[arg_discuss] Commercial ARGs with learning outcomes

[Bryan Alexander]

Coming in late to the conversation:
	I share Wendy's delight for the learning-play combination.
	I also agree with Adam's point about transferrable learning
between games.  There's some scholarship on this (James Paul Gee; Harry
Brown; Consance Steinkuhler; the Selfe and Hawisher anthology).  One of
the hard parts, though, is helping students see such transfers as
possible.  Academic boundaries block this in many ways, and not just on
gaming's learning.  So does academia's disdain for gaming.

-----Original Message-----
From: arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org [mailto:arg_discuss-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Adam Martin
Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 2:21 PM
To: Discussion list of the IGDA ARG SIG
Subject: Re: [arg_discuss] Commercial ARGs with learning outcomes

2009/1/12 Nathan Mishler <nathan at studiocypher.com>:

> It's possible.

>

> There's a problem with the thought that there are Games and then there

are

> Educational Games. Many people think that only learning comes out of

games

> that are specifically designed to teach. The thing is, ALL games

teach.

Yep, so ...


> Granted, much of what entertainment games teach is not useful or

applicable

> in any form in the real world. Okay, you learned how to avoid the

alien's

> attacks on level 8. That is very specialized knowledge.


... I disagree that what you learn from a shmup is to "avoid the
alien's attacks on level 8" :). I believe that with any good game you
learn more transferable skills than you ever learn sepcialized ones.

For instance, someone said to me recently that Tetris teaches mostly
"how to pack objects in a box with no wasted space". Nah ... it
teaches you a bunch of things much more than that, each related to the
actual gameplay mechanics, such as "mentally rotate any object in 2D
with a low degree of error when it comes to accidental reflection"
(the game gives you L pieces upside-down for their most common
use-case, forcing you to mentally rotate them before deciding where to
position them).

It takes some effort to work out what a game is *really* teaching, and
in my experience it is very rare for either professionals or education
researchers to do that, in detail. Among professionals it seems
there's a widespread (b belief that the deep, highly transferrable
skills are there - and often in much greater number than people
suspect - but few of them have ever done the analyses themselves.


>

> ARGs on the other hand tend to involve more "real world" knowledge,

using

> things that people already know (or can learn) as part of their

puzzles.

> They also tend to encourage players to go out into the world and doing

this

> learning on their own.


With ARGs I think you'd have to start by breaking out the highly
differentiated classes of players, from the problems solvers to the
forum lurkers to the researchers to the group-organizers ... Etc ...
And look at the different sets of experiences each was going through.
The overall journey/game experience for each kind of player is usually
very very different - often they don't even experience the same
content, or even the same narrative (many people get different subsets
of the narrative)

That said, I think it would be much easier to just embed traditional
learning inside traditional ARGs, capitalising on how readily they
absorb and link other media. As I understand it, that's what most of
the educational ARGs have done to date (and in some cases done very
successfully?)

It may not be optimal, nor work as exceptionally well as a fully
integrated learning experience+ARG might, but IMHO it would already be
a big improvement on the educational tools we currently have in this
area, and so it's very worthwhile in it's own right.

Adam
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