Design thinking in gamestar mechanic: the role of gamer experience on the appropriation of the discourse practices of game designers

This paper explores the pedagogical potential of Gamestar Mechanic, a computer game where players learn the principles of game design by making, sharing and reviewing games in the context of an online community of designers. The game has been designed to foster the appropriation of complex language and literacy skills by middle school children. By relying on think aloud interviews and a discourse analytic framework, this paper explores the language practices germane to the game designer Discourse enacted by players as they tackle a game design challenge. Context for the Study Thinking as a designer has been recognized as an important asset to learners in a world defined by the globalization of economy and intense pressure on them to produce new knowledge, innovate, and solve complex problems (Kolodner, Crismond, Gray, Holbrook, & Puntambekar, 1998; New London Group, 1996). Adopting a designer perspective entails an epistemological shift by the learner from the teacher-driven transmission view commonly promoted by schools, to a conception of knowledge as a dynamic construct that emerges from a dialog between the designer, the designed and a larger community of design practitioners (Schön, 1995). Game design, which sits at the intersection of computer science, graphic arts, interactive storytelling, has been hypothesized to be an intellectually valuable design practice as it could provide avenues for youth to develop computational literacies, software design skills, models of systemic thinking, and specialist language and literacy skills (Games, Learning, & Society, 2005). Game design is an eminently social activity, where the task is distributed among teams of designers, programmers and artists. As a consequence, effective game designers must recruit a variety of oral and written language practices, using a variety of media in order to communicate game ideas across teams, defend specific design decisions, or present insights learned from designs in the form of post-mortems (Grossman, 2003) among other things. The popularity of computer and video games, particularly with low-income boys disaffiliating from school, make it an intriguing domain for exploring language and literacy development. Recent research on literacy learning documents the prominence of the fourth grade slump (Gee, 2004; Hart & Risley, 2003), a phenomenon whereby seemingly well performing students (particularly disadvantaged students) in early literacy, fail to do so in later grades where specialized language is introduced. This problem becomes compounds throughout late elementary and middle school, developing into what some have called “the eigth grade” cliff, a point at which students failing complex literacy tasks such as inference, comprehension, writing, and domain-specific reading disaffiliate and drop out of school (Chall, Jacobs, & Baldwin, 1990; Chall & Jacobs, 2003; de León & Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2002). These phenomena have been cited as key reasons for students dropping out of school, which, with almost 40% of male students dropping out before graduation, is a pressing national concern (Ewell & Wellman, 2007). The study in this paper happens in the context of Gamestar Mechanic, an online role-playing game that is about designing video games to help students practice and learn complex language and literacy skills. Gamestar Mechanic is designed to initiate players into the Discourse of game design, through a series of well ordered game scenarios and encompassing curricular activities that are designed to emulate the key learning practices operating in game design communities. The game is currently under development in joint collaboration between GameLab, a New York based Videogame Company and the Games, Learning and Society group at University of WisconsinMadison. It is currently funded under the Macarthur Foundation’s Digital Media Learning Initiative, a $50 million effort aimed at understanding the effects of digital media in young people’s lives. About Gamestar Mechanic In Gamestar Mechanic, players take on the role of “game mechanics”, characters that are brought to a fantasy world where the economy, culture and lifestyle are fueled by well-functioning games. In the plot of the game however, a catastrophe has taken place resulting in that the overall system upon which the world functions has been broken, and the elements which once comprised well made games have fallen to disrepair. Mechanics must interact with world elements in the form of game creatures (e.g. heroes and enemies) through which they can make and repair games and gradually restore harmony to the world (Salen, 2007). Players advance in the game by participating in a series of game design challenges, which introduce them to the parameters and rules that define the behavior of each creature, and its relationship to the game system as a whole. Players can also gain the ability to access and manipulate these parameters and behaviors through the use of a web-based game editor. By using this tool, players can modify character properties such as speed, strength, and response to other creatures, as well as systemic characteristics of the games they will be part of, such as the design of game levels and game rules, allowing players to produce complex interactions in their games (see Figure 1). Figure 1. A game design by Marc, one of the workshop participants in an early version of the Gamestar Mechanic Game Editor. In some ways, Gamestar Mechanic may seem similar to constructionist approaches aimed at facilitating computing as a form of literacy (DiSessa, 2000; Resnick, 1994). However, a fundamental difference between these approaches and the Gamestar Mechanic approach is that in constructionist tools such as Logo or Boxer, the emphasis has commonly been placed on teaching students the fundamentals of programming, in hopes that once familiar with the tools, they will appropriate them in their own designs. Conversely, Gamestar Mechanic places an emphasis on teaching what James Gee calls the Discourse of game design, a term which refers to ways of doing, talking, thinking and using tools that game designers enact in professional practice (Gee, 2005). In other words, while constructionist approaches to computational literacy have emphasized learning to make meaningful creations with computers, the approach proposed in Gamestar Mechanic focuses on learning how to make those meaningful creations through games. In order to give the game this emphasis, design challenges within it are framed within the context of a metagame consisting among other things of an overarching narrative and rule system that help define player characters’ identities, goals, and paths of advancement and status within an online community of game mechanics. The challenges are constructed in ways that require players not only to design games, but also to engage players in written discourse with other members of the community. This paper explores the way in which previous gaming experience by middle school players influences their adoption of the language and literacy practices of game designers in the context of a Gamestar Mechanic design challenge. By relying on a discourse-analytic methodology, it aims to illustrate the ways in which a gamer identity mediates the adoption of a game design Discourse through play. Theoretical Framework and Research Questions This paper examines learning from a social-constructivist framework of learning. The central interest of this study is to understand the appropriation and enactment of a Discourse by players. That is, how players adopt and enact ways of design thinking and doing, and to explore the utility that these habits may have in other spheres of life. Within this framework, language is central to the learning of individuals and communities, since it mediates the negotiation of meaning between individuals, tools, and context (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1996, Vygotsky, 1930). Lemke (1990) for example, uses the term “talking science” to address the ways in which scientists use language to communicate findings and disseminate knowledge across their communities. At the same time, a socio-constructivist view of learning within games characterizes it as conceptual change that is achieved through the gradual appropriation of a discursive identity by the learner (Shaffer, 2007). Gee calls identities such as these big ‘D’ Discourses (Gee, 1999, 2005), an umbrella term that encompasses multiple sociocultural theories of knowledge (Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991), and refers to “ways of knowing, talking, doing and being in the world” practiced by people affiliated to a certain identity. The term stands in contrast with little ‘d’ discourse, which refers to instances of language-in-use through which people situate meaning and construct reality for themselves and others at any given time. This project takes advantage of a learning-through-design instructional framework (Kolodner, et al. 1998; Perkins, 1995) as a means to foster the emergence of a game design Discourse in children. In this design approach, learning is achieved through an iterative process enacted through the production of public artifacts in problem-based contexts. Such approaches also emphasize experience as central to learning, and rely on presenting students with learning scenarios where ill structured problem solving tasks are framed within the context of close to real-world situations. An example of these frameworks is Learning by Design (Kolodner et al, 1998), which blends insights from case-based reasoning pedagogy (Riesbeck & Schank, 1989) with problembased learning (Barrows, 1998). This framework presents learners with a sequence of modules where they must tackle challenges centered on the design of real world artifacts, which in Gamestar Mechanic are embodied in a series of game design challenges. In these challenges players are required to engage with specific design problems that require the enactment of a designer Discourse for their solution. These challenges are constructed to introduce learners to key ideas and language in the Game Designer Discourse, and require players to put them into practice as they tackle their game designs. For example, the introductory statement for a challenge could be: “A core mechanic represents the essential moment-to-moment activity of the player, it is what the player will be doing over and over as he plays the game. For this challenge, make a game where the core mechanic is to collect things. When you’re done with your design, write the instructions for your game so that others can play it.” In this statement, introduces the player to the game design concept of core mechanic, a specialist term that refers not only to a fundamental component in games (the central activity of the player), but that also emphasizes the need to design mindful of the systemic relationship between game elements (e.g. a collect mechanic would be useless in a game with nothing to collect). Alongside design-based frameworks the work on constructionism has served an important role in informing this study (e.g. Harel & Papert, 1992). Constructionist approaches emphasize not only the design process as a way to enact the public construction of knowledge (Papert, 1991 p.1), but also the role of epistemological pluralism (p.10), which refers to the need to acknowledge the existence and value of multiple ways of knowing beyond those traditionally accepted by schooling. Given that one of the most fundamental ways of learning within Gamestar Mechanic comes through the completion of design challenges, where meaning making happens with a mixture of both the grammar of traditional texts, and the design grammar of games, these frameworks became useful in the attempt to understand the players’ design strategies and process towards their design goals. Close to these approaches, the third theoretical framework this study relies on is DiSessa’s work on the Boxer programming language (DiSessa, 2001). In Boxer, DiSessa and colleagues designed a programming language that removes the abstraction and complexity inherent to most commercial languages, with the purpose of letting novice computer users engage in an experiential approach to learning through simulations, by constructing models in which patterns of design and knowledge can emerge. In his view, one of the most important benefits that programming can bring to learners is the ability to create simulations that will help them learn complex concepts in more experiential ways (P.35). While Gamestar Mechanic fully aligns with these views, it differs from this and other constructionist approaches to computational literacy in that it doesn’t have their underlying assumption that the activity of construction itself will motivate learners to use tools such as Logo or Boxer. Conversely in Gamestar Mechanic, the assumption is that videogames have become a widely disseminated medium that many children are familiar with, and enthusiastic about. Gamestar Mechanic attempts to harness this enthusiasm by fostering a community where game design principles and patterns are learned through active participation in play, and construction plays a more supportive role. The notion of thinking through simulations put forth by DiSessa has been echoed by researchers in the field of games and learning (Gee, 2003, Squire, 2006). This field recruits a diversity of learning science frameworks to analyze the learning that takes place in the context of game play. These include situated learning (Lave and Wenger, 1999), Connectionist cognitive models (Gee, 2003), socioconstructivist perspectives on technology-supported learning (Bonk & Cunningham, 1998; Vygotsky, 1930), and models of knowledge based on the professions (Schon, 1995; Shaffer, 2006). Research into games and learning suggests that by playing videogames, players learn to see them as designed objects (Gee, 2003 P.42) which represent complexly interrelated and context-dependent meanings that designers build using symbols that are given structure through a design grammar (p. 30). Players also learn to see games as forms of text representation where aspects of printed texts such as genre are also present (Gee, 2005 P.108). If in line with this view games should be considered a form of new literacy, game play could be said to be analogous to reading, and design to writing. This notion becomes even more compelling if one considers that several scholars have put forth the notion of written text as a designed object in recent years (Kress, 2003). Given that reading and writing are the most used literacy practices in schools today, one could then imagine that some aspects of the discourse of game designers could serve as a basis to help students participate more effectively in their school lives. In line with this theoretical framework, the four guiding research questions posited for this study were the following: 1. How and to what degree does language reveal the enactment of a game design Discourse by students in the context of Gamestar Mechanic? 2. What aspects of the game designer Discourse play out in the solution of a Gamestar Mechanic Game Design Challenge? 3. In what way does Gamestar Mechanic facilitate learning through games and simulations? 4. What similarities and differences between the Discourse of game design and the discourse of School emerge in the context of Gamestar Mechanic? Research Site and Participants One of the central aims of pedagogies such as the one furthered by Gamestar Mechanic is to bridge the gap that exists between the learning and literacy practices of formal education settings and those of informal learning communities. Given that videogames nowadays find their principal venues in the second category, the current study focused on the use Gamestar Mechanic and its associated curriculum in out-of-school settings. Participants were recruited from a variety of after school programs in a several cities in the greater Madison-Milwaukee Wisconsin area, as well as from the general community, through flyers which invited them to participate in a short workshop where they would learn to make games by playing games. The project began in January 2007, and to this date three instances of the workshop have taken place, two of the workshops took place in a computer lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and one at a High School in a suburb of Milwaukee. Given that the main populations of interest to the project are middle and high school students, particularly those from low-income households, thirty participants between the ages of 12 and 16 years both backgrounds in order to help us identify differences in the interactions with Gamestar Mechanic between low and high-income groups. Methods: Data Collection The background information for all participants was obtained by a series of ethnographic interviews (Spradley, 1979) done individually with before the start of each workshop. Since a core interest of this study was to assess the relationship of previous gaming experience to the adoption of the language and literacy practices that Gamestar Mechanic aims to foster, through the interview background data was collected on the participants’ number of years as a player, number of games played, favorite games, and ease of access to videogames at home or in other contexts. Also, in-workshop activities such as game design discussions, play sessions and collaborative design challenges were documented via video recordings and field notes. In addition, in order to assess the language and literacy practices of players, samples of oral and written language skills were collected before and throughout the workshop in the form of game labels, blog entries, level messages and digital voice recordings of design discussions. Finally, a hybrid data collection approach mixing video capture of the participant’s computer screen during the design process, mixed with a think aloud interview of participants during the process was used in this study. This approach has recently gained popularity to assess participant problem solving and information search strategies in human-computer interaction (Benbunan-Fich, 2001). Given that the intention of this study was to understand the use of language used by the participants to explain their design process during a Gamestar Mechanic challenge, the focus of the analysis was on meaning making practices rather than on the cognitive aspects of the problem solving process itself, the think aloud takes the form of an interview as opposed to a protocol in the traditional sense. In order to add reliability to the analysis, aside from notes taken by the researcher, both the participant and the computer screen wee recorded during the think aloud, using a digital camera and a CamStudio (http://camstudio.org), screen recording tool and the data were analyzed and corroborated with four other research team members.