As you can see from my very first blog, I was a complete novice when it came to video and digital games.  Also within my immediate family there is a feeling that games are frivolous.  What seemed incongruous to them was this up-to-now serious academic suddenly playing games.

However, I was curious as to what games could offer education and I have not been disappointed.  I particularly liked Nicola Whitton’s approach – focusing on what educators can learn from good game design and also her concentration on higher education which is where my own teaching is located.  As a sociologist I am fascinated by the evolution of digital game play which somehow passed me by – from the very public context of arcade gaming, to early console games, to initially textual multi-player online games in MOOs and MUDs, to fully 3D immersive MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Everquest, to ARGs and multi-modal games and mobile and wii games.  These developments have occurred in a relatively short time frame of about 30 years.  Being in my mid-fifties I can see how these developments have passed me by although I am not arguing strongly for a generational difference as I was never ‘into’ games that much. I can see someone of my generation who was a game enthusiast would have been enthralled by these developments.

I had a very simplistic notion of what is ‘play’ and what is a ‘game’.  The distinction between paedia (spontaneous, unstructured play) and ludic (structured play) (Caillois,2001) was illuminating particularly as I could apply it to my practice of qualitative analysis – where I can see a phase of ‘playing with the data’ in the paedia sense when experimenting with ideas, immersing oneself in the data and a more ‘ludic’ phase i.e a structured, methodical approach to managing and analysing data.  The problematic nature of ‘what is a game’ was brought home to me when we had to design in our own groups a game using Google Earth as the back drop.  After constructing our game, I was suddenly not sure whether it was a game or not (see blog).  I had to think hard about what differentiated a game from a learning activity.  This was not something I had expected – having read the literature on the characteristics of a game. It was in the practice of trying to design a game that the issues the literature discussed became meaningful.

My own experience with playing games during this course began with a lot of frustration.  I had never played arcade-style games so my attempts with PacMan (I had never even heard of PacMan!! – which seems amazing to me now), Donkey Kong etc. were fraught.  It was like entering a new world, learning a new language for me.  I did not enjoy the early weeks of game playing.  Ironically, I now play on my iPhone two arcade-style games – DoodleJump and Ragdoll 2.  I play them when I want some down time to relax and empty my mind – something I never thought possible during my first attempt at playing these games. And I get satisfaction in getting better – improving my score.  As I tried different types of games, I became more involved in them and started to look at them from a meta-level perspective – learning their design grammars or understanding their semiotic domain (Gee 2003).  This level of understanding was reinforced in searching for a game to review that would somehow be related to my practice.  At this point in the course, we had not looked at ARGs. I first looked at educational games but as most were aimed at the K-12 level, I did not find anything that I thought could be translated to post-graduates. I then looked at commercial games and the ones that I thought had relevance to qualitative analysis were detective games.  The one I ultimately chose (Missing: Since January AKA In Memoriam) I discovered retrospectively had elements of an ARG – playing as oneself, having an ongoing storyline, moving between the game and the real world (real fact-based sites, emails),  a ‘this is not a game’ attitude and a simulation of collaboration.  The blending of the real and game worlds I particularly liked as it engendered a sense of the uncanny (Bayne 2008) – an uncomfortable feeling, a disorientation which mirrors the ‘troublesome’ nature of the qualitative analysis process and links to Meyer and Land’s (2005) notion of students’ needing to grapple with troublesome areas before being able to assimilate the ‘threshold concepts’ relevant to their subject area.

Missing: Since January was the first ‘long’ game that I played and I had to grapple with the variety of puzzles, arcade-style games as well as internet searches in order to proceed. I also discovered a number of cheats on the internet and thus connected with the affinity group associated with this game. At this mid-point of the course, I felt that I was getting a deeper understanding of games.

My biggest surprise was how much I enjoyed the MMORPGs.  I was slightly apprehensive about playing these games and I welcomed the fact that we would be playing them as a group.  I doubt whether I would have ventured into them alone.  I enjoyed developing my avatar and learning about the role my type of character plays in the game.  I have blogged about the ethical issues I think these games raise but I like, in general, the notion of completing quests.  World of Warcraft and Everquest II reminded me a bit of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (with the idea of travelling through unknown lands to complete a quest).  Not surprisingly, I recently discovered that there is a Lord of the Rings MMORPG.  I enjoy the richness of inhabiting these simulated environments.

I am still absorbing how I can apply what I have learned about games to the way I design workshops supporting learning about the qualitative analysis process and the use of CAQDAS (Computer-Aided Qualitative Data AnalysiS).  I can see how each software package (such as ATLAS.ti,  MAXqda or NVivo) can be used as a platform for a game.  Using an existing software package as platform for a game (in the way we used Google Earth as a platform) has the benefits of being efficient in terms of cost (not having to design from scratch a game environment) and being authentic – playing in the environment that you are learning about.  However, I am reluctant to explore this route as these software packages are complex as it as and adding learning how to play a game on top of these packages would be adding an additional layer of complexity.  Students may feel they are wasting time learning how to play the game.  In addition, all these packages are in a phase of rabid development with new versions coming out every 18 months or so – any game I develop for a particular platform will be quickly out of date.

More importantly, I need to consider whether a game is an appropriate vehicle for the kind of teaching I do. I can see the relevance of the collaborative nature of games and the development of affinity groups to develop a researcher identity.  Many of the people who attend my courses are new not only to the software tools but to qualitative data analysis itself – so I see the potential of creating something that addresses that need.  Whether that something is a game or a series of learning activities is something I need to consider.  In fact, I should not think of my choice simply as an ‘either-or’ between a game or a learning activity. Jackson (2009) gives an example of game-based teaching where she used principles from gaming – levelling, “well-ordered problems”, immediate feedback, resubmission and discovery learning – in designing learning activities. What I need to steer clear of is what Papert (1998) calls – shavian reversals – combining the worst from the education and the gaming worlds. This is something I will be working out in my final assignment on designing a game.

References

Bayne, S. (2008) Uncanny spaces for higher education: teaching and learning in virtual worlds, ALT-J, 16:3, pp.197-205

Caillois, R. (2001) Chapter 2, 'The Classification of Games'. In Man, Play and Games. Illinois: University of illinois Press.

Gee, J.P. (2003) What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy, New York: Palgrave

Jackson, J. (2009) Game-based teaching: what educators learn from videogames, Teaching Education, vol. 20. No. 3, September 2009, pp. 291-304

Meyer, J.H.F. and Land, R. (2006) Threshold concepts: An introduction in Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, London:  RoutledgeFalmer.

Papert, S. (1998) Does easy do it? Children, games and learning, Game Developer, June: 88

Whitton, N. (2010) Learning with Digital Games: A practical guide to engaging students in higher education, London: Routledge.