Squire: Videogames as Designed Experience
From Eduwiki
From Content to Context: Video Games as Designed Experience
Summary
Videogames have emerged as an important medium that exerts a large amount of economical, cultural, and social influence. As the younger generation spend more time playing in digital worlds, educators need to become more aware of videogames and the experiences in which participants can learn through doing and being. Games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas gives gamers an opportunity to take on a certain persona as they freely play a game that revolves around inner-city Los Angeles. Such games allow interactivity and allows the players to be narratives in their own gaming experience. These games allow payers to explore the results of their own choices. However, they do not fully represent reality but instead provide a world in a box.
Research studies on game play for educational purposes are limited, yet there are two main reasons to study this type of learning, for practical and theoretical reasons. Practical game play is what gamers are taking away from the play. Theoretical game play looks at what learning is naturally occuring and is it intrinsically motivating. Research on games in the past has not focused on newer games that involve interaction, narratives, collaborative problem solving, and game players as producers. Games in the 21st century are now focusing more on interaction in the social and material world, as well as gamer participation in organizations. Games now encourage players to perceive, act, think and do. Multiplayer games promote social learning and have become increasingly more popular.
For games to be part of our educational system they need to become not only interactive, but more demanding on meaning, goals and motivation. Games like Supercharged!, designed by MIT students to promote student understanding of physics, has improved physic scores amoung students. However, it is limited to other aspects of science learning that can be critical to the science-minded populations. There is still much to be researched and designed in the field of educational games, but the need to implement games into education will eventually be necessary.
Conclusion
This article argues that game play is a designed experience where player’s understandings are developed through cycles of performance inside the games themselves. It explains that more and more children are spending their time playing in the digital world as opposed to watching television, reading, or viewing films. According to the article, games are socio-technical networks for gamers to explore, communicate, and learn. Moreover, the internet and improvements in computer technology have created whole new kinds of experiences available outside of school. Because of this, the article argues that educators need to pay close attention to video games because they offer “designed experience,” where learners learn through doing and being.
What games offer has led corporations and the military to turn to games to express their ideologies. The author considers this a challenge to educators to respond and make available their own ideologies. The focus for educators should be on experience that allows students to develop situated understandings, to learn through failure, and to develop identities as expert problem solvers. The author continues by insisting that educators stand to gain by studying designed experiences.
