Saturday, October 11, 2008

A Question of Resposibility & Tangential Learning.

James Portnow, formerly of Activision, is the CCO and founder of Divide by Zero Games. Besides his work as a designer, James Portnow is a recognized design theorist and prominent industry journalist, having been published worldwide and being a regular columnist for such sites as Edge-Online and Game Career Guide.

Program was changed from "Bringing Tangential Learning to Games". He changed his topic based on the presentation earlier on Serious Games.

Propagandic Games
So what should we do with our amazing interactive medium?

How do we do it?
  • Discover what queswions your mechanics inherently present
  • consider the questions raised by the situation or scenario you are placing the player in
  • Design interactions around the intersection between mechanics and storyline
  • don't mask problems as choices?
Can responses to qeustions be biased free?

The greatest danger does not come from the propaganda games. It is from the regular every day games that we have to worry about. We will indoctrinate without purpose, and we need to be aware of what we are doing.

Tangential Learning
A brief musing on Engagement
"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always want to be taught".

Egagement: is directly related to learning and life long retention

Engagement is outside the class room, but video games can do it for us.

Tangential learning is about exposing people knowledge, with out teaching them. If an audience is engaged, your audience will self educate.

300 was not history, however, how many people know about Leonidas today than used to?

Its easier for people to learn something if they know its worth investigating
How do we do it now?
  • Random words
  • highlighting
  • Association
  • Civilopedia
Better implementation: Wikipedia

Tangential learning is not limited to theming
Tangential learning as a whole different set of ideas can be taught through mechanics
We already often teach very valuable ideas via mechanics (see wired article.

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