R parent c&w 2011 - the playful classroom - beyond gamification

“the Playful Classroom: Beyond ‘gamification’”

Richard E. ParentUniversity of [email protected]

1) Composition isn’t a game.

2) Playfulness > Games.

3) Literacy is an inherently, beautifully complex, playful activity.

“…those of us who do games…”

–Samantha Blackmon, CCCC 2011

Kurt Squire“Video Game Literacy: A Literacy of Expertise.”Handbook of Research on New Literacies. 2008.

“Games push our theoretical notions of learning and literacy, firmly unseparating knowing from doing.” (647)

“To be literate in the gaming medium means to be able to do things with games; one cannot imagine claiming to be ‘literate’ with games, yet never having finished a game (or substantial portion thereof).” (646, emphasis in original)

Teachers present challenges to students,who meet those challenges with their skills.

Composition ≠ Game

Playfulness!

Byron Reeves & J. Leighton ReadTotal Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete. Harvard Business Press, 2009.

“This book is about a new idea -- incorporating the power of multiplayer games in the redesign of work, making work more engaging and making workers more productive.” (vii)


“This book is about a new idea -- incorporating the power of multiplayer games in the redesign of work, making work more engaging and making workers more productive.” (vii)

“For anyone convinced that engagement is a key ingredient of the future of work, games are the definitive model.” (4, emphasis in original)


“In other words, we think people should benefit from game ideas while they are making money for shareholders, not just while they are getting ready to make money for shareholders during training or school.” (4-5, emphasis in original)

Jane McGonigalReality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin Press, 2011.

“The real world just doesn’t offer up as easily the carefully designed pleasures, the thrilling challenges, and the powerful social bonding afforded by virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential. Reality wasn’t designed from the bottom up to make us happy.” (3)

“Reality, compared to games, is broken.” (3)


“If the goal is truly compelling, and if the feedback is motivating enough, we will keep wrestling with the game’s limitations -- creatively, sincerely, and enthusiastically -- for a very long time. We will play until we utterly exhaust our own abilities, or until we exhaust the challenge. And we will take the game seriously because there is nothing trivial about playing a good game. The game matters.”

“This is what is means to act like a gamer, or to be a truly gameful person. This is who we become when we play a good game.” (27, emphasis in original)


“[Clay Johnson’s] Plusoneme isn’t a game -- there aren’t any built-in goals, and there are no restrictions on how you give or earn a plus-one. It’s like a gesture toward a game [. . .].” (148, emphasis in original)


“[...] the single most convincing and useful definition of a game ever devised:

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

That definition, in a nutshell, explains everything that is motivating and rewarding and fun about playing games.” (22)

Bernard SuitsThe Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. University of Toronto Press, 1978.

“[p]laying a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (41)

Bernard SuitsThe Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. University of Toronto Press, 1978.

“[p]laying a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (41)

“The attitude of the game player must be an element in game playing because there has to be an explanation for that curious state of affairs wherein one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end.” (38)

Playfulness > Games

Ian Bogost“Exploitationware.” Gamasutra, 3 May 2011.

“[g]amification is a misnomer.

A better name for this practice is exploitationware.”

PhaedrusTrans. Walter Hamilton

PHAEDRUS: But I have been told, my dear Socrates, that what a budding orator needs to know is not what is really right, but what is likely to seem right in the eyes of the mass of people who are going to pass judgment: not what is really good or fine but what will seem so; and that it is this rather than truth that produces conviction. (around line 260)

Mihaly Csikszentmihayli “The Concept of Flow.” Play and Learning. Ed. Brian Sutton-Street. New York: Gardner Press, Inc., 1979.


“I don’t think play is the most interesting subject here. I’m really interested in flow as being the critical category. [. . . .] So play seems to be a culturally structurally form, or an individually structured form, for experiencing flow.” (268)

“Very simply, I wanted to study the experience of playfulness, rather than play itself.” (260, emphasis in original)


Bruce McCall: “A global definition of play would suggest that play is meeting challenges with skills for the sake of making that match, the primary goal being to match skill with challenge.” (281)

Ludology vs.

Narratology

Violence in Video

Games?

Newsgaming,

Reality is Broken

“Exploitationware”

Literacy is Playful

Education

R parent c&w 2011 - the playful classroom - beyond gamification