- Who are you?
- Why are you here?
There's a movement devoted to sparking fun and engagement in dull subjects or inconvenient tasks, but this is not a session about gamification. The aim here is not to make maths (or any other subject) fun by turning it into a game.
Instead, I want to share my experience using game-making as a teaching method. I spent some time asking students to make games about something they wanted to (or had to) learn.
I believe that by making games, students gain valuable skills (researching, planning, prototyping, testing...) and the conceptual tools to make sense of the complex world around them (aka system thinking).
The goal of this session is to come up with game-making workshop ideas, which educators like you can use to facilitate the learning of a theme / skill.
Hacking intended as the practice of modifying something, possibly to improve it.
Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things.
A Hacker Manifesto by Mackenzie Wark
A hacker is intellectually curious, a critical thinker who is not afraid of subverting systems to her own needs, responding to the principles of the communities she belongs to.
In that sense, our challenge as educators today is to help learners become the hackers, instead of the mere consumers, of technology.
Many of your students are avid consumers of games, especially video games.
Making (as opposed to consuming) games is the key.
I'm a big fan of learning by doing. More precisely, Seymour Papert's constructionism.
Learning can happen most effectively when people are active in making tangible objects in the real world.
Let's hack rock-paper-scissors.
Some ideas:
- Add or remove one element
- Rename the elements
- Change the number of players
- Change the rules
- Use the whole body
- Use noises or smells
- Is there a strategy to win this game?
- Change the goal of the game
- Turn it into a collaborative game
One way to understand games is to analyse their mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics (aka the MDA framework
- Mechanics are the rules of a game.
- Dynamics what players tend to do in order to reach their game goals.
- Aesthetics are what players experience and feel while playing.
For example, in Chess
- Mechanics: if your king is put into check, you are forced the move it out of check
- Dynamics: you may start your game with pawns, then as the board clears, shift your focus on more powerful elements (there isn't a rule that forces you to do that, but you may have noticed it's a better strategy)
- Aesthetics: you play the role of a medieval commander, trying to outsmart your opponent in an open battle between two armies
Mechanics shape dynamics, which in turn shape aesthetics.
As game makers, we can hack the rules of the game, but we can't control how players will interpret those rules and whether they'll have fun playing. Like policy-makers, we can only encourage / enforce certain behaviours, but we can't be sure people will behave like we envisioned.
We create a system of mechanics but we do not directly create the player's experience.
We control the mechanics of the learning environment (we can set the rules and promote certain behaviours), but we can't learn on behalf of others :)
It's a conversation and game-making can facilitate that.
For example, a couple of years ago we asked young people (12-16) to pick a game they play and hack it with new rules, new goals and new messages.
They kicked off by listing the verbs of their chosen game, and discussing the values that these verbs may convey.
Then they introduced a new set of verbs, so that their game would express their own messages and values.
Kids came up with great ideas, such as a game about bullying at school, and a hack of Snake which promotes healthy eating.
You can find more examples here.
Another way to understand games is to analyse them as systems.
We often use the word system to talk about very different things: the solar system, the operating system, the prison system, the ecosystem...
A system is a set of interconnected things that work together to achieve something. To use a common catchphrase:
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
In a system elements have interactions and interdependencies.
You can't understand an ecosystem just by analysing one part of it (eg: only a bee). Likewise, you can't make sense of human systems just by looking at the behaviour of individual players.
Games are often inspired by real world systems, which they generally simplify to make them playable.
By making games we can take a step out of the social systems we inhabit, conceptualise them as a whole, identify the conflicting forces in play, and envision better systems.
Designing games to understand complexity by Paolo Pedercini
Through game-hacking, we can promote system literacy.
So I prototyped a game about the system of our times: capitalism.
The working title is Beesness.
- As a player, you control a bee colony.
- All colonies operate in the garden of Commons.
- Throughout the game, you can deploy different beesness models: from converting flowers’ nectar into honey, to stealing other colonies’ honey, privatising flowers and other nasty moves.
- Your goal is to have the most honey at the end of the year.
While the game mechanics are (still) clunky and the rules a little foggy, my preliminary tests with primary school children indicate that it can be an effective way to introduce tough questions like How does our economy work? and What can we do to avoid running out of flowers?
I presented kids with a paper-prototype and encouraged them to hack the game with new rules. They started negotiating tweaks and fixes, persuading each other and explaining how those changes would fit with the game logic.
We commonly use feedback as a synonym for comment or suggestion.
Technically speaking a feedback is the output of a system, which is fed back into the input and conditions it.
Feedback loops are a crucial aspect of all systems.
We can spot these in an ecosystem, where predators and preys populations balance each other.
In Beesness the extraction of flowers is balanced by flowers re-planting at every turn.
A reinforcing loop is one in which an action produces a result which influences more of the same action, resulting in growth or decline. The rich gets richer, the powerful gets more power and so on.
Reinforcing loops are built into many games (Monopoly, Chess, Settlers of Catan, Risk) because we want games to have winners and losers. In Beesness, when a player starts growing their colony, they are compelled to keep growing it.
Sometimes reinforcing loops lead to escalation (e.g. when you argue with someone) or to the tragedy of the commons. These two are also built into Beesness, and players are challenged to find solutions by hacking the game mechanics.
Can you think of ways to counter reinforcing loops, both in games and IRL?
Now that we dipped our toes into game hacking and system thinking, how can we apply these to Web Literacy?
Since the mid-1990s more and more products, services and scenes from everyday life have moved online. The Open Web that Mozilla believes in so strongly is now under attack from a variety of forces.
From the Mozilla Webmaker white paper
The DIY potential for connected, participatory, improvisational learning requires new skills, what many are calling new literacies.
Just what is it that people should be getting better at to avoid being stuck in the trap of elegant consumption?
Web Literacy is the skills and competencies needed for reading, writing, and participating on the Web.
In small teams:
- Play with the game-hacking idea generator to come up with a game-hacking workshop idea!
- Explain to the rest of us how you envision it working with a group of learners.
- Share your idea on the session etherpad.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
