Designing Games as Playable Concepts: Five Design Values for Tiny Embedded Educational Games

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Kultima Annakaisa Lassheikki Christina Park Solip Kauppinen Tomi
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Digital games transform our lives; they provide an opportunity to engage with other worlds in a playful way, in many ways similarly to what other forms of audio-visual communica- tion (like movies, paintings or photos) have offered for a longer time. However, learning materials still use rather traditional ways for accompanying media, ranging from static fig- ures and graphs to videos and animations. In this paper, we explore the notion of Playable Concepts: tiny games that are embedded as part of educational material instead of separate and standalone products. We argue that games could be in a similar role as static graphi- cal elements in educational and communicational material, embedded in the text, together with other media formats. We suggest that the design space of Playable Concepts can be framed with five distinct design values: Value of Partiality, Value of Embeddedness, Value of Simplicity and Immediacy, and Value of Reusability.

 

Sami Game Jam – Learning, Exploring, Reflecting and Sharing Indigenous Culture through Game Jamming

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Kultima Annakaisa Laiti Outi
2019 DiGRA '19 - Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

In this paper, we explore the experiences and lessons learned from Sami Game Jam 2018. Sami Game Jam 2018 was organized in Utsjoki, in a small Sámi village next to the border of Finland and Norway. The group of 44 jammers consisted of local Sámi participants and Finnish as well as international game students and professional developers. The event had 12 Sámi themes to explore that were divided between the teams and the event resulted in six games all combining two. The jam was stressful for the participants and organizers, both Sámi and non-Sámi, but in the end created an invaluable space for rich experiences, learning and self-discoveries. Furthermore, the jam provided a platform for indigenous game development and local game education and a platform to develop Sámi Pedagogy further.

 

The Diversity of Attitudes towards Play at the Workplace – A Case of an Academic Community

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Nummenmaa Timo Kankainen Ville Savolainen Sampo Kultima Annakaisa Karvinen Juho Alha Kati Syvänen Antti Tyni Heikki
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

In this article, the results from an experiment of playful videos are presented. In the experiment, leaders of an academic community participated in workshops where they playfully envisioned the future of the workplace. These workshops were videotaped and edited into short videos, which were made public within the community and used as a probe for exposing attitudes towards play within an academic environment. The study revealed diverse views towards play and its role at the workplace.

 

Using the VNA Ideation Game at Global Game Jam

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Kultima Annakaisa Alha Kati
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

In this article we present the findings of a game idea experiment run at the Global Game Jam (GGJ) 2010 and 2011 events in Tampere, Finland. We were examining how well the game-based ideation method Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives (VNA) and similar approaches fit the constrained game design processes. GGJ 2010 and 2011 both had a theme for which ideas were produced. Our previous studies indicate that the VNA ideation method is well-suited to blue-sky ideation, but it is harder to use the ideas in ongoing design processes. In this study we compared four different approaches and the ideas resulted by using these methods. This study shows that the theme-tuned VNA variant performed best both in theme-related and interesting ideas, indicating that the method for coming up with new ideas matters.