Playing to learn game design skills in a game context

This interactive session presents early research findings resulting from a game simulation currently called Gamestar Mechanic through which 70 middle and high school-age players learn to design video games. Gamestar Mechanic is an RPG (Role-Playing Game) style online game through which players “take on” the behaviors characteristic of professional game designers (e.g., designing games, accounting for variability change within a game’s system, critiquing games). Reflecting on and practicing design can lead, we believe, to skills that are crucial for success in the modern, high-tech, global world. Game design is but a start in learning to think of complex interactions among variables, people, and technology, but it is also a domain that can help others reflect on complex interactions among systems. Early findings are showing that the pedagogical design of Gamestar Mechanic has the potential to help participants develop understanding of technical concepts particular to game design, systems-thinking skills, and other behaviors associated with the domain. Overview: Gamestar Mechanic and the emerging games and learning field This session will be devoted to GameStar Mechanic, a video game whose core game mechanic involves designing games. It is an RPG (Role-Playing Game) style online game where middle and high schoolage players learn the fundamentals of game design by playing roles as “game mechanics” charged with the making and “modding” (modifying) of games. The game is being developed and tested in a collaborative project between the game company Gamelab in New York (http://www.gamelab.com/) and the Games, Learning, and Society Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (http://website.education.wisc.edu/gls/). It is being funded through the MacArthur Foundation’s new Digital Media and Learning Initiative (http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/). The project holds out a great deal of importance for educational reform, especially in the new push for innovation, creativity, and systems thinking (Friedman 2006). However, such a project may seem odd to people not familiar with current work on games and learning (Gee 2003, 2007) and its relation to design-based learning (Kolodner, 2002) Some years ago, the New London Group (1996), in its manifesto on multiple literacies and new literacies argued that “design” ought to be seen as the center of learning for young people in the modern world. We live in a world in which complex systems interact in often dangerous ways. We humans intervene in the world by understanding natural systems as if they were designed so that we can leverage them for our own (good or bad) purposes. We also design complex systems that interact with designed and natural systems in complex ways. Policy decisions and civic participation in the modern world need to rely on “design thinking” that focuses on intraand inter-system relationships and patterns, as well as the intended and unintended consequences of local actions within a complex system (witness the intersections of religion, culture, language, industry, economy, and politics in the Iraqi War and the disaster to which simplistic linear thinking has led). The New London Group stressed, as well, the importance of seeing language and literacy as systems that humans don’t just accept and passively use, but design in practice moment by moment through decisions and choices, hopefully based on deep understanding of the communicative resources (the “design grammar”) constituted by different styles of language. Gamestar Mechanic is a game designed to teach young people about game design, with the emphasis on design, not programming. Game design inherently involves building, assessing, and transforming systems that involve game mechanics and human interactions with technology and other humans. The goal is not to entice young people into game design as a career, though the game will introduce them to aspects of what such a career would involve. The goal is to help young people—gamers and nongamers—learn what it is like to think about design and to think like a designer (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003). Game design is, for many young people today, a highly motivating domain within which to first think about design. Game design involves a rich array of knowledge and skills. Knowing how to put together a successful game involves system-based thinking, iterative critical problem solving, art and aesthetics, writing and storytelling, interactive design, game logic and rules, and computer skills. The designer must also be a sociotechnical engineer, thinking about how people will interact with the game and how the game will shape both individual, competitive, or collaborative social interaction. Designers must use complex and technical linguistic and symbolic elements from a variety of domains, at a variety of different levels, and for a variety of different purposes. They must explicate and defend design ideas, describe design issues and player interactions at a meta-level, create and test hypotheses, and reflect on the impact of their games as a distinctive form of media in relation to other media. And each of these involves a melding of technological, social, communicational, and artistic concerns, in the framework of a form of scientific thinking in the broad sense of the term (e.g., hypothesis and theory testing, reflection and revision based on evidence, etc.). Learners are making and thinking about designed complex interactive systems, a characteristic activity in both the media and in science today. One of our key goals for GameStar Mechanic is to intervene in the so-called “fourth-grade slump” and “eighth-grade cliff”, the phenomena whereby many children who pass early reading tests cannot read to learn as the complexity of language increases through the later grades. We believe that these phenomena are caused by young people’s lack of early preparation for and facility with “academic language”, the sorts of non-vernacular school-based language associated with the content areas in school (Gee, 2004). GameStar Mechanic is an ideal environment in which young people can learn and practice—in situated practices as part of a learning community—forms of specialist, technical, and academic language that pay off in school success. Reflecting on and practicing design in these terms can lead, we believe, to skills that are crucial for success in the modern, high-tech, global world. We live in a world replete with interacting systems—natural and designed—that create complex risks, such as science, market, state, and demographic systems interacting to affect global environmental change. Game design is but a start in learning to think of complex interactions among variables, people, and technology, but it is also a domain where eventually, through “gamed simulations”, designers can help others reflect on issues of social change and complex interactions among systems. At the same time, game and gaming are a truly global phenomenon. Young people all over the world— whether from rich or poor countries—play games if they have any access to them at all. People today are familiar with playing in multiplayer settings—like World of WarCraft—with people from all over the world. It is possible that we can use games, gaming, and game design as bridge with which to form international collaborations for world-wide creativity and innovation, as well as the spread of tech-savvy identities across the globe in the service of far more uniform development across countries and regions than we have today. It should be mentioned here, as well, that games are a truly multicultural phenomenon in the United States. For example, African-Americans are among the largest demographic of game players and this holds true for many different game genres (http://gotmaddgamez.blogspot.com/2005/08/blacks-more-likely-to-behardcore.html; http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PJQ/is_15_2/ai_n6131152). People have argued that video games are, for some young people, a route to IT and STEM skills, if these young people think about them strategically and involve themselves with “modding” (modifying and making games). GameStar Mechanic is all about modding and one of its goals is to ensure that minority boys and girls get the opportunity to engage with games in a way that leads to IT and STEM possibilities.