What struck me was how similar emergent learning is to emergent gameplay. The experience of a game can be thought of as a collaboration between the player and the designer. In most games, the designer sets up the game's rules, mechanics, and play space, and the player works within those constraints. The best games allow the player to experiment and explore within the game space to come up with player-directed goals and/or novel strategies to a defined goal. Gameplay emerges from the player's creativity and the game's set up. As game designer Warren Spector puts it in Alexander (2013), game designers should be putting "a sort of creative box around" the player experience, and not directly scripting every experience. Sounds familiar to emergent learning, right?
Think about a game like Scrabble for a minute. The rules and constraints are fairly simple. The player must make words to score points. Words can only be place on the board and go from top to bottom, or left to right. There are bonus points that can be earned. However, from these basic rules, you see players engage in deeply strategic and interesting behavior. For instance, players may play worse words in order to prevent their opponent from gaining points. Or they might allow their opponent to make a good play so that it opens up an opportunity for them. The simple mechanics breed interesting depth.
This has further clarified for me why I find the relationship between games and education so interesting. It is not that I necessarily believe that kids should be playing lots of games in school. It is that game design and instructional design are similar enough that they can learn from each other. When designing learning environments, especially those online, we should be examining the affordances that are available to students and what types of behaviors those affordances facilitate, just like good game designers do.
References
Alexander, L. (2013). Spector: Go emergent - Game design is not all about you. Retrieved from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/204942/Spector_Go_emergent__game_design_is_not_all_about_you.php
Williams, R., Karousou, R., & Mackness, J. (2011). Emergent learning and learning ecologies in Web 2.0.International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 12(3), 39-59.
Interesting post! You draw some great parallels that I hadn't thought about before. You selected a reading that I did not select, so it was good to learn a little about it through your entry. Also, a good friend of mine designs computer and video games for a living, and once described to me the work that has to go into helping the player learn how to play the game through the first few minutes of game play. This reminded me of what you wrote, though your conclusions were a lot more novel than that simple connection!
ReplyDeleteI had many of the same revelations designing games in Powerpoint for EME 6415, Development of Computer Courseware. There's an element of distracting the user (like that commercial where the parents keep stopping each other from telling their kid that the food is nutritious--I think it was for soup?) from the educational value while mining the game format for the best learning resources.
ReplyDeleteI might disagree with the distracting element. Kids are smart, and they can tell when you are trying to trick them a lot of times. I hear educational games often called "chocolate broccoli", implying that we are just covering up the important stuff with unrelated attractors. However, I don't think learning games should be thought of this way. The best learning games are designed such that the learning content and game mechanics mesh together. Just my two cents.
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