Welcome to the seminar “Games as medium”…

Hello Sanna in Helsinki and Ville in Copenhagen, welcome to our blog!

I will try to summarise your (project) interests in one sentence, please correct and differentiate this first impression if necessary…:

• Sanna’s project ideas deal with social media as environment for a learning game, with a focus on cultural signification processes, e.g. the acquisition of (foreign) language and culture.
• Ville’s project interest is focused on augmented reality games, touching concepts of ubiqitous/mobile/location based computing,  multimodal interfaces and pervasive gaming.
• Both of you are interested in learning theories in general, as well as their connection to games.

Seminar organisation
This course will be project-oriented: goals are an introduction and conceptual application to game design as medium design, with the topic or theme for a conceptual game / a game concept free to choose. The applied theories and the project should touch your area of interest, at best these should be (re)usable for your further studies, your job or your master’s thesis.

Project work / dates
There is no decisive deadline for the project, though April 2013 would be fine.

Communications
We will meet 3-4 times via Adobe Connect, or alternatively via Skype for organisational issues, group discussions and project presentations.
Asynchronous communication, the mainstay of this seminar, will take place via this blog, i.e. for project documentation, thoughts, ideas etc. and eMail for questions, clarifications, notifications etc.
As an example for a seminar blog see “Shaping Media: Pedagogical Media Theory”.
The next two videochat-meetings will be Nov. 12th, 20:00-21:30, and Dec. 3rd, 20:00-21:30.

Literature – recommendations

• Gregory Bateson (1972), “The logical categories of learning and Communications.” (learning)
• Roger Caillois (1958), “Man, Play and Games.” (playing & games)
• Bunchball (2010), “Gamification 101.” (social gaming (with a grain of salt))
• Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen (2005), “Beyond Edutainment.” (learning & games)
• Heinz von Foerster (2003), “Ethics and second order cybernetics*”, paragraph “Metaphysics.”
• Johan Huizinga (1938), “Homo Ludens.” (playing & games)
• Eric Klopfer (2008), “Augmented Learning. Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games.” (augmented reality/mobile/location based games)
• Jane McGonigal (2003), “This is not a Game.” (social gaming)
• Markus Montola et al. (2010), “Pervasive Games.” (pervasive gaming)
• Kurt Squire (2005), “Game Based Learning”, selected pages (learning & games)

A quick overview on well-known learning theories / paradigms and their transfer to instructional design can be found here:

• Behaviorism, Cognitivism, (moderate) Constructivism
  (see also: Brenda Mergel’s paper on the three learning paradigms)
• Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning

From the same site a quick overview on the ARCS motivational model:

• ARCS motivational model

Interestingly, games – the non-learning-kind – can be classified quite well by learning theories; and they usually follow motivational design principles.

Examples

Do you know some?
Post’ and comment on them as blog entries!

Some first questions

• What is “social media”? What are its specific strengths and weaknesses, what selection of these are the most important ones for you? What kind of learning and gaming could be supported or enabled especially well within it, and how? What do you wish for?
• What is “augmented reality”? How and with what can reality be augmented? What kind of learning and gaming could be supported or enabled especially well within it, and how? What do you wish for?
• Can you connect the basic gaming principles of your favorite game(s) to learning paradigms/taxonomies?

What do you wish for?