If You Weren't

If You Weren’t How can games be a mirror for us, and what can they reflect back to us?

Games, maps, delusions, colonialism…

How to articulate learning

Epistemic network analysis (Useful for Paly Study)

June Ahn:

Heather Browning:      Not gamification

CBT     Definition of a game from Games and Men

    MDA game design framework        // MDAO

    http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~rob/publications/MDA.pdf

Jeff Watson     The technologies we use to organize and structure playful engagement. 

    Designing for assessment…

    The procedural: Encode sustainability in the rules. Procedural generation of narrative. (think soccer)

Question:  Games shape the practices that constitute identity. Critical pedagogy & critical literacy can be framed as helping people become aware of the games they are already playing, and to participate in choosing the games they want to be playing. At the same time, design often aspires to make itself invisible. Is there tension here?

FOR QP: Follow-up survey: Did this change your thinking at all over the last few weeks? FOCUS IT ON TASKS.

Game design as a way to critique cultural practices “Critical design”: Alan Hook

Transmedia Games as a form of philosophy

Transformational framework.

DISCUSSION

How do you connect in-game behaviors to learning outcomes?     June: That’s one reason we like the 3d visualization of behaviors, so people can see what they are doing. 

**How to get the right balance between behaviors and learning objectives.  **     Heather: Your in-game goal should not be your learning objective. The way you achieve the goal should be the learning objective. The goal should be non-poroductive for the player. The obstacles are unnecessary. Jumping on chairs is the solution. You’re teaching people how to jump on chairs. If your goal is to teach people to sprint and you tell them to sprint across the room as long as possible, you have made it into a tedious project where if you’re not good at it, you will feel bad about yourself.

If you were to code for joy and bliss, how would you do that?     June: You have to be empathetic to differences between different players with different goals. 

How can participants play a role in designing the game?     June: Learning is similar to a story. Good game mechanics create productive tension.

How do you balance giving your user a sense of autonomy and also teach specific skills? Heather: You want to define what your learning outcome is really well. A lot of people overweight the importance of particular information compared to specific tasks. What will the consequences of failing be? Game-based pedagogy is the next stage of inquiry-based pedagogy.  June: What kind of procedure are you trying to teach? Measuring blood-pressure correctly. A lot of practitioners make mistakes. June: There are skills and context involved. Those create rich scenarios. 

Chris: How can we frame literacy participation as a game?