Meaningful play: learning, best practices, reflections through games (original) (raw)
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Mitgutsch K., Huber S., Wagner M., Wimmer J. & Rosenstingl, H. (Ed.) (2013): Context Matters! Exploring and Reframing Games in Context. Proceedings of the Vienna Games Conference 2013.
""Considering the current technological development and the rapid change in how we communicate, we focus on the field of learning and the new roles within it. With learning we refer, in particular, to the process of gaining and absorbing information and knowledge, a process that requires engagement, involvement and dedication. The meaningful experience concept is connected to and harnesses reflections and awareness, suggesting best practices. The game as a representative system reflects the context and the culture in which it was born. Therefore, the act of playing within a particular context leads the player to overcome the magic circle boundaries and symbolically interact with the socio-cultural elements of the society itself. On account of this, we present five Game Design projects dealing with social innovation, socio-cultural and cross-cultural issues investigated through ludical metaphor, stimulating individual and collective socio-cultural reflections aimed to support learning.""
2014
Nowadays, the gaming instance is an increasingly popular practice. It has become a crossroad of perspectives and multidisciplinary hybridizations. Between tradition (Huizinga 1938) and innovation (Bogost 2011), from Game Studies to Social Sciences, from Design to Psychology, the game plays a fundamental role in the everyday life of common people (Fink 1957; Suits 1978) and in research activities. Our intent is to investigate through sociological and design tools how the game, as a communication system for social innovation, is capable of generating experiences that stimulate a reflection on socio-cultural issues (Flanagan 2009). The designer becomes an activator of best practices and the game becomes a facilitator for content transmission: our aim is to understand how the immersion into ludic/fictional world, delimited by the boundaries of the magic circle (Salen, Zimmerman 2004), encourages players to open their mind to new ideas. Playing, we enter the “circle”: our mental and beha...
Game and play as means for learning experiences (Maresa Bertolo & Ilaria Mariani)
The progressive spread of interpersonal communication devices and their evolution into more and more versatile, pervasive, ubiquitous and user-friendly systems contribute to the contemporary process of creating new systems of languages and social behaviours. Today, we witness the constant progress and emergence of an interactive language that is strongly focused on visual and experiential culture. In particular, the technological context characterizing the contemporaneity and the youth’s daily life are strongly interwoven, leading new generations - the digital natives - to develop from an early age an entrenched ability to interact with the communication tools. Referring to the analysis of contemporary scholars (Castells, Jenkins, Flusser) we can affirm that the technological revolution is leading to a new people-to-technology relationship; therefore, there is an urgent need to revisit the traditional epistemological paradigms of dissemination and learning of information. The socio-technological transformation strongly influences our attitude to experience space, time, contents as a way to know and learn. The experience concept assumes an important role for the Communication Design field, which is now enriching itself through the relationship with other disciplines. In this scenario, the connection with Game Studies assumes a great importance and many scholars (Salen & Zimmerman; Montola; Juul) consider the gameplay experience as a crucial point. In this paper we observe how the Communication Design might embrace the Game Design paradigms and methods, aiming supporting to support the learning of contents, attitudes and best practices. We emphasize the meaning of “learning”, reading it as a process aiming to develop abilities and knowledge; we also refer to any activities that lead to define, obtain and consolidate awareness, whether instrumental, social, behavioral, mental (Koster). In the thousand-year-old study of the learning process, we are now in a phase wherein the learn by doing paradigm becomes more and more important (Castells; Prensky) and acquires new tools and methodologies. We propose to consider the game and its prominent role in the coeval panorama: its contemporary typologies and state of the art demonstrate its aptitude to act as an interdisciplinary tool. The game is able to involve users in immersive experiences, stimulate the reflection and act on attitudes and habits. It is also important to deem the role of the play activity as a communication and learning mean. People learn by playing thanks to game’s motivational system, that can actually improve cognitive capacity and the ability to abstract, learn and act with awareness (Salen; Juul; Flanagan). We propose QRiosity, a pervasive game we designed and performed with the Around Play and Interaction Design Research Group, based on the interaction among space, mobile technologies, people and knowledge. It leads players to interactively explore an environment, that is able to react to their actions. It explores the idea of space as a storyteller focusing on the benefit coming from the act of experiencing space and contents through a ludic intervention. QRiosity is an applied playfulness system that induces players to be in a state of psychological flow (Csikszentmihalyi): it is an actual example of the aptitude of people to learn through a ludic process that increases the cognitive process of learning by experiencing.
This paper introduces a tool of a framework for the observation and analysis of play experiences (PEOF - Play Experience Observation Framework). PEOF consists of a multidisciplinary set of theoretical and empirical tools and guidelines between Sociology and Design that scholars, designers and researchers may use in order to comprehend and exploit the ludic dynamics in terms of meaningful experiences. It is mainly addressed to Persuasive Games and Games for Change, as communication systems for social innovation capable of generating experiences that stimulate a reflection on socio- cultural issues. Indeed, through the play activity, we can experience (and therefore understand) perspectives that are different from our usual ones. Specifically, we describe the set of concepts of frames, patterns and scripts on the ground of the PEOF and in particular of the Evidence- Interpretation Matrix (EIM), a PEOF related research tool. EIM focuses on how the mentioned concepts can be empirically used to attest that a change is occurring by playing certain games. Through observation and interpretation of a playing activity, it aims to understand what happens when players are encouraged to open their mind to new ideas. The overall framework and related EIM tool have been tested and refined through several case studies developed at the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, like the Persuasive Urban Game A Hostile World, here used as main example to explain and validate our suggestions. Keywords: Social innovation; multidisciplinary framework; game design; player experience analysis; persuasive games
Guidelines for the design of (educational) digital games on complex societal issues
2021
Designers of digital entertainment games and designers of games for education can learn from each other when it comes to gameplay mechanics, content and mediation techniques that enable a fun and at the same time educational experience for players. The following design guidelines bring together the perspectives of entertainment game industry and educators. Based on a range of studies, they present 11 recommendations to facilitate the design of games on complex social and socio-ecological issues such as climate change, migration, city development and resource conflictssuitable for any designer who wants to provide an enriching game experience.
Game-based learning as a meaning making-driven activity process: a human factors perspective
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Game Based Learning ECGBL 2019, 2019
This article presents a human factors theoretical framework aimed at understanding learning in games as a meaning-making process. The framework models the gameplay activity as a process intrinsically driven by learning, conceptualizes game-based learning as a meaning-making process central to any type of game, and identifies aspects of a game system key to originate and influence such process. During gameplay, players continuously interpret changing scenarios, decide and plan action in order to pursue desired goals, execute planned actions, and evaluate results. Through this process, the gameplay experience unfolds as a holistic activity that integrates players' thinking, feeling and doing: players define their courses of actions based on the interplay of their perceptions, feelings and thoughts, which are in turn shaped by the outcomes of their actions and other relevant events unfolding in the game space. Through gameplay players explore the game space in order to make sense of the properties and relationships of game entities and events, their patterns of interaction, and the socio-cultural valorization that all this has within the game context. Accordingly, players learn continuously about what happens in the game, how and why, and, by extension, define what is meaningful to them, what they should do, how and why. Understanding the nature of this process and the key game elements that define it is crucial to identify learning potentialities offered by existing games, or design learning affordances for newly created products. We use an example to show how the framework can facilitate both the analysis and design of games from a learning perspective.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015
This workshop investigates the mechanisms for behaviour change and influence, focusing on the definition of requirements for pervasive gameplay and interaction mechanics, procedures, actions, mechanisms, systems, story, etc.) with the purpose of informing, educating, reflecting and raising awareness. By connecting various experts such as designers, educators, developers, evaluators and researchers from both industry and academia, this workshop aims to enable participants share, discuss and learn about existing relevant mechanisms for pervasive learning in a Serious Game (SG) context. Research in SG, as a whole, faces two main challenges in understanding: the transition between the instructional design and actual game design implementation [1] and documenting an evidence-based mapping of game design patterns onto relevant pedagogical patterns [2]. From a practical perspective, this transition lacks methodology and requires a leap of faith from a prospective customer to the ability of a SG developer to deliver a game that will achieve the desired learning outcomes. This workshop aims to present and apply a preliminary exposition though a purpose-processing methodology to probe, from various SG design aspects, how SG design patterns map with pedagogical practices
Introduction: A Game's Study Manifesto
2013
We also acknowledge that literature is only one constituent of Western culture; that non-western cultures are comprised of various components, including literature and media; that media and literature are but components of global culture; and that the terms 'western' and 'non-western' reify the Orientalism identified by Edward Said (1978). Finally, we note that digital games are not literature, but we find much promise in their consideration as popular global fiction.
Games, learning & society: Introduction to the special issue
2009
Each year, the Games, Learning and Society (GLS) program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosts a conference to facilitate conversation about digital literacy learning in the spaces of popular culture, fandom, and interactive media-like games. Each year, we bring academics, designers, educators, and media fans together to share thoughts and findings on how digital media, commercial and otherwise, can enhance learning, culture, and education. The event has been a surprising success in many ways, and we now boast an acceptance rate (13-30%) more stringent than some peer-reviewed academic journals and a waiting list for entry each year. In response, we have not only expanded our capacity for participants each year but also increased our audience through special issues in journals central to our community such as E-Learning. This special issue represents one of our attempts to connect important research themes represented at GLS to broader conversations about the nature and quality of learning through digital media more broadly. Although the title GLS specifies 'games', our interests are better conceptualized as 'learning through interaction' in more comprehensive terms. The community and field has expanded over the past five years to include research and design in areas well beyond video games alone to include popular culture and fandom communities, digital/visual cultures, and interactive design more generally.
The Contextual Game Experience: On the Socio-Cultural Contexts for Meaning in Digital Play
The experiences game players and other people have around digital games are not limited to the intensive, immersive ways of playing them. Therefore the earlier SCI model of gameplay experiences is not sufficient to cover the full range of game experiences. In this paper a more comprehensive model is presented by describing the multiple contextual layers that surround and underlie every encounter with digital play and games.