Go Morse Go! Review
- Dakota Hernandez
- Mar 1, 2022
- 4 min read
Game Metadata
Learning Objectives
Go Morse Go! teaches the player Morse code, a language for communicating over telegraphs invented in the 19th century. Morse code is transmitted as a series of beeps with varying length. All letters in the Morse code alphabet are constructed from a mix of long and short beeps. Given that the game provides players with a guide for how to form each letter, the player doesn’t need to know the Morse code alphabet before playing the game. The only prerequisites that come to mind are knowledge of the English alphabet and fine motor skills, as short beeps require precise button timing. As for transferable skills, unfortunately knowing Morse code doesn’t exactly transfer well into other domains. However, practicing Morse code in auditory signals (beeps) could also help the player with practicing Morse code in visual signals (flashes).
Game Elements
Go Morse Go! has two gamemodes, Survival and Championship, each with similar core gameplay loops. In each mode, Samantha the cheerleading bunny prompts the player to “Gimme a letter!” The player can see the letter and its corresponding Morse code representation, and their task is to produce the correct signal using a button on their keyboard before the 5-second timer runs out. In the Survival mode, players try to form (random) letters endlessly; if they mess up or the timer reaches zero, they lose some health. After approximately 4 mistakes, their health runs out, and the last player standing (if playing with more than one) is the winner. The Championship mode is limited to multiplayer, and differs from Survival in that players compete to see who can reach a target score the quickest. Players earn more points by spelling letters quicker, and their game wins are displayed in subsequent rounds.
The main game screen (both modes). The Blue player spelled the letter (T) correctly, while the Pink player couldn’t spell it in time.
Unfortunately, there is no difficulty increase as games go on. I was expecting the timer to decrease, but that’s not exactly feasible considering the longest letters have three long beeps and one short beep and take up most of the 5-second timer to construct. Nevertheless, the game still feels fast paced and the cute art keeps me motivated.
Learning Mechanisms
Go Morse Go! has the potential to be a great learning tool for Morse code, but some minor systems and visuals kept the game from properly accomplishing its prime learning objective. The game excels at giving the player immediate feedback on their mistakes: When a player sends the wrong signal or takes too long to construct their letter, their bunny character fizzles out and the player loses health or misses out on points. This system is very effective as the player can immediately compare their work to the correct answer and identify where they went wrong. Moreover, only having 26 letters to learn means that the player will often encounter redundant letters in a single session thus reinforcing their learning for those letters.
After playing the game with some friends, we immediately saw some of Go Morse Go!’s missed opportunities for enriching our learning. While the game appears to order its UI elements in such a way to establish some top-to-bottom spatial contiguity, we realized that the game never takes away the Morse code sequence for each letter and asks the player to recall the corresponding English letter. We realized that we could ignore the “Gimme a letter!” line entirely and skip straight to the sequence, but this meant that we never really learned the letters. The other major design decision that really hindered our learning was using random letters. Actually applying our learning by spelling out actual words instead of just random letters would make it much easier for us to combine letters in meaningful ways.
The game never removes the Morse code sequences for the letters, so we started ignoring the letters and exclusively focusing on the sequence.
Improvements in the Full Game
Go Morse Go! was created for two game jams at once! The first jam’s theme was “it’s a small world,” and the second jam asked for games with single-button control schemes. With these considerations in mind, the game’s design makes much more sense. After the game jam, Impostor Cat Games developed the game further into Go Morse Go! Arcade Edition. I didn’t purchase the full game, but the trailer on Steam shows that the developers addressed most of my criticisms of this game. The default UI places the Morse code guide separately from the target letter, so players have to actually make an effort to read the target letter, find the letter in the guide, and read the corresponding Morse code sequence. They can later hide the table completely once they feel more proficient and can decrease the timer to add extra emphasis on speed. However, it doesn’t look like they added words or multiple-letter strings.
Overall Critique
Overall, Go Morse Go! is a blast to play and I would highly recommend buying the full game if you want to learn Morse code. The game jam version, while very fun, doesn’t fulfill its educational goal due to a lack of evaluating the players’ skills. Our favorite mode was Championship mode, as competing against each other actually provided some challenge compared to Survival mode, where the constant 5-second timer rarely invoked a sense of urgency. Given that this was a game jam game, I am very impressed with its quality, and the educational shortcomings can be attributed to a lack of development time.
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