Spotlight MacArthur Foundation

Robert Torres: Gamestar Mechanic’s Learning Potential

Filed at 6:48 pm on July 26, 2007 in Games • Leave a comment

Since our NYC workshops started, we have been using a prototype build of Gamestar Mechanic that still doesn’t have features we believe will be key to the game.  Especially significant to these will be a kind of community forum that will allow players to post ratings and critiques of other players’ games.  However, from this first wave of workshops, we have started to identify a few general areas in which kids have begun to show some signs of potential skill development.  Among these are:

1. Understanding and producing dynamic systems
2. Assessing games based on understood set of criteria
3. Developing game worlds and game narratives

Again, while too early to reach any conclusions on what students are “understanding” in a deep and enduring way, some evidence suggests that they are, by design, making the elements currently available in the game interact to produce a certain result.  In designing a game for her partner, one (African American) participant explained: 

To make [her partner’s] game, I had to ask him what he likes and didn’t like in a game.  He said that he liked, fighting, collecting and obstacles, so for fighting I put a lot of shooting enemies, for obstacles I make a lot of blocks in his way so he couldn’t get to the goal and I made a lot of point blocks so he could collect them on his way to the goal.  The point of the game was to get to the goal.  The part that made the game hard was trying to collect all the point blocks without getting hit by the shooting enemies.

In an activity designed to have kids develop an understanding of core mechanics, kids again showed some signs of developing the ability to design dynamic systems.  One Latino male participant explained: 

My core mechanic was climbing.  I tried to make like a cliff-hanger story where he’s basically a guy who likes treasures and he has a little side of greed.  His objective in the game is to get up the mountain, and during the way up there [are] enemies, not only humans like scavenger hunters who are trying to get the treasures before you, but monsters from the past, like pre-historic, and mutated monsters, so on your way up, you might collide with a couple of those. 

At the top there’s suppose to be treasures and, throughout, different levels ... and you add on more people, like a party of people, like you get a whole squad ... I wanted to be like a lot of objects.  I would like for there to be a couple of different ways to continue on, so if you go this way [points to the left] you’re gonna end up having to climb a whole mountain.  If you go that way [points right], you can climb with a high wire to another mountain and then take the short cut instead of having to go all around.  Through the game I really want, not for it to be easy, but I want there to be tricks, you know, to get around.  You can do it the hard way, or you can try to find the tricks, and you’ll be slick.

Both of these participants seem to demonstrate an emerging ability to articulate and potentially design a system of interacting elements that produces a certain experience.  The second example goes further in showing how his design could produce a variety of different results.  In this short time, participants seem to be showing encouraging signs of developing the kind of design literacy that Jim writes about, the kind, as he explains in his post that may permit kids to see the world as if in fact they could design it.  This, of course, will require us to not assess the immediate skills the game may help kids develop, but also gauge how effectively, if at all, they can transfer these skills to other domains.  This summer we continue running workshops where we hope to test assessment strategies that could effectively capture these skills.