Given the wide variety of approaches and styles that different designers bring into their own design process, it can be confusing and difficult for new learners to come to understand the nuance and complexity of thei

gns. In particular, the more social the jobs were, the more effective they seemed to be in promoting student engagement with the game, as well as reflection on thei

es. Its possible that this was due to the fact that up to this point the game simulation had not tied the jobs in the game to the overall narrative,and thus writing was not seen as something valuable by the

In order to garner some initial insights regarding their engagement with the game, we also gave them access to a video game lab where they could play many popular games such as Guitar Hero and Halo.

ponents. Their purpose was to simulate as completely as possible the overall experience of playing Gamestar Mechan

olving initial versions of the look and feel for the game interface, the narrative and the play experience, all of which were documented digitally in a design document and a shared

Such theories necessarily forfeit any claims to grand generaliz

h, the goal for the Gamestar Mechanic team has been to produce a learning environment that encourage the appropriation of what Gee refers to as the big “D” Discourse of game designers (1996). By discourse, he refers to an “identity toolkit” represented by the ways of doing, communicating, thinking, and interacting with the material world that people use to demarcate an identity as members of a particular community to others (in this case, an identity as game designers).

Council of Master Mechanics, some of which are represented by game characters but which can also be impersonated by live players. To do so, they must complete a series of jobs that involve playing, designing, documenting and repairing games, as well as discussing their games and having them rated and critiqued by others.

78) including (but not limited to) activity theory (Emgestrom, Miettinen and Punamaki, 1999), situated learning (Lave, 1993; Lave and Wenger, 1991), mediated action (Werstch, 1991), connectionism (Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 1990), socially embodied cognition (Barsalou, Niendenthal, Barbey and Rupert, 2003), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), ecological psychology (Gibson, 1977), Discourse theory (Gee, 1992; 1996; 2005), and sociocultural theories of literacy (New London Group, 1996).

students. While skeptics might claim that such interventions “taint’ the research context and diminish

s well. With the interactive design interview format, we took the first step into identifying better and more effective ways to assess the understandings of children in these contexts, an area of research that will play a key role in determining the effectiveness of 21st century curricula.

ers. At the same time, these findings have suggested to us a diverse number of directions where future iterations could go, since questions such as how to best integrate writing into the game, or what the best way to structure its community components remain largely unansw

ations. In some of these cases, the verbal explanation, even using the specialist terms of game design, would have proven insufficient to communicate the designer’s point.

w ones. Some of the participants were able to develop more sophisticated views of the game design activity, as well as of the systemic relationships between its sub act

Individual participants tended to specialize on specific game designs, preferring to perfect those designs than start completely n

they tended to produce a lot more in the context of the collaborative exercises, an encouraging observation in light of the concerns about writing we had in previous tests.

ame. In this way, as the assessment was ongoing in Madison, so was the feedback we provided Gamelab with being incorporated into the next implementation of the game: the alpha build.

guage. This suggested that a future iteration of the game should integrate the writing components more closely into the game if it was to promote 21st century literacy practices on children.

By the end of the workshop, more sophisticated responses such as “a game designer plays games, he learns about other games, and he designs games” were more common among participants, reflecting the activities that they would participate in with Gamestar Mechainc. However, these observations also suggested that the speed with which a player would increase in sophistication with their designs would have as a factor the previous gaming experience of the playe

ren. For the girls, this was characterized by intense spans of collaborative design and discussion. This provided an opportunity for Barbara to participate by making suggestions to the other girls as they designed. With the boys, these jobs were marked by a mood of competition with comments such as “check my game out, I bet you can’t win it!” typifying their exchanges during these j

As before, the social jobs were the ones that seemed to generate most enthusiasm among the chil

vel. In the interest of assessing participant progress, at some points in the workshop I decided to use this framework in the context of an individual interactive interview, a method I designed where the participant would explain out loud their design process as they tried to tackle a job in the toolk

ers. Given our interest in collecting in-depth data on their enactment of the game designer Discourse, we chose methods that would capture as fully as possible the interactions between the participants, the toolbox and the job context.

a) play jobs–where players needed to win a game previously designed, b) repair jobs –where they had to identify and fix a problem with a dysfunctional game-, and c) design jobs– where they had to design a game from scratch within constraints specific to the Disc

ing, the question still remained regarding whether they would sustain engagement with it over an extended period. We also wanted to know whether such engagement would lead to students appropriating more of the practices of the Discourse of game design, and whether the curriculum designed for the game would facilitate this appropriation.

observe the way in which players could work around the limitations of the game to make their design intentions happen, as instead of creating a single game with multiple levels, they created multiple games representing different levels of difficulty of the same concept using the name of the game, and presented them to their peers this way

the majority of them would take at least 15 minutes designing a game before testing it even the first time, leaving questions open as to what degree of understanding of individual components of their games they could get from the game

t about half the students preferred designing games on their own, while the other half preferred to do it socially hinting at the possibility that we would have to implement multiple paths to advance in the game to keep players engaged.

the boys tended to enjoy first designing complete games to share with friends more rapidly than girls. The designs themselves however would commonly use a shooting the enemy mechanic and tended to be more

implistic. Girls in contrast tended to design in groups, with one girl controlling the mouse while others commented and made suggestions to her. The designs took longer to make, but were more complex in their use of space and used a variety of mechanics such as collecting coins or navigating a maze.

I gave them the rules for a job that required making games for others to play test, and fix them using any feedback obtained from their peers.

This protocol asked players to tackle both structured and open-ended design jobs

We also had questions regarding the steepness of the learning curve that children would experience trying to play the game, especially given that some of the prototype’s functions had not been thoroughly tested yet

writing. Being a product of design research, Gamestar Mechanic is not only meant to inform learning theory development, but also to be a reification of such theory at different sta

At this point in the research one of our core questions was whether the game would be interesting and engaging to th

tween them. The data sources for this study were collected by members of Gamestar Mechanic research team during the two years of research, and included transcripts of interviews with players and members of the Gamestar Mechanic team, naturalistic and participant observations, field notes, audio and video recordings, as well as digital and paper-based documents.

) “In epistemic games, learners do things that have meaning to them and to society. Such games are knowledge games. They are meant to teach learners both how to navigate complex linguistic, cognitive, and symbolic domains and to innovate”.

social constructivist perspectives of learn

vide instructional designers contemplating the development of videogames for learning with useful insights for their own designs.

. When a published games is played, a rating scale and a form to provide comments are associated to it on the websit

e. It also provides others with a place to identify a specific mechanic’s game design interests and preferences through a character profile, as well as his/her relative status in the community in the form of an experience level and the ratings for the games he/she has creat

A fundamental aspect that the game exploits in order to foster the appropriation of a game designer Discourse by learners is framing these jobs in the conte

The Gamestar Mechanic project is a collaborative research and development effort between the Games, Learning and Society Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Gamelab, a professional game design studio based in New York

d. Some have argued that the widespread dissemination and lowering cost of information and communications technologies have made it possible for new literacies to emerge, characterized by thinking and meaning production practices more attuned to the needs of an increasingly global society

One consistent message coming from those warning us of these issues however is that in order to tackle them we will need new ways of thinking, a new mindset that can harness our curiosity and imagination today so that we can find solutions tomorrow.

We would be wrong, however, to see this as a simple binary: youth whohave technological access and those who do not.

Our focus here is not on individual accomplishment but rather the emer-gence of a cultural context that supports widespread participation in the production and distri-bution of media.

We are just beginning to identify and assess these emerging sets of social skills and culturalcompetencies.

students were learning how to read information from and throughgames, but they were not yet learning how to read games as texts, constructed with their ownaesthetic norms, genre conventions, ideological biases, and codes of representation

every child deserves the chance to express him- or herselfthrough words, sounds, and images, even if most will never write, perform, or draw profession-ally. Having these experiences, we believe, changes the way youth think about themselves andalters the way they look at work created by others

wiki enthusiasts argue that giving all members of a larger community the ability to correctany mistakes will ultimately lead to more accurate information.

he emergence of systems-basedthinking has arisen hand in hand with the development of digital simulations.

We are still experimenting with how towork within these knowledge cultures

The proliferation of digital technologies requires aconcerted effort to envision activities that enable students to engage in more complexproblem domains.

In less nurturing spaces, individuals place more of a premium on establishing their expertise in relation to other people in the space, and may vie to lay claim to the possession of unique knowledge or skills.

In a sense, however, all games treat players as designers, as an inherent property of good games, in that players must figure out the game rules and interactions so that they can use these rules and interactions to their advantage to win the game. Players are, in that way, co-designers of the game, recruiting the rules (as well as taking advantage of flaws or bugs in the rules) in certain ways to customize their own play and, thus, their own game.

She failed to learn geometry well in school but now feels quite confident in her geometrical knowledge. This woman did not master geometry because someone told her she ―had to‖ or ―should.‖ She learned it because she wanted to design in Second Life, and knowledge of geometry is required to do that. Further, shehad the support of the people and resources in Second Lifeaffinity spaces devoted to design. Geometry became a tool for something she wanted to do.

The above features are not easy to achieve, in either nurturing or less nurturing versions, and they can deteriorate over time

n less nurturing spaces, such requests can be treated as evidence of stupidity,

Indeed, students often learn to articulate knowledge (say it or write it down) that they cannot apply in practice to solve problems.

it is important that each person with specialist knowledge sees that knowledge as partial and in need of supplementation by other people‘s different specialist knowledge

persist past failure

The subject serves as a gateway

Affinity spaces do not have ―bosses.‖ They do have various sorts of leaders, though the boundary between leader and follower is often porous, since members often become leaders and leader often participate as members

eople who frequent a Simsaffinity space often go there to consume, that is, to get content other fans have created, and that is fine.

viewed more as a threat to ―safety‖ than a means of accessing important, decentralized knowledge systems

An important question for further research is how nurturing affinity spaces are initiated, by whom, and how they are sustained over time.

ven a visitor who has come only once to the news room is ―in‖ the affinity space and part of what defines the space

Within a space, various other sorts of (sub-)group membership criteria or norms can be set up

Children in school rarely share a common passionate endeavor

beginners; indeed, anyone can begin at any time.

ensuring the survival and flourishing of the passion and the affinity space, requires accommodating new members and encouraging committed members.

This is the way in which many games today stress the role of players as designers

generic game activity that doesn't match the underlying non-game setting will create a hollow gamification experien

ful is to allow players to set their own goal

c user, however, they have to be relevant to that user

l motivation. Allowing users to self-identify with goals or groups that are meaningful is much more likely to produceautonomous, internalized behaviors, as the user is able to connect these goals to other values he or she already holds.

e goal of this paper is to explore theories useful in user-centered gamification that is meaningful to the user and therefore does not depend upon external rewards

almost all forms of rewards (except for non-controlling verbal rewards) reduced internal mot

the potential long-term negative impact of gamifica

One problem is with the name. By putting the term "game" first, it implies that the entire activity will become an engaging experience, when, in reality, gamification typically uses only the least interesting part of a game -the scoring system

These designers are first asking: "How does this benefit the organization?” instead of how the gamification benefits the us

The implications of focusing on user-centered design can help designers avoid meaningless, or even harmful, gamificatio

Chore Wars

engage with what others have crea

This concept has been at the center of tabletop roleplaying games for decades, and early text-based Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)

Universal Design for Learning

ery. Without involving the user, there is no way to know what goals are relevant to a user's background, interest, or needs

is to create long-term systemic change where the users feel positive about engaging in the non-game activity

ion. Underlying the concept of gamification is

"playification"

around those goals. These communities of learners can share experiences and increase their learning around the non-game activity, which OIT suggests is a method more likely to create truly internalized experiences

By being transparent about the constraint process, the users can learn about why constraints are in place, become more informed about learning outcomes, and then see how the game elements are connected to the learning outcomes

What is common in these games is that the game designers created not only a game, but developed a system to allow others to create and modify the games. Allowing player-developed content extends the life of a game and allows the designers to see how creative users can be with the toolkits provided.

OIT

gh, that "once you start giving someone a reward, you have to keep her in that reward loop foreve

hat gamification systems need to either allow different ways for users to achieve goals so that users can be involved in the ways most meaningful to them or to allow users to set their own goals and achievements.

n, meaningful gamification puts the needs and goals of the users over the needs of the organizatio

Another example of meaningful gamification is the display of the Toyota Prius. This game-like display shows the driver if power is coming from the fuel or battery, and when power is being directed back into the battery. The driver can get information about how their driving is affecting t

A class of examples of meaningful gamification is most Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). In these games, game elements are used to tell a story that is based upon a non-game setting

. Ensuring that there are a variety of ways for the "what", the "how", and the "why" will allow more users to find meaningful connections to the

011b). Putting these two theories together means that for meaningful gamification, it is important to take into consideration the background that the user brings to the activity and the organizational context into which the specific activity is placed. A significant challenge in creating this type of a broad system is developing a strategy to encompass a wide variety of user backgrounds, desires, and skillsets

ns, students should be able to select the way in which they demonstrate how they have met learning outcomes. The result is a course that is meaningful for a wider variety of learners (

at a user is motivated by an aspect of a system only when there is a match between that aspect and the background of the

. Two users with the same search query will have different information backgrounds, so that a document that is relevant for one user may not be relevant to another use

l influence. OIT explores how different types of external motivations can be integrated with the underlying activity into someone’s own sense of se

Organismic Integration Theory

there are more effective ways than a scoring system to engage use

programs. These gamification programs can increase the use of a service and change behavior, as users work toward meeting these goals to reach external rewards (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011, p. 27)

For the rest, those of you who would consider that games can offer something different and greater than an affirmation of existing corporate practices, the business world has another name for you: they call you "leaders."

The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about--a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter

bullshit

gamification is marketing bullshit

The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous

For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors

Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity.

Gamification is reassuring.

Gamification is bullshit.

bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce.

In the end, it’s just a game. ♦

According to the SuperBetter method, you should turn your regret into a bad guy, do your power-ups, tell trustworthy people that you need their gameful help to lick the grief and move on with your life.

McGonigal points out implications for P.T.S.D. treatment: offering victims a Tetris console in the chopper as they leave the battlefield could spare them a great deal of suffering.

Really?

“Work ethic is not a moral virtue,” she writes. “It’s actually a biological condition that can be fostered, purposefully, through activity that increases dopamine.”

Having friends—or allies—around can cause cortisol levels to drop, indicating a decrease in stress.

in a world of knowledge and technology, the only obstacle to happiness is your own state of mind.

Institute for the Future, a nonprofit think tank in Palo Alto, designing video games for the cause of human progress.

“You will hear stories from people who have adopted a gameful mindset to find a better job, have a more satisfying love life, run a marathon, start their own company, and simply enjoy life more.”

Now it’s Friday, and you’re due to give a terrifying presentation in three hours.

when a jumbo bottle of shampoo fell on your foot

I don’t think games are happiness engines, either

I don’t think reality is broken. It’s messed up and horrifying, sure, but we don’t get to fix it, ever. It’s flawed and messy and delightful and repellent and stunning. Reality is alright

where she values happiness and epic wins, I value wonder and sublimity

tend to see my games as troubling the idea of solutions rather than leading us toward them

claims that games can save the world

I need to remember that reality is always a mess. That’s not tragedy to me. It’s the unstoppable infinity of being.

we never save the world

we don’t occupy game worlds because the real world isn’t happy or fun enough, but because we need help embracing that real world through the properties of ambiguity and intricacy that make games like the world in the first place

One can only hope that McGonigal’s book scores an epic win against the trite, simplistic trends in “gamification” that her smart, sophisticated ideas overshadow

playing and making games like Evoke not only make people happier (she calls game designers “happiness engineers”), but also inspire people to collaborate to solve problems

“ARG” to mean any game that integrates itself with the real world

A design tool like Scratch can promote the reciprocal development of individual and community, enable youth to ex-press their cultural heritage, have a broad communi-cative value, and allow for information and resource exchange (Pinkett 2000)

Jerrell, Chandelle, and Jorge to implement ideas that are personally meaning-ful to them without having to conform to a designer’s aesthetics or to a choice of genre that may not be ap-pealing to marginalized groups.

Interfaces happen to be one of the most difficult artifacts to design, because many assumptions about human interaction are built in, as-sumptions that most people are not aware of unless faced with designing them.

technical and creative fluencies that are complexly intertwined, helping them to organize and coordinate multiple events and types of meaning-making systems in the process. We call this intermix of technology and gaming practices “gaming fluencies” because youth became fluent not only in game design but in technol-ogy design.

Our central argument is that gaming fluencies, like gaming literacies, promote valuable learning goals in the design of games but do so in addition to developing technology fluency (National Research Council 1999).

Our interest in gaming fluency has involved the creation of a more general tool that is not specific to game design.

We define gaming fluencies to include not only the critical evaluation of game designs but the creative production and technological implemen-tation of those designs.

he scope of Club-house game production and the variety of game designs we observed provide evidence that game-making activi-ties can authentically connect youth to multiple expert communities, including the game-design industry, the gamer community, programming communities, and visual arts and design communities.

Jorge began to mentor other inspired youth in the creation of their own games

support alternative path-ways toward gaming fluencies and, more broadly, the new literacies important to 21st-century learning

archive shows that youth engaged heavily both in learning to program and in designing the types of interactions that players would have with one another as well as with the computer-crucial technology fluencies that underpin most con-temporary technologie

suggests that more complex forms of human-to-computer interaction need to be an explicit part of youths’ exploration of Scratch.

The increased breadth and frequency of challenging programming concepts in the second year of the study indicates that the Clubhouse community had become more adept at programming with experience—another central component of creat-ing a sustainable video game design community

hese findings indicate that the Clubhouse members were widely incorporating aspects of aesthetic and audio design, enhancing the professional value and personal quality of their work

But do these game designs represent the full range of gaming fluencies?

game designs: three Case studies

peer-to-peer mentoring

Work in Scratch established one’s membership within the Clubhouse community

In ad-dition, Scratch was quick to be adopted in the Club-house because of rules and norms that supported a design-based approach to learning as well as the presence of mentors and knowledgeable peers

Our goal was to capture the range of gaming fluencies that emerged over the course of the study.

We believe this distinction is arbitrary and neglects to take into account the design process and community in which game design with Scratch is situated.

By providing opportunities for underrepresented youth to participate in making games, we hope they can be vehicles of change as both critical consumers and designers in an industry that has an increasing importance for schools and society at large.

game play is not the only approach to becoming literate in gam-ing; writing reviews or “modding” game components can be equally instrument

Gaming literacy is the understanding of the narratives, rules, and economies that provide the semiotic structures of games, whereas creative produc-tion involves transformation of different resources and assets pertaining to games

design computer games that would teach younger students in their school about fractions.

One of the first studies to address game produc-tion for learning did not come out of the traditional strands in these academic communities but built on efforts to construe design as a new pedagogy for learning with technology.

address the following general research question: What do youth learn in the process of designing games?

approach differs from these other efforts in that we use game produc-tion not just as a way to promote gaming literacy in the broadest sense but to enhance the technological fluency that disadvantaged youth particularly need

kidstaking on identities from the game

Does Using “Cheats” Make a Player a Cheater?

heat codes

“in-room” interaction provides opportunities for sociality, joint projects, and empowermentthrough sharing one’s knowledge and seeing it used for concrete success by others. Sincethis interaction occurs primarily without adult guidance or direction, it may be that thekid-organized and kid-managed aspects of these contexts—for kids of this preteen and earlyteen age—make them powerful learning contexts.

Sales ofits products support a multibillion dollar industry that continues to grow. And while thereis a good deal of innovative writing—both popular and academic—about video games, onlya small percentage of this writing arises from ethnographic studies of game play.

Doesdesigning virtual cities inSimCityprovide a starting point for a career designing real cities? Isthat starting point different in any substantive way from building cities with wooden blocks?

we do see video games as an important type of human activityagainst which to pose the basic question of transfer

We really do want to know whether playing first-person shooters actually teachesplayers how to use weapons in real life.

using thegame as a context for design was her leading value

This scrutiny—in turn—affected Tyler’s play, as he would then hold the controller so his competition could watchhis hand movements and see that he was not entering the codes

a link between gameplay and identity formation,

Rather we see the reason that games, or more specificallycollaborative interactions around video game play, are good learning environments

Across fourvignettes, we see real variation in the learning arrangements involved. Pure cases of clearlymore expert players teaching more inexperienced players are not what we see; instead, wewitness more complex situations in which less able players provide instruction to betterplayers

, our interest is in theway in which this learning occurred—through an evolving sequence of interactions betweenthe boys and the spontaneous use of an unconnected controller as an instructional device

strongest themes in this study—young people organize themselves toteach and learn together, with adult intervention and as a taken for granted, as a natural partof playing video games together

laboratory studies would suggestshould be beyond the capacity of an eight-year-old

Mikey providing assistance to Maddy as she requests it, illustratingthe working apprenticeship that formed between them.

In other words, the tutorials, not Rachel, were in control of thetiming and direction of the learning.

she sought out the learning resource that allowed her the greatestcontrol over the learning experience.

most of the learning happens in the context ofvaried arrangements of people working together

Rachel’s brother functions for her as a just-in-time guide and instructor for a course of learning she herself is organizing in the moment

more permeable and blurred than the separate worlds view would suggest

tangled up11with other cultural practices, which include relations with siblings and parents, patterns oflearning at home and school, as well as imagined futures for oneself

video game play as a cultural practice worthy of study in its own right.

writing about video games is what we will call theseparate worldsviewof video game play

This is part of a larger project tounderstand learning within and across informal and formal settings.

We visited each focal participant ap-proximately once a week and observed his or her play. Among our core participants we hadfour boys and four girls, including two sets of siblings. We purposefully selected participantsin our study to maximize variation; this is a common strategy when pursuing a new researchdirection because it helps define an uncharted territory

The research we describe in this chapter is ethnographic, based on a six-month-long studyof young people in different families playing video games in their homes, using their owngames and game systems

Considerthe following thought experiment: imagine that a learning scientist definitely proved, allother things being the same, that a year spent immersed in a game-based curriculum betterprepared a young person for a successful life and career than that same year spent in atraditional high school curriculum?

what kindof effect, on how that person leads others in collective action