http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey MA-Thesis: Narratives and games in education Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:04:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I try to move my postings to the newly founded blog-farm at Hamburg University: http://blogs.epb.uni-hamburg.de/metagames/  For further postings, visit me there... see you! http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=26 This is a short summary on “Storyspaces and Rulespaces” from the MA in ePedagogy Design I’m currently working on. Wey-Han Tan (April 2008) Rulespaces Rules define the boundaries of the player's actions and give them direction and jurisdiction. As shown in the ambivalence of games and toys (Sutton-Smith), they provide both limits ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=25 This is a short summary on "Storyspaces and Rulespaces" from the MA in ePedagogy Design I'm currently working on. Wey-Han Tan (April 2008) StorySpaces Stories give in-game experiences context and contingency. There are abstract games like "Tetris" or "Add'em up", which rely exclusively on game mechanism and aesthetics to hold the player's ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=20 I just stumbled upon this entry in the great BoingBoing-blog, an excerpt from a longer Smithonian article: Steve Martin explaining a special method of eliciting laughter from the audience, in comparision to the usual comedian's technique of creating tension and releasing laughter via a punchline. Martin's approach is different: Creating tension ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=18 For my seminar "Games, Play and Education" I've scraped together (via skinning, modding, recontextualisation) three minigames. These should serve as an intro to the three learning paradigms of Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism and their possible realisation in games via their very different gaming mechanisms: Scalability: Due to division in small groups of ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=19 I've noticed that rubberbanding is a good metaphor to describe what Lev Vygotsky, a russian educational scientist, described as keeping a learner in the 'zone of proximal development'. This means that the environment - parent, teacher, virtual learning environment - keeps up a certain level of difficulty in its tasks, ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=17 One of the distinctive criteria of games compared to 'reality' is their loose connection to the latter, a worksafe simplification of rules and goals. This doesn't mean that these games are simple to play, but that rules and metarules are stated or can at least be relied upon as unchanging ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=16 There's a category of games which deals with 'the impossible' as main theme. This is an approach which takes an entirely different direction than the quest for more realism in gaming. Most mainstream games usually strive for physical, contextual or emotional realism: Realistically behaving objects and environments, relatable everyday settings, ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=15 As with the ongoing 'Killerspiel' debate in Germany, public and politicians are in search of The Meaning of a game. Though it's understandable that there's concern over violent, pornographic or propagandistic content, few seem to understand that games can also be created as toys. To quote Marvin Minsky in his 'Society ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=10 Where's the actual interpretation and acting taking place when you're 'playing'? Games can be used to understand, and to intuitively act upon, the inner workings of a set of rules (e.g. simulation games), or they can show the inner or hidden conflict of a game and reality (e.g. serious newsgaming or ... http://www.mein.examensblog.de/wey/?p=9