GameLog - Fostering Reflective Gameplaying for Learning

Jose Zagal - Starts by explaining that this session is not about learning from games or by creating games - but learning about games. How can students use what they already know about games to help them? Can this teach us anything about learning in general?

How many of these games have you played?

Difficulties students have in learning about games: Can't express ideas about games/gameplay, dwell on superficial features ("cool" or "sucks") and lack the language to understand or describe their experiences or observations. In fairness, there isn't much background or resources that prepare or help students to talk or write about games - most game reviews, the closest thing to a related-resource are really only designed to communicate information to potential players about whether or not they are likely to like a particular game (kind of like the difference between a movie review and an academic reflection on a film).

His product, GameLog, helps people learn about games and game playing. Its a free, online blog with many game-friendly features. It allows you to maintain multiple parallel blogs about different games and enables/facilitates blogging about game-play. Why Blogging? - Writing to learn - writing can be a powerful tool for learning - helps learners integrate learning.

We were then given an opportunity to play a game and write a gamelog blog entry. I played two of the games:
Double Wires: http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/double-wires/
UpBeat: http://www.miniclip.com/swfcontent/freegames/upbeat.swf

My review of the former: My initial response was that it looked like “line rider” so I thought it would be relatively fun/easy. I couldn’t get very far – not even off the first ledge. There wasn’t much feedback – nothing that told me what I was doing right or wrong, my co-player suggested some more visual information about whether or not the web had attached. I got bored with it rather quickly because I couldn’t figure out how to improve my performance.

His students/research subjects came to feel more appreciative of video games - and found that it deepened and broadened their understanding of games and many found it to be empowering to write about their experiences playing the game - e.g. things that didn't make sense. It also helped students to realize that different people have different experiences playing games and what he calls "non-obvious insights."

The analysis of their entries revealed that there were six styles of entry: overview, narrative, comparative analysis, plan/hypothesis, experiment, insight/analysis. Most students used many of these styles over time. The overview was typically the first thing that they wrote (like game review - "contextualizing game for the uniformed reader"). Narrative style was common - students explained what happened (what they did and what resulted). Down the road there was more planning and hypothesizing (state what they plan to do and what they expect to happen) and experiment denotes an entry where they explain actual in-game experimentation. Comparative analyses were efforts to compare something specific in the game to something else. Finally, insight/analysis entries were entries about specific insights that came to the player during the gameplay experience.

Students perceived blog writing to be less formal - therefore the overall writing quality in the blogs was farily low, but the informality was liberating for the students. A teacher in the group commented that she had found, to the contrary, that her students were far more careful in their writing when it was going to be posted online and viewable by their peers as compared to private, non-posted journaling.

He provided an example from a game called Facade, which sounded like it was worth checking out a little later.