Pedagogical Dramas and Transformational Play: Realizing Narrative through Videogames Design (original) (raw)
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Pedagogical dramas and transformational play: Narratively rich games for learning
2010
Although every era is met with the introduction of powerful technologies for entertainment and learning, videogames represent a new contribution binding the two and bearing the potential to create sustained engagement in a curricular drama where the player's knowledgeable actions shape an unfolding fiction within a designed world.
Pedagogical Dramas and Transformational Play
2016
Abstract. Although every era is met with the introduction of powerful technologies for entertainment and learning, videogames represent a new contribution binding the two and bearing the potential to create sustained engagement in a curricular drama where the player’s knowledgeable actions shape an unfolding fiction within a designed world. While traditionally, stories involve an author, a performer, and an audience, much of the power of videogames as media for advancing narrative springs from their affordance for the player to occupy more than one role—and sometimes all three—simultaneously. In the narratively-rich videogames that we design, players have the opportunity to perform actions, experience consequences, and reflect on the underlying social values that these situations were designed to engage, affording a type of narrative transactivity. Elsewhere we have discussed designing these media as contexts for engaging academic content; here we illuminate the power of videogames ...
Transformational Play Using Games to Position Person, Content, and Context
2010
Abstract Videogames are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals. In these worlds, youth can become scientists, doctors, writers, and mathematicians who critically engage complex disciplinary content to transform a virtual world. Toward illuminating this potential, the authors advance the theory of transformational play.
The Role of Narrative in the Design of an Educational Game
Storytelling is an important, engaging social practice. While video game designers are storytellers of the information age, educational video games fall short of using narrative effectively in practice. To better understand useful narrative approaches, this study explored how designers perceived and used narrative during the creation of an educational video game. A qualitative, ethnographic, single case study approach was used to collect and analyze data pertaining to the narrative design trajectory of the game design team as well as Citizen Science, the game artifact they produced. Findings include typologies comprised of fourteen key types of narrative perceptions and uses that surfaced in this case study. Implications include the notable use of narrative as a reward mechanism, and as a design team anchor.
Stories, Games, and Learning through Play: The Affordances of Game Narrative for Education
2017
Stories are the mechanism through which humans construct reality and make sense of the world around them. Yet, literature on the effects of narrative in game-based and other learning environments is quite variable, and the relevance of narrative to the learning sciences is not well-researched. Identifying precisely how narrative intertwines with human experience of the lived-in world requires the application of a situated cognition framework to understand user-content-context interactions as dynamic and co-determined. This chapter uses examples drawn from a narrative-structured, game-based learning program to accomplish that goal, discussing in-context, on-the-fly dialogic interactions between narrative “producers” and “recipients.” While there is still much to learn, the leveraging of narrative to help recipients grapple with complex social, cultural, and intellectual issues may be one of the most important—and overlooked—means of inducing game-to-real world transfer.
Narrative Reformulated: Videogames and Storytelling
I argue that the theoretical debate between ludology and narratology concerning narrative in game spaces is too restrictive. Of course traditional narrative models don't fully apply, as ludology argues, but no reason exists to argue that narrative can only be formulated as it already has. Ludology has argued far too restrictive a sense of time and temporal perspective in games.
inkido.indiana.edu
Grounded in our work on designing game-based curriculum, this paper begins with a theoretical articulation of transformational play. Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the play space and themselves-they are able to see how that space changed because of thei r own efforts. Grounding these theoretical ideas, in this manuscript we describe one curriculum design informed by this theory. We also describe a study of the same teacher who was observed teaching two different curricula (game-based versus story-based ) about persuasive writing. Results showed that while students in both classes demonstrated significant learning gains, the gains were significantly greater for students in the game-based classroom. Additionally, students assigned the game-based unit reported significantly higher levels of engagement, had different goals motivating their participation, and received fewer teacher reprimands to stay on task. Both quantitative and qualitative results are interpreted in terms of the theory of transformational play, which guided the design. Implications in terms of the power of game design methodologies for schools as well as learning theory more generally are discussed.
Narratizing disciplines and disciplinizing narratives: Games as 21st century curriculum
2010
Abstract Education is about revealing possibility and exciting passions, empowering learners with the disciplinary expertise to meaningfully act on problematic contexts in which applying disciplinary knowledge is important. Toward this end, we have been using gaming methodologies and technologies to design curricular dramas that position students as active change agents who use knowledge to inquire into particular circumstances and, through their actions, transform the problematic situation into a known.
Playable Fictions for Learning: Affordances of Multiuser Online Role-playing Games
In this chapter, we discuss the power and struggles associated with using multiuser online roleplaying games to establish playable fictions. Playable fictions are interactive stories in which the player is positioned as a protagonist who makes game choices that have consequence in the fictional world. First, we review the potential of games and how, in multiplayer games in particular, overlapping narratives arise through the designed structures and the affinity groups and emergent meanings. Next, we identify four design affordances that we view as pedagogically powerful and pragmatically informative to designers: (1) Games afford playful structures that define the gameplay experience while, at the same time, the experience must be crafted to support structured play; (2) Games afford truthful fantasies in that the storylines must be internally consistent while, at the same, they can offer fantastical truths whose meanings find significance beyond the gameplay world; (3) Games afford a collective emergence as individuals work collaboratively to invent systems for succeeding in the game world while, at the same time, emergent collectives grow around the games in the form of guilds or affinity groups; and (4) Games afford customizable experiences as players come to make decisions that evolve the game narratives while, at the same time, users also create experiential customizations that augment the game design and their potential for action. With these affordance structures in mind, we then review three exemplar multiuser game worlds, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Guild Wars, and the different ways that the games demonstrate these structures. Finally, we present one of our explicitly educational designs, Modern Prometheus, in which players must decide whether "the ends justify the means." In the initial single-user trajectory, students role-play as reporters visiting a plague-ridden town and using persuasive writing to support or obstruct Dr. Frank's dangerous work. In the subsequent multi-user trajectory, students decide on a group solution to the plague. Both trajectories demonstrate the tensions inherent in using games for education, and they illuminate the final walk-away of the chapter, which is this: In contrast to many types of instructional design, games can position person (with intentionality), content (with legitimacy), and context (with consequentiality) in ways that can make learning personally meaningful, situationally important, and consequentially impactful.