This is a blog post from my Masters work which was conducted in 2018-19. It is a re-post from the original site where the blog was held and was only slightly adjusted to the new website. If you are interested in the larger project you can read the thesis here.
This is one of three blog posts that discuss the idea of educational games in relation to this project’s game.
Any of my friends in education will be familiar with the growing buzzwords or game-based learning, play based learning or gamification. The formalization of games within education is only increasing, especially in primary grades. I remember typing games, spelling games, and the legendary Oregon Trail, but the link between games and education is almost as long as the field of study.
Johan Huizinga, one of the grandparents of modern game studies, positions games as a space for individuals to “playfully” interact and discover their own abilities and parts of the world around them (Huizinga, 1955). Huizinga’s theory laid the groundwork on the concept of the ‘magic circle’, suggesting that games occur in a “consecrated spot” that holds special rules (Huizinga, 1955, p.10). From an educational standpoint, this magic circle can provide ‘safe’ or specifically created spaces to explore an idea in further deal.
While the notion of the magic circle and games has fallen out of favour within games literature for a range of issues in how it frames the game and play experience, it is still somewhat useful when thinking about educational game design. Games that rely heavily on environmental pieces can create ‘worlds’ or spaces where participants will engage with content. It allows designers to adjust the space to target/represent specific issues, ideas or partial experiences bringing players into a distinct form of interaction with content. However, it is critical to recognize that the game space does not stand alone. The lines of the magic circle are translucent, allowing players to bring their own ideas, opinions, experiences, emotions and relationships into a game space (Consalvo, 2009). It is this specific interaction that makes games such a valuable tool for learning.
From my past experience working on an escape room about older adult mistreatment, the project found that many participants would discuss their personal connections or knowledge to the material. This individual knowledge and connection became part of the game, hinting at the power of the genre for facilitating conversation, knowledge dissemination, and potential data gathering. I want to bring this into the core of design, using the game to engage players with their own experiences/knowledge and relate it to the play contexts.
Games involve a series of inputs and outputs from players. Typically in educational games, those outputs focus on presenting specific ideas/concepts or ideas, or can be in direct response to players practicing an educational task, such as a math game providing a reward for a student solving a problem. Educational games can function as assessment tools, and information sharing tools. Assessment focuses on the players existing skills and knowledge reinforcing and checking current ability, while information sharing games focus on imparting new knowledge and ideas to players (Grace, 2019). For design, this means we need to think beyond binary information models (typically found in edutainment), and consider knowledge as imparted through back and forth interaction.
While I will spend more time in a later post discussing escape rooms as a design genre, and their role within the field of educational games, my project’s current focus has been around the information of the game. I want players to engage in the game to learn about an issue, but I am focused on providing gamic outputs in a way that weaves conversation - not instruction. More specifically, the game presents a scenario, space, and context that encourages players to discover through play. In this process, players are encouraged to share their thoughts, and provide feedback based on their knowledge and experience. Most importantly, immediately after completion, players are invited to a semi-structured debrief that will build off of the scenario and knowledge recounted by the game.
The idea of inputs and outputs offers design potential where personal player inputs can be recorded and regurgitated into unique outputs. While this does lead to some concerns of bias, as players might be influenced by the game experience to respond in ways potentially counter to their own ideas, the games framework is curated to lay the groundwork for a conversation. As players engage with the game they will be presented with a specific issue, which, when revisited after the game, will lead to further questions about their own understanding and experience around these issues. In this case, presenting the issue of digital personalization and subsequently trust, will hopefully engage players in reflective post game practice on their own media habits and digital trustworthiness. This project studies the curation of an educational analog game around digital issues, but also explores the possibility of gameplay and debrief as a research methodology. In the next post, I hope to further justify how an escape game helps fit this hypothesis by breaking down educational games and design processes.
References:
Consalvo, M. (2009). There is No Magic Circle. Games and Culture, 4(4), 408–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343575
Gillin, J. L., & Huizinga, J. (1951). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. American Sociological Review, 16(2), 274. https://doi.org/10.2307/2087716
Grace, L. (2019). Doing Things with Games: Social impact through play (1 edition). Boca Raton, FL: Routledge.
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