Playful knowledge: an explorative study of educational gaming (original) (raw)

Game Studies

Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, 2010

Historical Perspectives on Games and Education from the Learning Sciences

International Journal of Game-Based Learning, 2011

This paper reviews three classic theorists’ writing on games, learning, and development. Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner all wrote about games and play as important to thinking and learning. This review attempts to synthesize their perspectives as a means to revisit underused theoretical perspectives on the role of games in education. The views of Piaget and Vygotsky are applied with respect to the role of games and play in learning and development to the design of a popular commercial game. Bruner’s perspective offers the embodiment of games into a larger and controversial curriculum intended to teach young people about human culture. Each of the perspectives is reviewed and considered in light of new gaming technologies and their potential for educational change.

Rediscovering the Roots of Games in Education

2008

In view of the recent interest in using videogames for learning, many teachers and parents have begun to question the place of videogames in the classrooms. In this chapter, we attempt to explore the very idea of playing and learning by trying to rediscover the hidden meanings in usual words, like “game,” “play,” “school” and “education” through a lexical and conceptual analysis within the Western culture, roaming among ancient and modern languages. It is through the rediscovery of our roots that we as educators can be better informed to either embrace or discard the call to integrate play into education for game-based instruction.

Philosophy of Games (Philosophy Compass)

Philosophy Compass

What is a game? What are we doing when we play a game? What is the value of playing games? Several different philosophical sub disciplines have attempted to answer these questions using very distinctive frameworks. Some have approached games as something like a text, deploying theoretical frameworks from the study of narrative, fiction, and rhetoric to interrogate games for their representational content. Others have approached games as artworks and asked questions about the authorship of games, about the ontology of the work and its performance. Yet others, from the philosophy of sport, have focused on normative issues of fairness, rule application, and competition. The primary purpose of this article is to provide an overview of several different philosophical approaches to games and, hopefully, demonstrate the relevance and value of the different approaches to each other. Early academic attempts to cope with games tried to treat games as a subtype of narrative and to interpret games exactly as one might interpret a static, linear narrative. A faction of game studies, self‐described as “ludologists,” argued that games were a substantially novel form and could not be treated with traditional tools for narrative analysis. In traditional narrative, an audience is told and interprets the story, where in a game, the player enacts and creates the story. Since that early debate, theorists have attempted to offer more nuanced accounts of how games might achieve similar ends to more traditional texts. For example, games might be seen as a novel type of fiction, which uses interactive techniques to achieve immersion in a fictional world. Alternately, games might be seen as a new way to represent causal systems, and so a new way to criticize social and political entities. Work from contemporary analytic philosophy of art has, on the other hand, asked questions whether games could be artworks and, if so, what kind. Much of this debate has concerned the precise nature of the artwork, and the relationship between the artist and the audience. Some have claimed that the audience is a cocreator of the artwork, and so games are a uniquely unfinished and cooperative art form. Others have claimed that, instead, the audience does not help create the artwork; rather, interacting with the artwork is how an audience member appreciates the artist's finished production. Other streams of work have focused less on the game as a text or work, and more on game play as a kind of activity. One common view is that game play occurs in a “magic circle.” Inside the magic circle, players take on new roles, follow different rules, and actions have different meanings. Actions inside the magic circle do not have their usual consequences for the rest of life. Enemies of the magic circle view have claimed that the view ignores the deep integration of game life from ordinary life and point to gambling, gold farming, and the status effects of sports. Philosophers of sport, on the other hand, have approached games with an entirely different framework. This has lead into investigations about the normative nature of games—what guides the applications of rules and how those rules might be applied, interpreted, or even changed. Furthermore, they have investigated games as social practices and as forms of life.

(2004) The Nature and Classification of Games

2004

Physical education curricula have often been grounded within game classifications derived from the play-game-sport continuum models. Nevertheless, criticism of the continuum model of games suggests that it misunderstands the nature of the phenomenon itself and thereby renders game classifications and/or physical education curricula derived from it less than compelling. Essentialist definitions contrast continuum models and thereby provide alternative perspectives from which game classifications and physical education curricula may be derived. Bernard Suits (1978) is best known for his broad yet discerning essentialist definition of games. The purpose of this paper is to champion Suits' position via a demonstration of its inclusive scope. This purpose is served in the proposal of a taxonomy of games including three game distinctions: competitive versus noncompetitive games, interactive versus noninteractive games, and physical versus nonphysical games. Paralleling these distinctions are six subcategories of games: noncompetitive nonphysical games, parallel nonphysical games, interactive nonphysical games, noncompetitive sports, parallel sports, and interactive sports.