Playful Play with Games: Linking Level Editing to Learning in Art and Design


Engeli Maia
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

The title ‘Playful Play with Games’ refers to the possibility of creative involvement with games by altering their structure in a playful way. The focus of this paper is on modifying the first person shooter game Unreal Tournament as a learning process. Modifying the game means to become a creator or writer in addition to a reader and player, but nonetheless with a playful attitude and a good understanding of the game at hand. Understanding the game involves an understanding of the different levels of meaning of the game. Three levels of meaning produced in and around games can be distinguished: Meaningful play, meaning beyond play, and creatively added meaning. Five examples from courses to media management, architecture, and media art students as well as a group of activists illustrate the design of courses that are based on level editing.

 

What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Access and Ethics in Participatory Culture


Kafai Yasmin B. Burke William Q. Fields Deborah A.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In “Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture”, Jenkins and colleagues (2006) outlined three challenges in their participatory competencies framework that need to be addressed to prepare youth for full involvement in a digital culture – participation, transparency, and ethics. Expanding upon the framework of our earlier work, in this paper we examine more closely two aspects of Jenkins and colleagues’ challenges – the participation gap and the ethics challenge – as they apply to game-making activities in schools. We report on a four-month ethnographic study documenting youth’s production of video games in both an after school club and classroom setting. The growing use of videogamemaking for learning in schools offers youth the opportunity to no longer simply be consumers but also producers of technology. But as kids learned to contribute as such producers, both participatory and ethical issues arose in the ways they were willing or reluctant to share their own ideas and projects with their peers. Schools’ long-standing focus on individual achievement and traditional notions of plagiarism drew these issues of participation and ethics to the foreground, making them especially relevant considerations given on-going efforts to bring more game playing and making activities into schools.