Week 5 readings

What Every Game Developer Needs to Know About Story -- John Sutherland

PART 2 (I posted on this reading before)

Looks at video games from the lens of story, analyzing them in classical story terms of protagonist/hero, inciting incident, "gap between the hero and an orderly life," risk taken by hero to overcome the gap, reversal in which the hero learns something but then confronts yet another gap, another risk that has to be taken, followed by another reversal, another gap, etc. All the while the hero is moving toward the "object of desire," "usually an orderly life." Sutherland delves into different types of conflict (internal, interpersonal, external), the use of empathy in games, considerations of pacing and use of dialogue, and why the hero must be the cause of the ending not just an observer. The author says that the old rule of "show, don't tell" in games becomes "do, don't show." The player must experience the game/story as the main actor as much as possible. He stresses the collaborative nature of game creation, including the creation of story.

The Designer's Notebook: Educational Games Don't Have to Stink! Ernest Adams

Adams outlines what he recommends for designers of educational games in terms of what he thinks doesn't work: games that are too much fun or not fun enough, games that are too long, games that aren't focused enough, games that do not include opportunity for users to be creative, that do not include an "advisor" to help and prompt the user, games that try to be what they are not. He holds up what he calls the "Socrates Standard" in stating that the best education comes from interaction/dialogue, not speechifying. Although I am not certain how that directly relates to educational games. He raises interesting points to think about when designing/evaluating educational games.

The Effect of Positive Emotions on Multimedia Learning --Um, Song, Plass

A study demonstrating that positive emotion in a learning situation enhances learning, promoting knowledge construction and problem solving. Further, positive emotion can actually be created by good instructional design. The authors state that the creation of positive emotion has not often been considered as a component of instructional design, but has rather been relegated to affective learning domains. They recommend that emotional design be incorporated and considered in the process of instructional design.

The Jenkins White Paper

MacArthur Foundation-funded study of the rapidly changing media environment that looks at many facets of media and society. It presents a series of snapshots that together create a portrait of how the changes in the forms of media and their uses is affecting every part of our lives. The importance of teaching media literacy to kids is underlined. A topic that particularly interests me is the idea of distributed cognition, which looks at knowledge creation and transmission from a social, networked point of view. Each person is just a part of a larger intelligent social organism that collectively possesses greater intellectual power than any one person alone. The creation and use of this power is unprecedented, enabled by advances in technology. All the social networking tools fall under this category -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube. There is constant immersion in multiple forms of media and full participation in media creation by users/consumers.