I’ve just used up the rest of my holiday allowance this year to take a week off to concentrate on writing my Great Novel (and getting on top of the washing). I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the composition of narrative (not procrastinating, you understand) and, in particular, the Hero’s Journey, which provides an archetypal framework for storytelling.
I was interested to find this article on the use of the Hero’s Journey in games.
I coming to the conclusion that ‘learners as game builders’ is a better model for game-based learning that ‘learners as game consumers’, and a couple of cool game-building tools have recently come to my attention.
The first is Game Maker. It’s a free (or $25 for the Pro version) development kit designed for making all sorts of games. I’ve not had as long as I’d have liked to play with it but it seems pretty intuitive, easy to get starter, and you don’t need a programming background (though I’m sure it helps). I can also recommend Jake Habgood’s The Game Maker’s Apprentice as a good starting point.
The second is the VASSAL Game Engine (thanks to Ian Smith for pointing this out to me), a free game development tool for building online adaptations of board and card games. I haven’t played with it yet (recognising a huge potential time sink when I see one) but I like the look of it.
It’s quite a busy week this week so I haven’t had time to explore any of the following links in detail, but thought I would get them down in one place before they disappear into the ether (i.e. the section of my bookmarks list that goes off the end of the page).
First, a couple of different takes on a game-based learning institution. Quest to Learn is a school based around gaming principles, which describes itself as “a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.” In contrast, the WILL Campus online learning environment provides access to “socially responsible interactive video games” (although from the demo it looks like these are really video-supported decision trees with fairly limited interactivity).
I’ve also recently come across this report from Learning and Teaching Scotland on the use of the Mangahigh maths game in Scottish schools. The research shows that greater use of the game (i.e. greater maths practice) leads to better results. Says more about the importance of control groups to me than about the value of Mangahigh.
Finally, I’m glad that Alan Titchmarsh has taken the time to add his considered and well-researched opinions to the video games and violence debate. Don’t know about video games, but I’m sure that listening to too many ill-informed media pundits could be proven to lead to violence.
Interesting site here from Randolph Carter. His project, in his own words, involves
“… going about the internet, darkening people’s doors, and inviting them to participate in an email interview with me. I’m then posting the results here for all to see. Game bloggers and podcasters, industry professionals, journalists, academics, and authors of both fiction and nonfiction are fair game in my book.”
There’s a lot of work gone into this site already, and a lot of interesting stuff here drawing parallels between gaming and writing. Clearly he is very discerning and only asks the best people to be interviewed (mine is here).
Just a quick post to highlight a new alternate reality game meta-site, looking at ARGs in institutions: museums, libraries, schools and beyond. This site contains a whole range of resources on ARGs in different fields, including research, articles, discussion and links to the games themselves. Well worth a peruse if you have a couple of spare hours.
Thanks to Fiona Littleton (who incidentally runs a excellent course in computer games for learning at Edinburgh University) who sent me the link to this article from Time magazine on the use of computer games to support awareness raising and activism.
A long time ago I worked for Oxfam and one of my tasks was to engage with groups on developmental issues as part of the education remit. I remember being asked to run a last minute session with a very well-to-do pensioners’ group in Edinburgh, and because I didn’t have anything prepared, I decided to run a development game with them. I think they were expecting a slide show of ‘poor children in Africa’ because the fact that they were going to do something interactive came as a bit of a shock (and initially met with a fair bit of resistance) but by the end of the session there was a high level of engagement and some of those present were starting to think differently about the reasons for poverty.
So games for activism aren’t something new, and in my experience they are certainly powerful, but I wonder whether the people who play these type of games aren’t already well informed and active. Without something to force the initial engagement are they simply preaching to the converted?
Thanks to Katie Piatt for a recent inspiring blog post on play in relation to student’s learning. She considers how Eberle’s process of play (described by Johan Brand) could be applied to the design of student learning experiences.
The process of play model contains six cyclical steps, roughly sequential:
What also interested me in Johan Brand’s post was the idea of enablers of playful behaviour, which can be harnessed to support the design of playful experiences. These enablers are described as: ownership; sharing; personalisation; creation; participation; socialising; and competing.
One project that I’ve been watching with interest over the past year is the ARGuing project, which used an alternate reality game for language learning in secondary schools across Europe.
A key feature of this project was that it made use of a network of teachers to support the delivery of the game, and the involvement of this resource is key to the methodology developed by the project. I had an interesting chat with Joel Josephson, one of the project partners, recently (who incidentally runs a children’s educational gaming site that is well worth a look) about the appropriateness of this model in Higher Education and the difficulties of getting staff engaged and able to devote time and energy to the extent seen in the ARGuing project.
One of the key issues of ARGs in education is engaging players, and the time required to provide the ongoing interaction that supports this (particularly in the early stages of the game) was one of the difficulties encountered in the ARGOSI project, and I think that looking at solutions employed in other education sectors could provide some valuable ideas here.
The Increasing Mainstreaming of Games in Learning Policies (IMAGINE?) project aims to draw together and examine the results of previous games-based learning projects and initiatives. The recently-published final report (pdf) provides lots of examples of projects in the area, usefully categorised by target audience, technology used, and project outputs.
It’s been a bit of a hectic month. On 2nd October my husband and I became first time parents, to a happy and healthy baby girl, and since then it’s been an endless cycle of eat, poo, cry, sleep, sick, etc… thus there hasn’t been much time for blogging. However, one advantage of my recent erratic sleeping habits is that I’ve discovered some late night telly that wouldn’t normally make it on to the radar.
A real treat was Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe (which is unfortunately no longer available on iPlayer but can be viewed in installments). This is a caustic analysis of the world of computer games (in usual Brooker style) including some interesting comments on the influence of violence in games. This managed to make a very long night very much easier to cope with.