ncern. Every time 10 or more students logged into the game simultaneously, the server at Gamelab would crash and log everyone out until it was restarted

in order to participate in a Discourse is its set of language prac

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

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

I don’t think games are happiness engines, either

bullshit

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.

ultitasking enters pedagogical practice when teachers recognize the desires of contemporarystudents to come at topics from multiple directions all at the same time or to maintain whatsome have called “continuous partial attention,” interacting with homework materials whileengaged in other activities

As we look to the future, one possibility is that schools will bedesigned to support both hunters and farmers, ensuring that eachchild develops multiple modes of learning, multiple strategies forprocessing information.

The farmer must complete a sequence of tasks that require localized atten-tion; the hunter must scan a complex landscape in search of signs and cues of where their preymay be hiding. For centuries, schools have been designed to create “farmers” (Hartmann, 1999)

Currently, young people are playing with these skills as they engage with games or social activ-ities that reward the ability to maintain a mental picture of complex sets of relationships and toadjust quickly to shifts in perceptual cues

Learners must filter out extraneous information and sharpen their focus onthe most salient details of their environment.

Perhaps one of the most alarming changes in adults’ view is the perceived decline in youngpeople’s attention spans with the rise of digital media

Appropriation enters education when learners are encouraged to dissect, transform, sample, orremix existing cultural materials.

Sampling intelligently from the existing cultural reservoir requires a close analysis of the exist-ing structures and uses of this material; remixing requires an appreciation of emerging struc-tures and latent potential meanings.

ost of the classics we teach in the schools are themselvesthe product of appropriation and transformation, or what we would now call “sampling” and“remixing.”

All artistswork within traditions; they all also violate conventions. School discourse, however, focuses onone over the other.

The digital remixing of media content makes visi-ble the degree to which all cultural expression builds on what has come before. Appropriationis understood here as a process by which students learn by taking culture apart and putting itback together.

Performance enters into education when students are asked to adopt fictive identities and thinkthrough scenarios from their perspective.These identities may be assumed within the physicalworld or the virtual world

hese learning processes are likely to sustain growth andlearning well beyond the school years.

Educators have for too long treated role play as a means to an end—a fun way to introduceother kinds of content—yet we argue that role-play skills may be valuable in their own rightand are increasingly central to the way adult institutions function.

role playing enables us to envision and collaboratively theorize about manipulating entirelynew worlds.

Role play, in particular, should be seen as a fundamental skill used across multiple academicdomains.

Assuming this new identity requires a close analysis of the originating texts, genreconventions, social roles, and linguistic codes

Performingthese shared fantasies (such as the scenarios that emerge in superhero comics) allows children tobetter understand who they are and how they connect with the other people around them

Children acquire basic literacies and competencies by learning to manipulate core culturalmaterials.

In con-structing and inhabiting these virtual characters, participants drew together multiple sources ofknowledge, mixing things they had read or learned in other educational contexts, informationexplicitly contained within the game, and their own introspection based on life experiences tocreate characters that were more compelling to them than the simple digital avatars the design-ers had constructed.

et, game play also is one of a range of contemporaryforms of youth popular culture that encourages young people to assume fictive identities andthrough this process develop a richer understanding of themselves and their social roles.

Engendering true procedural literacy means creating multiple opportunities for learn-ers—children and adults—to understand and experiment with reconfigurations of basic build-ing blocks of all kinds

Students need to learn how to manipulate and interpret existing simulations and how to con-struct their own dynamic models of real world processes

Students who use simulations in learning have more flexibility to customize models andmanipulate data in exploring questions that have captured their own curiosity.

we must know how to interpret this information.

Second,students experience what they have learned from a robust simulation as their own discoveries.

First, students oftenfind simulations far more compelling than more traditional ways of representing knowledge;consequently, they spend more time engaging with them and make more discoveries.

ontemporary video games allow youth to play with sophisticated simulations and, in theprocess, to develop an intuitive understanding of how we might use simulations to test ourassumptions about the way the world works

We learn through simu-lations by a process of trial and error: new discoveries lead researchers to refine their models,tweaking particular variables, trying out different contingencies.

Newforms of simulation expand our cognitive capacity, allowing us to deal with larger bodies ofinformation, to experiment with more complex configurations of data, to form hypothesesquickly and test them against different variables in real time.

build on this intuitive and experiential learning in theclassroom, introducing equations, diagrams, or visualizations that help them to betterunderstand the underlying principles that they are deploying and then sending them backto play through the levels again and improve their performance

Such questions also haveno right and wrong answers; they emphasize creative thinking rather than memorization;they allow diverse levels of engagement; they allow students to feel less intimidated byadult expertise; and they also lend themselves to the construction of arguments and themobilization of evidence.

Play in the context argued here is a mode of active engagement, one that encour-ages experimentation and risk-taking, one that views the process of solving a problem asimportant as finding the answer, one that offers clearly defined goals and roles that encouragestrong identifications and emotional investments.

Some have expressed skepticism that schools should or could teach young people how to play

We suspect that youngpeople who spend more time playing within these new media environments will feel greatercomfort interacting with one another via electronic channels, will have greater fluidity in navi-gating information landscapes, will be better able to multitask and make rapid decisions aboutthe quality of information they are receiving, and will be able to collaborate better with peoplefrom diverse cultural backgrounds

ideo gameplay is now hunkered down in our culture. And “what we do” is something that gets learnedsomehow and someway

One interpretation of why this happened would be to say thatthese kids were extremely “motivated” to learn to play video games, and so they learnedhowever they could manage.

Watching these kids lying around, talking,joking, and trying to figure things out in this ordinary way was very familiar.

This passage, taken in isolation, might support the separate worlds view; even worse, itmight suggest that these boys are learning from the game the idea that it is both okay tobeat someone up and it is a way to improve your pitching.

nother of our participants, Katarina, also made comparisons between in-game and in-world behaviors.

But ourstudy has taught us that the identities being crafted through game play are in fact real-world identities that are crafted as young people compare their actions in-game, and theirconsequences, with the consequences those same actions would have in the real world

At the beginning of the chapter, we referred to a perspective we called theseparate worldsview—the idea that games are a world apart from the real world where players can take onnew, and possibly transgressive, identities.

This vignette involving Holly and Brandon also adds something to this account, throughits comparison of a learning arrangement between two siblings that is durable in the gamingsituation, and fragile—and a source of self-abnegation—in the homework situation.

Gee has argued that this is, in large part, because gamedesigners have employed good learning principles, thus locating the locus of productiveagency primarily in the games.

We find this a strikingdifference when compared with her helping during game play; in the gaming situation sheknew equally little, and perhaps even less, about the content at hand, but in the case of thegame, her own lack of ability was of no issue

MaybeI’ll learn something.

At one point, after she handedhis textbook back to Brandon following a helping episode, he quickly handed her anothermath problem sheet. She responded with a tone of pleased and feigned exasperation, “I’mnever going to get out of here am I?” She clearly had no real need, at that point, to “get out of[there].”

What was similar between the gaming and homeworksituations was the sense of Holly serving as something of an ambient resource for Brandon;she was just hanging around, waiting to be asked for help, and offering it even when he didnot ask

it may have beendue to the fact that Brandon was the better player and both knew that he was assessing thevalue of her suggestions and deciding on the basis of the in-game situation whether it wassensible to act upon or disregard his sister’s help.

Holly played the role of running commentator, seem-ingly in hopes that some of her narration would prove useful to Brandon, but she showedlittle distress or frustration when he failed to follow her suggestions.

We often observed Holly with a game’s strategy guidein hand reading aloud sections she felt were relevant to Brandon’s play.

Holly often assumed a coaching or caretaker role, oftenwithout invitation to do so from Brandon. In these situations, she actively assessed hisneeds and attempted to provide a resolution to what she saw ashisproblem.

Rachel also maximized her in-game funds by purchasing the minimum number of itemsnecessary to keep her zoo’s animals healthy and happy, whereas Katarina would add extrafeatures to the exhibits, like trees and rocks, that did little for her in-game bottom line butimproved the aesthetics of her zoo.

Zoo Tycoon,

For example, during play ofBurnout 3: Takedown,when Tyler saw that his friend’s car was critically damaged, he pulled over to the side of theroad and waited for a fatal crash. This allowed Tyler to win the race, not by having to runlaps and risk taking more damage himself, but by default when his friend’s car was inevitablydestroyed

He is both an unabashed user of cheats, sporting a somewhat transgressive personalreputation he values at times, and, at the same time, someone who does not want his playwith friends interpreted as unfair—thus the overt display of his hands during the openingsequence to show his competitors that he is not entering cheat codes

hese are,depending on your point of view, an example of the morally sanctionable behavior of“cheating,” or an acceptable part of play.

In general, these vignettes collectively show how important it is to understandwhat goes on in-room if we are to understand how young people come to learn and playin-game.

n Moment 2 (below) the disconnected controller, previously useless in-game, was againused by Andrew, this time more demonstrably, as an instructional device. As in prior vignettesinvolving other children in other families, we see young people organizing themselves toteach and learn together—in ingenious ways.

After this early attempt,it seemed as though Johnny held the knowledge of the move, which they would needperiodically throughout the game. Just over twenty minutes after the early encounter withthe chimney, Evan stated that he had figured out a way to make climbing the chimney easier.

Moreimportant for our general argument, we see another instance in which teaching is organizedfor learning during play (like the last vignette showing Mikey and sister Maddy).

Inessence, they managed to keep their play going while they demonstrated to each othersuccessive attempts to create and solidify the climbing move with the controller, in a kindof “on the job” learning.

fter a bit of disagree-ment about the problem Maddy was having (lines 3–8), Mikey took the game systemfrom her (line 11).

It shows howMikey acts as a guide by providing advice to Maddy as she plays a game; it shows also, inher not taking his advice, that Maddy is playing an active rather than a simply passive rolein the apprenticeship and in her own learning.

Maddy:I’m just going to try it anyway.

oes it suggest a person who maintains control in the rest of her life,with game play simply another expression of this control, or might games represent a uniquecontext for its expression as compared, for example, with school, where she might have verylimited control of her our learning paths?

Typically, in an innercircle in the room, Mikey and Johnny were at play, with Maddy at the periphery observing,often commenting, and sometimes entering play under the watchful eyes of her brotherMikey.

Further support for thisinterpretation of the way Rachel organized learning for herself as a video game player can befound in the fact that she generally avoided in-game tutorials

Her questions were extremely focused, relating toparticular game moves or to identifying unfamiliar icons on the screen.

Unlikein other families in our study, siblings Rachel and Cory seldom played together because, asreported by Rachel, they had very different ways of playing.

earning arrangements

In order to better understand the question of how kids’ video game play is tied up intheir other activities, we also focused on one specific activity in the kids’ daily round outsideof game play—homework

we see a persistent bent that analyzes video game play as largely disconnectedfrom the other moments and activities of people’s lives.

We recruited the participants through advertisements onCraigslist, flyers in gaming stores, and word of mouth.

Ecological validity is about having a basis to credibly claim that our researchaccounts are about how and what people do, learn, and think in daily life, and not simplyabout what they do within the context of contrived laboratory tasks.

First, therearewidelydiffering views on the positive, negative, and noneffects of video games on otheraspects of life or learning.

Learning scientists use the termtransferto refer to the phenomenon of taking what youhave learned in one context and transferring it to another.

Not only does heor she feel like the time spent playing is both valuable and meaningful, but he or she is antic-ipating playing again.

Long beforeMath BlasterorOregon Trailhit the market, games have been used as learningtools

I did not realize that my skill sets/strategies were not fast and efficient enough to take on harder challenges

RTS games are among the most complex and demanding of computer and video games

Good video games are complex, challenging, and long; they can take 50 or more hours to finish. If a game cannot be learned well, then it will fail to sell well, and the company that makes it is in danger of going broke.