Wow, long time since last post, lots to tell, more coming soon, but in the meantime here’s something really neat:

Quest to Learn is a school established in New York by Katie Salen and co. with the aim of teaching kids entirely through games (both physical and digital). Immediately I’m reminded of The Young Ladies Illustrated Primer, and would love to see first hand how the whole thing is working out for them. From their website:

“It is a place where digital media meets books and students learn to think like designers, inventors, mathematicians, and more. Q2L brings together teachers with a passion for content, a vision for helping kids to learn best, and a commitment to changing the way students will grow in the world.”

I would SO send my kids there.

It’s fantastic that initiatives like this are getting funding and that people like Katie are putting a lot of this Games for Learning theory into serious practice. It’s one thing to put a budget maths tutor on the market, or create an experimental MMO designed to teach history, but running an entire school curriculum on play is entirely next level. Congrats Katie and look forward to seeing more!

I was excited to see yesterday that the Gamestar Mechanic Beta is now open to the public, swiftly signing up and beginning to play through the first season. I first saw the game in Katie Salen’s presentation during the Serious Games Summit last March, and was immediately captivated by its premise and generally top notch production values. I highly recommend giving the game a go, whether you’re interested in games for education or even just for a bit of fun. Yes, you heard that right, this is a new standard for serious / educational / meaningful games in that it is indeed fun in its own right.

Click here to play Gamestar Mechanic

Gamestar Mechanic is a game about making games. In particular it’s designed as an immersive interactive primer in game design, no programming or art skills required. Right away you’re thrown a bunch of simple game challenges to beat, clashing egos with the other players in the arcade, learning the basic controls of the top down or side scrolling interface. It gets really interesting when you stumble upon a malfunctioning game reactor core thats about to go critical. The games are all broken and the facility will blow unless you fix it. And so the centrepeice of the experience comes into play, a big red switch that flicks you between play mode, and EDIT. You’re now able to rearrange all of a levels elements, configure enemy’s AI, set win conditions, etc All of the fundamental building blocks of game design are there, and while a veteran designer might be frustrated by the limitations of the interface, it in insanely easy to pick up and be productive with right off the bat.

An interesting aspect of its implementation is the heavy focus on narrative, something that I’d expect was a hard sell to the funding bodies, but pays off in spades. GameLab have done a terrific job of crafting the world of Factory 7. The depth of their imaginary world is immediately apparent, a completely original canon wrapped in political intrigue and quirky characters, anchored by a classical hero’s journey tale of a young “mechanic” who aspires to be a great game designer. This drives the player through the various play / edit challenges that the game presents, feeding shreds of the story in as you progress through the world’s arcades and collect new items with which to build your own levels. The balance and tuning in the game really is downright professional, and something which I could easily see becoming a hit as a cart for the DS whether people knew it was “educational” or not.

This really is a shining example of where “Serious Games” need to go. A few things that GSM gets right that others in the field should pay special attention to:
– The lessons are interwoven into the gameplay, you really do learn by experiencing the mechanics at play. After editing your first level, it completely changes the way you look at all the play challenges after that. They gently introduce elements into levels like timing, AI pattern recognition, projectiles, gravity, all these building blocks are experienced first hand by the player before they’re then thrown into their toolkit
– Even if you didn’t give two hoots about game design, this would be fun. It stands alone as an intriguing, innovative game that is smart and well balanced. I can probably count on one hand the amount of other games with any inkling of educational content that I could say the same for
– The immersion in this narrative isnt disturbed by any hard link to curriculum. This is SO key. The game makes no mention of learning anywhere, it is not being sold as an “educational” game, which removes so many barriers when it comes to uptake with students
– The aesthetic is magical, leveraging common elements from the very hip eastern / western fusion comic style, but still managing to stay different enough to avoid looking like a copy-cat. The animations, character design, coloring, music, and sound effects work harmoniously to present a world you just want to keep playing in.

I’m going back to finish off season one. Everyone should give this a shot, and send your feedback to the creators, they deserve to have a strong community behind the project to help them refine the final product.

It is my sincere hope that the project continues to get funding and is as successful financially as it is creatively.

So we’re here at GDC and its kicking off brilliantly with the Serious Games summit in West Hall. I’ll try to give updates on talks, people, and general discoveries that have relevance to the Meaningful Play message throughout the conference.

I was really looking forward to the opening talk for the Summit by Ben Sawyer and Peter Smith that aimed to look at the current state of the Serious Games industry, and the way we define the scope of the field. While they gave quite a nice overview of where games are being used for applications other than pure entertainment, they didn’t actually make much progress as to whether “Serious Games” is in fact the best definition for what we’re trying to do. For anyone that’s read our paper on the issue, you’ll know that we’ve put that definition on our blacklist for bringing up way too many negative connotations when presented anyone outside the industry.

On a lighter note, it’s not even lunchtime yet and I’ve already seen what is sure to be one of the coolest things at the show. Katie Salen (Parsons School of Design) and Greg Tretry (GameLab) presented their quite stunning game about making games: Game Star Mechanic.
Aimed at children in the 10 – 15 age group (I think), the game is presented through a beautifully rendered stream-punk-esque Anime World, drawing in any kids who might even be slightly interested in the YuGiOh or Pokemon franchises (which I think must make up around 70-80% of American kids). The story revolves around warring factions of Mechanics, who each think they know how to design the best game (each represents a different style or genre). The player is tasked with exploring these worlds, and fixing broken games. As they use subsets of the tools to make broken games playable again, they’re introduced to new elements of the game construction system. Before they know it, they have all the skills to start making their own games, without a single piece of code, and all playable by simply flicking a big EDIT / PLAY button always present at the top right of the screen.
Unlike other “simple to use” game creation tools (like Game Maker) this game doesn’t require a single piece of code to be written, and is all driven by and drag-and-drop, slider based interface.

Really quite amazing, and from the videos they showed us of the game’s in use in the classroom, the kids absolutely love it as well.
Other interesting developments of the day include Submarine training simulations, an open critique for a redistricting game, and a meditation game that you play with your heart rate!
Neat stuff. More soon.

In my opinion the best book out there on game design right now is Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen. The heavy yet somehow still refreshingly succinct text lays out the most thorough and consistent framework for the analysis of computer game design today.

With the creation of Meaningful Play as a strategy, we scoured many texts on games and learning to figure out what two words we could use to describe our philosophy. By the time we came round to actually figuring it out, we realized it had been staring us in the face for a while (albeit in need of some reworking) right out of the pages of Rules of Play. You see Eric and Katie are also big on the concept of Meaningful Play, which they define on three different levels, according to the relevance or impact of an interaction which takes part between the player and the game:

Rules: An action is immediately interpreted and fed back by the system
Play: That action has a consequence within the closed game system
Culture: That action has a consequence to the player outside of the game

So we’re thieves right? Well I suppose we are actually (although not purposefully) but I’d like to think it’s in more of a Remix Generation context than outright snatching. Our definition of Meaningful Play sits within their Culture layer, requiring that the player walks away from the game with new skills, knowledge, or perspectives.

So thanks for the awesome text Eric and Katie, hopefully we havent butchered your brilliant framework