Serious game „Tiebranimes“ to download

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Nearly ten years ago I attended a seminar about „Kinderspiel – Kinderspiele: Theorie – Empirie“ („Children’s Play and Games: Theoretical and Empirical Views“), where one possible task was to create a learning game. I was flabbergasted that the three other groups came up with – quite adorable, I have to admit – variations of games similar to „Trivial Pursuit“ for pupils: Roll a die, draw a card, answer correctly and go on. This seemed to me like an unfortunately quite realistic representation of schooling.

Depressed and feeling slightly challenged, I and a co-student went to work on a game suitable for students of pedagogy: It should be usable to give new students an overview on historic and contemporary educators, but also deliver a tongue-in-cheek view on the study of educational science in the cogs and wheels of the university.

So, here’s a serious game about historic educators, where you can cook your fellow students‘ goose while competing for the scarce ressource of books in the department’s library. Testplayers enjoyed the game and found the short descriptions, categorisations and quotes on people like Comenius, Flitner, Socrates etc. quite helpful.

You may now download the card game (german texts, 88 cards, rules, and a nifty box to store the stuff) in 300dpi-print quality. This game was my first attempt on an educational card game, a labour-of-love as well as a proof-of-concept: You know, not all learning games have to work like quiz games!

By the way: „Tiebranimes“ can be read backwards, then it spells „Homework assignment“ in german.

First Faculty Research Day

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This wednesday there will be a presentation of projects and initiatives stating research interests of members of our faculty. As it seems, my poster (german) will be up, too, to give a slight and very superficial overview on Game Based Learning and its implications, as expressive medium, ethical playground, experimental simulation, metagame and cultural mirror. The first feedback so far: Nice idea using Tetris. And having a certain yellowpress-appeal in its brutal bluntness. Well, one can do worse, I guess.

All initiatives can be found at
http://www.epb.uni-hamburg.de/de/forschungstag2009.

The teacher as hero

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A hero (…) is a (mostly male) person with exceptional abilities or traits, driving him to exceptional feats, so called heroic deeds.

Wikipedia „Held“ (Dec 6th 2008), translated from german

Don’t we all wish for us to make a difference for what we do, to achieve greatness, and to get apprehension for this? As well as artists, doctors, politicians, soldiers and fighters do teachers and mentors of all kind find their way into medial representation. Best known, probably, are teachers in mainstream movies. You can probably put up a set of teacher-archetypes as diverse as in any fairy-tale cast. Movies like the german „Feuerzangenbowle“ come to mind, where we get three clichees to compare: The beloved put disrespected kind one, the stern but fair one, or the authoritarian despised one. But there are also more recent movies, with archetypes of eastern (the ubermensch, the fool) and US-american cultural ilk (the victim, the physical fighter, the heartthrob)

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Topological Metaphors for Structuring Games (I): Storyspaces

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Wey-Han Tan (April 2008)

StorySpaces

Stories give in-game experiences context and contingency. There are abstract games like „Tetris“ or „Add’em up„, which rely exclusively on game mechanism and aesthetics to hold the player’s attention. But in the end, a player of an abstract game can retell it to interested listeners just in terms of general adjectives, and not about the none the less exciting events and situations in it.

Connected to Situated Cognition, Anchored Instruction and Cognitive Apprenticeship, one can say that a gripping story that’s deemed worth to be retold by the player/learner, is also one most likely to be remembered – including the facts and skills contextualised with and situated in it. Weiterlesen →

Topological Metaphors for Structuring Games (II): Rulespaces

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This is a short summary on „Storyspaces and Rulespaces“ from the MA in ePedagogy Design I’m currently working on.
Wey-Han Tan (April 2008)

Rulespaces

Rules define the boundaries of the player’s actions and give them direction and jurisdiction. As shown in the ambivalence of games and toys (Sutton-Smith), they provide both limits and freedom, but also usually require unquestioned acceptance (Caillois) for the player to play a game.
As well as the method of teaching (see the learning paradigms) has repercussions on what is learned beyond the overt content, so does the use of certain types of rules affect the playing experience and the situating of skills and knowledge learned in-game. Weiterlesen →

Reviewing the seminar “Games, Play and Education”

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This is a short review on the seminar “Games, Play and Education” I held as a combined event for both online students in ePedagogy Design and offline students of educational science from Hamburg University during summer term 2008 in Hamburg.
From the official seminar description:

“Educational games are advertised as a cure for most ills of our stratified information society with its ‘demand’ for life-long and self-reliant learners. A player is usually intrinsically motivated and angst-free to experience and practice new knowledge in a problem-oriented and highly contextualised manner, in a controlled artificial environment – and even has fun doing it. If the factual, practical, or reflective game-knowledge could be transfered to the player’s everyday life, we’d have an ideal educational setting (or a bloody massacre) at hand. The stunning visuals of contemporary computergames lead to a common fallacy in the understanding of play: We don’t play games because they resemble reality. We play them because they don’t. Games are powerful as learning environments on different levels, but they are also full of paradoxons.” Weiterlesen →

Creating cognitive tension – and then what?

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I stumbled upon this entry in the great BoingBoing-blog, an excerpt from a longer Smithonian article: Steve Martin explaining a special method of eliciting laughter from the audience, in comparision to the usual comedian’s technique of creating tension and releasing laughter via a punchline.

Martin’s approach is different: Creating tension – and not to relieve it. Giving an unexpected anticlimax, not the expected ‚unexpected‘ exit. And then let the audience choose a point where to relieve the upbuilt tension. Steve Martin:

„What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it? What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax? What would the audience do with all that tension? Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime. But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.“

This seems to be a good approach, too, for educational gaming. In a usual, moderate constructivistic setting, you have the path of

[exploration] – [encounter of a task/test] – [correct solving of the task/test] – [reward].

What will happen if you constantly deny the learner the ‚punchline‘ as confirmation that he learned something he was meant to learn?

Three learning theories mini games

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For my seminar „Games, Play and Education“ I’ve scraped together (via skinning, modding, recontextualisation) three minigames. These should serve as an intro to the three learning paradigms of Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism and their possible realisation in games via their very different gaming mechanisms.

The 32 cards and the rules can be downloaded as printable PDF (three pages) via this link: ThreeLearningTheoriesMinigames.

ThreeLearningTheoriesMiniGames

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Gaming: A cheat mode for reality

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I’ve noticed that rubberbanding (aka levelled gameplay or dynamic game balancing) is a good metaphor to describe what Lev Vygotsky, a russian educational scientist, described as keeping a learner in the ‚zone of proximal development‚. This means that the environment – parent, teacher, virtual learning environment – keeps up a certain level of difficulty in its tasks, to further emerging abilities in the learner. Coincidentally – or not so – this goes quite well with theories (for example Brian Sutton-Smith) that play and game are the most fulfilling when experienced in a state of internal insecurity of the outcome.

Thus rubberbanding is a game designer’s meta cheat to keep the player in the game and the learner hooked to the knowledge.

It could be discussed whether any game, by artificially creating rules facilitating a fair, inherent meaningful and fulfilling gaming experience is a cheat mode for the game we call ‚reality‘ and a tutorial mode (or editor) for the game we call ’society‘.

A path unwanted: Impossibly realistic games

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One of the distinctive criteria of games compared to ‚reality‘ is their loose connection to the latter, a worksafe simplification of rules and goals. This doesn’t mean that these games are simple to play, but that rules and metarules are stated or can at least be relied upon as unchanging background as long as we play the game.

The same two mechanisms, simplification and a stated stable background, are the cornerstones of politics, especially in times of war. Knowing the enemy, recognizing the enemy, destroying the enemy, all executed in an unerring, straightforward mode.

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