Baba Is Education
A critique on the indie game Baba Is You. What makes this game educational?
The Game
Baba Is You is a logical reasoning puzzle game devoped by Hempuli Oy. This game is playable on multiple platforms: PC, Mac, Linux, and Nintendo Switch. The high-level subject area is within computer science, more specifily geared towards logical reasoning. Playing as Baba (and Baba’s friends), you must solve intricate puzzles by pushing blocks and creating logical statements. With a unique and innovative concept, Baba Is You tests players to think outside of the box to navigate through perplexing challenges.
Play the game here: https://hempuli.com/baba/
Educational Goals
This game aims to teach the player a handful of educational skills. The most notable of these are logical thinking, critical thinking, creativity, and trial and error.
When first starting to play the game, the player is introduced to simple logical statements. For example, “Baba Is You” represents that the player is Baba while “Wall Is Stop” indicates that the wall will stop the player from moving. Having Baba remove “Stop” from the statement will allow the player to move through the wall as the “Wall” no longer stops Baba from moving. Soon after, the game becomes more advanced — involving trickier statements and all types of conjunctions.
From this, its apprent that Oy wants the player to learn how to think out of the box when forming logical sentences to help Baba reach its flag goal. The developer assumes that the player already has some understanding on how logical propositions and basic sentence structures with conjunctions work. They also assume that the player has a good sense of pattern recognition. The beginning levels are considered easy and gives the player time to form different strategies that they can later apply to more challenging levels.
As the game progresses, the player begins to gain experiences and skills that can be transferable to other mediums. Logical reasoning is one of the more prominent themes within this game. The player must be able to understand how to interpret each noun and conjunction — as changing one of those may change the level entirely. Players should have a good grasp on thinking critically and devising creative solutions in order to progress thoughout the game.
Game Elements
Nouns and Verbs
Objects, or nouns, are what the player interacts with; whereas actions, or verbs, are the rules that can be applied to those objects and state when these rules will occur.
The nouns within the game are the player, the objects it can potentially interact with, the object word nouns themselves, conjunction words, and the goal flag.
The overarching verbs are being able to move the player (whether they are Baba, a key, or even a box) and touching the goal flag to win. Specifically, move, push, pull, toggle, join, interact with objects, create rules, destroy rules, undo moves, and restart the game.
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The more complicated verbs (join, create rules, destroy rules) within the game are created by the player and other moving objects. For example, a created rule can be “wall is stop” but when moving “is” out of the statement, the wall can no longer stop a moving object from going past it. Thus, a new verb for wall has been created. Words and objects can be joined together to make new rules or pulled apart to make a whole new rule.
Game Loops
The main core game loop involves the player exploring and analyzing the map, solving the given puzzle, and progressing through the levels. This usually has the player begin with the start level, explore and observe the level, solve puzzles through trial and error, achieve the win condition, and progress to the next level.
The outer loops of Baba Is You focuses on the overall progression throughout the game levels. This includes puzzle exploration, puzzle solving, and completing level.
The inside loops of Baba Is You are the puzzles within the level and solving them. This has the player explore the puzzle and analyze the current existing rules and relationships the player can interact with to successfully achieve the win condition.
The Player Experience
Overall, the player experience can be described as challenging yet fun. The player would feel rewarded after completeing a difficult level. Since each level is unique and has many logical steps, there are a plethora of solutions players can follow through to complete a level.
Learning Mechanisms
The learning merchanism that the game is trying to impact is sense-making and critical thinking through fluency building in logic. This is due to the game employing the following learning science principles: application, feedback, and segmenting.
The game does not provide any instructions on how to put together blocks to create sentences — but it does tell the user that they have the ability to move and by moving, the user also has the abiltiy to push. Oy’s use of application helps challenge the player to use their knowledge to solve puzzles. Although the game does not offer the player practice puzzles to hone their skills, the game lets them learn by doing.
To add onto this, Baba Is You gives the player a lot of feedback. The player would see their environment change around them as they move around words and conjunctions. This gives the player some feedback on how their actions affects their surroundings and from this, they can use trial and error to understand how to progress through a level.
One of the last core learning science principles of Baba Is You is segmenting. Segmenting breaks down the materials into segments that allows for the player to approach the problem in smaller chunks. This is mainly seen when a player is introduced to new words and conjunctions. These levels are seen as simpler to help the player familiarize themselves with them and think about how they can apply it to the other words they already know.
These learning science principles are found within the learning mechanisms. When put together, the educational goals of teaching the player logical reasoning and critical thinking through trial and error is successfully seen.
Final Critique
To conclude, I believe that Baba Is You is likely to succeed as both a game and learning experience. This is due to its challenging levels and rewarding feelings felt by players once completeing a puzzling level. Baba Is You encourages creativity, strategic thinking, and logical reasoning which creates an overall stimulating environment.
From the copious hours I spent playing Baba Is You, I personally believe that this game helped me with thinking about problems from different angles and boosted my confidence when solving logical puzzles.
