Embracing the Fiasco!: Roleplaying Games, Pedagogy and Student Success (original) (raw)

Narrative and Social Collaboration in the integration of Games in the Curriculum

ece.salford.ac.uk

In the long-term development of the curriculum, there is an ongoing need to devise challenging and innovative assessments and activities as a way to motivate and engage students more fully with content that is critical to their learning outcomes. Higher Education, it is claimed, is now dealing with a generation of students for whom the playing of computer video games is secondnature. Many educators see this as an opportunity to make use of already available games and simulations for learning purposes. This paper begins by exploring the rationale and challenges of integrating Commercial Off-the-Shelf Games (COTS) into the curriculum. We then go on to describe our own efforts in selecting suitable computer games for Politics and International Studies. Our paper reflects on designing for context and the ways in which consideration of narrative and collaboration among students can influence the relevance of games. We argue that the implementation of games needs to be considered within the holistic framework of the student experience, rather than a narrow focussing on content.

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.

Pedagogical Dramas and Transformational Play: Realizing Narrative through Videogames Design

2009

Whereas 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.

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.

The RPG Classroom: How Role-Playing Games Have Influenced the Gamification of Education

The Role-Playing Society: Essays on the Cultural Influence of RPGs (McFarland, 2016), 2016

Introduction: What if education could be made into a role-playing game (RPG) where students played characters, completed quests, and earned experience points? The idea of turning education into a game has received much attention in the last few years. This concept is different from traditional forms of game-based learning, which focus on the benefits of embedding commercial games or so-called "serious games"--games designed to teach specific content--into learning environments, a practice that boasts countless examples, hundreds of research studies, and at least a half-dozen meta-analyses. Rather, it hinges upon the idea of turning the classroom itself--whether it be a traditional brick-and-mortar space or an online virtual space--into a game by revamping pedagogy and curricula to look and feel more like games. These efforts are part of a larger trend called "gamification."

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.

Gaming, World Building, and Narrative: Using Role-playing Games to Teach Fiction Writing

This paper reports on the findings from an experimental creative writing course entitled “Gaming, World Building, and Narrative” that incorporated digital and tabletop role-playing game principles to teach fiction writing. Students studied the narrative unit operations (Bogost 2006) present in short fiction, films, and the videogame Fallout 3 before collaboratively creating an immersive fictional world by populating a wiki with items, locations, and characters. Students explored their newly created world through tabletop role-playing campaigns and wrote vignette-length stories from their characters’ perspectives. Students strongly preferred this approach to the traditional workshop method commonly used in creative writing classes, citing stronger understanding of character and motivations as well as the significant benefits derived from collaborative writing. Role-playing also fostered a strong and supportive community for student writers. Despite institutional challenges, role-playing games offer a compelling way to improve current fiction writing pedagogical practices and encourage new modes of collaborative writing.

Unpacking the Domains and Practices of Game-Oriented Learning

Games and Education: Designs in and for Learning, 2018

Using games for learning tends to blur boundaries across across in- and out-of-school domains. In this way, it becomes difficult to describe and understand the meaning-making processes involved in game-oriented learning. In this chapter, we present the analytical framework of scenario-based education, which can be used to explore the translation processes and framings in relation to using game-oriented learning designs. The framework is used to analyse two empirical cases. The first case concerns the use of two different types of computer games (the serious game Global Conflicts: Latin America and the horror game Penumbra) in formal education and focuses on the relation between schooling and everyday life. The second case concerns the development and use of a specially designed practice simulation that invites school children into a universe as professional journalists and newspaper editors and hence builds on a designed relation between schooling and professional domains. Based on these examples, we discuss how the aims and practices of game-oriented learning designs must be translated, communicated, negotiated, integrated, and thus reframed by teachers and students in order to produce relevant and valid forms of educational knowledge.

Teacher as Game Master: Using Tabletop Role-Playing Games in the Classroom [EXTENDED ABSTRACT]

DiGRAA conference, 2019

In tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), a game master (GM) is responsible for describing how a fictional world reacts to the actions of their players. The GM is described by (Garcia 2016) as a 'teacher, facilitator, and writer', with their role including the ability to navigate when to teach the players about the space they are inhabiting and when to allow players to construct their own environment.

Towards a Theory of a Games-Based Pedagogy

This paper identifies problems encountered with attempts to use commercial games in educational contexts and highlights the need for a theory and illustrated examples of an effective game-based pedagogy that demonstrate how games might effectively be used for educational ends. A model is presented as one example of what a games-based pedagogy might look like. The model grows out of a series of design experiments established in an attempt to use Revolution (a multiplayer role-playing game) as a resource to support learning about aspects of social history. The paper proposes that similar pedagogical models, grounded in action research initiatives, are required to push forward the educational games agenda and guide researchers and practitioners interested in exploiting the power of role-playing games in real classrooms. Keywords: games-based pedagogy, virtual role-play, experiential learning, machinema, design experiment."""