Sustainable Life Cycle Game Design: Mixing Games and Reality to Transform Education

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Harteveld Casper Folajimi Yetunde Sutherland Steven C
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

Although educational games have much promise across domains, their use is not widespread due to a lack of dissemination. This lack, combined with the development costs, has led us to identifying a different approach to educational games to increase adoption of games in education. Based on the reflection of two cases, where each tried in its own way to deal with the challenges of current educational game design, we introduce an approach called sustainable life cycle game design, inspired by the cradle-to-cradle® model for product manufacturing without waste. This approach emphasizes mixing existing games and educational activities into the design, mixing the game development with education, and developing with the goal of mixing new games in the future.

 

Press Enter or Escape to Play – Deconstructing Escapism in Multiplayer Gaming

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Warmelink Harald Harteveld Casper Mayer Igor
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

The term escapism tends to be used in game research without providing any extensive definition of what it means or acknowledging its composite nature. In this paper, the authors question the possible conceptualizations of escapism and the extent to which gamers identify with them. Beginning with a theoretical deconstruction of escapism, the authors developed a framework that they applied in an empirical study with three focus groups. Respondents in these groups completed a survey and participated in a group discussion. The resulting data allowed the identification of eight different discourses of escapism in the context of playing multiplayer computer games. In addition, the study showed that citing escapism as a reason for playing games elicits debate and emotional responses. Given the existence of multiple interpretations and connotations, this paper concludes that escapism is problematic for use in surveys, interviews, and other research techniques.