Playing the Kukui Cup

In the quest to learn more about serious game development, it becomes necessary to explore an existing serious game system. With that said, we take a look at The Quest for the Kukui Cup, The University of Hawaii Manoa dormitory energy challenge that was done in the past (For a brief look at the systems concept, you can take a look at this video). The Quest for the Kukui Cup (or Kukui Cup for short) uses the concept of quiz recall and activities to encourage and reward the use of energy saving techniques to help enlighten students on the need for energy conservation, especially in a high-cost energy-consuming environment like Hawaii.

Common to many serious game systems, the Kukui Cup provides activities that provide rewards, and maintain engagement for the users, similar to the points mentioned in both the Google Tech Talks "Meaningful Play" presentation and the Tech Crunch article on "Everything You'll Ever Need To Know About Gamification" mentioned in an earlier blog post. In order to gain the users attention and maintain engagement, it's not only provides simple activities worth points, but also expands the potential gain from the activities with added incentives. This is one of the strong incentives for anyone who is interested. In addition, prizes are obtained through competition, applying drive to users by making prizes obtainable by either winning in their energy consumption or investing lottery tickets, they gain from completing tasks for the chance at winning a prize. The games provide a novel and easily structured system that validates the users participation, creates clear completion points, and balance potential difficulty (in meeting requirements and answering quiz questions, with the necessary amount of time and skill to give a good sense of flow.

Reviewing this Kukui Cup experience lead me to trying out the first couple of levels of each activity, this includes watching videos and answering questions about them for points, making commitments to do energy saving techniques for points, and to sign up for potential events. Each of these is also connected to a "quest" system, which gives a set list of activities that can be completed for more points.  Including in the basic activities is the ability to give feedback which provides a small amount of additional points, encouraging providing feedback to the system. While each task felt like a normal activity, the potential for entertainment is apparent. Videos combine illustrations and narratives to provide information to users, and reward retention of information. And though I was not particularly involved in the activities, it was not for lack of trying, but rather that the site felt like it was still in development, graphics and videos were good but lacked the style typical of "mainstream" project. Some narration included some studdering, showing another sign of "almost complete" over a completed project.

It is a good project, I very much enjoyed the idea of giving gaming a purpose and teaching energy conservation, but at this point, some issues were prominent in holding back the experience. In quizzes, many required fill in answers which would need approval for scores, this delays the gratification and increases anxiety about a question, something which should be avoided as much as possible. In the overall presentation some areas felt a bit too condensed for information, as all the different layers were displayed in one area and felt rather cluttered on the screen. For now though, the Kukui Cup is a step in the right direction, and one I think people will appreciate going forward.