Game Design for Learning

This blog post focuses on the concept of games as designed experiences. Games are more than just a media or resource, but something that you learn within and that you learn through interacting with. Good games are possibility spaces in which we get good at doing new kinds of things and becoming new kinds of people. Good learning within games enables us to become knowledge producers. It gives us robust ideas to think with and propels us toward participation in social practices.

What is it that makes a game "good"? The key thing is the way it orchestrates time. All the events are designed to give you a very smooth experience, a very smooth learning curve. Sid Meier, one of the most famous and accomplished designers believes that "a good game is a series of interesting choices". A lot of times we talk about addicting games. But what do we really mean? Give players these cycles of choices that are compelling, where they are curious to find out how they resolve, and the game stacks these and intertwine them so that players are never bored, never looking for things to do. Players are always confronted with more that one interesting option or thing. Players want to see how it plays out.

Furthermore, games open new social possibilities as well. In terms of the designed experience, this accompanying social sphere, and the game as a designed object can also foster other kinds of social experiences. This is something that games do really well, that educators are really fascinated by. So how is it that certain game features, like forcing you to group, or encouraging to group at certain points of the experience, getting you to socializing and meeting new kinds of people. Or how games encourage you to become part of a larger organization, like a gild. Games do this in very clever ways. That's the kind of thing that we as educators are really trying to leverage.

There is one final component that is really critical to this, in terms of a theory of learning for games. And that's this last thing about how do games get you to start producing information, producing knowledge, becoming an active productive member of a group, or society or a game. What we want to think about is how games open new productive possibilities as well as consumptive possibilities.

You want kids to be playing games where they can develop a deep system level of understanding. Next, starting to participate in social groups, they start to become tutors and mentors, but the next is taking the role of designer, to design the rules of those worlds, starting to develop their own depictions and their own creative vision for how the world can be.

[Information adapted from a lecture by Kurt Squire]