In the article about the power of UX, CPO of InnocuShay Dagan celebrates DuoLingo's Match Madness minigame as a "masterclass in design and gamification."Not to be a cynic — I love DuoLingo, but Match Madness is a masterclass in missing the point of your core value proposition. Shay's screenshot showcasing the Match Madness interface resting on level 7 speaks volumes to my conclusion. In my opinion, getting past level 7 requires one of two things.
Paying to Learn or Paying to Win?
You can "pay2win" (a cynical term in gamer culture that decries the gradual scaling back of victory through merit inherent in the nascent video game industry) to get to the higher levels. There is another "legitimate" way of winning outside of buying swathes of gems with real money, but it is not through engaging in a learning activity. It is instead to develop or use a technique to maximize matching output to win.
The scale in which you need to match words in such a short time is not feasible for the average person translating words, even someone fluent in both languages.
Attached is a screenshot I took after completing level 12. That's right, there isn't nine levels. There are twelve. Wait, what?! Why? Why are there three hidden levels? Because they know anyone who has gotten this far are addicted gamers or gamblers. Yet again, another example of a "masterclass in design and gamification." That is, if you work for a casino or pay2win video game.
People using Duolingo, as a majority, are not gamers. They are general consumers seeking to develop their language skills. They arenotactions-per-minute maximizing gamers or degenerate gamblers. The Match Madness design is for gamers and gamblers, not learners.
Match Madness Damages Learning Outcomes for Gamers
So, why is Match Madness a bad thing? One of the paid subscription features with DuoLingo — a "Pay to Learn" feature (not "Pay to Win"), is extra lessons that aid you with your weaker areas of language learning. For me, conjugations while learning in Spanish have been extremely difficult for me. Yet, my personalized learning was having me work on extremely simple words like "uno" and "tres." As a result, I continued to be weak in mastering Spanish conjugation format.
If you are an American like me who speaks at most 20 words of Spanish, it's quite likely "uno dos tres," are in your diminutive vocabulary. If you're a Millennial who grew up listening to the band The Offpsring's hit Pretty Fly (For A White Guy), it's virtually guaranteed that counting to six in Spanish is within your reportoire.
Yet, because I am a gamer determined to get to the max level, my frantic attempts at matching resulted in mistakenly translating words like "one" to "una" instead of "uno" and "train" to "tres" instead of "tren" due to their visual similarities and my mindless attempts at matching as quickly as possible. As a result, DuoLingo's attempts at baiting me into lining their revenues with gem purchases reduces the overall value I get from the "Super" subscription they are already earning my money from (or in this case, my sister's money – thanks for the family plan, sis!).
How to Beat DuoLingo's Match Madness
The rest of this article is detailing how to beat DuoLingo's Match Madness without spending money. I must stress again that this has nothing to do with learning and my writing after this point is purely a how-to on playing a game, not maximizing learning outcomes in an educational consumer app.
So, how did I not only get past level 7, but blaze all the way to conquering level 12? I developed three techniques to make the gameas mindless as possible. In other words, not learning! When playing match madness, using the brainpower of problem solving actively works against you and can most often guarantee a loss. Here are the three techniques:
"Psychic" Row Blaster
One of the paid options to win is called the "Row Blaster" which removes one of the five matching rows to reduce the cognitive load of ten words to match down to eight. With my "psychic" row blasting technique, we simply do this in our mind and accept that we can only realistically match three rows quickly anyway. Pick three rows with your mind, ignore the other two.
In practicality, this means that in a favorable environment, we want three rows, side by side, that we can quickly match in sequence. When we match the third row, the first row should be fresh with a pair to mindlessly tap once more to power through as many words as possible.
By focusing on only three rows, we are reducing our cognitive load from ten down to three. Because we have identified the three pairs at the beginning of the game, we know exactly where our fingers (or two thumbs if you hold and tap your phone like a gorilla as I do) are tapping next based on the placing of our previous sets of matches. Now that we're psychic row blasting, we are only translating 3 pairs of words (not learning). Now, it is simply a matter of matching 3 words optimally at the beginning, and getting our actions-per-minute optimized.
Dual Digit Proximity
When I say "digit" I mean fingers or thumbs. Since I use my thumbs, I will be speaking from that worldview. Dual Digit Proximity takes the "psychic row blasting" to a more optimized state. Instead of just using any old pairing, finding a pairing in which your thumbs don't need to move as much can shave off 10 seconds or more from a round.
This means that a row pair at the top, the middle, and the bottom is not as ideal as a perhaps more confusing set of pairs where your thumbs are matching in an "x" shape in some instances.
"Taking the L" and Restarting
In contemporary video gaming culture, "taking the L" means accepting you've lost. In many Match Madness scenarios, the match pairings ideal for psychic row blasting and dual digit proximity are non-existent. Match Madness has 3 rounds within each "lesson" which increases the possibility of unideal layouts.
Theoretically, you could make matches that generate a more favorable row setup. However, I am not a smart person, and I already spend much of the round identifying an ideal row layout for myself. Because of this, I unapologetically will end a round before it even starts if I know I'm not going to get myself positioned for a winning time.
Take the L and move on. You're here to win, and in the current game's "meta" (another gaming term for commentary separate from the designer's intended gameplay), there is virtually no penalty for stopping and simply starting the round over again.
Much to the original point, though, learning is about perservering through the tough parts. To challenge your mind to push past hurdles and reach your learning goals. Maybe in Match Madness, I'm doing this as a gamer, but certainly not as a language learner.
