Katie Salen: Learning to “read” a Game System (includes a podcast interview!)
Filed at 12:55 pm on November 6, 2006 in Games • 2 comments
Three “gaming literacies” are presented: modding, world-building, gaming etiquette and more…
The gaming attitude, which is enacted during both in-game and out of game play, emerges directly from the creative qualities of play. Gamers not only follow rules, but push against them, testing the limits of the system in often unique and powerful ways.
As designed systems, games offer certain terms of engagement, rules of play that engender stylized forms of interaction. Learning to “read” a game system in order play with it points toward a specific kind of literacy connected, in part, to the ability of a player to understand how systems operate, and how they can, in turn, be transformed.
Modding and world-building, which form the basis for much of the play of MMOs and virtual worlds, for example, might be a related literacy, while learning how to navigate a complex system of out of game resources, from game guides, FAQs, walkthroughs, and forums, to P2P learning, represents another. A third literacy might be seen in the learning that takes place in negotiating the variable demands of fair play: players must become literate in the social norms of a specific gaming community, learning what degree of transgression is acceptable, and when a player has crossed the line; a fourth perhaps in learning how to collaborate within a multiplayer space, where knowledge is distributed and action most often collective.
I moderated an online conversation (see podcast below) around this topic and recorded an audio interview with several members of the Games, Learning and Society group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Eric Zimmerman, co-founder and CEO of Gamelab. The conversation began with this question: What are domains of literacy we see emerging from the specific qualities of games and gaming?
** Hear the full podcast of the GAPPS interview!
Next: Justin Hall: What Can We Hope for in a Gaming Future? > >
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Comments (2)
1: Tom Hoffman at 2:51 pm on Monday, November 6, 2006
In an educational context, it shouldn’t really be acceptable to keep the internal workings of the game a secret. Teachers and students should also be able to read the code and manipulate it.
2: Sandra Dickinson at 3:26 am on Friday, December 15, 2006
I’m interested in fostering learning by MAKING games and in player/learner-made content. So I keyed in particularly on the modding & world-building portions of this podcast, especially the process you describe that players go thru:
1. consume
2. critique
3. create
Making a game together is a structure for a community of practice to think together with. Together, the practitioners know everything that any one of them needs to know (even if they don’t yet know that they know it). Since a game is inherently ordered by patterns, making a game is a natural tool for a community to use to discover the patterns hidden in the collective experience of its practitioners. The patterns discovered are the common solutions to the common problems that have proven effective over and over again. The patterns discovered in collective experience can be applied for individual success.
It has been suggested elsewhere that the best learning games design the experience - not the content. The designer has control over the tools and nothing else, and even then, only in so far as to set the stage for the community to connect and interact. Set up the tool and let the community use it whatever way they will to make something useful to them to improve their practice.
If the first step in the process of modding and world-building is consumption—that implies that there’s already something there there. But if the underlying value of the learning game is player/learner-made content—- HOW CAN WE GET STARTED?
Robust discussion/debate is encouraged. Comments are reviewed before posting to ensure they are on topic and do not promote commercial products or services.
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