A few more concerns about the potential of games as educational tools arose in my game design course today. The subject today was MDA (mechanic-dynamic-aesthetic) analysis of games. The somewhat green and nervous second instructor in the course gave a provisional list of the types of “fun” which could be had in a game — that’s the “aesthetic” element which is built from the mechanics and the dynamics which arise from the mechanics.
These include (apparently stolen from Marc Leblanc):
- Sensation
- Fantasy
- Narrative
- Challenge
- Fellowship
- Discovery
- Expression
- Submission
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I never finished writing up my summary of last year’s DiGRA conference to post, but never mind; some of the major threads keep coming up anyway.
One prominent theme was that academics and game industry folks don’t usually mix well. At the lone industry panel, both sides made noises of disdain abut each other (OK, I admit, I myself was among those who led the hissing when the panelists patted themselves on the back for achieving 25% female hiring rates); academics asked why industry members didn’t read our publications more, to which the panelists responded that if they saw another damn article on player practices, they’d hurl.
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I’m pleased to see that Google, Consumer Reports, Harvard Law School, and such luminaries as Vint Cerf and Esther Dyson have teamed up to Stop Badware which installs itself on your machine, tracks your Net use, runs popups, etc. Now let’s just hope the org has teeth… and that comment spam is also on their list of things to do.
Continuing the investigation of my early technological literacy practices, here’s some homework from a computing class, I think sometime in middle school. I’m not even totally sure if it was a Mac or pre-Mac Apple computer assignment… any clues?
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(how’s that for a colon-oscopy?)
I’ve finally started taking a look at StudyPlace, the Plone tool which our department is developing to support academic collaboration. I hadn’t really gotten around to it until now for the same reason one doesn’t usually get around to using any digital tool — I haven’t really needed it yet. But I’m re-entering the second half of Communication Theory and Social Thought (aka Frogmarch Through Western Thought) this semester, and the course is using it as a central place for discussion and notification. So I’ve been driven to it over the past few days to look up info on our first reading of the semester, Horkheimer and Adorno’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment.
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