Uncharted Depths by Filament Games: a science inquiry game

Uncharted Depths is a science game from Filament Games, a learning-game production studio. The studio also called it the game of scientific inquiry. It is built around the working habits of science professionals: forming questions, collecting data, compiling that data into defensible theories, stating those theories and taking part in a community of practice.

The setting is science fiction. The player is an inter-planetary researcher who studies life on remote, uninhabited worlds. A mobile research station gives access to unexplored undersea areas, and a submersible carries tools for taking readings, such as phosphorus levels, and for capturing specimens. With them the player investigates alien ecosystems, looking at creature relationships such as symbiosis, population dynamics and water quality.

Play alternates between lab-based controlled experiments and field-based measurements and observations. Each one feeds the same job: to develop, refine and defend a theory. The design goal was exploration over formal assessment, a game that helps a player form an opinion instead of being handed an answer. Filament described that as a different kind of game experience from one built around explicit objectives.

Filament Games, LLC, builds learning games that combine commercial game development practice with learning science. Its portfolio at the time covered both 3D games built on the Torque engine and 2D Flash games, across STEM, literacy and civics. Named clients included National Geographic's JASON Project, Florida Virtual School, the University of Wisconsin, the Smithsonian Institution, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning and iCivics. Grant funding came from the MacArthur, Kauffman, Annenberg and National Science Foundations.

Its method starts from the learning objectives. The team then designs gameplay verbs, the actions a player can take that carry them from understanding an objective to internalizing it. Its stated philosophy holds that games are not a good fit for every learning goal, that learning is naturally pleasurable and needs no sandwiching between unrelated fun mechanics, and that good games embrace experimentation and failure. Uncharted Depths applies that last point directly, because a wrong theory is part of the process.

Filament Games is still in business. Its website describes the studio as "educational game developers creating playful experiences that improve people's lives" and links a portfolio of more than 400 projects, among them Superkids World, Sound It Out! and Investigation Declaration. Uncharted Depths does not appear on the home page.

No page for Uncharted Depths was found on the studio's site, and no other official source offering the game turned up. The game was built when Flash and desktop plug-in technology were common, so even a surviving page would need to offer a version that runs in a current browser to count as playable. The games directory therefore lists its status as not confirmed.