kids through badges and stars and points. But really that comes back down to extrinsic motivation because you can dress up homework with animations and, you know, stars and all that, but if the kid doesn't want to learn, they don't want to learn. And that's something the teachers have to assign, say, hey, finish this and get points or whatever. It's not— we're not discounting that as a viable source of teaching because it's probably a really good way to get in some practice, but ultimately we want the kids to be motivated themselves. And when we were designing this, we really had to think about the various approaches. The 3 groups that we're looking at— parents, teachers, and kids— who do we appeal to first? There was— there's strong pressures to appeal to the teachers first because once they adopt this, they will give it to the kids. But ultimately, we decided against that because we— the kids are our end users. And the people we really want to motivate and inspire are the kids. So we decided to go a more video gamey route that's more difficult for teachers to grasp for the most part unless— I mean, we have encountered some teachers who are very gung-ho about the game, fortunately. But for the most part, kids see it, they pick up on it, and it's just like any other video game for them, even though there are mathematics involved. So we haven't really had to convince children to play it. It's more— It's more fun. convincing teachers and parents to use it at home or in school. Okay, you.
I really like this game, it's so awesome.
Well, thank you.
I would like to promote this, for example, in Estonia, but how is the selling process? Do you have some resellers network or do you have some affiliate programs or something like this?
Yeah, we do, we have a number of partner organizations who work with us and distribute the game for us. You can buy it directly, but we like working with our partners too, just because it reaches a greater audience.
How much textual content does it have? For example, the kids from 1 to 6, maybe they don't speak English yet, so is it hard for them or no?
No, we initially, we had a lot of text explanations, but even the English speakers, they don't stop and read text, they just want to keep playing. So we just scrapped all that. You have some very basic instructions in the game. You have a walrus in the game. I don't know how we went with a walrus. We have a walrus in the game that— who serves as your guide, and if you need some hints and tips, you go up to him and he explains. But other than that, it's— math is a language, so it could work in any context. So if we were to market this abroad, the most I think we have to do is create like a user guide for teachers in that language, but the game itself could stand alone. Okay. I skipped over ENF.
