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Thursday 12th July 2007 6:22 pm

James Paul Gee: Getting Young People to Think Like Game Designers

This post starts off a discussion of the GameStar Mechanic project. GameStar Mechanic is a game which players play by making and sharing games. The purpose of the game is get young people to think like a game designer.

But what does it mean to think like a designer, of games or anything else for that matter, and why is it important in the modern world? At the most basic level, a designer has to reflect on how parts fit together into a whole under two sorts of constraints, internal and external. Internal constraints are all about what combinations a system allows. External constraints are all about how forces outside the system interact with the system, forces like people, social systems, institutions, and the world. 

The “Grammar” of Gaming

Take English grammar as an example. Speakers can and should think of themselves, when they take control of their language, as designers. Compare, for instance, a sentence like “Microsoft’s operating system is loaded with bugs” to “Microsoft loaded its operating system with bugs.” Internal properties of English grammar allow two different ways to combine these similar words and the way we combine them interacts with the world in very different ways, in the second sentence, but not the first, we are blaming and accusing Microsoft. As a linguist I want people to see grammar not as inert structures, but as tools for designing messages to have certain effects on the world. A predicate adjective like “is loaded” when combined with a subject gets you a quite different effect than does a transitive predicate like “loaded.”

I want kids to think about the “grammar” of games and gaming in the same way, to take control of their games and gaming. How can pieces be put together to make a game with effects of certain sorts? I want them to see games as a unique form of communication, like language or music

Understanding the Design of Systems

I want young people to understand other varieties of media in the same way. I want them also to understand that a powerful way of looking at the world is to treat natural and physical systems as if they were designed so that we can ask how to interact with them in ways that facilitate effects we want on people, institutions, and the world. I want them to understand something like biology deeply enough to know that a statement like “DNA replicates itself” really makes no sense. A glass of DNA will do nothing. DNA is part of a whole system, whose pieces fit together in certain ways, a system that replicates DNA and ultimately itself. Without the other parts (e.g., ribosomes, messenger RNA, cytoplasm, and much much more), nothing happens. When we understand the system, we can then think of ways to use its “design principles” for our own purposes. When we just (think we) know “DNA replicates itself” we can’t actually do anything.  [School by the way is too often about giving assent on a test to false statements like “DNA replicates itself"].

Game Design and Social Life

Games designers have to think about how objects and actions (their nouns and verbs) combine to get effects from players when specific goals are assumed or given. In this sense, game design is a core way of thinking about the world, because, in fact, social policy is exactly the same thing, how to get certain effects when you combine objects and actions under certain assumptions about goals (and here, too, people will seek to optimize their own experience on the ground, just as gamers do). Indeed, in our daily lives, when we are thinking proactively, we look at the world as if we could design the objects and actions around us to achieve certain goals, we “game” it. Game design is, thus, akin to the design of social life.

Category: Ecology-of-Games

Tags: game-design, games-and-learning, gamestar-mechanic, james-paul-gee

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