Link List (Games Education Summit 2009)

The Game Education Summit was really an eye-opener for me. It encouraged me to take a look at games in the classroom in a whole new way. If you are interested in some of the other posts in this series, you can see the list below:

Live-Blogging The Game Education Summit (Part 1)
What's In A Name? (Part 2)
Open Creativity (Part 3)
Brenda Brathwaite Is Amazing! (Part 4)
Innovative Teaching Through Game Design (Part 5)

Here are some other links that I found at the Game Education Summit that were interesting:

Game Education Network
Art Institute of Pittsburgh
Panda -- Free game design software
Alice -- Free game design software for beginners
RIP -- a Remix Manifesto
Workbookproject.com -- a social network for those who want to be creative in the digital age

Innovative Teaching Through Game Design (Games Education Summit -- Part 5)

(Note: I am still playing catch-up from a series of conferences I attended over the last several weeks. The post below is taken from notes done at the time of the Games Education Summit. I hope I captured the very good thoughts of the speaker, Ian Schreiber, accurately.)

Ian Schreiber spoke eloquently and at some length at the Games Education Summit about using the principles of game design to construct better learning experiences for our students.

He started his presentation by comparing Pokemon to the periodic table of elements. How is it, he asked, that children will happily remember all of the characteristics of all of the Pokemon characters but not be able to remember any of the characteristics of the periodic table of elements?

Both contain a wide variety of seemingly unrelated information and both are fairly complex yet children as young as 6 and 7 can remember all sorts of things about a Pokemon character and almost none about an element of nature.

What is it about the game that encourages and facilitates learning?

Schreiber did not pretend to have the answer. He readily admitted that game design had no real theory to speak of and made a point of mentioning that 90% of all games are essentially unsuccessful (in that they do not turn a profit).

He did think, however, that there might be some leads in the game design literature that would translate well into instructional design principles.

Specifically he mentioned 3 ideas, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's ideas of "flow", Raph Koster's Theory of Fun and Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, Robert Zubek's 8 kinds of fun.

Csikszentmihalyi (a psychologist and not a game designer) argues that learning stuff at the right pace puts us in a "flow" mode that encourages us to learn more. If things are too easy we are bored. If things are too hard, then we quit. We need do-able challenges that allow us to progress, to learn and get better (see image at right). If we have this (or can find it on our own) then we are in the flow.

Schreiber joins this idea to games by way of Koster. Koster's Theory of Fun is as much about learning as it is about games and the book is a perfect segue from the more abstract ideas of Csikszentmihalyi to the world of games.

Finally, Schreiber points us to the 8 different kinds of fun (at least) that are out there. Specifically, these are: Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Discovery, Expression and Pastime. It is important to understand that fun comes in a variety of sizes, e.g. learning that is "challenging" can also be "fun". Fun does not, in this way of thinking, equal easy.

Schreiber clearly stated that not all classes had to include all the elements of fun. He seemed to be recommending that considering these elements in the design of a class might increase the "fun" in the class and thereby increase the learning.

Beyond these three broad elements, Schreiber pointed to a few additional thoughts that seemed to me to be worth considering. First, he offered a quote from Sid Meier, the designer of the popular Civilization game series (among others): "A good game is a series of interesting decisions." Translating this to the classroom means that these decisions need to be decisions that the students make in the course of the class, not decisions the teacher makes for the students. Furthermore, these decisions do not necessarily have to do with content. Schreiber called the attempt, in some classes, to jazz up the content to make it seem more fun to be little more than "chocolate covered broccoli" (I love this term...).

Schreiber's ideas were thought-provoking and his presentation was well designed and easy to wrap your head around. For more of his ideas, he blogs at Teaching Game Design and
Game Design Concepts.

Surreal Saturday: Origins Game Fair 2009

I went to the Origins Game Fair a couple of weeks ago (Trying to recuperate from the event is what has kept me from posting).

For those of you not familiar with Origins, it is one of the largest, if not the largest, game fairs in the world. When I say "games", by the way, I do not mean video games. This is old school, table top, role-playing and even collectible card gaming. And lots of it.

Over 14,000 people from all over the world descend on Columbus, Ohio each summer and pack the very large convention center they have there. Gaming started on Wednesday and went -- 24 hours a day -- until Sunday evening. My son (this was his graduation gift) and I got there at 0900 and did not leave until after midnight most days. The place was never less than half full and during peak times you had people gaming in the hallways. Literally hundreds of exhibitors (see picture at right) were there with every conceivable type of game.

I know, I hear you. "Odd," you say, "But how does this approach surreal?" Mostly because of the wide variety of games and gamers represented. On the one hand, you had Army Command and General Staff officer types recreating cold war nuclear scenarios and lecturing to the assembled grognards about the intricacies of 17th Century tactical formations while, on the other, you had people dressed as cats participating in some sort of bizarre anime-based role-playing game.

There were cool-sounding games like Oh My God! There's An Axe In My Head: The Game of International Diplomacy along with the truly cool Aerodrome, a WWI aerial combat game. Watching all these people criss-cross through the convention center and picking and mixing snippets of conversation from these extremes (and many others, e.g. "You mean there really are people who play Settlers of Cataan competitively??!!") led to a sort of cognitive dissonance that was, truly, surreal.

But surreal in a good way. These people were not causing any trouble. They were just having fun and, frankly, stretching their minds in ways that video games cannot. Don't get me wrong; I like video games but I think you get a much better appreciation for a system when you have to learn the rules and figure out how a game really works. This appreciation for the way systems work translates, I think, more or less directly into the creation of a better analyst, for example.