Play to Learn to Play

I’ve been looking at Metaplace since alpha and I’ve been quite impressed with what they are trying to acheive with the product and how well things are going so far. Now things are looking even more promising after some further major funding for the project has just been announced.

Koster has an interesting article on his blog in relation to what fun is with respect to games. Sex comes into the discussion – are we have fun because we are learning, and if so why is sex fun?

http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/10/13/fun-in-class-in-sex/

I tend to be with Koster on this debate. Fun has a lot to do with learning, experiencing new things, and overcoming challenges which are close to your level of ability.

Games based learning researchers will be keen to see how this new Microsoft project works out for school students in the New York area. As strange as it seems I’m not sure $1.5 million will be enough funding to do anything large scale.

This is an excellent article from (Henry Jenkins – MIT) – even if I only say that because it supports my own experience and instinct (plus bias!). In (crude) summary: games are not just for male children, they are social and there is very little evidence that they encourage violence among the young, except that violent play may lead to violent play. Sort of obvious when you think about it. There is more to the article than this and it is good to see such a clear and reasoned debunking of these commonly believed myths.

If would could save all the money wasted on poorly designed violence-in-games research we perhaps we could put that into more proven contributors to youth violence!

A very interesting article here discusses whether video-games can inspire reading among children. It skirts around the old video-game narratologist – ludologist debate which can instigate some fierce argument. Up front I have to say that I tend to view the world of games from a narratologist point of view and so I do believe that stories do have a place in games – supporting the “rules” of a game rather than forming the them.

I like the idea of using games to inspire reading and I have some anecdotal thoughts on the subject. I know that for older players there are broadly two camps in relation to stories/text in a game. The first group who just want to interact with the game world and other players and the narrative is formed by the player only; things that happen to them, the choices that they make, and the conversations/interactions that they have with other players. The second group care about this “ludologistic” approach but also care about characters, a story that is narrated (in the broad sense), and often wish to become a character that has a clearly (predetermined) role in a narrative. Members of this (crudely defined) second group are generally only interested in a rich and deep narrative as evidenced in some role play games, as opposed to a game like Doom which has a back-story though most who play it don’t care or know much about it.

It is my experience that young players (especially 3-6 years old) tend to see narrative (text or aural) as an obstacle in the way of gamepla- they are annoyed with it and want to click on through. However, I have found that young children do develop reading skills through games, even if this is just through the menu traversal. I know of one situation where a young mildly autistic child was helped a great deal in his reading and social skills by videogames.

I would like to see games help literacy but alongside and not as a replacement.