Archive for Education
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Divinare
In precisely one month’s time Divinare will be published by Asmodee in France. I’m not privy to exactly when the game will likely reach these shores — or American ones; or the German, Italian or Dutch borders either! — but I don’t think the waiting World will have to wait too long. Tick tock!
The story of Divinare’s development was featured in Episode 1 of Asmodee’s rather swanky new webcast La Tête dans le Pion — a ‘making of’ feature begins at 10:34, and is a lot of fun to watch, even if you don’t understand the très rapide French voiceover. The gameplay will be covered in the forthcoming Episode 2.
If you can’t wait, TricTrac TV recorded a gameplay video at the Cannes Games Festival, which shows off the artwork and components.
LEGup
Next week I’m going to be speaking at the London Education Games Meetup, which is only a mildly terrifying (I’m hardly a practised public speaker!). The meet up is open to all interested parties, so do come along if you fancy it.
I wrote about last November’s excellent meetup in these pages, and following my blog post organizer Kirsten Campbell-Howes graciously asked me to take part in a future session, which, at the time, seemed a suitably distant prospect. However, the weeks have rolled by and this month’s meetup is the ‘board game special’ to which I hope to be able to bring some practical insight into the process of board game design. Fingers crossed!
Playtest
Can I also point your collective browsers to the Rob Harris’s Playtest Games Meetup, which is a monthly get-together for, well, playtesting games, oddly enough.
The group has been meeting for a while (and thoroughly productive and fun it has been, too!) but now that Rob has made the jump to Meetup, it looks like there’ll be plenty of new blood in future get-togethers. One thing you can never have enough of is playtesting, so hopefully the group can continue to be an excellent incubator of new ideas and new talent. And the more the merrier!
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
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Brett J. Gilbert
United Kingdom
Cambridge
Divinare — Coming from Asmodee 2012!
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Last week I went along to the London Educational Games Meetup, and the event proved engaging, enlightening and thoroughly worth the train fare, so thanks must first go to organiser Kirsten Campbell-Howes. Props are also due to the good people at My Note Games who sponsored the event, and oiled its proverbial wheels, by supplying wine and beer.
There were around 50 people at the get-together, primarily computer game makers and educationalists — although I am not sure that those terms really do justice to the breadth of skills and backgrounds in the room — and Kirsten had found some great speakers to entertain us.
First up was Phil Stuart from the game studio Preloaded, who gave a presentation based on his post on the studio’s blog: Games that are ‘about’ something. If you want a primer on the studio’s work, their approach to game creation and the meat of his talk, go check out the blog post! Phil spoke about some of the studio’s work in term of four game ‘shapes’ — abstraction, metaphor, simulation and narrative — and gave examples of each. He also introduced their latest game, a commission for Channel 4 called The End, which is a game aimed at 14–19-year-olds designed to engage with some of the moral and philosophical aspects of death and mortality. Quite a heady mixture, and hardly obvious territory for self-identified ‘casual’ game makers.
Phil’s talk was excellent and debate-worthy and it was great to see examples of the studio’s work explained in terms of their pedagogical intent. Phil’s blog post begins by stating that Preloaded “make fun games, with a purpose” and in his talk Phil spoke about how getting the balance right between the two — between fun and purpose — is (not surprisingly) a tricky business. The studio begins by interrogating and understanding the education goals and content of each commission, and then works out from that point to create a learning experience that can be delivered in the form of a game.
The (open) question — and I sincerely hope that I am neither misrepresenting the tenet of Phil’s presentation nor the reaction of the audience — is how overt those educational goals can be before you start to lose the fun, and commensurately how effective they are if their purpose is too well hidden? When does play become work? When does a game become a test?
I shall leave those questions as open as I found them for now, because next up was primary school teacher, mother, gamer, geek and all-round educational evangelist Dawn Hallybone, who spoke with enough enthusiasm to fill a very large assembly hall about her experience of using computer games in the classroom. What I thought was striking about Dawn’s presentation was her seemingly heretical (in the circumstances) rejection of so-called ‘educational games’, or at least her observation that her own students often rejected games that were too obvious or preachy about their educational content.
Dawn, in contrast, makes creative and inspiring use of computer games as diverse as Mario Cart and Myst as a launchpad for all sorts of curriculum-driven outcomes that her (very lucky) primary students clearly have a great time engaging with.
To hear Phil and Dawn speak, one after the other, was fascinating. They stand at different points on exactly the same path. You might say that Phil (to borrow his own phrase) makes games with a purpose, and that Dawn (to paraphrase) uses games for a purpose. That shared purpose is indeed education, but I am left wondering whether the games in either case should really be called ‘educational games’ — and (importantly) I don’t think that either Phil or Dawn did so!
Are we not learning something every time we play? Are not all games inherently educational?
I’m not saying don’t make ‘educational’ games, nor that games can’t encapsulate and deliver deliberately ‘educational’ goals; I’m just wondering aloud whether labelling any such experience as as ‘educational game’ might be counter-productive. The language seems to carve off some games at the expense of others, instantly valuing (or devaluing) one apparent class of game against another.
Both Phil and Dawn spoke eloquently about the value of games within education — and more power to their collective elbows! But it seemed to me that there was a palpable tension between their approaches that the evening left unresolved. If all games teach, then how and why do some games designed to teach succeed and others fail, either as games or as educational tools? How similar or distinct are the essential natures of learning and play? And is an ‘educational game’ a tautology, or a contradiction in terms?
I don’t know. I’m still learning.
This post also appears on my BrettSpiel game design blog.
Mon Nov 21, 2011 10:57 pm
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