Gamepaddle : Video Games, Education, Empowerment

Michaela Anderle, Sebastian Ring

• Editore: Ledizioni
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9788867054107
• Argomento: Pedagogía
• Categoria: Educación inclusiva

In the educational discourse video games are often regarded as a vital risk for young people. Especially excessive gaming of adolescents troubles teachers, educators and parents. The lack of knowledge about digital gaming worlds, as well as the lack of own gaming experience can lead to misjudgement and ignorance of resources acquired by young gamers. This is the starting point of the Gamepaddle project: identifying young people's game-related resources and helping them to benefit from them in other primarily non-game-related contexts such as school, intergenerational dialogue, creative activity or civic commitment.

Chapter 1 - 1

Game and Video Game.
Reflections between Education and Entertainment.

by Massimiliano Andreoletti

Anyone who tries to make a distinction
between education and entertainment
doesn’t know the first thing about either.

Marshal McLuhan

The educational and training potentials of video games – which have been debated in the teaching context over the last years – have seen a slow but progressive shift of the attitude of the institutions and people in training agencies of every order and degree towards the acknowledgement of the many training and educational potentials of the medium, although it has not yet been possible to define the dimensions through which video game should be observed from a teaching point of view.

It is possible to divide the attempts that have been made so far into two categories of contributions:

1. Those that focus on video game activities considering the risk-benefit dualism in the use of such media, they highlight the former quoting researches often lacking scientific value and will not go any further than showing the latter;

2. Those that exalt video games as a powerful learning media, especially on a disciplinary level, though not justifying this process with theoretical references and not identifying the modality in which the video game can be introduced into daily didactic activities.

The teaching research on video games should start from a reflection upon the issues concerning man in relation to video game and technology. Then it should identify the characteristics that video games could and should present in order to be considered as educational media.

Starting from this consideration, the central issues related to video games will be analysed first beginning with a general talk that stresses both the meaning of electronic media in the relationship to man and the role that digital technology is gradually playing in contemporary society and culture; after that there will be the description of three meaning pairs that are supposed to characterize a preliminary reflection upon the medium from an educational-training point of view - interaction and participation, simulation and immersion, exploration and mastery.

Questions

Man vs. Machine?

In order to reflect upon the meaning that video games have within the teaching research it is necessary to first of all understand the role that such media play in modern society and which can be the sense horizons that it has in its relationship with man. For centuries each culture has expressed games that were different from the ones of previous and following cultures, therefore creating new ones and eliminating the superfluous (Staccioli, 2004) ones. It is thus natural to ask why video games have appeared now. You could at first reply very superficially that technology has only now allowed developing such an entertainment mode. To understand the meaning that technology, or rather digital technology, has in our culture, it is essential to consider that over the centuries technology has increasingly affected man’s operational dimensions. From the industrial productive fields, technology has gradually entered those environments connected to knowledge objects, passing from economy and science to art and culture until it has filled spaces and times which make man different from any other living being: leisure time. In games an evolutional process began centuries ago with the introduction of small mechanic devices that were hand operated or used electric power (analogue technology) has led to video games (digital technology).

Analogue vs. Digital?

Thus, the starting point focuses on the relationship between man and machine in the moment the latter becomes the intermediary of the gaming activity. If any human activity can be considered in the form of a game, we must not make the mistake of thinking that technology, especially the digital one, can convey any kind of game.

Currently the completely analogue game culture – which has developed over 3.000 years – is at risk of not finding a way to be “digitized” (Jenkins, 2010). The term digitization as it is used here does is not mean the process of converting phenomena and behaviour into discrete representations through mathematical algorithms. It is instead considered as the meaning that such process is having for mankind – the impossibility to simulate the deepest and intimate dimensions of the human being (emotions, feelings, affections) and the reduction of some experiential aspects which present a mediate and simplified use in digital technology (relationships, society, world).

Still the digital game must not be considered as opposing or eliminating the analogue game, it must be seen as a new way of conceiving the game since its presence enriches the general game scene. Video games present new game situations that led the classic game model to a crisis as its space-time-dimensions and goals must be clear and set in advance. Endless simulation games – such as SimCity and The Sims – present the typical situation in which a player might theoretically play an endless game without ever reaching a clear goal but prolonging the game itself endlessly (Juul, 2005).

Digital games with such characteristics lead to another fundamental question: Should they still be considered as video games or should they be called video toys?

Video Game vs. Video Toy?

Distinguishing between game and toy may look simple, but defining the toy characteristics is complex since there is no univocal game definition. In our perspective, the game is peculiar to the person who is acting as player, therefore it is an inward-pointing action. On the other hand, the toy is connected to the object – whether material or immaterial – that undergoes the action of playing. In this sense, the relationship between game and toy is the relationship that is established between a person and the surrounding environment, and playing can be seen as a person’s ability to interact with the environment and the elements it contains. Thus, the wide range of playing does not depend on the quantity and the economic value of the materials within the environment but on their variety and quality, they must always be considered as a support to the game activity. The game is not an action that is directed inwards from outwards, from the environment to man, on the contrary it is directed outwards and on the outside because the person is the drive of the game activity – without a player there is no game and the toy is an inert matter.

Over the last years, the reflection (Goldschmied & Jackson, 1996; Bondioli, 1986; Bondioli, 1996; Guerra, 2008) on the characteristics of the game setting has highlighted the quantity and the variety of the game materials – regarded as objects within a given space and with the function of supporting people’s game activity. In the simplification process carried out by adults such materials are named with the term toy, but this definition tends to be reductive and misleading. Since it usually refers to those commercial products whose game characteristics are: high specialization (they can only do one thing), little flexibility (they are not adaptable to other game situations) and little freedom of action (they reduce the game possibilities to a limited sphere of situations).

The material supporting the game activity is generally divided into two categories: structured material and non-structured material. The objects that belong to the first category are those products, mostly industrially manufactured, specifically designed for playing and usually made of plastic. The second category includes all the materials that present the following characteristics:

• low specialization level: they can adapt to game contexts which are very diversified;

• high flexibility level: their roles and functions in the game activities are always new and different;

• high freedom of action: they allow to act with a small space-time limitation;

• infinite use: their function is not limited to a restricted sphere of space-time situations;

• no pre-established goals: they do not have any special meaning within the game, thus becoming part of the process.

This category includes natural materials (wood, stones, sand, fabric, water, vegetables, fruit and so on), those who were originally produced for the many different purposes of human activities (recyclable materials, industrial materials, home items, food items) and those designed for a creative game activity (small bricks, crayons, modelling clays, glue and so on).

The wide range of video game types on the market can be divided into two categories of games:

1. Those that have a specific objective to reach (constrain the victory to reach the highest score; defeat of the opponent; conclusion of options and/or gaming opportunities; obtaining the predetermined goal etc.) or allow a maximum time for the playful activity can be approached with the term games as they enable the player to act within an environment well defined in time and space. In these cases the rules define the boundaries within which the subject is free to act.

2. Those that do not have a specific goal to reach or a time limit within which the game concludes (they are formally infinite) can be compared to unstructured toys, since they allow the player to manipulate the game to his liking, bend it also for purposes which are external and extraneous to the objectives of the game. Machinima¹ is the most typical example of this concept. The game is meant here as a non-structured to support the free and personal playful activity: the player uses the potential and the resources of the world simulated to set the scene ludic forms different and alternative.

Learning vs. Fun?

In recent years, the institutions and training agencies ascertained the strong interest of parts of younger generations towards gaming entertainment and have tried to find the philosopher’s stone that transformed their commitment to video games into training and disciplinary activities. The tools identified do not always have achieved an acceptable result, because if the objectives have been achieved on the content/school matter level, on the interest/fun level they rarely managed to get to say “I’m playing” to the end-user.

These failures certainly are to the delay of the research in social sciences and humanities and to the deficiency inherent in many educational environments, accompanied by a reflection on the human activity that sees positive and educational dimensions only in work, understood as “effort” and “duty”, in opposition to playing games, understood as “loss of time” and “pleasure”. The expression “duty comes first!” belongs to a popular pedagogy still dominant, which finds its roots in the protestant ethic (Himanen, 2003) and doesn’t see a valuable opportunity for learning, discovery, comparison and experimentation in playing games. In addition to this, the difficulty of integrating playful methods into school-educational activities – that occurs already at the beginning of the second cycle of the primary school – does certainly not make the task easier for those who believe that the game stimulates the learning person to approach problems and issues the world and culture.

The fundamental mistake is to think that learning is always played off against fun, that there is opposition between gaining knowledge and play, as if the pleasure of discovering new things and the satisfaction to find appropriate solutions to a problem can belong only to the educational...