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Recently, Kevin and I have started to talk design much more seriously, working on a very small independent project that is so awesome that once it gets released, will make us both multi-gazillion-aires. Not really. But seriously, we’ve previously worked on game design together, most often through the game design jams, and through these conversations, I’ve come to note how important it is to be “on the same page” in terms of the language and shared representation that we use for game design. That is, I’m amazed at how we’re able to communicate any ideas at all when we’re dealing with fairly abstract concepts that we’re trying to come up with as we work. Distinct from referencing a symbol that has some culturally understood shared meaning – we’re creating something that never existed before based on our own unique/independent understandings. There’s a lot to say here, with regards to shared meaning, representation, semiotics, language, etc. etc. but what I’d like to focus on is the utility of language within the context of game design.
What I think this drives at is the way that our similar understandings of “how games work” – the mechanics, dynamics, content, etc. within a game –allows us to communicate effectively. Here is a recent conversation* that Kevin and I had while discussing a game that existed only in our minds and on a white board:
Kevin: But I think that the game is broken because it’s got too many boxes
Matt: I think that’s an issue of balance, not mechanics
Kevin: Oh
While this is pretty banal, and any game designers reading this are probably rolling their eyes and returning to a better blog, I ask you to hear me out, as I’d like to point out how exactly this conversation is crazy.
I’m guessing that the way that most folks think about learning is based predominantly in an information theory perspective; that how most people think about learning is based in late 20th century psychology. I’m guessing this, in part, because I know that’s how I thought about learning, but also in part because that’s what I’ve heard designers describe as how they think about learning. Considering the impact that thinking about “information transfer” has had on the past seventy years or so in terms of the development and advancement of science and technology, it seems fruitless to even consider hacking away at this epistemology. Nevertheless, I am increasingly convinced that considering learning as information transfer is part of what’s holding back good educational game design.
This notion of learning as precisely information transfer (with the usual caveat of observable behavioral change sometimes thrown in) stands in opposition to, as the field of education and a different branch of psychology has proposed, learning as an act of situated and knowledge as constructed. Rather thank focus on the bits of ‘information’ that are transferred via some medium from setting to individual, these perspectives acknowledge the importance of setting, of wetware, of motivations, and of the individual, not just as factors that affect the baseline learning process, but as fundamentally irreducible from the definition. Rather than thinking about learning as simply information transfer, they think about learning as a social act (like rituals, perhaps?) that involves the construction of situated meanings.
What’s amazing about the conversation that Kevin and I had was not just that we could communicate effectively about some construct that we were grappling with, but that we could reference another construct that we were both familiar with, leveraging language and meaning based on previously shared experiences, in the pursuit of a continuing activity. That is, what’s amazing was not the fact that we shared information with one another, rather is the way that with some mediator (the game we were designing, our previous working together, our shard cultural understandings) we were able to communicate.
The reason why this is important is because it means that what games provide players with is not just the “content” of the game nor just the mechanics of the game, rather they provide shared experiences of meaning construction. That is, games can be thought of as creating a dialog between the designer and the player, in which meanings are constructed via the actions of the player and the subsequent responses of the system. Or said another way, games can be thought of as akin to conversation in that player constructed meanings get refined through action and feedback.
*This memory is almost, but not quite, entirely made up.
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