EDUCATIONAL MODELING, SIMULATIONS, & GAMES: Theory of Fun

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Interesting blog and content on games from Sony creative guru.

tc

tcarroway said...: Oh, I should probably put in a note on why I think of this as relevant to our discussion of utility for instructional design and learning...

A process-oriented, sometimes-reductionist, little gremlin in my head tells me that if we understand how game designers think... if we can ken their MO and their metamodel for how to make a game fun... and if we can analyze the components and design elements and the reasoning behind their use and structure / their purpose, we can compare them all to the descriptive and prescriptive elements of different instructional designs, to see if there's an opportunity to leverage the inherent design of a game to make it educational, or, to add to it or enhance it with either explicit or implicit design elements that support, for example, the 9 events of instruction, or, fill in gaps identified by Clark Aldrich, or show how a specific game type has value and utility for supporting complex problem solving skills...

If we are to work together, we must understand how they think, how they speak, and share with them our own taxonomies and lingo and be able to describe why we do what we do - and then get the game designers to turn on the lightbulb and see how what their doing is already creating an interesting form of learning sequence - through models of problem solving, the structure of games (roles, rules, constraints, some explicit, some to be discovered...).

What do you think?

tc; June 28, 2007 at 10:23 AM

EDUCATIONAL MODELING, SIMULATIONS, & GAMES