The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

Department of Art Education

GAMES AS ARTISTIC MEDIUM:

INTERFACING COMPLEXITY THEORY IN GAME-BASED ART PEDAGOGY

A Dissertation in

Art Education

by

Ryan Matthew Patton

© 2011 Ryan Matthew Patton

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2011

All rights reserved

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ii

The dissertation of Ryan Patton was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Karen T. Keifer-Boyd Professor of Art Education & Women’s Studies Art Education Graduate Coordinator Chair of Committee

Charles R. Garoian Professor of Art Education

Matthew Kenyon Assistant Professor of Art

Brian K. Smith Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

iii

ABSTRACT

Having computer skills, let alone access to a personal computer, has become a necessary

component of contemporary Western society and many parts of the world. Digital media literacy

involves youth being able to view, participate in, and make creative works with technologies in

personal and meaningful ways.

Games, defined in this study as structured play, provided the foundation for many of the

works from 20th century art movements, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Situationism, and Fluxus.

I argue that these artists used games as methods to explore and expose rules and systems in ways

of understanding the world through art. I describe how these artworks embodied complexity

thinking in their use of game making methods to expose social, political, economic, and

environmental systems. The game-based art pedagogy derived from this art history, also draws

from the features of game-like unit operations (Bogost, 2006), strategies and tactics (de Certeau,

1997), and infinite play (Carse, 1987) to foster a critical aesthetic.

Complexity thinking (or complexity theory), represents a way for constructing meaning

that involves the integration of multiple types of systems, including dynamic models, closed-

looped systems, and the ability to transfer one model of a system to another situation or

phenomenon. Emergent behavior is supported in the complex systems modeled in video games

such as SimCity and Civilization.

Much of game-based art pedagogy research centers on students learning by playing

games. Learning history or other factual data in the form of games has value, however using

games in this way does not encapsulate games as an artistic medium for creative purposes, only

as a means for teaching. That is, while students created video games in a variety of classroom

environments over the last fifteen years, typically it was done to learn subjects like math,

computer science, or to develop language skills.

iv

In my action research study, I began with the premise based on my prior teaching

experience, that video game creation was an attainable goal by youth, and a valuable studio

project in the art classroom to understand complexity in social systems, and learn an art history of

games as artworks. I recruited youth (ages of 8-13) and taught them how to make games in four

iterations of a game creation course. The make-up of the courses comprised one class of middle

school girls, two classes of elementary school children, and one class of middle school boys and

girls. Each class met during a five-day course, learning concepts and methods of game

development by playing and making physical, board, and video games. New curricular elements

for the research included a physical game activity, a mobile game using 2-D barcodes, a tabletop

game connecting the video game instruction, and game cards written as independent

programmable unit operations.

Students made video games that used the concepts of move, avoid, release, and contact

(MARC) as a method I designed for exploring complexity thinking. I observed and recorded the

participants’ game making process; collected their games, journals, and pre and post surveys; and

from these observations and feedback, I reviewed and revised the curriculum for each class. I

interviewed the other course instructors who used the curriculum that I developed providing

additional insight to the pedagogy, delivery of the curriculum, and student learning. Three months

after the courses ended, a sample set of students and parents took part in follow-up interviews

regarding the impact of the course. Because games, specifically digital games (also called video

games), are seen as potentially corrupting to children, I gathered parental input on their child’s

involvement.

At the center of this study’s curriculum, playful, game-like methods were used to create

game-based artworks. Students critiqued games using detailed, expressive language to describe

how games work, critically aware of how commercial games differ in complexity. From their

game making experiences, students gained confidence and knowledge finding game structures in

v

everyday life and how to make programmable media like video games. This study argues that

learning through game-based art pedagogy, students begin to understand complexity thinking by

producing digital media as a form of artistic expression, and as a form of preparation for future

learning in and beyond a 4-12th grade art curriculum.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES................................................................................................................. ix

LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................................. x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................... xi

Chapter 1 Source Code........................................................................................................... 1

Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 Purpose of Study: Game-based Art Pedagogy and Complexity ...................................... 8

Complexity Theory/Thinking .................................................................................. 11 Research Questions.......................................................................................................... 12 Significance of Study....................................................................................................... 13

Limitations of Study ................................................................................................ 13 Dissertation Roadmap ...................................................................................... 16

Chapter 2 Art Games .............................................................................................................. 17

Debating Games as Art.................................................................................................... 17 A Brief Art History of Games ......................................................................................... 20 Game-based Pedagogy .................................................................................................... 27 Game Studies: A History ................................................................................................. 27

Game-based Pedagogy: Historical Examples .......................................................... 29 Quest to Learn: Game-based Pedagogy at Work............................................................. 31

Preparation for Future Learning (PFL) .................................................................... 34 Games as Interfaces ................................................................................................. 36

Complexity Thinking....................................................................................................... 38 Complexity Thinking and Art Education ........................................................................ 42

Unit Operations: Code as Text................................................................................. 44 Strategies and Tactics .............................................................................................. 45 Infinite Play ............................................................................................................. 47

Chapter 3 Research Methodology: Action Research.............................................................. 50

Games as a Form of Artistic Production.......................................................................... 50 Prior Game Curriculum ................................................................................................... 52 Games as Art Curriculum ................................................................................................ 52

Game Maker Interface ............................................................................................. 53 How Game Maker Works ................................................................................ 54

Previous Game Curriculum ..................................................................................... 55 Four Iterations of the Game Curriculum for Action Research Study ...................... 56

Action Research with Qualitative Data ........................................................................... 61 Role of the Researcher..................................................................................................... 63 Research Assessment/Data Sets for Analysis.................................................................. 65

Selection of Research Participants........................................................................... 66 Data Recording Procedures ..................................................................................... 66

vii

Data Analysis Strategies .......................................................................................... 67 Strategies for Validating Findings ................................................................... 67 Anticipated Ethical Issues................................................................................ 68

Narrative Structure................................................................................................... 68 Presentation of Final Report ............................................................................................ 69

Chapter 4 Reseach Findings: Game-based Art Pedagogy in Action ...................................... 70

Game Curriculum: Physical Spaces of Embodied Learning ........................................... 70 Planning the Physical Space as Game Curriculum .................................................. 70

Physical Space in Action: Week One .............................................................. 73 Physical Space in Reflection: Analysis of the First Physical Game ................ 75 Teachers’ Reflection/Analysis ......................................................................... 76

Change in Physical Space: Modifications to the Physical Game Curriculum–the Smithsonian...................................................................................................... 79

Game Curriculum: Tabletop Worlds ............................................................................... 83 Planning and Playing Tabletop Worlds: Penn State ................................................ 83

Critique of Popular Tabletop Worlds: Evidence of Complexity...................... 84 Creating Personal Tabletop Worlds ................................................................. 87 Reflection/Analysis of Personal Tabletop Worlds: Luck Rather Than

Complex ................................................................................................... 89 Change in Tabletop Worlds: The Smithsonian........................................................ 90

Game Curriculum: Video Games as Virtual Worlds ....................................................... 94 Planning Virtual Worlds .......................................................................................... 94

Making Virtual Worlds: Production and Reflection on Complexity ............... 96 Teachers’ Reflection/Analysis ................................................................................. 101

Teachers’ Preconceived Ideas.......................................................................... 101 Teachers’ Post-camp Reflection/Assessment .................................................. 105

Change in Virtual Space: Modifications to the Video Game Curriculum–The Smithsonian...................................................................................................... 112 Weeks One and Two........................................................................................ 112 Weeks Three and Four: New Media and Art Education Instructor.................. 116 Weeks Four and Five: Principle Investigator and Art Education Instructor .... 119

Game Curriculum: Three-month Follow-up.................................................................... 122 Student Understanding of Complexity .................................................................... 122

Gale: Playing with Health and the Everyday ................................................... 122 Gina: Making Games from Life....................................................................... 126 Stewart: Designing Emergent Complexity ...................................................... 129

Reflecting on the use of MARC and new understanding of games and systems..... 132 Sawyer: Seeing MARC in Commercial Games............................................... 132 Gabbie: Avoid Found Elsewhere ..................................................................... 132 Sam: The Unit Operations of MARC Everywhere .......................................... 133 Gitka: Games in the Play of Everyday Life ..................................................... 134 Saddie: School Shares Systems with Games ................................................... 134 Gina: Recognizing the Complexity of Game Code.......................................... 135 Gale, Gina and Spencer: MARC Important to Gameplay................................ 136 Santos: Understanding Systems and Patterns by Making Games.................... 137

Parents: Post-Course Assessment ............................................................................ 138 Parents: Could Making Games be Good for School? .............................................. 139

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Chapter 5 Discussion and Conclusion .................................................................................... 142

Discussion of the Research Questions............................................................................. 142 Response to Research Question One: MARC and Critical Art Structures .............. 143 Response to Research Question Two: Game Making and Complexity Thinking ... 146

Implications of This Study .............................................................................................. 150 Suggestions for Further Study ......................................................................................... 155

Works Cited............................................................................................................................. 164

Appendix A Game Booklet .................................................................................................... 181

Appendix B Game Maker Tutorial......................................................................................... 196

Appendix C Game Cards........................................................................................................ 220

Appendix D Camp Survey...................................................................................................... 236

Appendix E Three-Month Post-Survey Questions ................................................................. 239

Appendix F Recruitment Flyer ............................................................................................... 240

Appendix G Smithsonian Physical Game .............................................................................. 241

Appendix H Tabletop Version of Video Game Tutorial ........................................................ 244

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2-1: MARC .................................................................................................................. 45

Figure 4-1: QR Code for Penn State game ............................................................................. 73

Figure 4-2: Students at Penn State Course using QR codes ................................................... 74

Figure 4-3: The Game of Swirls ............................................................................................. 88

Figure 4-4: Super Pac-Man Land ........................................................................................... 89

Figure 4-5: Jenga Tower Defense........................................................................................... 91

Figure 4-6: Ninja Cow............................................................................................................ 98

Figure 4-7: IPod Touch vs Robber ......................................................................................... 99

Figure 4-8: Surfer Game using MARC .................................................................................. 113

Figure 4-9: BP Oil Game using MARC ................................................................................. 114

Figure 4-10: Gale’s Ronald’s Revenge–Thin Player.............................................................. 123

Figure 4-11: Gale’s Ronald’s Revenge–Fat Player ................................................................ 123

Figure 4-12: Afroman............................................................................................................. 128

Figure 4-13: Stewart’s Game Staying Alive (initially) .......................................................... 130

Figure 4-14: Stewart’s Game Staying Alive (adjusted for complexity) ................................. 131

Figure 5-1: Student Designed Game Interfaces...................................................................... 160

x

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3-1: Game Study Daily Schedule .................................................................................. 57

Table 3-2: Game Study Teaching Schedule ........................................................................... 64

Table 4-1: Pre & Post-Survey–Likelihood of Making a Game. ............................................. 151

Table 4-2: Pre & Post-Survey–Ability to Explain how to Make or Modify a Video Game .. 152

Table 4-3: Pre & Post-Survey–Likelihood to Take Future Classes that Focus on Computers or Technology ............................................................................................... 152

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The list of people that have been a influential to this process over the course of my

lifetime are too numerous to mention, however I will try to give an abbreviated account that

is suitable for these pages. I first would like to thank all of those who were directly involved

with the implementation of the study: Jaquan Washington, Brian Franklin, Bob Sweeny, Kyle

Hood, Brian Maynard, Nate Kling, Curt Kling, Jamie Hollingsworth, Jan Mahar, and Molly &

Tony Wagner. Without the help and support of these people the study would not have been

possible. I would also like to thank the students and families that took part in the study,

supporting the advancement of research.

I also would like to thank some of my former students and fellow teachers. The

experience I had working with Dale Gentry, Asondre Taylor, Wilbert Echeverria, Jeevon

Kondayya, Mochan, Ramon Monegro, Ilene Colbert-Smith, Cindy Salcedo, Anne Flanagan,

Derick Schuelein, Harry Rios, Pierre Williams, Brianne McGuinness, Paula Berg, Bobby

Zerega, Sharron Smalls, Bernardo Ascona, and Clara Janis helped make me the teacher I am

today.

I also would like to thank my committee for all of their support and insights to my

study. To my chair, Karen Keifer-Boyd, I can’t possibly thank her enough in these few pages

for the countless hours she has spent with me over the years helping me through this process.

I can only hope to be as good of a mentor and advisor as she has been with me. Her limitless

energy shows the field of art education what is possible. To Charles Garioan, the committee

member I have known the longest, his vast knowledge of art and theory challenged me to

push my writing and the thoughts behind the words on the page. To Matt Kenyon, much of

this study is a result of the conversations, examples, and views we shared over the years.

While Matt is my contemporary in age, I deeply value his mentorship. To Brian K. Smith,

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while he served as the external member of the committee, much of the dissertation was

written with his voice in my head.

I would also like to thank my family. To my father James, mother Diane, and brother

Michael, for all the support they have shown over my lifetime, pushing me to think outside

of myself and drive me to pursue my interests to my fullest potential. To my grandparents,

aunts, uncles, niece, nephew, and in-laws, I want to include you in my thanks for the support

and kindness you have given me.

Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Julianne, who joined me on this adventure in the

last stages. While we were both working on our dissertations, you made sure that you were

there for me, keeping everything in perspective, pushing me when necessary, holding me up

when I was down. This document is as much yours as it is mine. I love you.

1

Chapter 1

Source Code

Introduction

When I was nine years old, the film WarGames with Matthew Broderick, was released in

1983. I remember being awestruck, not at the threat of nuclear war like in the movie The Day

After (1983), which developed my fears about nuclear annihilation. Nor was I enthralled with the

WarGames storyline about a computer controlling the United States missile system. I was,

however, interested in how Broderick’s character could use electronics in such innovative ways.

Broderick was able to “hack” into school to change his grades and make free long distance calls

through “phone phreaking.” Later through research and applying his knowledge of computers,

Broderick connected to a defense department computer system that has what he suspects are the

latest computer games. In 1983 for most people, myself included, modems and the Internet were

things of science fiction. Yet, the speculative fiction of WarGames foreshadowed our

connectivity through the computers. WarGames also introduced me to the system and file

structures inherent in computer logic.

Around this time, my friends played video games in their homes with the Magnavox

Odyssey and the Atari 2600. Our family didn’t own a game system but one of my dad’s friends

had an Apple III where I played games like Lemonade Stand (Kellner, 1979), The Oregon Trail

(Rawitsch, Dillenberger, & Heinemann, 1981) and text-based versions of football and Star Wars.

In part, since the graphics were limited and home computers were new, I remember being more

interested in how the machines and programs worked rather than the games themselves. A few

years later our family purchased an Apple IIc of our own, not an Atari or a Nintendo, the latest

2

game console at the time. Looking back, my parents had quite a few card and board games in the

house, but did not want my brother and I to have a game console. I think my parents saw a limited

value to video games, or at least the cost of them. We played video games at our friends’ houses

but weren’t allowed to “waste our money” at the arcade or the local convenience store. In 1985,

my older brother and I received as a gift, the game Lode Runner (Smith, 1983) for the Apple II

computer. Lode Runner involves moving the player around the room to collect the gold while

avoiding robots. The player stops or slows down robots by digging holes, rendered by the player

releasing something that looks like stardust. When the player collects the gold by physically

contacting all of the gold, a ladder appeared to take the player to the next level. Lode Runner also

had a unique feature for the time, a level editor, giving players the option to create new levels.

Both my older brother and I spent many hours creating new levels, playing for the sake of

ongoing play rather than to reach an endpoint. I was also developing a database of my comic

book collection and began to understand how data can be delineated. I taught myself how to copy

files and turn a read-only disk to a read-and-write disk, motivated by my desire to unlock and

produce work rather than consume what others produced. All of these activities helped shape my

understanding and confidence with technology. This confidence made exploring the complexities

of technology less scary and developed a personal drive in me to know how electronic/digital

objects and systems worked.

At public school I learned very little about programming. The lessons were abstract and

formalized, like a biology and physics lab assignment in which students reproduced the example,

and answered standardized questions about the task performed. In school we used computer

programs such as The Oregon Trail and typing software, where my classmates and I became

exposed to glitches in software. We outsmarted the computer logic to move The Oregon Trail

game money in our game bank accounts, and improved our typing speed. I identified with

Broderick’s WarGames character as one of many young people appearing in popular culture and

3

the news in the 1980s and ‘90s that revealed that many computer hackers and makers were young

people almost the same age as me (Levy, 1984). I identified from my school experiences and

playing with computers at home that the preconceived complexity of these computer programs

became more approachable, and I could take my personal interests and technological systems and

fashion them to be relevant to me.

During my undergraduate education in the mid 1990s, I double majored in history and art

history, using computers only when I needed to write papers and occasionally check what was

then a novelty e-mail account. I played console games and the first-person shooter game Doom II

(1994) every now and then, but I knew that if I played games as much as I wanted, my grades

would suffer. I graduated college in 1997 and began to take advantage of the Internet, exploring

for hours the information that was once difficult to access, even at a Midwestern Research I

university library. Through Internet searches, I could find job listings from newspapers on the

east and west coasts of the United States. I could narrow my searches to the relevant job positions

and respond, sending my resume by e-mail attachment. With this newfound access to information

and communication from the World Wide Web, my proximity to the rest of the world from rural

small town Iowa was inverted. The complexities of searching for jobs 1000 miles away were

greatly reduced by the Web. Now I could contact a job prospect easily, avoid rummaging through

piles of newspapers that were hard to locate, and move to a new city where I knew no one. I was

empowered to make discoveries on my own, finding a more level playing field with people who

were plugged into the amenities of cities and had access to the lived experience of the New York,

Washington D.C., Boston and Seattle, and San Francisco.

At my first fulltime job as an administrative assistant in a continuing education

department in a mid-Atlantic university from 1997 to 2000, I devoured news and information

easily available on the Internet, recognizing that computer skills were critical to the contemporary

workplace, partly because of the hype of the dotcom bubble of the 1990s. During this time, I

4

learned HTML code, and how to use multimedia authorware, image editing, video editing, and

page layout software. When I started my master’s degree in 2000, I knew I wanted to learn more

about the way digital art would develop and be used in art education.

Among my first formal art teaching experiences, I taught Flash animation to students

between the ages of 8 and 14 at the Smithsonian Associates in Washington D.C. beginning in

2002, and continuing on for the next nine years. This opportunity arose partly because I was

willing to jump into teaching children digital art making while in its nascent stage, embracing

technologies I knew little about rather than avoiding them. Each year, I noticed that students held

more knowledge about computers and software than previous years. By 2006, the animation

course moved away from teaching children how to use Flash, and focused more on narrative

construction and expression with animation software as the medium. The Flash software we used

at the Smithsonian was not the latest and greatest either. The version of Flash installed in 2010

was the same we used in 2001, irrelevant to the class goals. It was from these first few years of

experience at the Smithsonian that I began thinking about how do I move the teaching of new

media related material to my future public school students.

In 2003, I began teaching at Jane Addams High School in the South Bronx section of

New York City, hoping to make an impact on students’ lives, by motivating their enthusiasm to

learn, and become excited about art. I was also motivated and eager to develop courses in new

media, engage students in what I assumed were interests they held toward technology and media,

and their desire to have professional skills in those fields. When I started at Jane Addams, the

only computers available to students were used to teach basic typing skills, the same computer

activities I had done 10 years earlier as a high school student. Over the three years that I taught at

Jane Addams, the school received over eighty new computers, but continued to utilize them for

the same basic office skills along with typing traditional research papers in the Math, Science,

English, and Social Studies departments. The small rural town in Iowa I grew up in was a very

5

different place from the large urban and ethnically diverse South Bronx. However, I also knew

something about the need to pursue one’s own interests to find a niche in an environment that

didn’t support moving beyond the neighborhood. Art and technology was a way for me to take

risks and receive encouragement as a student. As I saw it, word processing and creating slide

presentations involved neither risk-taking, nor building encouragement for the high school

students.

Many students at Jane Addams were unable to conceive their future connected to the

school or larger community. Instead, students envisioned themselves being limited to the thug life

that they heard in music or saw in the neighborhood street, impossible to move up in the world

through education and hard work.1 Although the school had a number of role models from the

South Bronx, also representing the Puerto Rican, Dominican, African-American, or other ethnic

and gendered identities that the 15 to 18 year old students could relate to, these shared identities

alone did not help students feel better about themselves, school, or personal situations. I aspired

that art class could offer alternatives for students to find value in learning, and being creative or

resourceful did not have to be criminal or boring. My hope was to create a space where students

could explore ideas and objects they were interested in, demonstrating how lifelong learning can

happen inside and outside of school. Projects in these introductory art classes included discussion

and production of identity marks for entrepreneurial purposes, graffiti and its relevance to the

local South Bronx community, and mathematics in art. These projects were designed to illustrate

the complexity of how artistic processes can connect to the other subjects in the school and how

these artistic problem solving and methods surround them in their everyday life.

1 When I talked to students about taking school seriously, I had more than one student show me a wad of cash and saying he made more money being on the street. Another example was when I was teaching students how to use the image editing program Photoshop and the Web development program Dreamweaver. When the students could see that I had design skills that could employ me elsewhere, they asked why was I at the school teaching them.

6

Most students I taught had cell phones and digital game consoles, yet few students had

computers at home. One student who came by my classroom regularly after school, had a cell

phone and an X-box video game console, but did not have a computer and did not see the value of

having or using one. Most of the video games this student played on his X-box were also

available for the computer, however, he didn’t make the connection that video games could be a

way to develop his computer knowledge.2 Jerone Mitchell, a math teacher and game instructor in

a school in Dallas, spoke on the meaningful value of video games to education on NPR’s News

and Notes roundtable (2008):

People are investing in what they know about. If you don’t know what it means to be an engineer, then you can’t pursue that. If you don’t know that in theory you can actually download the code to create games for an X-box 360 … we need to be getting it out there to all communities, not just those communities that are conducive to that kind of thinking.

While the NPR roundtable discussion focused on the practical application of motivating

youth’s interest in careers in math and science, there was also concern about the images of

minorities in video games and the social justice of access to digital technologies in meaningful

contexts (Chideya, 2008). Mitchell’s sentiments on the importance of providing all communities

with examples of professional careers and opportunities that excite and engage students in

learning were guiding principles for the new media curriculum I was developing for the school’s

art program. I envisioned a new media program that provided relevant job skills as part of the

school’s vocational mission, allowing for personal expression, creative problem solving, and

critical thinking through project-based activities. Unfortunately the administration’s vision of the

art program was not in sync to this kind of thinking.

2 All digital games are described in this study as video games, which include games played on all types of display screens.

7

During the same three years I was at Jane Addams, I continued teaching Flash animation

at the Smithsonian Associates summer camps in Washington D.C.. The summer of 2006 after I

left Jane Addams, I began teaching game development in addition to animation at the camps,

something I continue to do in 2011. Students were taught introductory methods of game

development from creating board games, critiquing popular board and video games, and making

their own video games over the course of a week. As they made their own games, many students

would see and understand how the systems, tools, and processes they were using could be

deconstructed and reconstructed in ways that served their interests. For example, several students

developed cheats, secret passages, and hidden messages or “easter eggs” in their games. The idea

was to create the appearance that the games they made had insurmountable odds and only those

with knowledge of the system could pass the level. This kind of unpacking and repacking of

complex systems as an artistic practice is what I had envisioned for the curriculum at Jane

Addams. Most of the students at the Smithsonian had access to the kind of educational resources

that Jerone Mitchell talked about, being from middle class to upper middle class families. And

although some of the Smithsonian students may not have excelled in school, many parents

recognized their children’s interests and were proactive in continuing to develop those interests

after the camp concluded.

The curriculum, I conceived at Jane Addams, promoted using computers and new media

technologies for vocational training, consistent with school’s mission and contemporary K-12

educational policies (The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004). Having computer skills, let

alone access to a personal computer, has become a necessary component of contemporary

Western society and continues to expand globally. This is considered so necessary that the United

Nations is discussing, and countries like Estonia, France, Greece, and Finland have made access

to broadband Internet a human right (Reisinger, 2009). Even if one does not have a computer at

home, much of the North American and European services and social spheres have spread to

8

electronic devices. The ubiquity of these technologies and the rapid obsolescence of electronics

have made consumers passive, buying and installing software and hardware as part of the

corporate product cycle loop of upgrades. As consumers this is done without investigating how

the technologies are made or modified by people that use a learned body of knowledge. The term

“digital divide” (Clinton, 1996) has evolved over time to include these users who remain

consumers of the technology but do not have an awareness of how to create technology to

perform as artwork. From these personal experiences, situated in societal conditions of the past 28

years, I see opportunities of significance for students to learn complexity thinking by producing

video games in game-based art pedagogy, as a form of preparation for future learning in and

beyond a 4-12th grade art curriculum.

Purpose of Study: Game-based Art Pedagogy and Complexity

In this study, I facilitated game-based art pedagogy aimed at engaging students with

critical issues and complexity theory as art research and practice. Complexity theory is an

umbrella concept designed to include, combine, and elaborate on the insights of any and all

relevant domains of inquiry, such as economics, physics, and biology. Complexity theory (or

complexity thinking) involves transdisciplinary research, using an array of theories such as

constructivism, critical theory, and social theory simultaneously, rather than seeing these theories

as being incompatible (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2008). Complexity theory enables

exploratory methods and approaches, responding dynamically to necessities or positions, and

seeks commonalities with other domains of analysis (Sumara & Davis, 2009). For example, when

the roles of a teacher are being defined, they are often metaphorically equated to those of a coach,

improviser, nurturer, and emancipator. These seemingly disparate positions show how educators

9

are called on to fulfill a complex set of skills and knowledge within the system of education

(Barney, 2011).

Complexity theory is not limited to education or human behavior. Steven Johnson, in his

book Emergence (2002), describes how ants organize themselves into complex colonies, adapting

to their environment as a collective intelligence. Johnson goes on to say that the complex,

interconnected behavior of ants are also found in games like SimCity (1989), SimAnt (1991), and

The Sims (2000). These games are simulations of complex dynamic systems, like cities, ant

colonies, and the social, biological, political, economic, and environmental conditions of life. In

these games, the player does not experience the game the same way twice. The games that

students made in this study are not as complex as those commercially produced games mentioned

above, however, students created dynamic systems through the making of games and developed

their understanding of interconnected systems and complexity through this game-making process.

The four iterations of a game creation project constituted the game-based art pedagogy

that I conceptualized in this study. Each time the game project was taught, the feedback from

previous projects and my reflections with the students and other instructors modified the teaching

strategy. Several years of gathering data, reflecting on, and incorporating my experiences

teaching games went into the video game and tabletop game components. New curricular

elements for the research included a physical game activity, a mobile game using 2-D barcodes, a

tabletop game connecting the video game instruction, and game cards written as independent

programmable unit operations.

This iterative process of gathering data, reflecting, and incorporating those experiences in

the next round of participation was found in the process of game design and teaching practice.

While students learned how to make games and begin to understand complex systems in this

study, instructors learned how the complexity of developing curriculum corresponds with the

dynamics involved in making games.

10

While games, specifically video games, display the potential to provide meaningful

learning experiences to specific subjects and systems, most supporters of games relate directly to

the learning that stems from game playing activities (Gee, 2006; Jenkins, 2006a; Squire, 2004),

while fewer concern themselves to the learning from producing games (Peppler & Kafai, 2008).

In studies that focus on producing games, there is a propensity to match the game development to

standardized test scores for math or language (Kafai, 1995; Pericles, 2007).

By making games, students can explore and expose how game rules may be

advantageous to some players, or provide equity to all in other cases. Through the examples and

metaphors of games and producing video games and game interfaces, students can learn how the

structures of games and probability correspond to the complexity of real world scenarios, a type

of intervention for critical reflection on the similarities of game systems and social systems. My

pedagogical goal was to develop a curriculum for students to learn through the imaginative

process involved in making video games as artworks, and to understand complexity theory by

critically considering the interlinking of the social, biological, political, economic, and

environmental systems in which they live.

To initiate this curriculum, I developed game course content over a four year period

around the language of move, avoid, release, and contact (MARC).3 While the video game

industry focuses on ludic and narrative qualities of games (Frasca, 1999), and developing a

common formal language for game design, criticism, and technical research (Hunicke, LeBlanc,

& Zubek, 2004), little is done to expose, examine, critique, and repurpose games as critical

pedagogy. This curriculum can represent transgressive, transformative, or fundamental changes in

our current educational system by using game methods to promote radical politics. Or, the

3 I developed MARC as a way to abstract the actions of many video games into a language that shows commonalities across video game genres (shooter, action-adventure, role-playing, strategy, etc.) that also describes events in everyday life within a game context.

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curriculum could foster incremental political change, using creative agency where change is made

within the rules, or requires one to know the rules in order to change them. In this next section I

give some examples to complexity theory in art education how games provide methods for

students to think about and understand complex systems.

Complexity Theory/Thinking

Art educators discuss complexity theory in art education research. For example,

researchers at the University of British Columbia framed the online sharing of student work for

an art course using social networking sites to create emergent dialogues that can be documented,

traced, and observed (Castro, Barney, & Kalin, 2008). Using complexity theory to frame their

positions, these art educators describe how collaborative processes of art making and discussion

dynamically draw from sources in daily life, and through historical, sociological, psychological,

environmental, political, and physiological situations. Other scholars explain how artists like

Stelarc made artworks that networked the artist’s body to viewers, while Etoy and ®TMark came

together to create data-driven artworks, revealing how artistic community action can be emergent

and complex (Sweeny, 2008).

Quest to Learn is a New York City public school that uses for its curriculum game-based

pedagogy, based in the educational philosophy that games require immersive, active participation,

problem solving, and learning through rules-based systems (Quest to Learn: About Quest to

Learn, 2009a). Students at Quest to Learn investigate geographic, mathematic, sociological,

biological systems to convey how they are dynamic, and integrated like games.

Quest to Learn uses a project-based curriculum, exploring systems and learning domains

as games through a series of quests, puzzles, and problems. By theorizing, playing, and validating

ideas, students find core principles to systems, relationships and discrepancies with others, to

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reveal the complexity of their lives. Game-based pedagogy is useful to teach complexity theory in

the art classroom as well. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960/2005) describes how the

“to-and-fro movement” of game structures are also found in artistic processes, emergent and

adaptive in nature, demanding immersion from the artist and viewer. When artistic practice

dynamically combines relevant domains of inquiry as needed, and the space allows for

participants to respond in ways that fall outside normative structures and experiences, this

emergent, networked approach of art making takes on a complexity theory framework.

Research Questions

This research focused on how students understand systems and complexity through the

making of games. By making games using the metaphors of move, avoid, release, and contact,

my research examined the images, actions, and types of games developed by students, and how

their understanding of systems and complexity were expressed through their games.

1. How can game-based art pedagogy using the game structures of MARC create a

critical art structure that involves complexity thinking and systems?

2. Can the experiences of playing, critiquing, and making games and interfaces,

specifically video games and computer-human interfaces, facilitate a critical

awareness of how game structures (systems, rules, rewards, consequences,

probability, etc.) can be understood and represented for students through game-

based art pedagogy? If so, how are the experiences from making games

supportive of complexity thinking?

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Significance of the Study

While few research studies on the value of making games as art projects exist (Keifer-

Boyd, 2005; Gill, 2009), no qualitative research in art education looks at the impact of making

video games with students. Video game critiques are documented in the art education literature

(Parks, 2008; Sweeny, 2009), not examples of classroom game production. Past student-made

game studies in disciplines outside of art education focused on whether or not games were an

efficient and effective way to teach math or language (Kafai, 1995; Robertson & Good, 2005),

and are not focused on the creative, interactive components of game creation.

My study devised, executed, and evaluated how game-based art pedagogy provides a

model for understanding social, political, and environmental systems and how to critically

analyze systems through complexity theory. Other studies outside of art education documented

students making video games for computational learning (Seif El Nasr & Smith, 2006; Dalal,

Dalal, Kak, Antonenko, & Stansberry, 2009), however, there are no art education studies

focusing on creating games for the purpose of artistic and personal expression.

My action research focused on teaching students complexity thinking through game-

based art pedagogy. Using game-based art pedagogy, the teaching and curriculum are not dictated

by standardized content, rather the study of the pedagogy concentrates on documenting ways

students define and solve problems, see and define systems, determine multiple avenues to find

answers and raise questions posed in the lessons, and produce tabletop and video games.

Limitations of Study

Emphasizing the art educational value of developing curriculum for student game

creation, the study did not develop game curriculum for students to play exclusively. A number of

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scholars support playing games for their pedagogic benefit (Barab, Thomas, Dodge, Carteaux, &

Tuzun, 2005; Gee, 2005; Squire, 2004); these studies do not share the same methodological and

qualitative attention to the educational value of making games.

Because it is beyond the scope of my study, I will not make distinctions to whether or not

games are designed objects or art objects. This study contextualized games within the historical

practices of artists and art movements throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century of

new media art, showing that games are part of the history of art and can be included as part of the

contemporary art classroom. These historic art games and ideas guided the development of this

study’s curriculum and informed its final outcome. The recognized value of games in the history

of art makes game creation credible art content for parents and school administrators.

Contemporary artists using video games as a medium for art making receive widespread

recognition for their works (Iles, Momin, & Singer, 2004; Jongema, 2006; Slocum & Ramocki,

2008). Artists working in the medium of video games were not discussed at length in the

implementation of the game-based art pedagogy, but a few contemporary artists like Jason

Rohrer4 and Jonathan Blow,5 whose artworks are game-based are cited as examples in the student

curriculum (Appendix A). These video game examples will continue to grow and change as the

curriculum becomes less focused on the making of video games as art, to making games that

explore specific ideas and themes like other art forms. Limited to four iterations of teaching–i.e.

planned, implemented, reflected upon, and changed–in this study; the curriculum and its content

presented here will continue to change in future developments of game-based art pedagogy,

particularly when systematically studied in the cyclical approach of action research.

4 Rohrer, J. http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/ 5 Blow, J. http://www.braid-game.com/

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A number of studies in art education focus on agency through the making and creating of

one’s own avatar in game environments (Stokrocki, 2010; Liao, 2008; Hsiao, 2007). This study

does not focus on avatar creation and agency through the characters that students create.6 Rather,

in my study students created many game characters, developing not only visual avatars for all

game characters, but creating the underlying code that allowed the characters, and other computer

generated content they designed, to move and interact.

The majority of students were males in three of the four classes used in the study. One

class allowed only females to enroll in an effort to help develop and encourage girls to pursue

careers in technology. In these four classes, gender differences were found in the visual and

programmatic styles of the tabletop and video games students made. Gender differences in

making games may be the focus of further research; however, the dissertation analysis does not

prioritize gender or gender identity.

This study desired cross sections of students from diverse economic, ethnic, and racial

backgrounds. However, Caucasian students primarily signed up for the courses. While the Penn

State course recruited from rural, underserved areas near the university, the group was ethnically

and racially homogenous. Students in the Smithsonian courses came from the greater

metropolitan area of Washington D.C., primarily of middle class and upper middle class

backgrounds. In future iterations of the study, more research will be done with populations of

diverse economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds.

6 An avatar is an embodiment of a person or idea, often described in video games and other virtual worlds as a moveable icon representing the player.

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Dissertation Roadmap

In the following chapters, I describe how games were an important part of the history of

art in the 20th century for this research, showing how games are sets of complex systems that as

video games are written subjectively into objective code. Investigating how video games are used

in education as a tool for learning and a method for measuring learning, I argue why art education

should approach video game making as art curriculum from a complexity framework. I outline

the methodology and procedures I used in my study, explaining how I developed a game

curriculum that included making physical, tabletop, and video games using the concepts of move,

avoid, release, and contact (MARC). My purpose was to discover how game-based art pedagogy

provides an opportunity to understand complexity for the students to use in playing, exploring,

and making their own games. Finally, I analyzed the data within a framework of students

understanding complex systems through the playing, critiquing, and making of games.

To adequately answer my research questions–how do students and teachers interpret and

respond to game-based art pedagogy; how do students use and understand MARC in their games;

and how does making games inform an understanding of complexity–I explain how I developed a

game curriculum as a form of action research. Next, I describe how I implemented and revised

the different components of the curriculum in the four iterations of the course. Finally, I carefully

examined the interview research data gathered from ten student and six instructor research

participants to reveal the ways in which game-based art pedagogy facilitated students’

understanding of complexity.

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Chapter 2

Art Games

From my early days “hacking,” to teaching in an art classroom in the South Bronx and in

the museum spaces of the Smithsonian, my journey in art education has brought me to the

convergence of “high art,” popular culture, and the technological tools of contemporary life.

From these insights, experiences, and the theories of games as they relate to art from Caillois

(1961/2001), Flanagan (2009), Huizinga (1938/1971), Salen and Zimmerman (2004), Sutton-

Smith (2001), I explore in this chapter how games have been an important part of the history of

art in the 20th century in the work of the Dadaists, Surrealists, Fluxus, and Situationists. The

video game theories from Bogost (2006 & 2007), Galloway (2007), and Wark (2007), show how

games are sets of complex systems that are written subjectively into objective code. Finally, I

discuss how video games were used in education as a tool for learning and a method for

measuring learning; and why art education should approach video game making from a

complexity framework. This chapter informs the game-based art pedagogy I developed,

implemented, and reflected on for changes to improve teaching artmaking as complexity thinking

in four iterations of this action research study.

Debating Games as Art

Roger Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun Times, co-host of the movie review show At

the Movies, and cited by Forbes Magazine in 2008 as “the most powerful pundit in America”

(Van Riper, 2007, para. 7) wrote in 2005, and repeatedly defending until 2010, that video games

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are not art, inferior to traditional art forms that have achieved cultural relevance through their

ability to move people emotionally. Stating that “video games can be elegant, subtle,

sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful” but the nature of the video game medium

prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship (Ebert, 2005, para. 12). After much debate within

the game community and on Roger Ebert’s blog, Ebert admitted in 2010 that he had not played

any video game at any length to qualify his critical statements (Ebert, 2010, para. 4). In this

section I situate a theory of video games as art within a debate on games as art.

Later in 2010, G4 Media video game critic Abbie Heppe dismissed Nintendo’s efforts to

flesh out Samus, the main character of the Metroid video game series, in the 2010 game Metroid:

Other M. The female character Samus broke gender barriers in 1986 as a former space marine

turned bounty hunter in the action-adventure game. In Heppe’s review of Metroid: Other M, she

argued that the new game release makes Samus look like a weak, subservient woman, unlike her

earlier portrayals as a strong solitary character over the 24 years of the game’s franchise (Heppe,

2010). Most of Heppe’s review was a critical analysis of the artistic narrative of the game rather

than its technical execution. This was problematic with most readers of the website, citing

Heppe’s views as being “blindly feminist” and “too critical” for the video game medium.

It seems that many “gamers”7 themselves are not supportive of games being called art if

it involves critical analysis of how games are constructed (Abbot, 2010). These gamers prefer to

view games more as entertainment. An overview what the major game studios release annually is

evidence that, like the film industry, large budget, franchise-styled video games like the Call of

Duty or Assassin’s Creed series prioritize generating profit through creating entertainment, not

art. These two positions of games are visible in college departments that teach video game

7 According to statistics compiled by the Entertainment Software Association in 2011, 72% of Americans play computer and video games. The average “gamer” is 37 years old, and 42% of all players are women. http://www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/ESA_EF_2011.pdf

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development as a business or vocational program (e.g., Guild Hall at Southern Methodist

University and Full Sail University), and those that teach games as a form of artistic inquiry (e.g.,

Savannah College of Art and Design and The University of Southern California’s Interactive

Media Division).8

John Sharp (2010), game designer, educator, and art historian, argues that the

participatory nature of a game, its ability to be played over and over, and the aesthetics of a

game’s “fun factor,” is something that keeps games from going down the path that art has taken

over the past 100 years. Sharp states that maybe the concept of art, as a unique object to be

contemplated and discussed outside of its fabrication, may be outdated because games require

participation in a way that is unfamiliar to most art audiences. Sharp maintains that it is unnatural

for games to be viewed in the traditional gallery contexts, pointing to examples of video games in

gallery and museum settings that were not touched or interacted with as intended.

Mary Flanagan, explores in her book Critical Play (2009), a historical investigation of

games and play in art, that most higher education game programs look at video game

development from a technological or popular cultural perspective, overlooking how fine art

cultures have used games (Flanagan, 2009). In this chapter, I discuss games as structured play,

building my argument of games as art through 20th century radical art movements that rejected

historical assumptions and practices of art. This perspective is important because these artists

played within the structure of art like a game of Hot Potato, where players standing in a circle,

8 Guild Hall at Southern Methodist University is a highly rated game development program, one of the first graduate programs to teach game development in the United States. Full Sail University is a for-profit university specializing in media production, well known in the video game industry. Reading their curriculums, interviewing game development faculty inside and outside of the schools, listening to and reading testimonials from graduates, I find that Guild Hall and Full Sail’s game programs are career focused, developing students to work directly for large video game companies, rather than develop their students to receive a broader liberal arts education. Through faculty interviews, graduate testimonials, and the curriculum descriptions of the video game programs at Savannah College of Art and Design and The University of Southern California’s Interactive media division, these programs focus on developing students more broadly, not just developing their skills specifically for the video game industry.

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pass a ball around as fast as they can, trying not to drop the ball or make a bad pass. Like the ball

in Hot Potato, these Dada, Surrealist, Fluxus, and Situationist artists moved the materials and

definition of art around, shifting the position of art but not losing focus that there is a structure to

what art is, questioning what comprises the potato in art. These shifting positions in Western art

reflected how the assumed stable centers of power in modern society were also in play, beginning

with power and tradition moving away from European, rural, and agricultural economies and

culture, to include more global, urban, and industrial views.

A Brief Art History of Games

Because my action research study is contextualized within art education and the history

of art, I provide in this description a brief history of games in art. Histories of play that questions

the authority of artistic systems were dominant in early 20th century art movements. Subversion,

artistic participation, and questions to normative behavior dominated groups like Dada,

Surrealism, Fluxus, and Situationism. New media theorist Jay Bolter (2010) argues that art games

appear to loosely follow two strains of the avant-garde; one strain pushed the limits of the

medium (e.g., Cubism), and another strain pushed the limits of society (e.g., Dadaism). Using

these two strains as descriptive guides, this section looks at artists that used games and game-like

structures as a medium to explore artistic systems, experimentation, and subversion. These artists

engaged in these two agendas of pushing the boundaries of the artistic medium and society.

Early 20th century Western art brought child’s play and art together by focusing on the

importance of imagination. Movements like Surrrealism and Dadaism approached child-like

states of imagination as primitive, innocent, original, and ultimately fresh and untouched for art

making (Sutton-Smith, 2001). Dada and Surrealist artists like Sophie Taeuber (1889-1943), Hugo

Ball (1886-1927), Max Ernst (1891-1976), and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) built into their art

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practice structured play activities like dolls, puppets, and masks as ironic gestures to the culture

of bourgeois society. These artists sought to remove established social and historical conventions

and rules of art and to reconstruct them with role-playing and sandbox-style game approaches,

shocking audiences with questions of socially accepted and normative behavior (Flanagan, 2009).

After the death and destruction of World War I, many Dadaists used irony to show the

collapse of the rational. Dada artists like Hannah Höch (1889-1978), Tristan Tzara (1896-1963),

Francis Picabia (1879-1953), and Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) engaged in wordplay, techniques

of ironic juxtaposition, fragmentation, chance, and audience interaction as explorations of

authorship and authority in their art. For example, Höch and Hausmann worked together to

develop the photo collage technique. Playing with photographs of people, machines, and

advertising by cutting up and combining these images to create new representations of the body,

these artists questioned ideas of originality, the mechanization and industrialization of society,

and the authority of the artist as parody (Flanagan, 2009).

The most recognized artist from the Dadaists and Surrealists movements directly

involved with games is Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Quoted as saying, “art is a game between

all people of all periods,”9 Duchamp shifted his focus from painting to “non retinal art,”

notoriously leaving his artistic practice to pursue his interests in chess, even co-authoring a book

on the game (Duchamp & Halberstadt, 1932). Known as being ironic and playful, Duchamp

believed that a work of art is completed only when the viewer is involved (Duchamp, 1957/1975).

Several art scholars have investigated Duchamp’s relationship to art and chess (Damisch &

Krauss, 1979; Humble, 1998; LaFarge, 2000; & Randall, 2007). These scholars focus on

Duchamp as an artist who shows interest in chess, rather than appropriating art as a type of chess

game. With many of Duchamp’s readymade works–Bicycle Wheel (1913), Fountain (1917), Hat

9 Cited in Bourriaud (1998), Relational Aesthetics, p. 7

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Rack (1917/1964), Anémic Cinéma, (1926), and Sixteen Miles of String (1942), as a few

examples–the works were fabricated and positioned within an art context, pushing viewers to

consider their position on art and its meaning. Trébuchet (1917), named after a chess move, is

comprised of a coat rack that Duchamp nailed to the floor, which creates a chess-like scenario for

the viewer to interact with the piece. Like Duchamp’s more famous work Fountain, the viewer is

asked to respond to the placement of the art object in relationship to the art space, playing with

the traditional purpose of the material, its status as an art object, and the role of the artist.

Duchamp’s work raises questions about the conventional understanding of the utility of a urinal

and coat rack and our conventional understanding of art objects. The active efforts of Duchamp

and the Dadaists to redefine culture through participatory play, interactivity, and games as

research practices put questions of social norms in flux and “at play” (Flanagan, 2009, p. 139).

Building on Dada ideas of chance and randomness, Surrealists used “automatic” drawing

and writing to circumvent conventional logic in creating visual and verbal concepts related to

contemporary culture. Influenced by new psychoanalytic theories of the time, the Surrealist use of

“automaticism” (Breton, 1992/1924), was a stream of consciousness form of image making, used

to break away from rationalism and promote new states of awareness. This form of art making

gained popularity over the Dadaists’ more nihilistic use of chance.

As a group, the Surrealists explicitly talked about games with their art. Most famously,

the game the Exquisite Corpse (1925), appropriated from the parlor game Consequences, was

used as a collaborative method of creating compositions blindly. The Exquisite Corpse is played

by drawing part of a figure on one folded part of a paper and handing it over to another artist to

continue the drawing on another folded section. Without seeing the other drawings on the folded

paper, this method of working disrupts conventions of how one makes a drawing (Brotchie &

Gooding, 1995). The Surrealists’ application of games challenged the conscious limits of artistic

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practice with the use of chance and to draw out the subconscious, while the Dadaists used the

freedom of play to question social structures and normative behavior.

Cut from the same anti-art and anti-commercialism cloth as the Dada movement, Fluxus

artists used everyday objects and a variety of art media such as performance art, video, and

music, to develop their ideas. Both Fluxus and Dada artists used play and chance to show the

randomness of nature. However, Dadaism’s use of chance and play arose from the destructive,

bleak experiences of World War I, while Fluxus artists, working primarily between 1962-1978, in

Japan, Europe, and the United States, used play for positive social and communal ambitions.

Influential to the Fluxus movement, avant-garde composer John Cage explored chance

and the unknown in his experimental music. Works like 4’33” explored the sounds of the

surrounding environment as Cage’s score influenced many Fluxus artists to experiment similarly

with sound improvisation and audience participation in their work. Another influential artist on

Fluxus members was Allan Kaprow. Kaprow, known as the creator of Happenings, a form of

performance art, is quoted as calling happenings as: “a game, an adventure, a number of activities

engaged in by participants for the sake of playing” (Kaprow, 1957/2008, p. 1). Like a game, the

overall structure of Cage’s 4’33” and Kaprow’s happenings were planned, the spontaneous and

random activity during the pieces were part of the work. In doing so, these works broke the

traditional boundary between the artwork and the viewer, allowing the audience to be part of the

art rather than being “outside” of the piece. As discussed later in this chapter, the “magic circle”

of a piece of art often frames the audience as outside observer/participants, but works like 4’33”

and happenings open up the “magic circle” to actively include the audience in the art/game space.

The organizer of Fluxus, George Maciunas, made many games and toys, creating work

that emphasized how the meaning and nature of everyday objects can be put into states of

continuous change or flux. Maciunas’s games like Flux Ping Pong (1966) are played with the

formal aspects of the game of ping-pong, hitting a ball back and forth between players. However,

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artificial obstacles were created like modifying the ping-pong paddles and table, making the game

difficult to play, changing the competitive landscape. Maciunas’s ideas were reintroduced 30

years later with Gabriel Orozco’s interest in logic, systems, and physics revealed in his series of

games Ping Pong Table (1998), Oval Billiard Table (1996) and Horses Running Endlessly

(1995).

Several Fluxus artists worked in reference to Duchamp with the game of chess, using its

cultural position as a readymade intellectual game. Fluxus artists manipulated chess sets to

examine ways of knowing, bringing the conflict of the game to the forefront of their work. Fluxus

artist Takako Saito created several readymade chess sets, turning found objects into chess pieces.

Saito’s chess sets positioned players to use their senses other than sight, raising questions about

aesthetics and the predominance of the visual in artworks, commenting on the male authority in

the art world. In Saito’s Spice Chess Set (1965) and Liquor Chess Set (1975), the game pieces

must be smelled or tasted as part of the gameplay in order to figure out which chess piece it is and

what move corresponds with it. Yoko Ono’s White Chess Set (1966) and Play It by Trust (1991)

are completely white chess sets offering a cooperative form of play in the work’s anti-war

message of no visible opposition. Similar to Duchamp’s position on games and art, Ono is quoted

as saying “I see life as the playground of our minds” (Piasecki, 2008, para. 8), using the medium

of art as a form of structured play. Works like Ono’s Instruction Paintings (1962) asks viewers to

interact with the object or with other viewers. These pieces are extensions of Marcel Duchamp's

belief that the work of art is only partly created by the artist and is completed by the spectator.

Linked to Dada and Surrealism through the French avant-garde movement Lettrism, an

international Marxist avant-garde organization, the Situationists suggested alternative life

experiences that united play, freedom, and critical thinking through art (Knabb, 2006). The

Situationists developed revolutionary approaches to architecture and urban planning called

unitary urbanism, uniting experiments in behavior with the environment, using the concept of

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psychogeography as a starting point for their ideas (Chtcheglov, 1953/2006). A playful

exploration of the city, psychogeography blurred the lines of where function and play within a

space begins and ends (Debord, 1955/2006a). Serving as an instruction manual to the play

described in psychogeography, was the theory of the dérive (Debord, 1958/2006b). The dérive

acts as a playful exploration of the environment, without preconceived rules of how to navigate

the space. For example, Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) was structured as a dérive-like

performance around Acconci randomly following people until they went into a doorway. Acconci

stood waiting in the doorway until the next person walked out and followed them. Acconci let

those he followed navigate his way around the city, letting chance be his guide. The Situationist

concept of the dérive evolved to the more structured practice of détournement, sampling from the

past and other sources to playfully create new works that subverted the original work’s intent.

The Situationist theories and practices were viewed as influential to the May 1968 social protests

in France,10 a reaction to what was viewed as the complicit behavior of Western society to

advanced capitalism and mass media.

While writer/filmmaker, Guy Debord, is considered the primary intellectual leader of the

Situationists, most of the discourse and publications about him does not reference his work in

game development. Debord designed Game of War (1965) two years prior to the publication of

his seminal theoretical work The Society of the Spectacle (1967), cited as a catalyst of the French

protests of 1968 (Andreotti, 1996). Game of War is a tabletop game with the strategic elements of

chess and the combative characteristics of poker (Wark, 2008). In Game of War players must

manage fighting units, supplies, and communication lines simultaneously. If the lines of fighting

units are broken, supplies cannot be communicated back and forth between units. Debord

10 The 1968 French protests were significant because it included the first unauthorized union strike, becoming the largest strike in history. The 1968 protests also started a long series of student strikes and activism, viewed as being a milestone in the shift of French moral values.

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designed Game of War to connect his theoretical interests of how society’s understanding of

space and time is determined by those in power. The disruption of communication by a powerful

force is the key game element to Game of War. This game metaphor aligns with the argument that

Debord made in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Arguing that if the hegemonic cultural

narrative of consumption were revealed as a spectacle of capitalist society, its power would be

broken, freeing the proletariat. For Debord, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a

social relation among people, mediated by images” (para. 4).

From their theories, ideas, and games, the Situationists’ ultimate goal was to construct

situations; problematic and rarified ways of working that broke or disrupted the passivity of

everyday life and create societal change. The games and use of play from the Dada, Surrealist,

Fluxus, and Situationist art movements show methods of resistance to the conventions of art and

society. Earlier, I used the metaphor of the game Hot Potato to describe how 20th century artists

played with the meaning and definitions of art. This example is important because the game of

Hot Potato is like a readymade vessel, easy to comprehend, and quickly understood by students

of all ages for the structure the game takes. Abstract concepts like the meaning of art can be

understood with this game analogy as a conceptual framework, using the game form to explore

these questions, showing how artists negotiate, interpret, and define their views of art through the

physically fluid and ever changing movements. Games used metaphorically to frame serious,

complex systems and problems in art create an intellectual space where difficult topics can be

introduced playfully to students. In the next section, I explore the use of games in education,

discussing historical approaches to game-based pedagogy.

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Game-based Pedagogy

Game developers pride themselves as being in a cross-disciplinary field, yet the methods

used by the 20th century artists described above in contemporary game development circles are

viewed as outside the norm (Costikyan, 2010). The purpose of this section is to identify and

recognize how games became an area of study and how the technological rise of video games has

led to the educational use of games in the K-12 classroom. By focusing on the methods of these

prior studies, a distinction can be made to how my study supports methods of artistic expression

and imagination not explicitly developed in prior scholarship.

Game Studies: A History

Although games and play have been around for centuries, game studies began in the 20th

century. Johan Huizinga penned Homo Ludens (1938/1971) the earliest known academic work on

games, citing how play and games are a part of culture, valued as other spaces with limited

access, special designations, and ceremonial rites like churches, courtrooms, and battlefields.

These spaces, only used for specific purposes are defined by Huizinga as part of the “magic

circle,” outside of the reality of everyday life. While the magic circle can include risk, even be

deadly, it supports known parameters that encourage players to explore and create meaning

within the defined space. By claiming cultural and critical value to play and games gives a lasting

legacy to Huizinga’s work. However, Huizinga’s theories are dated by his rigid classifications of

games, play, and cultures. Roger Caillois (1961/2001) critiques and expands Huizinga’s play and

games classifications to a spectral theory in his book Man, Play, Games. Caillois’s typology of

play conceives structured and rule-based games at one end, and free form and spontaneous play at

the other. Part of Caillois theory breaks down when considering that even in defining free form

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play, a metastructure is created. Caillois sees structures of society as games and human behaviors

as forms of play, yet he only briefly discusses how the arts fit into his typology as a form of

mimicry. More concerned with how art fits into his structure, Caillois does not see the arts as

opening up spaces to question behaviors and structures in society. These two early theorists

established a language for discussing play and games, however Huizinga’s and Caillois’s

attempts to make their theories comprehensive exposes the limits of their experience with the arts

and the complexities of the human condition.

Unlike Huizinga and Caillois, Brian Sutton-Smith is less resolved to defining games and

play in his research. In his book The Ambiguity of Play (2001), Sutton-Smith states that the

definitions and understanding of play are integral to understanding games, while recognizing that

he is unable to capture the full scope and meaning of play. Instead, Sutton-Smith proposes seven

rhetorics of play that emerged through cultural shifts in time: progress, fate, power, identity, self,

imaginary, and frivolous. Drawing from theorists like Bakhtin and Derrida, Sutton-Smith

describes how the arts and everyday life are game-like; where society and culture are

undetermined and open to interpretation. It is in the framing and navigation of society, that spaces

for play and games are created. Later in the chapter, I explain how the French theorist Michel de

Certeau similarly proposes how games appear in the everyday life in his theory of strategies and

tactics. While Sutton-Smith casts a wide net on the forms play and games have taken, early video

games focused on competitive games and games of war.

In the history of video games, the first video games like Tennis for Two and Spacewar!

were designed by male military engineers as outlets for their work developing Cold War

technologies. Possibly because these games were designed as diversions in environments devoted

to weapons of mass destruction, creating games of war that used zero-sum outcomes may have

been obvious choices for these military engineers. As video games entered the mainstream and

the consoles of Atari, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony moved into the home, the kinds of video games

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children played and the ideologies reinforced in the games’ virtual environments took a greater

public interest (Gonzalez, 2005).

As the public’s cultural awareness for video games grew in the 1980s, so did academic

interest. The field of game studies is viewed as broadly having three areas of focus: the effects of

games on people, games and how they are played as cultural artifacts, and the design and

development of games (Konzack, 2007). The next section will look at how research into game-

based pedagogy used these three areas of focus.

Game-based Pedagogy: Historical Examples

Much of game-based pedagogy centered on students learning by playing video games

(Barab, et al., 2005; Paul & Hansen, 2006; Sorensen & Meyer, 2007; Squire, 2004). In this form

of game-based pedagogy, students learned specific academic standards by interacting within the

prescribed video game space. Even though these studies were designed from the premise that

students have fun playing games, most popular video games do not include developmental

assessment or pedagogical principles in their design (Fortugno & Zimmerman, 2005).

Students made video games in a variety of classroom environments over the last fifteen

years of game research. Typically, students learned subjects like math or language while making

games (Habgood, Ainsworth, & Benford, 2005; Kafai, 1995; Robertson & Good, 2005). Prior

quantitative research on student-created games measured their language building skills (Pericles,

2007), and how gender, race, and ethnic identities are represented, absent, and/or stereotyped in

video game creation (Denner & Campe, 2008; Kafai, 1996; Kelleher, Kiesler, & Pausch, 2007).

These studies, where students made games as a motivation tool for math or language courses

identified mixed results of improvement. However, studies looking at how students responded to

making games as a form of self-expression, time on task, or taking interest in school found more

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positive outcomes (Centre for Learning Innovation, 2009; Denner & Campe, 2008; Kafai, 1995;

Seif El Nasr & Smith, 2006). A 2009 study by researchers at Oklahoma State University

recommended a teaching model using “rapid video game creation tools”, like game engines as a

project-based curriculum to boost attitudes about computers, as well as critical and creative

thinking skills (Dalal, Dalal, Kak, Antonenko, & Stansberry, 2009). The researchers proposed

that “rapid game development tools” don’t require students to have prior knowledge of computer

programming yet involve art, music, and storytelling as part of the game making process. Rather

than separating out the arts as a distinct part of the game making process, in my action research

study, based on my previous teaching experience, I began with the premise that video game

creation is an attainable project for the art classroom. Studies of video games made in school art

classroom have not been conducted, although researchers suggest that students should make

digital media like video games outside of the environment of high-stakes testing such as in art

classrooms and afterschool programs (Gee & Hayes, 2009; Gill, 2009; Jenkins, 2006b; Keifer-

Boyd, 2005).

In recent years, advocacy for students to develop digital literacy skills (Jenkins, 2006b),

using video games as a vehicle for learning (Gee, 2005), caught the academic and general

public’s attention. Part of the enthusiasm for digital literacy is to use games to teach academic

content. This advocacy primarily concerned itself with ways that students can consume and use

digital media like video games for learning rather than produce games as learning. As previously

stated, the use of commercially made or educational video games has different purposes than

making video games, comparable to looking at paintings in contrast with making paintings, or

reading stories as opposed to writing stories. Teaching students to use and consume different

forms of digital media and skills without developing a critical awareness of how it is produced,

places students at a disadvantage in understanding the full capacities of digital media. For

example, learning how data access, computer code, hardware, and sensors controls, limits, or

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allows consumers to be informed how the digital devices of their daily lives work (Darts, 2004;

Rushkoff, 2010). A limited advocacy for digital literacy to consume what is popular rather than

produce critical work, perpetuates the view of schools as places for training entry-level workers

for the 21st century. Some digital literacy advocates shifted their views to include support for the

production of digital media, yet show minimal support for models in school-based instruction

(Gee & Levine, 2008). However, teaching digital literacies through games in schools still moves

forward with support (Pinkard, 2008). From these studies of game-based pedagogy and game

production as a form of critical digital literacy, we can surmise that the art classroom is a viable

space for teaching video games. From my perspective, the art classroom is a space where digital

literacies and criticality should be valued as part of a rigorous art practice.

Quest to Learn: Game-based Pedagogy at Work

In the fall of 2009, Quest to Learn opened, a new school in the New York City public

school system experimenting with digital media at the center of their curriculum. Starting the

school with a 6th grade class, the curriculum uses game-based pedagogy, based on the educational

philosophy that games require immersive, active participation, problem solving, and learning

through rules-based systems (Quest to Learn, 2009a). The school’s executive director of design,

Katie Salen, also Professor of Media Design at Parsons the New School for Design, is

characterized as developing the school’s game-based curriculum in a way that connects more to

children’s everyday lives and world beyond school. Salen argues that to reflect the needs of a

networked 21st century society, Quest to Learn reworks the traditional academic disciplines to

make a more participatory, immersive, and engaging learning environment than traditional

subject-based schooling (Corbett, 2010). Investigating systems through themes like “being, place,

and space,” students at Quest to Learn explore the structures of geographic space, modes of

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transportation, weather, cartography, biomes, and maps, to show how these systems are dynamic,

having common and unique features, discovering the systems’ optimal levels, hidden dimensions,

and homological understanding (Quest to Learn: Our Learning Model, 2009b).

Quest to Learn founders Salen and Robert Torres developed the school structure using

gamelike language such as achievement levels of expertise rather than grades, and developed

problem-based curricular units as missions; assignments as quests. In addition to learning how to

make games, students learn their math, language, science, and social studies lessons using game-

like scenarios. Salen believes that building a game teaches children about a dynamic system with

sets of rules, challenges, obstacles and goals; and that students will be able to understand and

design systems that work and have later application outside of school (Salen, 2007). This

description of how building games can teach an understanding of systems and respond within a

particular context is characteristic of art educator, David Darts’s (2004) “advocation of cultural

production as a pedagogical strategy to generate and facilitate student awareness, understanding,

and active participation in the sociocultural realm” (p. 313). Darts’s statement shows that art

educators should embrace contemporary forms of cultural production like games so students can

critically engage in the world around them.

Similar to school, games are designed experiences in which participants are expected to

be motivated to achieve the game goals while operating inside the systems of boundaries and

rules of the game. Certain qualities are part of game-based learning: understanding a given

environment; teaching skills and knowledge that are applicable to the environment; testing those

skills; completing tasks; rewarding the players; and progressing to the next stage. These traits also

align with successful teaching for impactful learning (Gee, 2004).

The learning at Quest to Learn has not translated into high scores on standardized tests.

The first class of Quest to Learn students scored similarly to other sixth graders in the New York

City district. One of Quest to Learn’s funders, the MacArthur Foundation, is developing

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alternative assessment measures that look at systems thinking, teamwork, and time management

to show the value of the school’s curriculum and philosophy (Shute & Torres, in press). The

MacArthur Foundation’s commitment to this game-based model is evident in their

investment to start a second school in Chicago for the fall of 2011 (Hood, 2011).

Video games are one part of the digital curriculum at Quest to Learn. Al Doyle, one of

the teachers at Quest to Learn, is quoted as saying that the students’ abilities with the computer

have changed dramatically in the last ten years. A decade ago Doyle taught students how to “Save

As” on a computer. Now students make videos, blogs, podcasts, and use social networks. He

argues that memorization, spelling, and handwriting has little place in 21st century education,

removing many of the pedagogical practices of traditional elementary school (Corbett, 2010).

Quest to Learn’s administrators argue that since children use these forms of media in their lives

outside of school daily, then digital media should be harnessed for academic purposes as well,

erasing the boundaries of school and life as much as possible.

Gaining support for radical change is harder than incremental shifts, particularly in

education. Quest to Learn’s game-based pedagogy for the entire school curriculum redefines

educational standards as evident in the school’s mediocre state test scores and development of

new forms of assessment. Additionally, students at Quest to Learn make and play games

primarily to support learning in other assignments rather than as a medium for self-expression.

Advocates to include games development as part of the art education curriculum received a boost

of support when the video game category was added to the Scholastic Art awards (Scholastic,

2010). Whether games are used in education boldly as Quest to Learn’s immersive program, or

Scholastic Arts incremental inclusion, I argue why making games should be understood as part of

the future of art education in the next section.

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Preparation for Future Learning (PFL)

Underlying much of my high school teaching was the desire for students to think

transdisciplinary, i.e., to see that ways of doing and thinking in the art class as being applicable to

other courses and beyond the school building. Until recently, applying learning outside of a field

or discipline to another context was understood as “transfer” (Green, 2010). Preparation for

Future Learning (PFL) is a reconceptualization of transfer, designed to capture the distinctions of

knowledge as transfer in and transfer out (Reese, 2007). PFL supports dynamic assessment,

measuring what students learn given additional resources. Specifically, PFL framework is

designed to test whether certain types of initial activities allow better preparation for transfer by

creating knowledge that is more suitable to be “transferred in” to a subsequent learning

experience (Schwartz & Martin, 2004). Proponents of game-based pedagogy like James Gee have

gravitated towards PFL research to support their arguments that students are motivated to play

video games and predisposed to learning through the medium (Gee, 2006). They argue that the

guided experience of games, using models with well-designed problems, and cycles of expertise

for players, promotes the best in learning by allowing for multiple and abstract experiences (Gee,

2006; Squire, 2008). However, citing that today’s youth need to understand complex technical

languages and skills that can be found in playing video games and modifying them, Gee does not

support making games for learning as much as the playing of games.

This study structures the understanding of dynamic systems and complexity through the

playing and making of physical and board games, prior to students developing their own, more

technically challenging, video games. By contextualizing game making activities within an art

environment, students utilized outside resources and research as a way to encourage their own

individual voice in artistic practice. Earlier art education studies spotlighted how personal

interests motivated and informed students in their artistic development. J. C. Holtz was inspired

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to draw from his personal interest in comic books (Wilson, 1974), and Judy Chicago encouraged

students to research from lived experiences to inform their artwork (Keifer-Boyd, 2007).

Grounded in this research that used art created from the personal lives of students within social,

political, and environmental systems and contexts, students in this study navigated how their

game narratives and choices in the level design, characters, sound, game difficulty, and methods

of play, reflected these personal interests. Although some post-secondary art education and studio

programs prepare students to create art with digital media (Gill, 2009), or are inspired by these

pre-digital game-like artworks created by Dadaists, Surrealists, Situationists, and Fluxus artists

(Gude, 2007), no examples exist in the art education literature of studies concerning video game

making as studio art curricula in primary and secondary schools. Art educator Kim Sheridan

(2009) links making video games with her research in scientific inquiry, and Kylie Peppler

(Peppler & Kafai, 2006; Peppler & Davis, 2010) invites the learning sciences field to collaborate

and engage the art education field to use programming environments as a creative form, but

neither scholar goes as far as promoting teaching video games production in the art classroom. A

few art education studies discussed the use of commercially made games such as State of

Emergency (Bolin & Blandy, 2003) Darfur is Dying (Parks, 2008) and art games like Everything

I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes a Difference (Sweeny, 2010) as focal points for video games

to be included in art education. However, the games are analyzed for the content provided rather

than as opportunities for content creation. In her dissertation, Hui-Chun Hsiao (2007) explored

how users of The Sims created their own stories using the in-game content of The Sims.

Nevertheless, digital multimedia story creation differs in learning outcomes than creating games,

just as the use of commercially made and educational video games has different teaching and

learning purposes than making video games. On the popular social network site for art teachers

interested in technology integrated in their art classes, arted20.ning.com, of the over 5,000

members, only two high school art teachers posted they make games with their students, using the

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program Adobe Flash, a popular piece of software for animation, and used to make games for

advanced high school students, not elementary or middle school students (Roland, 2010). What I

advocate in my study is the making of physical, board, and video games as art practice for

students as young as 8 years old.

In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss how this study contributes to an emerging

discussion in the field of art education about the educational value of making games as art within

the context of digital media (Bolin & Blandy, 2003; Freedman, 1991; Gill, 2009; Keifer-Boyd,

2005) and game-based art pedagogy. Creating games as interfaces allows for playful experiences

determined by game makers’ imagining and playing with structures of all kinds, such as objects,

physics, lighting, sound, physical responses, and other time-based structures that enable the

possibility of experimenting and exploring with contemporary culture and life. When artistic

practice combines any and all relevant domains of inquiry, using exploratory methods that are

dynamic to situations or needs, its process takes a complexity-thinking framework.

Games as Interfaces

In 2009 Eric Zimmerman, game designer, theorist, teacher, and artist was interviewed

about when he began designing games on the podcast Another Castle (Pratt, 2009):

There are lots of ways of thinking about play. One way is that, you know you buy a set of rules and you sit down and play the game and follow the rules. Another idea of play is like you have a skateboard and you are carrying it with you, and it changes the way you relate to your environment. Well you know, I could walk along side this rail but if I had a skateboard I could like, try and grind it. Suddenly my whole environment is transformed because I have this way of interfacing with it.

In this brief description, Zimmerman illustrates how children commonly invent games as

a way to interface with their environment. The interface is determined by the present, using the

personal material of the skateboard and skills of the child with the situational encounter of the

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stair rail. This performance/experiment can succeed or fail based on what the child has set as her

goal. While this example metaphorically makes games as interfaces in real space, electronics are

being used as game interfaces to measuring one’s health (Goetz, 2010), or visiting shops and

museums (Indvik, 2010). In the early days of the Internet, theorists like Sherrie Turkle (1995) and

Donna Haraway (1991) wrote that the interface barriers between humans and computers were

changing and merging, progressing to allow technologies to mix virtual and real world

environments that humans inhabit (de Sousa e Silva & Sutko, 2009). In the 1990s, art educators

examined the Internet as a way to critically engage in art using hypertext (Keifer-Boyd, 1997) and

teaching (Taylor & Carpenter, 2002) through the non-linear nature of Internet links. More

recently with the advancement of computers, broadband connections, and Internet-based social

networks, art educators create objects and avatars, exploring 3-d environments like Second Life as

a way to form identity and empower oneself (Ballengee Morris, 2009; Liao, 2008; Stokrocki,

2010). Art educators investigating Second Life look at the making and controlling of 3-d objects

and avatars as the art. However, in making games as art, its possible to be even more inclusive to

the physical world around you. Eric Zimmerman with his co-author Katie Salen describe games

as free play within larger structures in their book Rules of Play (2004). Game design is the art

form of creating structures for free play to occur within the designated structure of the game. For

example, the group Improv Everywhere turns public spaces into game-like scenarios with their

interventionalist tactics (Richardson, 2010). Approaching the normative behavior of specific

spaces and their public location, Improv Everywhere applies the principles of relational

aesthetics11 (Bourriaud, 2002) to their missions by using these everyday spaces as participatory

art. When Improv Everywhere organized over 200 people to stand frozen for two-minutes in New

11 Relational Aesthetics: a set of artistic practices that take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.

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York City’s Grand Central train station, the piece Frozen Grand Central (2008) created national

headlines (Cibrowski, 2008). The interface of games constitutes game-based art pedagogy by

creating structures defined by chance and circumstance. Employing these known and unknown

systems are forms of engagement in complexity thinking.

Complexity Thinking

SimCity (1989), a video game designed by Will Wright, is based on the premise that

players build and manage a city’s development (Johnson, 2001). By creating multiple variables in

the game (zoning, crime, taxes, natural disasters, etc.), Wright’s SimCity team created a

simulation that shows some of the complex, emergent behavior of the organic growth of a city.

Combining the values and functions of urban planning, architecture, criminology, government,

politics, climatology, sociology, and transportation, SimCity’s multivariate shows that a decision

may appear to be in the best interest for the greater good of a city, yet may also have negative

long-term effects. SimCity approaches city development as a transdisciplinary activity, where the

competing forces of how a city operates and the emergent behavior of its citizens respond to those

decisions, create the environment for the game. To play the game successfully requires complex

thinking, understanding the dynamic models embedded in the game, interacting with each other

to create emergent game scenarios.

Systems theory (or thinking) analyzes the underlying frameworks of a particular interest

or field, such as biology, chemistry, or a computer operating system, and what they might have in

common with another field. For example, the system of the laws of physics might be compared to

and contrasted with the biological process (or system) of human digestion. This theoretical

approach attempts to bridge larger concepts to showcase their commonalities. In a step beyond

systems theory, complexity theory can be defined within the plural: looking concurrently at

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multiple frameworks or systems that underlie a concept. Linked to system dynamics and chaos

theory, complexity theory shows that relationships in systems are non-linear and are difficult to

quantify.

In the game SimCity, the computer makes computations for multiple systems such as

crime, public opinion, population growth, simultaneously and synchronously at speeds our brains

cannot achieve. Yet the computer simulation of the events portrayed cannot be used as an

accurate actualization. The computations of code create ever-changing game objects, flickering

signifiers of what is on the screen, even though the changed states of the game objects are not

seen or visually recognize (Hayles, 1999). Complexity theory allows for multiple pathways for

artistic practice, problematizing understanding in relationship to an ecology, where one decision

may have unknown or seemingly unrelated effects.

Complexity theory, (or complexity thinking), involves transdisciplinary research,

considering an array of theories like constructivism, critical theory, and social theory

simultaneously, rather than exclusively using one (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2008). A

concept of contiguity and interconnectivity rather than synthetic closure designed to include,

combine, and elaborate the insights of any and all relevant domains of inquiry, such as

economics, physics, and biology. Complexity thinking calls for methods that allow for

exploratory approaches outside of any one domain, which are dynamic to situations or needs, and

seek commonalities with other forms of analysis (Sumera & Davis, 2009). For example, instead

of creating discourse to operate in a way that is oppositional to other theories, complexity

thinking applies an emergent model, acknowledging that the disparate positions of the rejection of

objectivity in poststructuralism can coexist with analytic thinking.

Like SimCity, research using complexity thinking intersects multiple theoretical and

disciplinary variables that allows for dynamic and complex systems to emerge and that resist

completion. Complexity theory is a recognition that outliers and undefined patterns and systems

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are part of making the complex systems work. An example of this would be found in medical

science research. Medical science has mapped out the DNA of the human genome, and

understands much about the skeletal, cardiovascular, digestive, respiratory, nervous, muscular,

cellular, and reproductive systems. However, there are many outliers to our understanding of

these systems and much more is being studied about the ways psychological, sociological,

dietary, and environmental systems effect us individually and as a species.

Contemporary artists like Mel Chin, Mark Dion, and Matthew Barney are interested in

how systems inform and interrogate our beliefs, raising questions about our understanding of the

complexity of our world. In works such as the landscape reclamation project Revival Fields

(1990) and the environmental lobbying piece Fundred Dollar Bill Project (2010), Mel Chin

exposes how the impasse between our political and environmental systems, lived experience, and

social mythologies contradict each other in our efforts to be socially responsible. Mark Dion uses

‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods in his work as a way to question the ‘subjective’

(‘irrational’) aspects of life. In Dion’s Neukom Vivarium (2006), a nurse log was permanently

placed in a climate-controlled gallery space. Nurse logs are bio-systems providing nutrients for

seedlings to grow and supports other forms of life. An artifical life support system of light, soil,

and water was built for the log in the gallery space, offering researchers and the general public a

controlled environment to study a phenomenon of the natural world that the technologically

developed world cannot sustain. Matthew Barney created systems of internal logic in The

Cremaster Cycle film series (1991-2002). Drawing from games, mythological, biological, and

other types of systems, Barney's five films are explorations of “compelled behavior,” framing his

universe around the processes of creation. The relationships between objects, ideas, and structures

investigated by these artists described above show how complex systems are ripe for artistic

investigation.

Of course, in games there are no systems that can address all forms of complexity,

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limited by the ability of the algorithms of games and the cultural bias of the systems on which the

games are developed (Galloway, 2007). However, by having students develop models of systems

in their games, they can begin to see how these systems are limited and can be expanded and

changed, recognizing those limitations. In what follows, I explore how the Quest to Learn school

approaches education through game-based pedagogy and how complexity thinking may provide

one theoretical avenue for teaching games.

Quest to Learn identified their curriculum as using a systems-thinking framework that

sees the world as being interconnected, with complex systems of activity (Shute & Torres, in

press). Although in this description Quest to Learn school officials describe interconnected

complex systems as part of their framework, they choose to describe it as a systems-thinking

framework, a more basic approach than complexity thinking. For Quest to Learn, using the

narrower definition of systems thinking may be appropriate because the school must still fulfill

general academic standards through regulated educational goals and normative structures.

However, included in the list of ten core practices of the school–taking on identities, reflecting,

and interacting with others–little is said about the students actively developing empathetic views,

rather emphasizing more practical problem-solving skills (Quest to Learn, 2009a). Making games

as a way to approach understanding complexity, the finite scope of the game creator’s abilities

and what emerges in the game, can reveal how complex and interconnected life is. For example,

in the video game Civilization, the algorithms of the game are programmed in such a way that a

player must use methods of domination quantified and supported by a late-capitalistic society

model to “win” (Galloway, 2006). Layering these algorithmic biases within the interactive game

environment directs players to assume these simulated late-capitalist methods of domination are

legitimate and necessary for societies to thrive. By making games, students can critique and

expose the biases in the source code, developing their capacity to critically read these

programmed texts.

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Complexity Thinking and Art Education

Game-based art pedagogy can be useful to understand complexity thinking in the general

art classroom. Games serve as a model for art making in Gadamer’s book on philosophical

hermeneutics Truth and Method (1960/2005). In his study of interpretation, Gadamer sees the

artist, artwork, and viewer having a “to-and-fro” relationship, asserting that the final outcome of

an artwork or game is unknowable at the beginning of play. Emergent and adaptive like nature,

Gadamer argues that games and artworks must be understood in relationship to the

spectator/viewer. Associating the interpretation of art with the spectatorship in games as

interactive, communicative events, including those watching/looking into the “magic circle.”

Gadamer assumes the viewer is absorbed in the artwork, participating in the subject matter that

the art activates, just as spectators participate in the events of a game. For Gadamer, game

structures free viewers/spectators/participants to respond to artworks and games in ways that fall

outside normative structures and experiences. Complexly, the free play of artistic practice to use

any and all relevant domains of inquiry, works together dynamically with the viewer’s active role

to complete the artwork.

Recently, art educators discuss complexity thinking in relationship to the field of art

education. Juan Carlos Castro used a social networking site as the forum for his studio critiques

as a way to measure the dynamics and qualities of knowing and learning. He found that social

networks developed an evolutionary dialectic that could be traced and observed (Castro, Barney,

& Kalin, 2008).

Sweeny (2008) writes that artists like the group Etoy fought against the corporate

interests of the Internet toy retailer etoy.com by coming together with other art organizations like

®TMark to create the community action work Toywar (1999-2000). Toywar was hacktivist

artwork that included a public relations campaign and denial of service attack on the etoy.com

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website, demonstrating how anti-commercial activism through data-driven artworks can be

emergent and complex. In these studies, the digital networks connecting the artworks with a

participating audience creates the emergent complexity. Davis and Sumara (2008) believe that

such complexity can occur in curriculum development, implementation, and evaluation,

thoughtfully and constantly when asking how, why, who, what, and where questions towards the

value of a curriculum.

I argue that the artworks/games from Dada, Surrealists, Situationists, and Fluxus artists

were exercises in complexity thinking, using game making methods to expose rules and systems

of art and society. Through their games, these artists disrupted artistic and social structures by

challenging conventions, showing how rules and systems define and respond to an individual, and

how individuals can define and respond to those rules and systems through creative practice. As a

result, the games from these artistic movements provide examples to complicate and re-imagine

structures and systems beyond societal norms. In this action research study, I developed,

implemented, and reflected on teaching complex systems through game-based pedagogy in the art

classroom, specifically teaching video game and interface creation as digital art.

For video game theorist McKenzie Wark (2007), video game systems are designed to be

utopian worlds, idealized for the purpose of play, yet when players expose the glitches of a video

game it is observed as a dystopic flaw in the game. However, our daily lives are not as orderly as

the game space. As video game theorists Bogost (2007), Galloway (2006), and Wark (2007) all

state, video game systems fail to cover all aspects of reality, systems overlapp and adapt in ways

that the limited scope of the programmed game cannot do. Through discussion of video game

theories and complexity thinking, students explore how the systems that underlie video games,

social, governmental, and environmental structures require infinite play for understanding the

interconnected nature of reality.

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Stated earlier, a game can be defined as structured play. Game-based art pedagogy finds

itself combining the exploratory openness of play with the structure of games. The dynamic and

homological systems of games such as the environment, participants, and changes in rules, make

complexity thinking evident through games. The purpose of the study is to explore how game-

based art pedagogy using complexity thinking draws from the features of game-like unit

operations (Bogost, 2006), strategies and tactics (de Certeau, 1997), and infinite play (Carse,

1987) to foster a critical aesthetic.

Unit Operations: Code as Text

Ian Bogost describes in his unit operations theory (2006) that computer programs should

be thought of critically, like a text, to be analyzed for the code statements embedded in the

program, and what code statement are left out. Object-oriented programming (OOP), is a form of

programming that uses datafields and methods that interact together to form discrete code as self-

contained data structures (or objects). Object-oriented programming is often used for creating

video games, allowing for flexible and multiple meanings to what a code object can do. As

Bogost writes, an object-oriented programming environment provides game designers a system

that enables and limits their abilities to create game environments. While students would learn

programming through a visual interface, for this study, students focus on four game-unit

operations: move, avoid, release, and contact (MARC). The complexity of what the four

operations encompass can expand or contract based on the intricacy of the system that students

develop.

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These four concepts, when considered as metaphors for options in different types of

systems, provide a basis for connecting video game unit operations to these systems and how

games can be used as artistic metaphors for the systems of everyday lives. For example, the act of

shooting, a trope in video games, can be deconstructed to be understood as releasing or

projecting, which may be interpreted as concepts like projecting your voice, projecting your

views onto someone else, releasing your fears, or releasing your control. These metaphors

provide the basis for producing interactive work with multiple meanings.

Strategies and Tactics

Studying game rules and the structures of games, students explore how a created system

can be easy to play or follow, while other systems may be difficult to navigate. To demonstrate

complexity thinking, game systems are compared to other systems or situations in life such as

school, politics, relationships, cheating, or consuming.

Figure 2-1: MARC

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Game-based pedagogy assumes there are systems of rules for scenarios that people

encounter (standing in line at the bank, crossing the street, having a conversation, personal

appearance, graduating, etc.). These rules provide incentives and deterrents for how a person

responds to social systems. Each scenario is predicated by a person’s current social, economic,

physical, or mental status and other known and unknown factors. The rules of these everyday

scenarios are often determined by social norms (maintaining order within a cue, crossing the

street at the intersection with a green light, maintaining formal personal space, taking turns

speaking, wearing shoes in public, doing assigned homework, coming to school, etc.). However,

rules can be broken or circumvented by individuals (budging in line, crossing the street with the

stoplight, hugging, interrupting, going barefoot, cutting class, etc.), but the deterrents or

consequences, and the value placed on those consequences, may determine if a person decides to

break the rules. Viewing society as having these rules and values were the basis of what de

Certeau meant by discussing strategies and tactics in his book The Practice of Everyday Life

(1997). In this book, de Certeau linked “strategies” with structures and institutions created by

those with power. “Tactics” are the methods individuals use to navigate within the structures

found in society, often influenced by the rules and practices of society, while never wholly

determined. Because an individual’s tactics are not fixed by the strategies implemented by

structures and institutions, tactics are operations in position to question the value of social norms.

The game-based artwork of the Dadaists, Surrealists, Fluxus and Situationists questioned

social norms, by exposing, examining, and critiquing society. This study’s game-based art

pedagogy uses these strategies to question, examine, and critique the rules embedded in social

norms, rules, and systems. The abstracted concepts of move, avoid, release, and contact (MARC),

in this study were used as way to frame scenarios that can have social, philosophical, theoretical,

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political, or psychological implications for students.12 This use of game-based pedagogy can

support tactics that make transgressive, transformative, or fundamental change, or tactics that

promote incremental change, by playing within the known rule set to move on to more desirable

states, or abide by the rules in order to understand how to change them.

Infinite Play

Games are often seen as something less than real, however, the activities in games are

often taken more seriously than things that are real, such as emotional, psychological, or physical

injury, one’s vocation, or legal status. For example, organizations like the Parents Television

Council called for the ban of video games like Grand Theft Auto and first-person shooters for

their violence and sexual content (Oliver, 2009). The Parents Television counsel and other groups

against video games called into question what and how a person plays in a game space, not

questioning whether or not a person separates game space and real space. Yet, the game is used as

a universal term for the mindset of engagement, where some or all of the rules are known, and

other rules are made unique through interpretation by the individual. Games are also seen as

places where mistakes are allowed, and the consequences are understood. Game-based art

pedagogy uses the concept of a game, as a form of structured play, to teach various concepts,

12 Social: Making Friends – move (moving towards a desirable person), avoid (getting away from people not desirable), release (removing friends from social circles), contact (take actions to becoming friends). Philosophical: Aesthetics – move (steer towards aesthetic preference), avoid (steer away from aesthetic pitfalls), release (masking aesthetic mistakes), contact (making aesthetic choices). Theoretical: Semiotics – move (grab signs that have multiple meanings), avoid (strengthening established meanings), release (send signs to the vocabulary pool), contact (combine signs with other signs to create new meanings or remove meanings). Political: Universal Healthcare – move (getting the health bill passed), avoid (losing votes), release (messages to the public promoting the bill), contact (persuade and acquiring votes). Psychological: Anxiety in public speaking – move (give speech in front of the class), avoid (poor inflection, students laughing), release (saying words at the proper time), contact (making eye contact, using inflection).

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systems, and challenges to systems. Even the rules of the classroom, school, or lesson can be

understood through game-based pedagogy, clearly delineating what is out of bounds, acceptable,

incentivized, or rewarded.

In game-based art pedagogy, students play, solve, and find problems based on

observations and feedback they receive. The teacher may propose the structures or rules of the

lesson or project at the beginning of class to begin play. Additional factors that are outside the

classroom or are assumed in the scope of the project, such as a student’s financial, developmental,

or location-specific abilities, may limit what a student may do with the assignment. However,

these constraints are expressed and revealed as needed through the observations and feedback

between members of the class in game-based art pedagogy. For students working in game-based

curriculum, there is a shift from memorizing required content and completing work in prescribed

ways, to playing within the space of the provided assignment and achieving curricular and

personal goals. The infinite play that James Carse (1987) describes, embraces this

problematization of structures and rules, opening up the possibility for surprise and

experimentation. Finite in nature, any curriculum is limited because of the quantified scope of

assignments, and resources available. However, game-based art pedagogy promotes learning

through an infinite process of play, encouraging life-long learning rather than static knowledge.

I argue that infinite play within game-based art pedagogy guides the creation of artworks

as exercises in complexity thinking. Game making methods expose rules and systems of process,

disrupting and questioning conventions. These methods provide opportunities for students to

develop their practice by showing how the rules and systems of art making and other assumed

beliefs defines and affects students personally and through their work. Students recognizing the

infinite loop of play by problematizing the rules and systems of their lives can in return define

and affect the embedded rules and systems with their actions. Learning these concepts of infinite

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play as game-based art pedagogy offers opportunities for students to develop viewpoints that are

empathetic and open-minded.

In the next chapter, I describe the methods, procedures, and types of data I collected in

my action research study. I discuss where I developed, implemented, and reflected on teaching

complex systems through game-based art pedagogy in the art classroom, specifically teaching

video game as contemporary digital art.

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Chapter 3

Research Methodology: Action Research

In this chapter, I discuss the action research methodology and procedures I used in this

study, describing the curricular decisions and changes I made over a four-year period of teaching

games as art curriculum. By describing the history of my curricular decisions and how student

feedback was part of an evolutionary, iterative process, I expose the foundation of my action

research methodology for this study. I outline the framework for the four iterations of the game

course, explaining why an action research methodology supports the curriculum and the data

collected on the making of games rather than using ethnography or arts-based research. Next, I

describe the methods used to select participants and the types of data collected. Finally, I explain

the theoretical framework for data analysis, the narrative structure used in analysis, and how I

used lessons learned in my final reporting procedures.

Games as a Form of Artistic Production

Making games understood as a form of art production were based on the evidence of

games in the history of art supported by the rules-based work of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and

Situationism. Because many art games of earlier eras were made using two different frameworks:

games as an exploration of the art medium, and games as a means to create social change–parts of

the study’s curriculum were designed using both of these objectives to show a variety of ways

games can impact meaning. Our first curricular exercise used the physical space by creating a

game from the surrounding environment, developed from the ideas and examples of Fluxus like

Slow Speed Cycle Contest, Situationists dérive, and contemporary works like Frozen Grand

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Central, Pac-Manhattan (2004) and Cruel 2 B Kind (2006). By introducing the idea that students

can use their current surroundings as game space, it was intended to show that games could be

used to reinvent their environment and create their own meaning.

According to several scholars who are interested in games and education, good teaching

is like game design, providing feedback to the player in a way that motivates a player to keep

playing (Fortugno & Zimmerman, 2005; Gee, 2006; Salen, 2007). Best teaching practices

consider students in the class, what their needs are, and strategies and tactics for providing a good

learning environment that connects the lessons to the students. Game designers consider the

players of their game, what they need to know to play, connecting the game to worthwhile

experiences, supporting the desire to keep playing. Games provide feedback to players by telling

them they have performed actions that give the player positive response, negative response, or

something else. A teacher, looking at a lesson similar to a game, receives and gives feedback to

students ranging from positive to negative, or indications of unanticipated learning.

The curriculum for this study shows game-based art pedagogy by making and playing

games and from the understanding that large, complex games are made of many small games.

Game designer Raph Koster explains that the ability for a player to complete small games builds

the player’s ability to take on larger, more difficult games:

In the classic puzzle game Tetris, the basic game is beating your high score. To beat that game, you have to master the game of forming lines. There’s actually multiple variants there, because you have to learn the games of placing all the different sorts of blocks. And finally, the simplest game is rotating a block, which is just a button and hard to screw up. So games are built out of games. (Koster, 2010, para. 8)

The curriculum was developed with the framework of a game in mind, using a scope and

sequence for the lessons that shows the complexity of game making. In the next section I describe

how I developed the curriculum through an iterative process, a process used by many game

designers when creating a game.

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Prior Game Curriculum

I started teaching video games to students at the Smithsonian Associates Summer Camps

after several years teaching Flash animation to elementary and middle school students. When

Apisak Sindhuphak and I began teaching at the Smithsonian in the summer of 2002, we lowered

the age of entry for the Flash course, increasing the number of classes we taught, and adding new

features to the course, like storyboarding and recording sounds for student animations. Constantly

looking at ways to improve and change the Flash class, and to make learning in general more

interesting, I read about youth in Los Angeles working with artists using Flash to make Tropical

America (2002), a video game about historic atrocities in Latin America (Irish, 2002). As I

continued to follow publications on teaching various digital tools and technology-related news, I

started seeing books (Makar, 2003), college courses (F.I.T., 2005), and summer camps teaching

youth how to make video games (I.D. Tech, 2011). From a non-programmer’s perspective, it

appeared there was increasing evidence that it was possible to teach youth video games with an

artistic intent.

Games as Art Curriculum

In the summer of 2005, I approached the Smithsonian’s summer camp manager, about

teaching video games in addition to teaching Flash animation for the summer of 2006. The

manager was about to approach me with the same idea and we began planning. Knowing the

Smithsonian had very limited funds and budget-level computers using the Microsoft Windows

operating system, I searched for video game creation software within my technological

capabilities and offered students opportunities to make a variety of video games. Because Flash

was already in the Smithsonian classroom, I looked at continuing and expanding the use of Flash

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for the game class. However, because I was not proficient with Flash’s Actionscript coding, or

didn’t know how I would teach a variety of video games with my limited knowledge of

Actionscript, I researched other software options. In this research, I read an article about a

progam called Game Maker used for a high school game development competition in the

Netherlands, with over 200 teams signing up for the competition (Overmars, 2010). The

significant number of teams participating in a video game development competition in a small

country like the Netherlands peaked my interest and I investigated further.

Game Maker Interface

Game Maker is a program developed by University of Utrecht computer science

instructor Mark Overmars. Originally made in 1999 as an animation program called Animo,

Game Maker was retitled and redesigned as a game development program to be used in the

Windows PC environment. In 2001, Overmars overhauled the program, changing the interface,

and increased the stability of the program in Game Maker’s 4.0 release. The software went from

366 downloads in 1999 to 270,000 in 2001. Game Maker continued to be updated by Overmars

until 2007 when he turned the software into the company YoYo Games, where as of 2011, is

being further developed. In 2010, Game Maker was released as a program for the Macintosh

operating system and in 2011, is being devised for mobile game platforms such as Apple’s iOS,

Sony’s PSP, and Google Android.

Game Maker appealed to me as a teaching tool for an art-based classroom because it was

easy to use with the program’s drag and drop features. The program was also inexpensive. When

the study took place in 2010, Game Maker was priced as free for the “lite” edition, and $25 for

the expanded “professional” license (Duncan & Cassius, 2011). Other digital tools with low

technical thresholds were already used in some K-12 art classrooms for creative expression in

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film production (Szekely & Szekely, 2005), and children using Scratch and LEGO Mindstorms

learned programming and robotics (Resnick, 2006). Although I was very interested in games as a

child, I was not an avid gamer, knowledgeable about the latest video games and game systems. At

the time that I researched video game programs to use in class, game companies were already

including level editors in their games, allowing fans of games like Warcraft (1995), Half-Life

(1998), Unreal Tournament (1999), Neverwinter Nights (2002) to modify these games with new

levels and create their own characters. In my research I was operating from a position of self-

discovery, familiar with video games as a player but with little programming knowledge or as an

avid gamer keeping up with the latest advances. I learned more about these video games with

level editors after teaching game development in the summer of 2006.

How Game Maker Works

The Game Maker program interface uses a drag-and-drop method to create code for the

programmable objects of the game. A person using Game Maker places these programmable

objects in a “room,” the space where the player would see the game. Images used for the game

characters can be drawn in Game Maker or imported from other graphic programs like Flash or

Photoshop. In Game Maker, images are called sprites, the visual skin of any object in the game.

Sprites are interchangeable on a game object, switched by simply clicking on a menu. Using the

drag-and-drop interface, objects are programmed to move, create the score, check the room for

other objects, etc. Objects contain the code that determines the game behaviors.

The objects in Game Maker are programmed either by writing code or using the pre-

written code from the drag-and-drop categories of events and actions. Game Maker uses events

and actions in an if-then fashion, with events happening first and actions responding to those

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events. For example, an event would be pressing the left arrow key and an action would be

choosing the left direction to move and the speed at which the object moves left.

Previous Game Curriculum

During the first summer of teaching games in 2006, I only thought about a game

curriculum in relationship to video games. Over time, with more practice, research, speaking with

game developers, and other instructors of game design, the curriculum changed to include

tabletop games and physical games. I continued to experiment with the video game curriculum

trying several different tutorial examples before settling on one introductory model.

In earlier iterations of the game course, students made several video games by completing

game tutorials showing how to make different types of games. However, when students went to

make or modify a game outside of the tutorials, most were not able to apply the knowledge they

took from completing one game and reapplying it into making new games. Unable to see how the

games and actions they had just learned could be applied to the new game they were about to

make. This limited students to following the game examples they saw in the tutorials, repeating

what they had observed rather than exploring new dimensions and concepts.

Regularly, students would ask during the week of the course how to put features like

health bars, gravity, or timed events into their games. Because many students had played

hundreds of hours of video games, they knew these features were possible and were eager to

know how to make them, unable to find the answers without assistance. Other tutorials written for

Game Maker had many of the features the students asked about, but these features were

embedded within the narrative of the tutorials to make specific kinds of games, difficult for

students to extract. Common to many video games, these features could be written as stand-alone

instructions that could be applied to any kind of game.

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The curriculum for the summer of 2009 consisted of making tabletop games and a variety

of video games. The introductory video game tutorial students followed used the same concept of

MARC implemented in 2010. The application of this tutorial has undergone several changes over

the years. First students closely followed the software maker’s example project (Habgood &

Overmars, 2006), using the sprites included with the book. Later the students modified the game

with their own images and ideas. Utilizing the course’s location at the Smithsonian’s Museum of

Natural History, the tutorial was later modified to reflect the relationships between predator and

prey, using the animals in the exhibits to guide the students with their game idea. While these

instructions taught the same concepts of how to make a game using Game Maker, little was done

to explicitly show the different relationships between the video game objects and the complexity

of game systems.

Four Iterations of the Game Curriculum for Action Research Study

Each of the four iterations of the course were taught in extended 4 to 5 hour classes over

the course of a week, totaling between 20-25 contact hours per iteration. On the first day (Table

3.1), the initial lessons were designed to bring the students into the classroom setting with a

game-like environment for learning.

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Table 3-1: Game Study Daily Schedule

Hour MON TUE WED THU FRI

10:00 Students arrive

Students arrive

Students arrive

Students arrive

Students arrive

10-11:00

Introductions, Play physical game, debrief

Continue video game

development 11-

12:00 Play board

games

Play student tabletop games, debrief Film/Outside

camp presentations

Continue video game

development. Playtest other student games

Continue video game

development

12-1:00

LUNCH LUNCH LUNCH LUNCH LUNCH

1-2:00

Play board games, debrief

Develop video game idea, begin video game

tutorial

Continue video game

development

2-4:00

Develop tabletop game

idea, Make tabletop games

Continue video game

development

Continue video game

development

Continue video game

development

Parent Presentations

4-5:00

Teacher debrief

Teacher debrief

Teacher debrief

Teacher debrief

Teacher debrief

Like most first days of classes, the teacher introduces him or herself and explains the

class rules. Previously at the Smithsonian, we went into the museum space for inspiration, touring

the exhibitions for ideas. This year, to keep the class engagement high, the students promptly

played a physical game. This strategy introduced students to the idea of making the physical

landscape of the everyday into a game space like the Situationists proposed, rounding out their

experience with physical, board, and video games. Asked to use language that is descriptive of

the experience, students critiqued the game they just played, framing their experience within a

game design context and how the magic circle of game space can be opened up to everyday life.

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Students continued on the first day by playing several different types of tabletop games,

discussing what makes a game. The conversation included how each kind of game could create

different experiences for players, what types of skills and knowledge people need to have to play

games, and how the features of a game are similar to other systems and structures outside of

games such as school, the legislative process, and social norms. Artists from earlier generations

who produced games about their artistic process and as social statements were to be discussed in

detail, broadening the dialogue of game structures, probability, fairness, and difficulty. Students

were asked to think about game activities that abstracted the player’s agency like rolling dice to

determine how far a player can move, or retrieve game items. Following discussion, students

prototyped their own tabletop games.

The first game design challenge was to make a tabletop game using the materials

provided in class. Like professional game design, making tabletop games are integral to

developing a video game, exposing what is required for a game to work and what information a

player needs for the game to be successful including replayability, difficulty, and challenges

(Fullerton, Swain, & Hoffman, 2008). Due to the time constraints of the course, tabletop games

were made and played by the other students in only a few hours. The making and playing of all

the student-made games involved the remainder of the first day of the course, spilling into day

two. Having the other students and instructors play the games offered an opportunity for the

students to see how their work engaged others and provided experience to understand their peers’

game development process. The tabletop game assignment was designed to move students from

the role of player/participant where they learn how to critique the physical game and commercial

board games they played. From these experiences students moved to playing, critiquing, and

making their own tabletop games and finally playing, critiquing, and learning the technical skills

needed for the video games they made on the second day.

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Through the earlier discussion of how the games support replayability, challenges, and

difficulty, the students prepared to make video games. The video game students initially learned

through the tutorial requires them to have basic computer skills. It was necessary for students to

understand how to use a graphic user interface (GUI) common to most personal computers, how

to open and import files, and use a program with drag-and-drop features. By making video games

through the concept of the four functions—move, avoid, release, and contact (MARC)—students

learned how their ideas could be represented in the game using these conceptual functions.

MARC acted as a constraint and focal point for the students’ ideas. Having them frame their ideas

around MARC, the students decided what their video game was about, the characters they were

using, the characters’ abilities, game sounds, and the game environment.

Starting the video game development process by generating student ideas with a MARC

framework and tutorial as constraints was a strategy designed to individualize the game

assignment. This minimized the range of potential problems students could face learning a new

software interface and programming concepts, while still creating functional games with flexible

visual and programmatic styles. The tutorial (Appendix B) was modified from the software

makers to include the language of move, avoid, release, and contact as objects that are put in the

game.

Students developed their game ideas by drawing their own characters in Game Maker and

placing them in the game environment using the tutorial instructions. When students finished the

tutorial portion of the assignment, which typically only took a few hours, a working game was

completed that contained move, avoid, contact, and release components. Students would modify

their games, using game cards that included new elements in their games with programmed

objects like gravity, portals, power-ups, energy, timers, artificial intelligence, etc. (Appendix C).

These cards were modeled after cards that students might collect or play such as baseball cards,

Pokémon, or Magic: The Gathering. MIT’s Scratch Cards (Resnick, et al., 2007) were an

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inspirational source, showing how to make discreet unit operations for the Scratch programming

language. The cards I designed were color-coded, working as individual unit operations,

independent of other cards. Students could choose between any of the cards, using as few or

many as they desired, allowing for self-directed learning.13 The game card component was

designed to let students who moved through the game tutorial quickly, to continue building on

their knowledge and expertise, providing relevant content for the course and the game creation

process. During the remaining three days of the course, students played each other’s video games,

critiqued their work, and offered suggestions to adjust the difficulty of the games, make more

levels, or change other parts of the gameplay. Finally, the students had the option to continue

building on their initial games or to create new games before showcasing their work at the end of

the week to their parents and friends.

Because the course was taught as a camp, it was formatted to take up to 25 hours of class

time with no additional requirements outside of class. However, many assignments could have

been shortened or done outside of class as homework. While other studies used games to improve

math or literacy skills (Kafai, 1995; Robertson & Good, 2004), my dissertation research brought

video games into the art classroom as a form of creative media. In my action research, I argue that

this curriculum expands art education to include video games as art making, exposing students to

thinking of systems and complexity. The aim of action research in education is to improve

learning with social intent. In the next section, I describe how I attempted to broaden the scope of

knowledge within the art education and game studies communities with my action research.

13 A process in which students take the initiative to determine their learning needs, make learning goals, identify resources for learning, choose and implement learning strategies, and evaluate learning outcomes. The role of the instructor shifts from being in front of the classroom to facilitating and guiding.

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Action Research with Qualitative Data

This study uses an action research methodology to examine the use of game-based art

pedagogy to teach concepts and methods of game development to four classes of students, ages 8-

13, each class running approximately five hours a day, for five days. In my analysis, I consider

the history of how I developed the curriculum and what adjustments were made to my teaching

during and after the course. Action research is a reflective process of progressive problem

solving, rejecting the boundaries between knowledge generation and the process of teaching

(Noffke, 2009). Action research differs from ethnography, which is an interpretation of the social

world without direct researcher involvement to invoke change. In my action research I asked

questions of the student and teacher study participants about the effectiveness of the curriculum,

what parts of the curriculum were understood, and what could be changed, and then implemented

change.

By investigating the viability of teaching video games within an art education setting, I

performed an empirical experiment like those found in a lab (Reason & Torbert, 2001). To

generate this living educational theory (McNiff & Whitehead, 2006), I generated action plans,

acted on and gathered data, evaluated, and modified my actions based on what I observed, heard,

and thought (Keifer-Boyd, forthcoming). Action research moves beyond reflective knowledge of

outside experts to an active form of theorizing, data collection, and inquiry as an emergent

structure. As an action researcher, I recognize that my positions may influence my class and

research, yet I do not expect this research to create a definitive answer to the making of games or

the understanding of complexity in art education (McNiff & Whitehead, 2006). Like other action

research that has personal, professional, and political components (Lewis, Perry, & Friedkin,

2009), I seek to improve my knowledge and effectiveness as a teacher, engage collaboratively in

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knowledge and theoretical understanding with the other game instructors, and support changes to

the goals and culture of art education and game studies instruction.

As Denzin advocates in his book The Qualitative Manifesto (2010), I approached my

research as a bricoleur, reading across theoretical, methodological, and ethical positions to use

what works and eliminate what doesn’t. Based on my observations and assumptions in this action

research, I responded to the cultural context of the participants with their interest in video games,

exploring how teaching the artistic production of video games, like teaching painting or sculpture,

through game-based art pedagogy may engage participants in complexity thinking.

Arts-based research is a methodology that can take on many forms. Studio focused, arts-

based research draws connections between artistic practice and research through three primary

methods: a body of artwork as a data set; works of art as examples of data points; and the creation

of works as theoretical statements. While I argue the student games from this study are

explorations of art making, and the curricular processes I undertook as a researcher can be viewed

as creative works, the focus of this study is on developing teaching approaches for a game-based

art pedagogy in which students discern complexity theory that impacts their everyday life. While

I believe action research and arts-based research can go hand in hand, this study focused on

teaching interventions in an art education context. My reflections for the study offer a lived

experience of education that could be used by others, seeing the impact of each intervention in the

four iterations of emerging game-based art pedagogy. The observation of these interventions

develops an understanding of the relationship of contemporary theory in game operations with

social, political, biological, and environmental systems.

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Role of the Researcher

As a form of action research, this study implements particular game-based activities like

game design, play-testing, and redesign. As one of the course instructors and action researcher, I

provide instruction on games as systems, introducing ideas of complexity theory in the form of

systems, how making games informs students about complex systems. I also reflected on changes

in my teaching, the classroom structure, and the classroom values. These reflections were

supplemented by daily interviews with the other course instructors.

The curriculum exposed the class to a number of systems as they are currently seen or

articulated (i.e., the Information Sciences and Technology building/Museum of Natural History,

Galaga-styled video games). The study's artistic component explores the complexity of these

systems by playfully creating new ways to interface with these systems and to give them new

meaning in the form of games (public space as gamespace, tabletop games as systems, game

actions as move/avoid/release/contact). Students received technical instruction on how to make a

video game, learning from examples of ways that a game can be individualized, and how game

interfaces can be created.

I asked for feedback from the students in formal assessment surveys at the beginning and

end of the course (Appendix D), using a Web survey with multiple choice and short answer

questions to ask students about their knowledge, comfort, and motivation to use technology, and

their opinions about utilizing technology for creative purposes. Additional data was gathered

through class discussion and journal entries over what students learned and experienced over the

length of the courses. Tabletop games were photographed and video games were saved daily as

artifacts to enable improved instruction on complexity theory and game-based art pedagogy

(McNiff & Whitehead, 2006). Over the six weeks that the course was taught, data was collected

from students in the classes that the principal investigator taught in weeks one, two, three, and

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five (Table 3-2). The instructors were involved in the study at different lengths of times, yet

interview data from the instructors was collected from all seven of the courses. Interviews with

the instructors provide an array of experiences with the curriculum. The study uses seven

instructors, including myself, the Principal Investigator.

As Principal Investigator, I interviewed all of the instructors for their role in the study.

Each of the instructors began the study with qualifications that are desirable for teaching the

course. Four of the teachers were undergraduates with experience making games as students of

game design, but new to teaching. The fifth instructor, a new media instructor, had experience

making games, being a student and teacher of game design in graduate school, but had never

taught youth. The sixth instructor, an art education instructor, had experience teaching youth and

college students, but no experience making games. As Principal Investigator, I provided the

curriculum and an orientation for all of the instructors before they taught the courses. In the first

week of the study, I furnished the curriculum for two sections of the course. One section was lead

by myself and two undergraduates, Maddie and Aaron, while the new media instructor and two

undergraduates, Ron and Chuck, taught the other section. The new media instructor led

instruction for his section the first week of the study and two weeks at the Smithsonian, and was

Table 3-2: Game Study Teaching Schedule

Games for Girls

Smithsonian Week One

Smithsonian Week Two

Smithsonian Week Three

Smithsonian Week Four

Smithsonian Week Five

• Principal Investigator

• Two undergraduate instructors

• (Maddie & Aaron)

• Principal Investigator

• New Media Instructor

• Principal Investigator

• New Media Instructor

• New Media Instructor

• Art Education Instructor

• New Media Instructor/ Principal Investigator

• Art Education Instructor

• Principal Investigator

• Art Education Instructor

• New Media Instructor

• Two undergraduate instructors

(Ron & Chuck)

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also co-instructor with myself for two additional weeks at the Smithsonian. The art education

instructor began his experience teaching game development with the new media instructor, and

finished with me. At the end of each day, all the instructors met to talk about the student

accomplishments for the day and adjustments that should be made for the following day and

future iterations of the curriculum. In those discussions with instructors, specific observations of

students were vocalized as well as general observations and assumptions of teaching, student

knowledge, and behavior, which I folded back to the curriculum.

Research Assessment/Data Sets for Analysis

Through this qualitative study I collected several types of information: the student games

gathered daily showing the stages of development as works of art, student explanations of their

games (written and verbal), teacher interviews, student interviews, parent interviews, course

assessments, and survey analysis.

The surveys consisted of Likert-scale questions about the students’ experience with

technology, and using computers for artistic creation to contextualize their knowledge before and

after the course (Appendix D). These surveys were also used to gauge the level of success the

course had in boosting the students’ confidence in technology, their desire to make games, and

their understanding of the course content.

Additional survey questions asked students (in short answer form) about their

understanding of systems. From the classroom experiences in complexity thinking and game-

based art pedagogy, I observed students’ dialogue of their game characteristics and structures,

and how students exhibited complexity thinking from their tabletop and video games that utilize

the four functions of MARC. My observations, survey data, and interviews with parents and co-

teachers provided feedback to iteratively develop the curriculum for future recommendations.

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Selection of Research Participants

Participants were selected based on their geographical proximity to where the studies

took place, recruited from the school age children enrolled in the game courses. For this study, I

used a mixed methods approach of quantitative survey evaluations and qualitative observations,

interviews, and studied the student-created games as artifacts of a game-based pedagogy in an art

course. Students provided survey information at the beginning of the study, answering questions

related to their knowledge and assumptions about games, game design, art, and digital media.

Similar survey questions were given at the end of the study to observe changes in their answers.

Artifacts of the board, physical, and digital games were collected as examples of how students

interpreted the assignments and constraints placed upon them. Student data was collected for four

weeks where I had access as a teacher to students for the full week. The teachers gave descriptive

accounts of the games and students in interviews from all seven of the classes.

Data Recording Procedures

On-line computer-based surveys were conducted using SurveyMonkey (2009), which

tabulates answers automatically. The board and physical games were photographed and journals

were photocopied. Copies of the student made video games were saved twice a day as evidence

of the individual’s progress in the course. Course instructors were interviewed daily at the end of

the day to assess where the class was as a whole and individually. The instructors also assessed

the curriculum and discussed approaches for changes the next day and for the upcoming iterations

of the course. A sample of students and parents were randomly selected for telephone interviews

three months after the course ended to see what impact, if any, the course had. All of these

interviews were transcribed for data analysis.

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Data Analysis Strategies

Surveys were tabulated and averaged on a question-by-question and weekly basis. I

evaluated responses to questions asked at different stages of the course in relationship to the same

question posed to other classes. After receiving instruction and discussion, the students’ video

games were analyzed to see what creative decisions students made to their games, and how

students understood the lessons in the course. Interviews provide a corpus of language and ideas

of how the students developed and understood their games and the teachers understood the

curriculum through my guiding them to reflect in conversation with me.

Complexity thinking was used to frame how students understood their games and

reflections on the concept of MARC, the making of games, how students understood systems and

complexity, and how game structures provided insight to their daily lives. The data was

triangulated between the survey data, interviews with students, teachers, and parents, the evidence

of game artifacts, and personal reflection to check for validity and to provide further

recommendations.

Strategies for Validating Findings

Three months after the curriculum implementation, I interviewed a sample of students

and parents from the study to see if the students had continued to see the ideas and methods of

game-based art pedagogy and complexity thinking in their daily lives. I also ask follow-up

questions to see if, how, and why students continued to engage with digital art and video games

(Appendix E). Triangulation of data from the student surveys and interviews with students and

parents, the interviews with teachers, and the games the students made, produced findings

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grounded in the data concerning the instruction and the course content related to games, art, and

complexity thinking.

Anticipated Ethical Issues

The study anticipated ethical considerations through Penn State’s and the Smithsonian’s

Office of Research’s Institutional Review Boards (IRB). These organizations reviewed the

protocol for the study making changes and recommendations before granting approval. All

students in the four sections of the course that I taught were informed of the study verbally and

through a written letter. There were no anticipated ethical issues, however no student was

required to be a part of the study. However, because the participants were minors, ages 8-13,

students and parents that agreed to take part in the study were required to sign consent forms for

permission to have data collected, photographed/videotaped, and interviewed (See Appendix F

for an example of the recruitment form used in the study.)

Narrative Structure

A daily log of activities of the study provided data for a narrative about this particular

game-based art pedagogy. Using strategies of autoethnography of how I reached this point in my

research process, educational background, and interests served as a prologue to foreshadow

choice of topic, theoretical frame, and methodology, to reflect on in analysis.

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Presentation of Final Report

The final analysis includes the “lessons learned” from the action research. I begin with

my research questions of how producing games within an art curriculum can promote complexity

thinking. I conclude with a summary of my findings as well as a discussion of suggestions for

future study. In the next chapter, I examine the research data gathered from game instructors to

reveal the ways in which the curriculum may have facilitated understandings of games as art,

game pedagogy, and complexity thinking.

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Chapter 4

Research Findings: Game-based Art Pedagogy in Action

To adequately answer my research questions–how do students and teachers interpret and

respond to game-based pedagogy, how do students use and understand MARC in their games,

and how does making games inform an understanding of complexity–I first explain how I

developed a game curriculum using physical, tabletop, and video games to discover how game-

based pedagogy provides an opportunity to understand complexity for the students to use in

playing, exploring, and making their own games. Next, I describe how and why the curriculum

was revised in each of the four iterations of the course. Finally, I analyzed the research data

gathered from 10 student research participants and 6 instructor research participants to reveal the

ways in which game-based art pedagogy facilitated students’ understanding of complexity and

their ability to make games.

Game Curriculum: Physical Spaces of Embodied Learning

Planning the Physical Space as Curriculum

Video games, tabletop games, and physical games that occupy the magic circle of a gym

or field are the areas that are identified most as game spaces. While students came to the course

interested primarily in video games, I wanted to show the relationship between all kinds of

games. While many video games use fantastical characters like aliens and fairies, the characters,

actions, and spaces of those video games can be translated to tabletop and physical games. To

show how games can be about everyday life, I decided to use the physical space of the courses as

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game space. In the spring 2010, for the first time, the game curriculum that I developed over five

years was given to another class to teach, and I would not be able to observe or supervise directly.

A few days prior to the first day of the course at Penn State, I described to the co-teachers of both

game classes, my experiences in what to expect the week to be like and described the curricular

structure. The two Penn State classes agreed to play the physical game together after class

introductions in our separate rooms. Following opening introductions, students in my classroom

began the course by playing a physical game.

Basing the physical games on the environments of the course facilities of the Information

Sciences & Technology (IST) building at Penn State, the physical game was a new component to

the earlier game curriculum I had developed over the past five years. Using relational aesthetics

(Bourriaud, 1998) and psychogeography concepts (Debord, 1955/2006a), the spaces and places of

the courses were reconceptualized as game spaces, taking into account the unique characteristics

of the environments and structuring them as opportunities for play. The IST building’s

architecture includes a glass bridge that spans over a highway with a walkway that connects the

two sides of campus. The course was sponsored by the Information Sciences & Technology

program, where part of the purpose of the course at Penn State was to engage girls to be creative

and play with technology, something that I believed was implicit in the courses I taught in

previous summers at the Smithsonian.

I knew from earlier research that it was possible to make games using Global Positioning

System (GPS) and mobile phone technology (Patton & Sweeny, 2009). Games like Pac-

Manhattan (2004) use the grid of the streets of Manhattan as the structure for a human version of

the video game Pac-Man (1980), communicating through mobile phones between the “Ghosts”

and “Pac-Man” (Lanz, 2006). These works have spurred other games to be developed, using what

have become ubiquitous technologies like GPS and digital cameras, as a way to explore urban

spaces and create game-like scenarios anywhere (Stein, 2006).

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Because of my affiliation with a new initiative at Penn State called Studiolab, the

students in the Penn State course were fortunate to be equipped with mobile smart phones, one

for every four students in the two sections of the game class, 50 students total. Although the

mobile phones had the capacity for calling and using the Internet, the budget did not include the

use of cellular networks. Although I wanted to use the technologies inside a mobile phone that

did not require a cellular network, I did not expect my students to have their own phones. All of

the mobile phones were equipped with built-in cameras so I began work on developing a game

that would be engaging as team play, requiring a limited amount of technological knowledge

amongst student group members. In my research on locative gaming, I found a mobile game

platform that used 2-D barcodes (Rezab, 2009). Unlike more recognizable 1-D barcodes, parallel

lines printed in a linear direction providing product information, 2-D barcodes show patterns in 2-

dimensions, capable of holding more data. When the image of a 2-D barcode is translated, text,

Web pages, or phone numbers are revealed to the user (Figure 4-1).

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Physical Space in Action: Week One

As in a scavenger hunt, teams of students received mobile phones with 2-D barcode

reading software, revealing information to the whereabouts of the four undergraduate instructors

Figure 4-1: Q-R Code for Penn State game

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in the IST building. The messages I created were written as clues to where the teachers were

hiding, encoded into the 2-D barcodes using a Web-based barcode generator, printed onto

standard letter paper, and posted around the IST building. As the student teams took pictures of

the barcodes with the mobile phone cameras, the phones’ free barcode reading software translated

the barcode back into the text clues (Figure 4.2). Because the mobile phones we used did not have

a voice or data connection, the 2-D bar codes were designed to create a text message localized to

the phone itself, displaying the clue. When the students found the instructors, they were to take

the instructor’s photo with their smart phone.

The curricular result presented a situation where students could freely roam the public

areas of the three-story IST building, exploring the space, while maintaining their attention on

specific dimensions of their surroundings. I employed an additional game mechanic to make the

game more dynamic, which I derived from the game Cruel 2 B Kind (McGonigal & Bogost,

2006). In Cruel 2 B Kind and our game, teams could add other members to their group by

challenging other teams to a paper-scissors-rock style stand-off. The hierarchy of paper-scissors-

Figure 4-2: Students at Penn State course Using QR codes

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rock (paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors, scissors cuts paper) was replaced with different

niceties (serenade surpasses compliment, compliment personalizes cheer, cheer blasts serenade).

When the first team found all of the instructors, took photos of them, and returned to the

classroom, the lead instructors awarded the team with a bag of candy as a sweeter nicety,

overriding other compliments of the paper-scissors-rock game component. Finding the bag of

candy was an incentive to complete the scavenger hunt portion of the game. Moreover, the candy

treat was conceptualized as a cooperative gesture of sharing in the game rather than an adversarial

claim or competitive reward of hoarding or self-indulgence. To become the winning team, the

other teams needed to be given candy and become part of the team holding the candy. Thus, when

one team included all of the players, everyone was a winner. This game encouraged niceness and

generosity as the motivating outcome of the game.

Physical Space in Reflection: Analysis of the First Physical Game

After the game was over, I asked the students in my classroom what they thought of the

physical game they just played. Although the 2-D barcodes were tested with the mobile phones’

software prior to playing the game, many phones could not accurately read the barcodes during

play. It was not until the game was almost over that I realized the plastic film prepackaged on the

mobile phones’ camera lenses were still on most of the phones, causing some of the problems the

students experienced. Some students wanted the game instructions attached to the phones, and

given more explicit directions to the game rules. Others thought the IST building was too big of a

game space, yet they enjoyed having the freedom to use the elevator, being able to run around,

and be physically active as part of the gameplay. Rather than trying to be the first team to find the

candy, some students used the strategy of joining the team with the candy to get a sweet right

away. The students’ answers in class and in their journals indicated that the building as a space

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for playfulness was a welcome activity and one that altered their perception of what could be a

game space.

Teachers’ Reflection/Analysis

At the end of class everyday the teachers would sit down and reflect on the course. These

reflections would begin with what had happened that day, what could be improved, and how to

move forward the next day and for future courses. The next section discusses some of the

reflected statements from the first day from the six teachers with whom I worked.

While the instructors were familiar with many contemporary artists using video games,

they were not as familiar with the contemporary physical games Pac-Manhattan and Cruel 2 B

Kind. Because the game combined a scavenger hunt with a form of team tag, the group of 50 girls

did not easily catch on to the fusion of two different game mechanics. However, Ron observed

the multiple mechanics of the physical game provided an opportunity to talk about perceptions of

what games are and what makes a good game:

A few of the girls brought up the idea in the physical game that if it was played to completion, everyone would win. One of the girls said that is boring because nobody would lose and there is no winner. We had an interesting discussion about that concept. I think it was interesting to give them an example of a game where nobody loses, or uses a structure that the students are not used to. Just introducing them to something that is unique or different than what they are used to playing.

Many students thought the game’s candy nicety was a good idea and when asked, came

up with new niceties like bunny ears, hugs, and saying hello. This discussion focused students to

critically think about the nature of play and competition and how one behaves in play.

The girls created their own form of tactics in the game by going up and down the elevator

and hiding out in the bathroom. The new media instructor remarked that he saw students

developed many different tactics for playing the physical game:

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It brought up different ways to play, so you can kind of choose how you won the game. You can win by getting the candy first, or when other groups discovered that someone else already had the candy, they decided to lose to the team with the candy, they were going to win because they were getting candy too.

Like de Certeau’s theory of strategies and tactics, the improvised individual strategies by

the girls show how games can be played with personal rule sets that aren’t determined by the

overall game structure. Although game designers, like painters, may try to create meaning for the

viewer/player, it is through the player or viewer that meaning is determined. Duchamp

(1957/1975) saw that through the viewer’s interpretation of the work, the viewer’s engagement

contributed to the creative act started by an artist. In games, the players’ actions show how

meaning is understood. Although many game critics cite the violence and adult themes of games,

particularly video games (Oliver, 2009), these themes are not always an important part of the

meaning for game players. Game designer and educator Brenda Laurel’s “rant” on the state of

video game development at the Game Developers Conference in 2005 devoted her talk to what

youth focused on when playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (Laurel, 2005):

I talked to 22 little boys in Los Angeles, interviewed them all extensively. All of them wanted to see that game. They were waiting for it to come out. And with only one exception–the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in the revenge or the bad story of crime and punishment, and violence. They weren't even interested in stealing cars. They’re interested in the simulation. They were interested in driving by their house. They were curious. (para. 116)

As in any game, players can choose to make their own reasons to play (to win, get x

amount of rebounds, grow crops, a means to escape poverty, etc.). Although some may argue that

a game designer controls a player, the player ultimately makes choices about how to play.

Through this experience, the students explored the IST building on the Penn State

campus, an unfamiliar and newfound space to many of them. Framing the game within the

concept of MARC, students moved through the IST building, choosing to avoid other teams,

when coming into contact with other teams choosing to join them, or releasing a compliment in

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an attempt to build up their own team. Part of how the game was developed, was giving the

students an awareness of the space of the building by searching for clues and instructors. Because

many games are structured by defining winning as coming in first place, a game was presented to

students designed around the cooperative element of sharing and support. The IST building, as

game space, included three floors with access to elevators and stairs, spanning over a highway

and supporting public and private areas that worked as natural boundaries for play. In this

context, the students were visible interlopers; girls from middle school, wearing uniformly

brightly colored t-shirts, massed together. The girls transformed a small part of the Penn State

campus into a game space with their playful objectives.

In reflection for future iterations, guiding questions about physical games that could be

used for class discussion:

• Is competition necessary for game design?

• Is competition inherent in systems design?

• How does your perception of a space change when you are operating within it as

a game space?

• What examples of systems that worked dynamically were involved during the

barcode game that would indicate elements of complexity theory in action?

• How could your daily activities of getting ready for school be made into a game?

Other routines? How could these routines be affected in a way that would make it

difficult for you to accomplish (physically, mentally, economically, socially, if

you lived somewhere else, etc.)?

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Change in Physical Space: Modifications to the Physical Game Curriculum–the Smithsonian

The remaining three classes comprising the sites of the study, were held in the

Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. With the massive amount of

visitors walking through the Museum of Natural History daily, the museum was not a space

conducive for playing games with rigorous physical movement. However, the exhibition halls

filled with contemporary and extinct animals, gems, and minerals, provided an ample source of

game content. When the courses at the Smithsonian were not in session, I was limited to develop

a physical game because I was unable to travel in advance to the Museum of Natural History in

Washington D.C.. I also had limited expertise with the museum’s natural science content.

Moreover, because the smart phones I used in the first class belonged to Penn State I couldn’t

continue making phone-based games. The program at the Smithsonian extended over a five-week

period, too long of a period to borrow the devices. Because the new media instructor and I were

teaching together at the Smithsonian and discussed the first game played at Penn State, we

redesigned the physical game to be a scavenger hunt using the exhibition material of the Museum

of Natural History for the game content (Appendix E).

Situated with its own particular content in the Museum of Natural History, the new

physical game was formulated as a way to develop an awareness of the ways animals are

classified and described in a museum. Artists like Fred Wilson make work that questions how

museums present and teach the public about their artifacts (Graham, 2007); and museums have

begun to look at ways that their spaces can be more gamelike (McGonigal, 2008).

The physical game at the Smithsonian changed over the remaining three iterations of the

course. In the first version, I designed a scavenger hunt matching game for the 8-10 year old

students, where instructors asked students to find animals that shared specific characteristics. The

characteristics (e.g., invertebrates, color, talons, meat-eating, flies, lives underwater) were given

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to students as a list that each of them carried while exploring the exhibition hall (see Appendix

G). As we moved from the mammal hall, into other halls containing dinosaurs, birds, reptiles, and

ocean life, students wrote down an animal that matched two specific characteristics from the list

they saw in each exhibition. The rules of the game allowed students to use a characteristic from

the list once in each exhibition hall. Some characteristics could be found with only certain

animals, like mammals that lay eggs. While others features, like fur, were more common to a

species or group within an exhibition hall. The game activity showed how the list of

characteristics supported methods of systematizing and identifying animals, scientifically and

culturally. While the idea of playing a game in the museum was interesting to students, the

selective matching approach became too confusing for many of the 8-10 year olds.

The new media instructor and I continued discussing how to make the physical game

more interesting to navigate the space of the museum. For the second week at the Smithsonian we

simplified the game by making it a shorter, more intense game, asking students to write down as

many animals as they could find in an exhibition hall that displayed two specific characteristics

from the list that the instructors chose (i.e., omnivore, larger than a student). This change

concentrated the ways of seeing for students; removing some decision-making complexities for

students to choose which animals would make their list from the limited list of characteristics. As

instructors we concluded even if the game was not exciting for most students, the discussion of

the game and the qualities that made the game appealing, difficult, or boring makes the act of

play a worthwhile experience for critique and reflection.

While I was away for the third week of the Smithsonian class, the new media instructor

and art educator took it upon themselves to change the scavenger hunt to find animals that all

shared three characteristics within a five-minute limit in time. In their recorded conversations, the

instructors stated they saw the game change being more appropriate for this group of older, 11-13

year old students because of their quick deductive abilities. The instructors understood that some

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of the students were critical of the categories used in this new iteration of the game and wanted

different categories for the different types of animals. The new media instructor remarked that

this was the first time anyone suggested different rules for different rooms, making the scavenger

hunt game a series of “mini-games.”

When students were asked about the museum game experience during the course and

three months later, the students gave mixed responses, many saying they never considered the

museum experience as a game environment. Some students liked the experience, some not. Some

students expressed they wanted to go to different exhibition halls in the museum. While the

impact of the game was mixed, students didn’t object to the process of play. The instructors

observation that the class saw the scavenger hunt as a series of mini-games shows that students

could see the exhibition halls as reflecting different kinds of systems, requiring criteria specific to

the animals, environments, or ecosystems.

However, this connection was not yet an explicit part of the facilitated discussion. For

future iterations, questions to lead a discussion about the museum as a game space could include:

• What are ways we categorize animals as scientists? As farmers? As hunters? As

environmentalists? As ecologists? As tourists?

• How does the period when animals lived affect the categories that we define

them by?

• If you picked ten animals (present day or extinct) to start an ecosystem on

another planet, what animals would you choose? What would happen to that

ecosystem?

• If the Museum of Natural History wants to make a game of its collection to draw

in more tourists, what kind of game would you make to bring in people? What

kind of audience do you think would enjoy the game?

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The museum game could have been developed in other ways. For example using it as an

exploration of how museums and exhibited animals are understood, or as an investigation of the

museum space as a site of tourism and education. The museum as game was successful within the

limitations of access, time, and instructional support. Through the use of the museum space and

the scientific classification systems of animals as the game’s structure, students understanding of

the museum as a game improved as it was modified to use more specific animal characteristics as

the game mechanic.

Both physical games at Penn State and the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian

achieved the curricular goal of exploring the space of the everyday as a gamespace. The Penn

State game allowed for more freedom to play within the building and used it openly as a game

space, whereas the Museum of Natural History required that we play within narrow parameters.

These narrow parameters may be more akin to how we might make games in our everyday lives,

the “magic circle” of what are spaces for games may be in our minds, individual game tactics,

rather than universally recognized methods of navigation. Like the group Improv Everywhere, we

came together and agreed to make spaces to be more gamelike, while it may be temporary and be

recognized only by those participating. Games disrupted the conventions of these spaces (e.g.,

sites of tourism, sites of rare collections, sites of classroom learning) and allowed for new ways of

thinking about them, both for the game participants and witnesses, opening up the spaces to have

more complex meanings.

Looking further at the methods of Improv Everywhere and de Certeau’s strategies and

tactics, using games as tactics can be one of the most disruptive to the strategies enforced in the

museum space. How one uses and moves in the museum space is highly constrained by the

planned concentration of valuable artifacts, security, and the stratification of social behavior.

Games offer an ironic structure to address the conventions of appropriate behavior in the serious

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space of museums. Additional work can be done on how we understand, support, challenge, and

disrupt the conventions of public and institutional spaces through the use of games.

Game Curriculum: Tabletop Worlds

Planning and Playing Tabletop Worlds: Penn State

In all four courses of this study, once the physical games were played and critiqued, the

teachers asked the students to play commercial tabletop games, critique them, and make their own

tabletop games. Since introducing tabletop games to the course four years ago, a variety of

commercial games have been chosen over time to show students that tabletop games use different

types of materials and gameplay. Games were chosen based on age appropriate levels and used

different types of gameplay including: strategy games (Checkers and Othello), knowledge-based

games (Boggle), probability (Mastermind), card games (Go Fish and UNO), games of physical

skill (Jenga), and visual games (Set and Scan). Students played each game for a designated period

of time, rotating to the next game until the class had played them all. This activity introduced

students to a lived experience of different kinds of tabletop games and forms of play before

making their own tabletop games.

Some games were more popular than others, and often the students would ask the

instructors to play with them. Students with specific knowledge of a game that no one else knew

how to play were asked to start the game by teaching the rules to other students. Games that none

of the students knew how to play, the instructors demonstrated and moved on to observe.

Because the pace of each game was distinct, taking different lengths of time to play,

students finished games like Mastermind and Jenga before others completed games like UNO or

Othello, while games like Set and Boggle can be played without end. Jenga, a game of building

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and balancing wooden blocks as a column, students would often modify it and played the game

more as a set of building blocks by the time a group’s session was finished. Games like Jenga and

UNO were familiar with almost all of the students, while the games Set and Mastermind were not

as well known to the groups.

Some students familiar with specific games or were skilled players, wanted to stay with

the games they had an affinity towards or in their comfort zone, rather than exploring something

different or new. Yet the new media instructor, observed that sometimes games become popular

after students develop experience playing them:

It was really funny when I brought out Othello. I asked if anyone knew the game. One girl raised her hand begrudgingly and said, “I had to play it, but I hate it” so then she taught someone else how to play and by the end of the day that was the cool game to play.

With Othello, the one player’s prior experience did not determine the overall class experience. In

the context of the class and the peers who played Othello, the whole class valued the game for its

complexity.

Critique of Popular Tabletop Worlds: Evidence of Complexity

When the students finished playing the tabletop games, the class described and critiqued

the games, explaining what characteristics made specific games interesting or not. In these

critiques students used descriptive language of what made the games interesting, fun, difficult, or

boring. The students’ answers varied, showing their individuality to what kind of games they

liked best, voting later on their favorite and least favorite games. For example, UNO, a card game

where the objective is to get rid of all your cards while preventing the other players from getting

rid of theirs, was described by students as being a strategic, flexible game where quick changes in

the game like “reverse” or “wild” cards, alters a player’s strategy. UNO was the favorite games of

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all four of the classes, with very emotional gameplay. Students would get frustrated as players

when they kept drawing cards, wanting to extract revenge on other players who disrupted their

ability to win by receiving “wild: draw four”, “skip”, or “reverse” cards. The easy rules and

combined elements of luck and skill made the dynamic systems of gameplay in UNO a difficult

but enjoyable game for students, without feeling they had much control in the game’s outcome.

Boggle was voted an unpopular game because of the perceived need for a large vocabulary and

word searches as the primary focus. A game that uses a 4 x 4 grid of dice with letters of the

alphabet, words in Boggle are randomly created when a player shakes the dice and falls back on

the grid. Lining up adjacent letters, players discover as many words as they can find in one

minute. The excitement and effort of discovering words was negated when other players also

found the same word, preventing either player from receiving points. One student noticed that

Boggle was different than other vocabulary games like Scrabble because of the game’s timed

component. Checkers, a two player strategy board game, was described by students as being fun

to play when you initially learn, but once you became an experienced player, the limited number

of moves and strategies in Checkers made the game too easy.

The first week of teaching at Penn State, the new media instructor and I worked in

separate sections and later together in the same classroom at the Smithsonian for two weeks.

When I asked the new media instructor what he did differently in his class at Penn State, he stated

his class didn’t talk about physical and tabletop games as much as my section did. Because his

section didn’t connect physical and tabletop games together with the video games, the physical

and tabletop game exercises “felt like a waste of time.”

As students described the tabletop games in my class at Penn State, they explored how

each game worked: observing methods of strategy, the dynamics of the game systems and how

they affected gameplay, the skills and knowledge needed to be a good player, and how the

experience of the games made them feel. These critiques showed how interactive works,

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including games, are accessible for students to engage in and express themselves through their

personal analysis, offering a critical awareness of the systems and elements of the games they

played and how they were understood and approached in their own methods of play. The

embedded complexity, skill, and chance in gameplay factored into how the students responded to

the games. A strategy-based game like Checkers, relies little on chance, but according to the

computational complexity of two-player games, Checkers is not as complex as Chess or Othello

(Eppstein, 2007). For students, Checkers was not as fun as other games because of the limited

number of moves and strategies, a reference to the game’s complexity. Because of this

understanding of how complexity affects the quality of a game, Othello was more popular than

Checkers. The computational complexity involved in playing UNO competitively has not been

solved (Demaine, Demaine, Uehara, Uno, & Uno, 2010). The game’s complex combined

elements of chance and strategy made the game of UNO repeatedly enjoyable to play. Games that

required specific abilities like building and balancing blocks in the game Jenga, matching cards

in the games Set and Scan, or used a type of knowledge base like Boggle, received mixed reviews

because of the skill requirements needed to do well in those games. The systems of the games

Jenga, Set, Scan, and Boggle requires players to have developed tactile, visual, or verbal skills to

perform well, where the importance of player’s decisions and strategy were reduced. Offering a

variety of games with different types of gameplay and skills is important to the continued critique

and analysis of games as part of the game curriculum. Through the analysis of the properties of

these games, and the statements from students showing their preferences, more was revealed

about how complexity is valued as a game quality in the reflective section in this iteration of the

game as art pedagogy.

In reflection for future iterations, guiding questions that could be used for class

discussion to critique the commercial tabletop games and to research further the complexity of the

games and how games functions as a systems:

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• How do the materials of a tabletop game give meaning to a game?

• Where in the game do you use strategy? Where is chance involved in the game?

• If you played these games with an additional component (e.g., dice, pencil and

paper, cards with relevant information to the game) how would that affect the

game?

• How could you add an element of chance to every game? How could you add an

element of strategy? What kind of knowledge do you need to have a strategic

advantage/disadvantage to that game? How would the game be set up to give you

a probability advantage/disadvantage?

Creating Personal Tabletop Worlds

From this critique of popular commercial games, students made their own tabletop

games, fashioning game boards, game pieces, game cards, and rules with large sheets of paper,

dice, blank cards, poker chips, pennies, markers, pencils, scissors, tape, and blocks provided in

class. Students were divided up into groups of two to four people to make their tabletop games,

giving them freedom to the type of game they could create. Before students made their games, the

instructors reviewed the list of rules and materials students needed for clarity of their ideas. With

two hours to make the rules, game pieces, and playtest their games before playing each other’s

games, students wrote critiques of their experiences and discussing the games with the class.

Many students made games that resembled those that currently exist either as commercial

tabletop games or as video games (Figure 4.3).

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Spending the majority of time designing game pieces and game boards, students were

concerned with how the game looked rather than creating complex gameplay. Using tabletop

games that have a familiar format like Monopoly or Candyland, is common practice for

commercial game companies, licensing their games to generate further revenue. Using a familiar

game and game structure limits the need for students to invent a new game system, where the

rules are known and problems with game mechanics are figured out. By creating games with few

dynamic systems, the students directed the players rather than creating a game that the players

make decisions in the game’s outcome.

Figure 4-3: The Game of Swirls

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Reflection/Analysis of Personal Tabletop Worlds: Luck Rather Than Complex

Students ideas for tabletop games varied in content that included references to Hannah

Montana, Greek mythology, Pokemon, and other video games and board games (Figure 4.4).

However, one of the instructors from the other section at Penn State noticed that rather

than requiring strategy or skills, most of the games the students made were luck-based:

One game involved charades, so you could gain an advantage by guessing the charade right, but other than that example, the games the students made were driven by luck. It seems that whenever students talked about the tabletop games, they liked games that weren’t luck. I believe that a majority of the tabletop games they have played and are the easiest to understand quickly, are games of luck. So I think maybe…we [should have] talked about different game structures

Figure 4-4: Super Pac-Man Land

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beforehand, such as a game where you have some decision making as part of the gameplay rather than relying solely on luck.

As stated previous, students preferred playing commercial games with elements of

strategy, following the recommended age guidelines on the game boxes. Recommended by

manufactures for children starting at ages 3-6 (Amazon.com, 2011), games like Sorry, Trouble,

Chutes and Ladders, and Candyland, generally require less skill and strategy to play, while

tabletop games like Scrabble, Othello, Uno, and Clue require strategic, decision-making skills,

are recommended for people ages 6 and up. Having students make games that require decision-

making as an element of the gameplay should be considered in future tabletop game instruction.

The instructor Ron pointed out that students varied in their awareness of making their

games function or to be interesting for others to play:

Many groups didn’t playtest their games or were not looking for problems with their games. The Greek group constantly made changes to their game as they played it, noticing mistakes and flaws in their work.

When the two classes at Penn State got together at the end of the day and discussed how

the day went, the new media instructor said he forgot to tell his class about all of the materials

that were available to the students, so none of the games from his section used cards as part of

their games. In this discussion, several instructors suggested more discussion should be paid to

making games using tabletop conventions such as turns, dice, cards, or spaces on a board. By

playing a variety of tabletop games and discussing how they work, this allowed students to think

about many of the options available to them before setting out on their own.

Change in Tabletop Worlds: The Smithsonian

For the first week of the Smithsonian little was changed with the tabletop component of

the curriculum, using the same commercial games from the classes at Penn State as a way to

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continue critiquing and contextualizing students’ understanding of tabletop games. The new

media instructor found the games from the first week at the Smithsonian less interesting than the

games made by the students from the Penn State course, saying that the girls made games that

used more narrative, creating games that had a more “personal quality” for the player. This

analysis connects to other research findings that girls are drawn to video games like The Sims

because of the narrative approaches to playing and modifying such games (Gee & Hayes, 2010;

Hsiao, 2007). The students at the Smithsonian were also younger (ages 8-10) than the girls at

Penn State (ages 10-13), possibly affecting the new media instructor’s perspective of what the

students would be interested in making.

Because students were told they could use elements from the tabletop games that they

played in the games they would make, many students decided to make modifications and create

hybrid games like “Poker for Kids” and “Jenga Tower Defense” (Figure 4.5).

Figure 4-5: Jenga Tower Defense

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Like the Surrealists and Fluxus artists, students fluidly worked with the material from

commercial games, appropriating the game objects for new ends. Week after week students

appropriated these materials for their tabletop games, finding the commonalities between the

commercial games they played and the games they made. The new media and art education

instructors noted:

New media instructor: What did you think of the board games?

Art education instructor: Depending on their familiarity with some of the games, some were more engaged in those activities than others. But I thought once they got into making their own games, you know the reasoning for having them play the board games was pretty clear. So that made for a nice transition. It was interesting that some used, well actually almost every group used pieces from the board games that we played to make their own games. So it was a nice kind of way to talk about, kind of influence and appropriation and that type of development with games…

New media instructor: Which works nicely because almost all of their games, and as you pointed out, they are using elements from games that they are comfortable playing.

Art education instructor: Yeah, I think that was a good sequencing for that first day.

New media instructor: Do you think it took too long? I really felt that we were going to be done playing the games yesterday.

Art education instructor: Yeah, it may have taken too long, but I don’t think they were–I think some wanted to continue playing.

New media instructor: Yeah, like no one was complaining about doing it. This is also the first week and no one has complained about not starting video games right away.

The new media and art education instructors recognized that the connection of playing,

analyzing, and critiquing tabletop games before students made their own was a valuable

experience, constructing their understanding from the lived experience of playing games to

making them. The new media instructor had no prior experience teaching students in elementary

and middle school before the game course, his reaction to the student wanting to make video

games right away was expected. The two instructors were also talking about students from an

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older age group (11-13 years) than the previous two weeks of the Smithsonian course. These

older students may have understood the interconnections between physical, board, and video

games.

In reflection for future iterations, guiding questions that could be used for class

discussion to critique the student made tabletop games and to research further the complexity of

the games and how games functions as systems:

• What are the different systems in your game?

• What parts of the game does the player have control/agency?

• What parts of the game does the player have to use strategy?

• What parts of the game are based on chance?

• What parts of the game are based on skill?

• Could your game be understood as being related to things you do in everyday

life?

• Could your game show ways to do things different that happen in everyday life?

Posing questions like these as part of the game making and critique process enables students to

think about how the systems of their games function. Questions asking the game creators to

recognize how the players have agency with the use of skills-based, luck-based, and strategic

methods of play in their games.

Because the course curriculum was developed with age and gender differences in mind, it

were sequenced to introduce students to playing and critiquing game systems that were

developmentally and technologically familiar and unfamiliar. First using physical games, then

tabletop games, and last video games. Although all students were expected to have experience

with all three types of these games, the curriculum structure was flexible enough to allow for

students of different maturity levels to use the curricular components independently.

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The language of move, avoid, release, and contact (MARC) developed over the four

years I created this game-based art pedagogy. In this next section, I talk about some of the

choices I made in the video game curriculum; how MARC is a way to provide an open structure

for game creation, how games provide methods for students to think about and understand

complex systems.

Game Curriculum: Video Games as Virtual Worlds

Planning Virtual Worlds

During the development of the curriculum for the video game component of the course, I

felt it was important for students to make games they understood as being game-like, sharing

common unit operations from video games they played. Yet, I used language in the curriculum

that opened up the possibilities for what the games could be. Because students would be creating

their games from their own drawings and imaginations, I didn’t want the games to be prescriptive

as to what kind of characters should be in the games. Designed around the terms of move, avoid,

contact, and release, the tutorials and course content was formulated so that the drag-and-drop

code of Game Maker could create these recognizable unit operations.

The introductory video game tutorial was modified from one written by the Game Maker

developers (Habgood & Overmars, 2006), teaching how to create a player object that could move

in two directions and pressing a button to release an object towards the computer-controlled

objects. Later, students would modify the game on their own, making the player move in four

directions, often giving the player a second release object. On the other side of the screen, the

computer-controlled object moves parallel to the player, releasing two of its own randomly

generated objects towards the player throughout the game. The player must avoid one of the

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objects or the game is over. The second object, also made by the computer, awards points to the

player if she comes into contact with the object. The player’s release object removes the computer

generated avoid object, awarding the player points. However, the game takes away points if the

player’s release object removed the contact object that gives the player points. This kind of game

mechanics forces a player to make decisions on scoring and continuing the game.

In the original tutorial, words like “fire” and “shoot” were used to describe how to make

the game. I replaced these words in the curriculum tutorial (see Appendix B) to include the more

abstract terms of release, avoid, and contact. Language perceived as aggressive could not be taken

out of the context of the tutorial fully; the Game Maker program uses “collision” and “destroy” in

the drag-and-drop code language, necessary to complete the tutorial.

Before the video game can work in Game Maker, the objects created by the student need

to be put in a virtual room created by the software. The room is the space where the player sees

the game. A game may have one room or several rooms, with few limitations to how large a room

can be.

The tutorial was self-paced, allowing for students to take all week to finish this

introductory game or move onto the additional components with properties like health bars,

timers, artificial intelligence, power-up objects, gravity, camera-views, and portals when students

were ready. Like playing a video game, when students finished the first level (the tutorial) they

could choose to continue to make and play at the tutorial level, or move onto the next level to

learn modification for their games. As described in chapter three, these cards were written as

recipes, code objects that allowed students to modify any game by adding these discrete unit

operations, engaging specific game mechanics and systems commonly found in many games

(Appendix C). To keep students on task and to make a working game by the end of the week,

students were introduced to the cards when they completed the tutorial. The unit operations on the

cards were based on game modifications students requested in years prior. Students could choose

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between any of the cards, using as few or many as they desired, allowing for differentiated

instruction. Students could incorporate other types of modifications not written on the cards,

however students needed special assistance from instructors to make the modification, the

instructors would be unavailable to the rest of the class. Students used these cards frequently in

their games. In the four classes of the study, over half of the students’ final games included at

least one of these additional unit operations game cards in their games, increasing in frequency in

the older age groups. The progression with the curriculum’s tutorial and game cards presented

students with the flexibility of what their game could be about and what systems and forms of

complexity students wanted in their games.

Making Virtual Worlds: Producing and Reflecting on Complexity

Using Game Maker’s drawing tools, students created their own characters. In earlier

iterations of teaching the course, students drew their characters on paper, scanning them into the

computer, editing and animating the characters in Flash, and finally moving the characters into

Game Maker for their games. This process of drawing on paper, scanning, and animating in Flash

was one that I used for years in the animation class at the Smithsonian. My section at Penn State

followed the same process, while the new media instructor’s section had the students draw their

characters directly in Game Maker. For the new media instructor’s section, not having students

scan and learn to use the Flash program removed a number of steps in the curriculum process.

The new media instructor’s section moved hours ahead of my section by the end of the second

day because they did not teach the Flash program, importing the drawn images into Game Maker.

The instructors concluded as a group, that the process of students learning Flash as an additional

computer program to develop and animate the game characters, did not enhance the student

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experience of game development enough to offset the added complications of extra time and

resources used.

Students interpreted MARC (move, avoid, release, and contact) in their games with

different character content and styles of games. As a curricular decision, I did not want to limit

the types of content students could use for their games. In the past at the Smithsonian, parents

complained that the content their children made troubled them and requested that the instructors

not allow students to make violent animations or games. Art teachers faced battles in the past

about exposing children to content viewed as violent or sexual (Blumenthal, 2006). Parents and

students must share some of the responsibility of making decisions to what is appropriate for

public consumption. Because teachers are responsible to parents for the stewardship of their

children and to educate them to understand social justice for the greater society, this tension puts

teachers in a position where de Certeau’s concepts of strategies and tactics are on display.

Teachers sometimes use strategies as a figure of authority and power; other times use tactics as a

public servant and school employee. Teachers must navigate what is understood as being

appropriate for the students, parents, community, and the world they live in, while keeping their

own integrity to their teaching practice. Within the concepts of strategies and tactics, the language

of MARC in the game tutorial was kept abstract, allowing for games to take different forms

without promoting the violent tropes of games that some parents feared. Students were reminded

that their families would see their games and to critically think about the messages stated in their

games, creating accountability for students and their game content.

Throughout the class, students showed their personal interests and ideas of what a game

could be. Although no examples used common game themes like zombies, soldiers, and ninjas,

many students chose these tropes for their video games, giving them the opportunity to play with

the visual culture of their surroundings. Students chose to develop video games from their

personal interests and to tell stories. Gem, a 12 year-old girl, interpreted MARC as a dog trying to

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“avoid” being poked with a syringe that was being “released” by a veterinarian. The dog could

release dog biscuits at the syringes to “avoid” them. Gem’s sister, also in the class, made a game

about a fashion model avoiding a crazed designer and her needles.

Some games took personal interests and created games from those interests while others

created games with narratives that told the objectives of how to play the game. One of the most

popular games in my section of the Penn State course was called Ninja Cow. In the Ninja Cow

game, the evil farmer is trying to capture the ninja cow and turn the cow into dinner (Figure 4-6).

The evil farmer releases workers (the avoid object) to capture the ninja cow (the player).

The ninja cow could release milk (the release object) at the workers to avoid being caught. The

Figure 4-6: Ninja Cow

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ninja cow was also trying to save his friend the pig (the contact object). This playful story shows

a view towards animal rights, giving “super powers” to a cow as humans try to turn animals into

food. Milk, a commodity of value that cows produce for people without harming the cow, was

understood as a power that could hold the workers at bay. A parallel can be drawn to the video

games Civilization, SimCity and Diner Dash, where players try to manage the community of their

civilization, city, or diner keeping them happy and functioning attempting a state of infinite play.

Gabbie, a student in the Penn State class, designed a game called iPod Touch vs Robber.

The player’s avatar is an iPod, trying to avoid a virus (the avoid object) released by a robber.

Figure 4-7: iPod Touch vs. Robber

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The iPod can release a 911 number (the release object) at the virus, while also trying to

come into contact with iTunes music (the contact object). These student-made video games are

similar to the kinds of work by Fluxus artists, playfully collaging people, objects, animals, and

concepts in ways that support the narratives for the students’ games. The magic circle of game

space promotes infinite play by combining fantastical possibilities with real-world relationships.

Gabbie showed how a relationship of avoiding has multiple meanings in her game. In Gabbie’s

game, viruses are one kind of relationship that should be avoided with an iPod, one that affects

the digital equipment, changing the way the user can use it. Getting an iPod stolen affects the

user, but has no effect on the abilities of the iPod. The mixing and matching of ideas, objects, and

systems of value, while staying within the parameters of MARC, shows the complexity of how

we operate with relationships in our daily lives.

Over the rest of the week students modified their games to include things like sound,

gravity, health bars, and timers. One item that was quite popular was the “power-up.” The

“power-up” functions as being able to change an object (often the player) when it comes into

contact with something else. Gem used the “power-up” in her game when the dog came into

“contact” with pills. The pills protected the dog, giving the dog extra strength until it came into

“contact” with a syringe, turning the dog back to normal. Gabbie’s iPod game made a battery as a

power-up giving the player an extra life. The power-up object was understood as something that

could dramatically change the game, sending players to the next level, provide invincibility, or

make the game harder for the player. Changing the abilities and relationship between the objects

in the game through the power-up added another variable to the game system, dynamically

changing how the whole system worked.

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Teachers’ Reflection/Analysis

Everyday at the end of class, the teachers would sit down and reflect on the course. These

reflections began with what happened that day, what could be improved, and how to move

forward the next day and for future courses. The next section discusses some of the reflected

statements from the six teachers.

Teachers’ Preconceived Ideas

Other than myself, the five other instructors teaching this course at Penn State and the

Smithsonian had not taught game design to children ages 8-13. At the end of the first day of the

course at Penn State, I asked the four other instructors about their preconceptions of what the

course would be like. The new media instructor, who was also a first-year Assistant Professor of

New Media at a public research university, explained his first impressions:

I hadn’t realized there would be a progression from physical games, to board game, to video games as the basis for the curriculum, which I think it is a really good idea. I also didn’t think that the girls would really like either the board games or the physical games but they actually did.

Although the new media instructor taught video games in a school of visual arts before,

the playing and making of physical and board games was not incorporated as part of his

curriculum. He observed that by creating physical, board, and video games, a progression formed

to understanding different kinds of games and their properties. The new media instructor saw that

the students enthusiastically played the physical and board games. This response surprised him

because the course progressed technologically, not only using video games. Because all of the

Penn State camps promoted teaching the making of digital media, faculty perceived a curriculum

without having a digital focus solely would be outside the accepted scope for students.

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Chuck was an instructor working on an undergraduate degree in computer science (a field

comprised mostly of men) and designed video games in his free time. Chuck had no teaching

experience and was surprised that the class of girls showed interest in board and physical games.

I noticed that some of the students were excited to get into the video game portion since the course is technology focused. Since we were doing physical and board games I wasn’t sure if the students would really get into the non-digital games, because I am assuming they didn’t have any experience with designing games beforehand. So I didn’t think that they would be as excited as they were to do those activities.

Ron, a recent graduate of the Penn State New Media art program and collaborated with

Chuck to make video games, was interested to see how a game design curriculum would work

with a young age group:

I think my ideas of what the course would be like were similar, but I was interested to see what your curriculum was like because I hadn’t taught younger kids game design. I helped my peers in college, which is completely different, but I hadn’t worked with a much younger age before. I guess I didn’t have too many (preconceived ideas).

Instructors Aaron and Maddie, both undergraduates in new media, did not think of the

use of physical and board games as part of the instruction on game creation. Rather, they both

believed the course would focus on the digital tools and the technical information of making a

video game. Maddie, who went to a game course when he was in high school, expressed these

views:

I expected more focus on the computing aspect of games, showing and making video games. But looking at and making board games is a really good introduction to the principles and mechanics of gameplay and that will carry over into all types of games.

Like these instructors, when I first started teaching games I did not think about physical

and tabletop games as being part of the curriculum, knowing that students could learn about the

complexity of making different kinds of video games for months. Yet, as I developed and refined

the curriculum over the years, like these instructors, I learned there are valuable lessons to be

taken from the playing and making of physical and tabletop games, including how the use of

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space, probability, and role of the player affects the quality of the game. Other university game

curriculums and video game companies require tabletop games as prototypes to making video

games (Fullerton, Swain, & Hoffman, 2008).

The instructor Ron was curious to what themes the female students would come up with

for their video games. He clearly had different expectations to what boys and girls would prefer:

I would be more concerned about a class of boys where I think [they] would probably choose army guns and super heroes but I think with girls there will be a wider variety of ideas. They would choose fewer fighting mechanics because… most games they like, [included] Guitar Hero, MarioKart, or Super Smash Brothers.

Ron’s assumptions of gender difference in the preferences of games between boys and

girl was found in national survey data. Studies show that over 90% of girls and boys play video

games, however broadly stated, females were less interested in games rated as “Mature” or

“Adults Only” than boys (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2008). The games Ron cited,

Guitar Hero, MarioKart, and Super Smash Brothers, both genders found popular and support

cooperative and competitive play. The games with explicit violent components like Grand Theft

Auto or Call of Duty are generally more popular with boys, viewed as models of games that boys

would emulate rather than girls. The curricular language of this class was designed to support

multiple themes, using the abstract language of move, avoid, release, and contact to steer clear of

promoting the violent themes found in “Mature” and “Adults Only” video games.

The new media instructor thought that it was important that the language used by

instructors didn’t reinforce these video game tropes:

I think one thing that’s important for having a variety of games is how we talk about them as the course packet describes. Technically, if you look at the tutorial game it is the bad guy shooting these things but if we say your object is to catch something, avoid something, and release something, instead of shooting and firing, that will keep the instruction from being pigeon-holed.

The new media instructor saw the value of how language is used in instruction. As a new

teacher and recent student, the new media instructor personally navigated how presenting

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educational material and how that material is perceived and understood by students. One teaching

strategy Ron suggested for the other instructors to keep the avoid, release, and contact objects

clear, students should write down the objects they were using next to the corresponding term of

avoid, contact, and release. The teachers’ dialogue about what they observed and what worked

was useful for the group of novice teachers.

When the video game assignment was introduced, narratives were not explicitly

discussed. In the middle of the week, instructors asked students to develop an introduction screen

that would tell players how to play and the theme of their games. When the teachers were asked if

the games students made could be classified as art, the teachers expressed mixed feelings that

students tried to create something that had meaning beyond entertainment. The technical

obstacles and the novelty of being able to make games prevailed over creating something that was

unique or thought provoking.

Maddie: Yeah even at the college level, to hand people the tools to make games and then ask them to make art, it is hard, to convince them that they can figure that out. Particularly because, (pointing to the new media instructor) you were around in those game art classes right? Everybody was complaining about the professor is making us do art.

Ron: But I mean like at least all games have some creative input into it like…

New media instructor: Yeah, yeah I think there is an interesting art that is happening almost accidentally or just inadvertently. The idea that someone stole all the light and you have to collect it back…

Maddie: We’ve got at least one statement being made in here with the McDonalds game…

In Maddie’s opinion, creating an interactive work that the viewer/participant is able to

recognize and engage in, and be valued beyond entertainment, is a difficult task. Yet, the same

instructor recognized student work that also conveyed messages that went beyond entertainment.

To define the student games only through the lenses of art and entertainment may not be

appropriate in this educational setting. Students investigated the medium of games, learning a

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number of technical skills, seeing how games can be connected to everyday life, learning, and

applied their own identities and values to their games. A pedagogical strategy that could inspire

and motivate students to make games that critiqued social issues would ask students to imagine

the game as a quest with obstacles, or puzzle that has multiple solutions.

Teachers’ Post-camp Reflection/Assessment

Several of the instructors were amazed that the students managed to finish their video

game projects over the course of the week. The new media instructor noticed that one student lost

the flash memory stick with her game project on it, but she was able to catch up with the class the

next day and move beyond many of her classmates. Overall, by the end of the week students

asked fewer questions and solved problems on their own:

Chuck: It seemed I helped certain students more, not because they didn’t understand as much, but because they were more into making games so they asked more complicated questions. When we were finishing up, I wanted to get to the group that didn’t really ask too many question[s] so we could make sure everything was fine with them. Whenever students would ask something I would ask them to trace back through what they had done and try to find the problem on their own … and … remember how you did everything. And, there were at least … a few times when I would come back to them [and] they said, “Yeah we found the problem,” and they were able to find and fix the problem themselves.

Part of the goal of the course was students being able to look at the game systems they

worked with and fix problems within those systems independently. For this teacher, the students

more engaged in making games asked more complex questions. One student stood out to the

instructors as being particularly interested in the process of making her game, using the strengths

she had and combining them with what she learned in the course, playing with the possibilities of

the medium of games within the limits of her newfound skill set:

Ron: It was cool that she incorporated Greek mythology into her game. She was one of the students that was really into making her game, and would work on it all the time, and really liked making new graphics for her game. She had the

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most interesting levels in terms of aesthetics. She had backgrounds, with lanterns. and things in the background with Griffins, flying in the air that shot little things at you. The boss in the game was Hades, and he was as tall as the screen and you could run underneath him, depending on the background. Hades shot blue orbs out of his face and the player had to shoot lightning up and hit him. There also was some music, so she definitely thought about the details of the game. She definitely was good enough that she could think of other details, and the coding wasn’t too much of a problem for her.

New media instructor: But she also didn’t do anything that was complicated. Like she’s a really good example of what you can do with all these drag and drop objects. You don’t need to be a master programmer or wizard of the game. She’s a perfect example of how you…

Patton: She tried to perfect the skills she had learned?

New media instructor: Exactly…

Ron: She used her previous drawing skills and her interest in what she learned in class.

New media instructor: She was thinking how can I take this basic things I learned and arrange them in really complex ways.

The instructors were asked if they thought the students experienced the course as their

typical school day. They responded students thought reading the tutorial (Appendix B) was

similar to expectations in school, but not the other course components. The instructors noted that

at the end of every day, students would tell the instructors they had fun.

At the end of the course students took flash drives home with copies of their video games

and the Game Maker software, allowing them to continue making games. One instructor noticed

that the students were excited about taking the software home:

I was really happy that all the students wanted the Game Maker software. One of the girl’s parents and grandparents came in late, and asked if she learned to do all of the things she did in one week and would she be able to continue at home. The girl said yes, she learned all of these things in one week and would be taking Game Maker home, making and working on games more, and making new games. So they were really excited about Game Maker.

The instructors believed that the students should work on creating their own characters

rather than downloading pre-made images and sounds from the Internet:

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Ron: I wouldn’t give the students sprites because I would encourage them to make their own. Because once the students see a really well done sprite, they were all going to use it and they’re going to think they [are] not very good.

New media instructor: They are going to feel bad about the sprites they make.

Ron: Yeah, because they’re going to say they not very good at drawing, or even the students that are good at drawing, but not as good as the pre-made sprites. The students will just take the pre-made sprites, then the games all going to look horrible because the games look so much worse whenever there are a mixture of graphics. It just looks so much better if the sprites are all in the same style, even if they are bad. I don’t know, I think the games are pretty cool with the child drawings they made.

Chuck: It makes it more fun for them to see their own drawings.

For these instructors, the student drawings gave the game projects more individual and

personal qualities. The teachers expressed their opinions about how games should have an

aesthetic consistency, noting for them, different styles within the games do not give the projects a

unified look. The instructors were concerned students would compare themselves to artists who

successfully created images for games or popular culture. Concerns about the pressure to create

valued images holding a perceived quality, are found in other studies where peer knowledge and

the ability to teach others how to create popular images (Thompson, 2002).

The Penn State instructors thought students met or exceeded their expectations of what

they were capable of doing in class. The instructors thought some of the students wouldn’t finish

or be able to handle the scope of their projects. Yet all the students completed their game,

understanding that elements like graphics could always be changed at a later date without

diminishing the games they already completed.

By the end of the week the instructors agreed that having physical and tabletop games

were important to the course, giving students the opportunity to see how physical, tabletop, and

video games relate and how video games can be made as tabletop games. As part of the first

course, a tabletop game based on the actions of the video game tutorial was developed and tested

in the days leading up to the course. This game was designed to transition from the tabletop

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games to the video games (Appendix H). The video game was recreated on a checkered board,

with one student playing as the player and one student as the boss. Both players rolled the dice to

move their players and used poker chips to recreate the release, contact, and avoid objects in the

video game. The new media instructor and his co-instructors used the tabletop game and

described its outcome:

New media instructor: It was a good link to say now we’re going to play this basic video game as a board game. Like that was okay…

Chuck: I think that was a really great [idea].

New media instructor: I don’t know, do you think that would have been [inaudible] …

Chuck: I would make a video game into [a] board game, but maybe not that particular example.

Ron: I don’t think the tutorial video game as a board game worked. The chips came too fast. The board game version really wasn’t like the video game. The board game had too many chips and the players moved so slowly because they moved only one square at a time. Because you only get to move your chip on your turn, it takes 20 turns for the chips to even get to the player. By the time that happened the students were bored.

Maddie: As Ron and the rest of the teachers found out, the video game as a board game makes a really good transition into explaining how the computer works. The turns you take in the board game, well a computer is just taking those turns faster, that’s what I like. Then you can actually relate that experience of a board game to the terminology of a video game. A move on the board game is a step in the video game.

The tutorial video game as a tabletop game received a mixed response from the

instructors and the students, but the concepts of how a video game works was embedded in the

play of the tabletop game with the way objects were created and move. After the tabletop game

was used in the initial course, it was not reused, primarily because of the time needed to make

revisions to the game before the remaining courses.

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Systems were not a concept explicitly spoken about in the instruction of the course, yet

when asked if the students learned the concepts of systems as objects interacting, the instructors

believed many students learned what systems were conceptually through the game exercises:

Patton: So what do you think the students believe they learned from this course? So what do you think the students learned, and what do you think the students believe they learned?

New media instructor: I would say most of the students would simply answer I learned how to make a video game, and they are thinking about the drag and drop method they learned in class. I think other students like Nene actually understands how computers think. Saying there are these nuggets of information that are put in the code and the computer checks to see if the action is true then the computer executes the task, or the computer executes another task. Nene had something in her game with 3 “elses” in her code. So in the code it says do this, see if it’s true, and it’s not. Then see if the second attempt is true, if it’s not, then see if the last attempt is true.

Chuck: I helped her with that code, but she fully understood how it was made and corrected it.

New media instructor: With me she wanted something to happen every time you hit a Mario block. You would hit it, but she wanted to make sure a power-up happened but would have three different power-ups.

Patton: Oh nice.

New media instructor: So it was a one-in-three chance for the power-up. There was code saying test a one-in-three chance for the power-up. If the code didn’t work then test a one-in-three chance again. If the second time doesn’t work then test a one in three chance a third time. Nene said sometimes the power-up still didn’t happen after the third attempt. So I explained that the code could say roll a two and the code doesn’t [do anything]. Then the code could roll a two again and it doesn’t [do anything]. The code rolls for a third time and doesn’t roll a two. Nene realized the last roll has to be a roll of one out of one so the code has to be a one-sided dice.

Patton: Right.

New media instructor: So the power-up code always happens if it reaches the third attempt. I know Nene was not the only one that understood this, but I think she understood it at the deepest level. Nene was not the only one that understood computers, which is understanding how systems work, because the code creating the three power-up attempts was a total system right there.

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Nene was able to combine procedural logic of rolling a dice three times, the randomness

of a roll, and how to produce a result that fit within the system of her video game. Through this

example, Nene was able to show an understanding of producing a system with branching

possibilities, and how randomness is something that can develop into patterns.

When asked what the students learned over the week of the course, the new media

instructor believed students now understood how to make objects with interactive properties and

make those interactive objects do something on their own. For the Penn State instructors,

knowing the objects they associate with a game, like the player or other characters, are actually

multiple digital files, not just one object, reveals what is behind the curtain in games:

Ron: I think most people who don’t make games or don’t know how are they’re made, don’t actually think there is a character in the game, but they think that everything is made like a character.

New media instructor: I don’t know if I actually ever thought through the fact that until you were saying it a couple of days ago, that when you start out playing the original Zelda game, you are the character Link and when you go into the cave and you get the sword, you are totally a different Link. I did not add a sword to Link.

Ron: I was thinking about how Nene might have wanted to add a sword to Zelda to make Zelda attack. I was thinking that the students would be surprised to probably find out that you don’t assign an equipment sword to Zelda. You just make it, and you just make a picture of a sword appear in front of the character and if the sword touched a bad guy, then the bad guy dies. So I think before the course the students would think that you needed to assign a sword to Link somehow. Maybe not literally assign a sword to a character, but the idea that the video game characters are constructed in the same way the world is constructed. When really you find out that games are a big façade and you just do whatever tricks you can in your game to thinking that your character is continuously on the screen.

As teachers realized how their conceptions of games changed since they were children, so

did the students. The computer processes in video games abstract our understanding of moving

left as changing the position of a character’s x coordinate rather than moving left in the space we

identify with on the screen. If a game character switches from facing left to facing right, the game

character is also abstracted and reduced, by replacing the image of the left facing character with

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the image of the character facing right in computer code. The physical forms of game characters

we perceive as constant are actually changing, flickering signifiers, constantly updated by the

game program (Hayles, 1999). By making games, students were able to see how move, avoid,

release, and contact were actions that could frame their understanding of how the unit operations

of video game code works. Creating video games gave students an opportunity to understand

complex systems with their personal systems of gameplay, patterns in computer generated

content, combining computer code’s procedural logic that Bogost (2006) describes with chance

operations.

As instructors, we repeatedly assessed the language of MARC, concerned whether

parents would perceive the course as promoting violence and shooting from the students’ game

ideas. We investigated how students understood the course language critically and what forms of

infinite play students pursued with their game ideas. From the discussion of the language of

MARC we talked about changing the language of release, avoid, and contact to positiving,

negativing, and defense; later at the Smithsonian, changing release to create. From these

discussions, it was decided that to encourage a larger variety of games, showing examples that

use the structure of the tutorial game but didn’t visibly suggest shooting or violence, or use a

another tutorial with a different style of gameplay. As part of the discussion to modify the

curriculum for future classes, the instructors recommended that the tutorial include a description

of how to make game elements of different sizes and rewrite some game cards to be easier to use

for future classes, in addition to the recommendation to remove the Flash program as a tool for

character creation and animations.

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Change in Virtual Space: Modifications to the Video Game Curriculum–The Smithsonian

Weeks One and Two

The video game tutorial was designed to have the game objects evolve together, showing

how the actions of one character affect the qualities of other characters. The first two weeks of the

Smithsonian were groups of students younger (8-10 years old) than the group that was at the first

week of camp at Penn State (10-13). The younger Smithsonian students were more apt to try and

finish an individual game object at once, building up all of the features of a character (the release

feature, health bar, power-ups, etc.) then move onto the next character object. For such young,

new game developers, this time off task created difficulties for the instructors. When students

encounter problems having skipped over steps and procedures, their issues become individualized

and compounded in a way that was exhaustive for the instructors to provide efficient and

effective support.

Over the previous four years of teaching the course, I attempted to address these issues

with the development of the tutorial and game cards as a way to mediate the needs for direct

instruction, individualized instruction, and sequenced learning. For the curriculum to work

smoothly, the instructors expect students to be able to work independently at times. Students

created video games by working in teams, however, a Game Maker game can only be edited on

one computer at a time. Instructors observed in multiple course iterations that one student does

the majority of the work in those collaborations using one machine, leaving the other students a

greater opportunity to be off task. To alleviate those problems, an instructor could tell students to

divide the responsibilities of the traditional team of game coder, visual and sound artist, and game

designer between the collaboration so when one student is on the computer working on the game,

the other students are completing other tasks.

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To direct students away from developing a shooting-type release object, I made two

games showing MARC with different characters and objectives, keeping the game format

described in the tutorial. One game, has the player as a surfer, making contact with trophies,

avoiding other surfers who have fallen in the water, and releasing a wave to protect yourself from

fallen surfers but prevent you from getting a trophy (Figure 4-8).

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010 was used for the second game theme. The player is

British Petroleum trying to avoid wildlife, come into contact with oil, and releasing a containment

boom that would collect oil, but would have negative effects to the wildlife (Figure 4-9).

Figure 4-8: Surfer Game using MARC

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These games were shown consecutively as examples to students, to show how the content

and images of the games could be very different, yet used the same tutorial game mechanic.

Bullets and other weapons like rockets and rayguns, declined in appearance after the first week at

the Smithsonian, however the release mechanic, as written in the tutorial, displayed an object

moving towards the avoid object, read by the new media instructor as a projectile weapon in most

cases.

After the end of the second day of class in the first week at the Smithsonian, the new

media instructor and I talked about the variety of games the students were making, frustrated with

the number of games that used the release object as a shooting type device:

New media instructor: maybe instead of release, trying to come up with different words, maybe create is a better one, so there is an object the player must create, because release implies movement afterwards. I thought Santo’s malfunctioning

Figure 4-9: BP Oil Game using MARC

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shield was one of the most interesting in all of these games, laying this trail of shields. So if you were thinking if it was just the idea of you dropped something, you could make a game where you have to collect all of the objects dropped or maybe laying a line of things that you created.

Patton: I think create could work just as well. In one discussion with my (committee) Chair, we talked about these different things and then we were bringing them up in the different real world kind of scenarios and different categories of real world scenarios. So like in a political scenario, a psychological scenario, release seems to make sense in terms of getting rid of a worry but you can also create a happy thought. Sort of the opposite of whatever the removing, that would be. Yeah, it is problematic. I find that contact doesn’t seem to be as problematic as release.

New media instructor: Contact makes sense in a way release does not. Because release then leads to throwing or a projectile which then leads to destroying or destruction. With create you are creating something so it’s the opposite of destruction so maybe it wouldn’t jump as often to bullets.

Because the new media instructor would be primary instructor the following week, he led

the game presentations to the parents at the end of the second week. In our conversations at the

end of the day, he observed that one of the parents noticed many of the video games used

shooting objects. The new media instructor realized that more information about what the class

did earlier in the week discussing the physical games and tabletop games could have been

presented to the parents, but he forgot that portion of the presentation.

From the experience of teaching the students and using the Game Maker program, the

new media instructor was inspired to begin working on a new video game of his own:

New media instructor: I’ve been trying to figure out like how to create more of a mood with a game so that it’s something you want to experience not necessarily play, but it’s something you want to experience that wasn’t heavy handed or felt contrived … so from learning Game Maker I realized that it’s simple to create games so that got me thinking again about it. I don’t actually know when I came up with this idea so I can’t exactly tell you how that happened…

Patton: But it was more of having this opportunity, using Game Maker and teaching Game Maker reignited…

New media instructor: I realized how to use it as a tool, once I got back into making games, then ideas … started coming, or, I guess, thought processes instead of being funneled into a framework of video, or the framework of some other procedural thing I would do. Then I also have the opportunity for games,

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kind of what I’ve been trying to get into, especially since, I’ve never been able to before. Where I’ve not been able to make … a game that was actually worthwhile.

This teaching experience gave the new media instructor the opportunity to learn how to

use Game Maker for video game creation, where before he had used Unity, a more robust 3-D

game program. For the new media instructor, Game Maker was an accessible tool to begin

thinking about games again for creative work.

Parental engagement was more intense the second week. The new media instructor called

attention to the fact that parents in the second week of the Smithsonian classes asked many more

questions about the curriculum and the games the students made than the first week of the course,

describing this observation of parent’s engagement as their “baby critique.” Later in the chapter I

will discuss more about how parents understood the curriculum and what they observed in their

children.

Weeks Three and Four: New Media and Art Education Instructor

For the third and fourth week of camps at the Smithsonian I was out of town leaving the

curriculum and class materials with the new media and art education instructors. At this point, the

new media instructor taught the class three times previously, now taking the lead in the course

instruction. The art education and new media instructors agreed to continue discussing the course

at the end of class each day, recording their conversations for my research. When I returned at the

end of the fourth week of the Smithsonian’s camp, I resumed collecting data from students and

interviewed the art education instructor who finished the summer teaching with me.

As discussed before, the two instructors continued to modify the physical game while I

was away. Before I left, per the new media instructor’s request, the language of “release” was

changed to “create” in the video game tutorial document to reflect our discussion. Below is part

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of the conversation the two instructors had about the change of “release” to “create” in the

tutorial:

New media instructor: What do you think about the games they are making as far as their content?

Art education instructor: Yeah it’s funny. The create concept, I think that was hard for a lot of them to understand what that meant. So when they realized that create meant shoot for their game, then oh, that’s the bullet; that’s the crossbow. So it’s still such a leap to get them to think about the character creating something that affects something else that isn’t affecting them in a negative way. I don’t know if you found that.

New media instructor: I found that when we said create, the first thing people created, the players creating a feeling, or ambiguousness, creating safety for the village, so I think once we got the students to understand that it is creating an object, then they thought, oh a bullet.

Art education instructor: Right.

New media instructor: So yeah, it didn’t work. Maybe having it saying like create an object, so you have to avoid an object, you have to contact an object, and you have to create an object, maybe that will avoid the confusion of creating safety for the villagers ...

Art education instructor: Right, right yeah so it’s all object-based.

New media instructor: … but still provide room for it not being a bullet. Because I think some of them, they didn’t automatically go to a bullet and I don’t know if it is because we used create instead of release, because now there is a car game for the first time. There is also a puzzle game maze.

Art education instructor: Yeah his maze is beautiful, and he made his health bar have artificial intelligence that so it follows the player. I think that it’s not all violent games.

New media instructor: I wonder if this age group is able to think about more than just an opposition of two people shooting each other and maybe that takes more intellectual power, or more processing power in your own brain to come up with different options, to come up with different things.

Art education instructor: Yeah I think they have more games to choose from in their experiences than we did growing up. So I think they have a lot more casual games to draw from, puzzles games, and things like that. But I think when they are given the option to make a game, any game they would want to play, maybe that’s something that we can talk about, who would be the audience of this game? Who is this game best for? So you might to have a challenge for them, saying design a game for your grandfather. Design a game for your two-year-old

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sister, or design a game for someone who lives in China and maybe doesn’t speak English so you can’t use text, or some sort of barriers to universality.

New media instructor: That was something we talked about before when … doing the girls camp. We talked about making games that were aimed at physical handicaps, which is where the whole one button game idea came from.

When the “release” object was renamed “create” for the tutorial, the “create” object still

presented itself as problematically representing a visible object for the player to use. When the

students were introduced the refashioned ideas of MARC as move, avoid, create, and contact, the

students ideas of “create/release” became more abstract, wanting to create feelings and thoughts

for their games. Because the MARC objects were written and understood in the tutorial as having

visible form, not invisible thoughts or emotions, the instructors believed it was a stretch for the

students to create visual representations of these ideas and emotions in their games.

The new media instructor observed that this group of older students, 11-13 years in age,

possibly had more knowledge or experience thinking about games outside of two players

shooting rather than the younger 8-10 year olds in the first two classes at the Smithsonian.

Because the older group made more visible changes and conceptual frameworks for

understanding create in their games than the younger students, the new media instructor

observations supports developmental models of learning (Efland, 2002). These observations are

typical of new teachers, limited by the few experiences of teaching, where evidence of discrete

stages of learning are perceivable. The instructors quickly moved passed discussing students

through a developmental model, to discussing ways to frame game ideas, building on the

knowledge and skills the students learned in the previous few days. From this exchange, it is

evident that the new media instructor and art education instructor could see different ways to

present the curriculum, using some if not all of the same content they were provided, modifying

the curriculum to what they saw were the strengths, weaknesses, and needs of the class and

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offering a number of ways to think empathetically about making games based on an audiences’

needs and abilities.

Weeks Four and Five: Principle Investigator and Art Education Instructor

To draw from his art teaching experience, I asked the art education instructor if the studio

assignment of making games shares qualities with his art classroom.

Patton: So when you were teaching high school or junior high and giving assignments…how would you set up an assignment and how would that be different than making games as an assignment?

Art education instructor: First of all they’d have a kind of an understanding what the general course goals were, and they were all themed. You know, “Photography I” or “Art I,” working with a specific media or specific themes–it was always, in my mind, run sequential, building up towards the development of certain skills or using certain media that rely upon the knowledge of prior media. Being that this [game course] is a week long, there isn’t as much of that. I mean you kind of have to rely upon their own experiences, not only by playing games, but also using the computer. Being familiar with drag-and-drop type of programs, because some immediately respond to that, and some it’s not as engrained in them. It’s such a short time frame that it’s hard to put it into a larger context. You have to take what the students come into the classroom with and build upon it. Whereas in an art class I think that you do that, but it’s more that sequentially building on other skills or other concepts throughout the semester. It is just time, but I think that you could easily take this type of production and put it into that context. We talked about it before, I don’t see why you couldn’t have a curriculum that’s game based, based in game production that fits into the public school. The new media instructor and I talked about where is gaming being taught? We had a discussion, that if gaming is being taught, is it being [taught] in art classrooms; is it being taught in technology ed[ucation] classrooms; is it being taught in computer science classrooms? So you have this three-way relationship where–we talked about it–I think if gaming is taught anywhere, it’s probably not happening in the art classroom, it’s in one of these other spaces, and a lot of that is just institutional, because the computers are in the computer lab. Either there is a common lab, but it’s used mainly by people in technology education, or computer programming, so you just don’t have access in the labs. And then if you make a game, does it even look like it belongs in the art classrooms, but that’s kind of a separate response.

In this discussion the art education instructor saw some value in teaching video games in

the art classroom, however, what could be taught would be limited to the students’ prior

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knowledge of making games and their computer abilities, sequentially building new skills and

knowledge. The art education instructor believed students were sequentially learning skills in the

game course but were limited with the amount of time in the course to learn these skills and

concepts found in art classes. I agree that the number of hours students spent making games

limited what they could accomplish, as a student would when they are learning how to use a

medium with an intense skill set to master, like printmaking, photography, wheel-thrown

ceramics, oil-painting, or wood sculpture while still creating a work for personal expression. Yet

by making video games, students are also learning how to make digital objects interact with each

other in ways that are unique to video games and programmed environments, not usually found in

art classrooms.

The art education instructor also believed that the competing interests of the school,

technology education, and computer science, might have priority to computer labs. The political

and territorial power of the school community is something that art educators always have to

navigate, making their case for when art is not seen as a “core curriculum” course. I argue that by

making games, art educators and the art class can be viewed as a critical authority of digital

media, valuable to a school if students are able to learn how to learn, critique and make digital

content, particularly as part of school reform movements (International Society for Technology in

Education, 2009; The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2004). Because the art education

instructor indicated that there might be games that “belong to the art classroom,” I asked a follow

up question:

Patton: What kind of things do you think would be made in an art classroom versus those other environments?

Art education instructor: When I talk about gaming with my art ed[ucation] students–pre-service teachers–it’s more about making games for students to play, it’s not about having the students make games themselves. So here’s the topic of art history and how do you make a game that it wouldn’t have to be collaborative but–what would a game look like that would incorporate elements of art history and typically it’s a murder mystery, or it is a theft, where some art was stolen and

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you are trying to catch a thief. Typically it uses the museum space as the game space so you are playing in the Met. I think it’s mainly subject matter from my experience but that’s in art ed, that’s not necessarily in art. I think you usually do an art game. Let’s look at what Jackson Pollock did with painting and if you were to take that action painting and translate it into a game space, what would it look like? Would it be taking a Wii and throwing paint on a canvas? How would that look, or would it even make sense? So I think there are various ways you could make that translation, but maybe it’s less about those formal rules and it’s more about the video game as a medium itself.

The art education instructor described that he teaches his pre-service teachers about

making games as a way to teach art history, similar to how games have been written about in the

art education literature, in the form of trivia, scavenger hunts, and matching games (Katter, 1988;

Kurtz, 1974; Osmundson, 2000). Although these methods of teaching history or other factual data

in the form of games has value, using games this way does not express games as an artistic

medium itself, only as a means for teaching. The students from the game course described in the

previous sections of this study, by making games, students learned how to create systems of

interaction and how those systems work, and were able to express themselves through the use of

personal images, issues, and personal interests. If students to pre-service teachers were creating

their own games as a way to learn art history or other subjects, students would be concretizing

their understanding of subjects by constructing representations that it provokes their thinking

about the subjects (Kafai, 1995). I argue that making games creates these deep connections

valuable to students that can be understood and applied with other systems of thinking and

learning.

The art education instructor’s suggestion of making an art game in the manner of a

Jackson Pollock painting implies that the traditional mediums of painting, drawing, or sculpture

could be explored through a video game medium. This position places games as a platform to

present other mediums and history of art’s canon, rather than expanding the ways art can be

created and understood. As described in Chapter 2, games in the history of 20th century art were

used to situate questions around the established conventions and rules of art making and social

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standards. Rather than mimicking established artists and ways of creating through a digital

medium, games playfully can be used to explore new ways of making, establish new mediums,

and mode of creating.

Game Curriculum: Three-month Follow Up

Three months after the courses ended, I contacted families requesting follow-up

interviews with students and parents. Conducting these interviews I was interested in seeing what

stayed with students, seeing if they continued making games, and what impression the course left

with parents. In the next section, I describe several research participants' game making

experiences and analyze how these experiences with game creation may facilitate reflective

learning and their understanding of complex systems.

Student Understanding of Complexity

Gale: Playing with Health and the Everyday

Gale, a 10 year-old girl, interpreted MARC for her game to be about a girl who must

“avoid” the hamburgers and french fries released by Ronald McDonald® (Figure 4-10), and

instead come into “contact” with healthy broccoli.

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If the girl (player) runs into unhealthy food, she physically changes to a overweight

character and moves slower (Figure 4-11), but if she is able to come into “contact” with healthy

food before running into the burgers and fries again, she returns to the thin size and speed and can

continue playing.

Figure 4-10: Gale’s Ronald’s Revenge–Thin player

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When asked about why she chose this subject, Gale responded:

Gale: I came up with the idea because Ronald McDonald is evil and he scares me.

Patton: Do you not like clowns or do you not like Ronald in general?

Gale: He’s just a creepy looking clown. I don’t, I have nothing against other clowns. He just scared me.

Gale’s inspiration for her game was from the documentary film Super Size Me (2004), the

story of the director Morgan Spurlock, who documented his experiment to go on an all

McDonald’s diet, exercising only at levels equal to average U.S. citizens. Over the course of the

Figure 4-11: Gale’s Ronald’s Revenge–Fat player

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month experiment, Spurlock gained 24 pounds, and experienced other physical changes like

raised cholesterol, and heart palpitations. Gale included in her game healthy food to counter the

effects of McDonald’s high calorie food. Gale also used the additional instructions she learned in

class to change objects in the game when they come into contact with other objects. Gale chose to

have the player change depending on what food the player came into contact with, transforming

between the overweight character and the healthy weight character. Gale’s interpretation of

MARC shows how the nutritional value of the food we eat affects our bodies, making us slower

and larger when we eat unhealthy food and more physically fit and able-bodied when we eat

healthy food.

When I interviewed Gale she asked me what I thought made a good game. I said that

what is commonly thought of a good game, particularly a video game, gets increasingly harder as

the player gets better and with more experience. Gale quickly responded that that sounds like

what school is supposed to be like, with different levels getting harder but you “learn how to do it

as you go.” In this context Gale makes the connection from her own game design to school’s

model of academic achievement where both good games and school become more difficult as a

player or student gains expertise. Through this example it is evident Gale noticed how game

environments and learning can be mapped onto each other, similar to Gee’s (2004) view that

situated learning should be the focus of education reform, seeing games as providing a model for

learning with feedback, rewards, and low-stakes failure. Further, Gale came away interested

enough in the experience of making games that she continued making games on her own after the

course was over.

In conducting pre and post-course surveys with students, many left the course with the

desire to make games. In the pre-survey, 11% did not plan to make games and 14% definitely

planned to make games. After the course was over, 2% did not plan to make games, and 40%

definitely planned to make games. Of the sample set of 10 students interviewed three months

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after the course was over, 7 attempted to make games after the course was over, showing that

there was continued interest in making games and using the lessons learned from the course. Gale

made a game for herself, one for her brother, and started working on a game for school:

I started a game for my little brother that was about the movie Cars (2006) because my little brother loves it. Then I started another game called “Little Ball Lost” as a play on the comic “Little Dog Lost”. The game is about a bouncy ball that lost its way out of its owner’s pocket and was trying to get back to it. One of the bosses in the game is a baseball glove and a baseball [IB]. There are coins you have to collect. Actually I just started a game yesterday for my math class because we are learning about a little character called Mugwump in our math book. In my math book there are two kids trying to create a video game, so my class thought it would be cool if we could make a video game so I offered to make it and then people could play it when we’re done with this unit.

Mugwumps are characters used in a mathematics context used to teach about X and Y

coordinates (Lappan, Fey, Fitzgerald, Freil, & Difanis Phillips, 1997). In Game Maker, X and Y

coordinates are used as units of measure to determine where the objects are in the game space, a

necessary component for the game to work. Gale was confident that she would be able to take

what she learned from the game course and apply it to her math class. When asked what her

teacher and classmates thought of this, Gale said the class and teacher were very excited to play

the finished game.

Gina: Making Games from Life

Gina, a 11 year-old girl also from the Penn State course, first thought the course would be

“boring,” just “sitting in front of computers and making projects.” However, after the course was

over she continued making games, changing the visual components of her game rather than

programmable ones.

I pretty much used the same layout as the other games but I imported pictures from my camera so I made games with my pets and stuff … so I could make my pets become bigger and smaller. It was pretty much the same as my game from the course but I have different characters.

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Like Gale, whose game for her brother was based on one of his favorite things, Gina

appears to also be interested in how to incorporate elements from her daily life into her game. As

Bakhtin (1993) writes about how the personal context is part of what determines creative acts, if

students are allowed, the personal experiences and visual culture of students’ daily lives are put

into their creative works. In the case of making video games, students are able to incorporate

what they find personally meaningful and when exposed to concepts or ideas that are imposed

upon them, they can see connections to how games can bring together these ideas.

Many students in the course, mostly males, made games with the computer generating

hundreds of objects per second. The games were made to push the capabilities of the Game

Maker program and computer system, flooding their screens with objects, impossible to contain

or control as a player. Like a hive full of bees that has been disturbed, these screens were covered

in objects that could be of benefit (points) and detriment (enemies) to the player (Figure 4-12).

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A skilled player in these games must quickly determine how to steer to an area outside of

the chaotic confusion. Making games using this approach of testing the limits of the computer

system and its programs is similar to the works My Desktop (2002) and Untitled Game (2002) by

jodi.org, an art collective that explores and questions the nature of digital media by disrupting the

user interfaces of Web browsers and video games, creating mediums that are unreadable. These

student games that test the limits of the program and computer system and jodi.org’s work are

investigations of code, procedural logic, and how quickly the computers perform calculations, no

matter what the calculations.

Figure 4-12: Afroman

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Stewart: Designing Emergent Complexity

Stewart, a 9 year-old boy, created a survival-avoidance game where the player must stay

away from bouncing boxing gloves, constantly being generated by the game program. As the

score goes up with each passing second, the player is able to move freely in four directions, trying

to avoid the boxing gloves generated from the corners of the room, bouncing off the walls and

objects in the room. Because the room was closed off, boxing gloves move in perpetuity,

eventually covering the entire room. As a player, a strategy to get a high score is to position

yourself in a room location that would be least accessible to the bouncing gloves. Through

avoidance, Stewart’s game shows how complex patterns emerge out of randomness of the

constantly moving boxing gloves.

Creating the dynamic flow of the boxing gloves to spread throughout the game space

while allowing for areas of partial protection for the player didn’t occur immediately in the

development of the game. In early versions of the game, boxing gloves appeared to move

randomly covering much of the game space (Figure 4-13).

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However, after a minute or so, the flying boxing gloves would make contact with certain

blocks in the room and begin to bounce off walls in a repetitive pattern forming a concentrated

route. This left much of the room untouched by gloves, making the game too easy and the desire

to play finite. Over the week of the course, Stewart developed incremental changes to his game,

adjusting the architecture of the room and placement of objects so the physics of the game

supported a complex pattern of boxing gloves (Figure 4-14).

Figure 4-13: Stewart’s Game Staying Alive (initially)

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These adjustments in the game space were small and iterative, requiring Stewart to test

his game several times, carefully observing where the flying gloves made contact with the walls

and how the gloves bounced around the room, tracking their movements and where they didn’t

go. The adjustments Stewart made to his game were not designed to affect all of the gloves, but

create emergent disruptions to the patterns of glove movement. By disrupting the system of glove

behaviors, Stewart created a new system complex enough to fill the entire game space. Seeing the

limitations of the glove pattern system in the original game, Stewart understood he needed to

resolve the pattern by disrupting the game space, increasing the randomness of glove interactions

Figure 4-14: Stewart’s Game Staying Alive (adjusted for complexity)

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with the walls by changing the game environment. Stewart’s adjustments show how the game

space is never resolved, where elements of chance and randomness are important components to

making play infinite.

Reflecting on the Use of MARC and New Understandings of Games and Systems

Sawyer: Seeing MARC in Commercial Games

The concept of move, avoid, release, and contact was understood and recontextualized by

several students. Some of the students interviewed connected the procedural rhetoric of MARC in

the games they made in class with the games they were playing at home. Sawyer, a 9 year-old

boy, made the connection the day after the course that he was performing the same MARC

actions in the game Infamous (2009), a video game about a bike messenger who receives super

powers and must decide if he wants to use them for good or evil.

I have a game called Infamous on the PS3. I was playing it right after the last day of the video game course, and I was fighting a bunch of people in the game and I was thinking, you know I’m releasing lightning, and oh yeah, didn’t we talk about that in the video game course? So that day I made a bunch of connections with what we talked about in the video game course.

In this quote Sawyer showed that he took much of what he learned in class and was able

to apply it to the context of the game he was playing at home.

Gabbie: Avoid Found Elsewhere

When asking Gabbie, an 11 year-old girl, if she saw MARC in games or other activities

she was involved in, she described a game on her IPod called Doodle Jump (2009) where the

player tries to move upwards by jumping on higher platforms, but must avoid other characters to

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keep going up. It could be interpreted that Gabbie made the connection that the avoid characters

in the game she created in the course and the non-player characters in Doodle Jump were

programmed with very similar unit operations.

Sam: The Unit Operations of MARC Everywhere

Sam, a 10 year-old saw a connection between his complicated 3-D games and the game

he made in the course:

I have these 3-D video games that are very large complicated worlds, but I still try to figure out how the game works, and if the designers used Game Maker, how to get the game to work … I actually thought once that the world could be like a game because if somebody made it a game and if you touched your desk, or you touch a table, it would need to be solid to move it … But that’s impossible to make a game like that because it would take like a million years.

In this quote, Sam immediately established what he saw as the difference between games

as being simple and complicated, describing the huge worlds of his 3-D games, inferring Sam’s

awareness that games are programmed with different levels of sophistication, and that the games

he plays have many types of objects interacting with each other in complex ways. His statement

of how the player object works and interacts with the other, objects being solid or not, or making

them move, showed an understanding of the coding of the procedural processes of the game

objects’ unit operations. Bringing back his understanding of move, avoid, release, and contact to

the real world, Sam understood that a person would need to create numerous objects and how

they interact with each other and the loops of infinite play that could occur if he could make a

video game out of daily life.

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Gitka: Games in the Play of Everyday Life

Gitka, a 13 year-old girl, saw a relationship between systems in games and the making of

friends. In her description, Gitka explained that when you make friends you have to gain a

person’s trust, learn what they like, and be able to keep secrets. Gitka noticed that the efforts

needed to make a friend are similar to the efforts of playing a game; developing an understanding

of how the game or person operates, what are the behaviors that are acceptable and encouraged or

behaviors that are seen as unfriendly, receiving feedback on your behaviors from the person that

you want to be a friend, and the privileges that come with being a friend (like secrets)–are

comparable to the activities of a game. Similar to Gitka’s ideas about how friends are made,

Sissyfight 2000 (2000), was a turn-based strategy video game looking at the nature of cliques and

the way friendships are formed and destroyed. Commenting on the nature of mean girls and

bullying, in Sissyfight 2000 players take away the self-esteem of others, the winner determined by

the player with self-esteem remaining. While developing relationships is a complex, emotional

project, the behaviors we use can be understood through a game context.

Saddie: School Shares Systems with Games

When Saddie, a 11 year-old girl, was asked if she saw activities in her daily life being

game like she said that by making games she saw a connection to the rules of grammar she was

learning in school. Saddie said that it is important to have elements of grammar in her writing like

nouns and verbs, and the order that words are put in are important to writing a sentence correctly.

Although it is unknown if Saddie would have seen games in the way she describes here without

the conversation of games relating to life, however, from this description Saddie saw a connection

of the systems of written language to matching-type games like Set, Scan, and scavenger hunts.

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Matching games require game elements to have particular properties to match and scavenger

hunts often require items to be found in a certain order just like words in a sentence must follow a

particular structure. Saddie’s understanding of grammar having game-like qualities supports

thinking in analogous ways, seeing systems as being connected and shared. This shared

understanding I would argue opens up a person to develop empathetic viewpoints.

Gina: Recognizing the Complexity of Game Code

Gina also saw different levels of sophistication to the game she made and the games she

plays, recognizing that the game code underneath has many different kinds of objects and

variables such as a range of motion, speed, and trajectory, to support the systems of these more

complicated games:

When I played games before, I didn’t really understand how they worked. But then I thought how many steps you had to include because I didn’t know that you had to set the objects up for each action. When I looked at simple games like what we did, I would think this wouldn’t take us long to make, but it took us a while to make it, and it was pretty cool to see how long it took. So now when I look at different, more complicated games, I try to figure out how long it would take and what kind of things they used in their games. I was playing this one game; a monkey game that you have to throw darts to hit the balloons. So the designers would have to set the range of motion for the dart and like how long you hold the dart is how fast the dart goes, and when it collides with the balloons what happens afterwards. It was cool to actually know how it worked. Before I was kind of like OK, I have no idea how this works but it’s cool.

By learning the MARC operational concepts, Gina understood games in a new way,

seeing below the surface to how some games work, and the relationships involved in making a

game as Fluxus, Situationist, Dadaist, and Surrealist artists did. In this case, Gina was also

describing an engineering problem that looks at trajectory, force, and speed. In the case of game

design, Gina was aware of the physics and math involved but also the user experience and what

the player would need to be given in order for the game to work. Gina recognized that the

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complexity of creating a game varies according to what the needs are of the game to function and

what the player is experiencing.

Gale, Gina, and Spencer: MARC Important to Gameplay

Gale saw MARC as being an important part of the mechanics of gameplay, noting that

the actions in the game are what a player responds to. Gale described how each of these actions

set up how the game works:

MARC was a set of guidelines, because if your game doesn’t have one of those things in MARC, your game is going to be pretty boring. For example, if there is no contact in your game, you wouldn’t really do anything. Say there was something bad in your game and the player came into contact with it but you didn’t create the contact in your game, then nothing could happen to you and then with release it’s the same thing … because in the games we made release is your defense. Move, well, you kind of have to move because if you don’t move the game is either really hard or really easy; and then avoid because if there’s nothing to avoid then there’s really no purpose in the game.

Gale was able to show how MARC supported gameplay that would be interesting for her

and why a designer would desire those elements in a game. Students, like Gale, understood that

the MARC actions work simultaneously, connecting parts of a system to function properly as a

game.

Gina understood MARC from what all of the objects on the screen are doing; the player

as well as objects run by the computer. Deducing that the objects are running simultaneously:

When the course was over, I went home and would talk to my parents about what we were doing and try to explain to them, how you put actions and objects in the game. So I would use actual examples. I would say if I would pick up a pencil then I would be contacting it. Then if you released the pencil, then you are dropping it. If you catch something, that would be contacting it, and all this different stuff … if this was happening in real life and if they were throwing this, then it would be releasing it and if I were catching it, then I would be contacting it.

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As students were able to think about MARC in the games they played, they also thought

about the creation of games differently after the course was over, understanding how the systems

of the games work. Spencer, a 10 year-old boy, didn’t know anything about making video games

before the course. After the course, he was confident he knew the necessary components of

making a video game and how to make one that is “the actual thing.”

Santos: Understanding Systems and Patterns by Making Games

Santos, a 10 year-old boy now looks at how the game behaves, understanding the patterns

and strategies underneath:

I look for strategies and stuff. If I get to the boss in a game, and if he does stuff over and over again, I try and figure out a way to get the boss to do something different and then see if that works better.

Santos believed that by making games, he saw how the procedural logic of a game

creates patterns that emerge that he now analyzes to see how to move forward in a game.

Although it was essential to talk to students after the course to see what stayed with them, I also

wanted to see what observations parents had made of their children after the course was over.

From these student responses to their understanding and continued use of MARC within

and outside a game context, their explanations show an understanding of systems that they

experience outside of class and how these systems relate to games. There was also evidence that

students make connections to how the complexity of everyday life can be understood within the

context of games and how the making of games support thinking towards the complexity of

relationships.

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Parents–Post Course Assessment

For this action research it is important to solicit feedback from parents and understand

their perceptions of what their children learned at the camps they were sent to, and if the parents

thought the course made an impact on their child. Many parents are involved in helping shape the

kind of education their children receive, whether it’s deciding the school their child attends, being

involved as a volunteer, assisting in homework or class projects, making higher education

decisions, or choosing what summer or extra-curricular activities their child is involved. Some

parents’ opinions weigh heavily in these choices while other parents let institutions and social

structures guide their child’s educational development. Ultimately, the child internalizes the

experience presented to him or herself at home, school, and outside of either of those

environments. The child makes decisions based on these experiences, but it is important to

understand what parents see or perceive happens in a classroom and the learning involved. The

next section will highlight some of the parents’ responses to the course. Again, direct quotations

are used to maximize the parents’ presence in the research. Because parents make these

educational decisions for their children, as taxpayers, advocates of policy, and monitors of the

day to day activities of their children, it is important to have an understanding what the parents

observed in their children, what parents understood their children did in the course, and get a

sense of what parents value in their child’s learning.

Some parents appear to have a limited understanding of what the students made, yet

could see their child’s enthusiasm by the end of the course. Sawyer’s father couldn’t remember

specific details of what his son made, but remembered that Sawyer was “pretty excited about it.”

Santo’s mother remembered her son was very “energized the whole week,” and Sam made his

mother a game of Pac-Man after asking her what her favorite game was growing up. Gabbie’s

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mother saw that the excitement level of the course opened her shy daughter up more, saying that

after the course as a family they were “sharing more.”

Parents: Could Making Games be Good for School?

Gabbie’s mother observed that making games was an empowering activity for her

daughter, allowing for her daughter to be more confident in sharing and taking the lead at school

with technology related projects. Gitika, a 13 year-old girl, thought she now had the basic abilities

to make a game, while her father saw that the teaching of games in school could be helpful to

prepare kids to make video games and other kinds of programming.

Santo’s mother saw that after this summer her son was able to plan better, strategize how

he operates throughout the day. The course also affirmed for her that games do have educational

value because of the connection to the Smithsonian:

One of the things that fascinated me about this course is that videogames would appeal to Santos, but just seeing the topic of video games at a Smithsonian course was interesting to me too, because that validated my suspicion that there are actually educational benefits.

For Santo’s mother, having a reputable, established educational organization support

video games, allowed her to support her son’s interests with confidence. Other parents wanted

more traditional educational activities as a part of the game making process:

As a parent who spent a lot of money on summer courses and drove into Washington D.C. every day, it certainly would make me feel better to see more kinds of explicit education coming out of the course. I wouldn’t know necessarily how to do that, because the games they made are quite elementary. But of course, I know they have to start somewhere. But it would be nice if the students had to implement some conventions that required some thinking, whether it was computational or something else. It would be nice if there was something else going on there … either having to compute something themselves in order to get a character to move from A to B or do some computations to play the game. One way or the other would help. And I'm sure you're deploying some logic schemes as well, but again I'm not sure how much of that my son would have gotten out of it. It's very hard for me to say. Boys in general are very impulsive and they really

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like the reactionary elements of video games and stuff. Many of us parents try to keep them away from it, so that they can develop true thinking skills and not get so addicted to the media scene’s instant gratification of video games. So I think as a progression, you would appeal to a lot more parents if they were able to use more thinking.

For Spencer’s parent, having students solve mathematic problems like parabolic

equations as part of the game making process or create arithmetic games like Math Blaster (1987)

would have made the course more educational, and would draw more parents to the course.

Spencer’s parent did not see the game the student made as having procedural logic, rather the

systems within the games the students made were lost on her child because the curriculum did not

focus on creating code with explicit mathematical formulas and logic. The parent made a

complex connection to how the reactionary elements within games and boys’ impulsive behavior,

creates an addictive environment of instant gratification that should be tempered with “more

thinking” in games. All the parents I spoke with said their child enjoyed the course and were

confident that their child learned “something,” whether it was how to make games, be more

confident with technology, or be able to express itself through a digital medium. Yet in future

iterations of the curriculum, more explicit connections can be made for students and parents to

how cause and effect, and the interaction of multiple variables are taught in through the

curriculum and the games that students view, play, critique, and make.

Gina’s mother, an art teacher, saw that the skills students learn from making games could

be used in PowerPoint presentations or other digital media creation for school. She had not

observed other art teachers in the school district making video games but could see it at the

middle school and high school level. When asked if art teachers like herself would be open to

learning to teach how to make video games, Gina’s mother responded that if she received “a lot

of training” she would be interested. She commented that in the school district she teaches,

children in elementary school are writing on the computer but don’t have experiences creating

visual work. Gina’s mother suggests that if the elementary school teachers were given support

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learning an animation program that all students would be able to achieve success with, would be

advantageous for students’ digital knowledge.

From these responses, parents were concerned that their children are learning things that

have application outside of making games, such as computational, creative, and mathematic

skills. Many of these parents believed that making games taught technological skills to their

children that would be advantageous, as many of the students agreed. Yet some parents were

concerned that game content did not reinforce what students were learning in the school setting,

focusing on what commercial games show, rather than how games are made. The questions I

asked students, about their understanding of MARC inside and outside of a game and

programmed context, and seeing how everyday experiences may or may not relate to games, was

not recognized by parents. More effort needs to be made in the explaining of curriculum to show

parents and other stakeholders how the critiquing and making of games develops an

understanding of relationships between objects and ideas, and the cause and effects of those

relationships, and how systems interacting together complexly.

In Chapter 5, I discuss my research questions and answer how students making games

using the concepts of move, avoid, contact, and release developed their understanding of systems

and complexity. I summarize my curricular findings, noting the lessons learned for students,

instructors, and parents. Following the discussion of the implications of this study, I offer

suggestions about issues not fully explored in this study and questions that remain for further

research.

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Chapter 5

Discussion and Conclusion

In this chapter, I first discuss and answer each of the research questions. Following the

discussion of the implications of this study, I offer suggestions about issues not fully explored in

this study, questions that remain for further research, and arguments advocating the inclusion of

games as part of art education.

Discussion of the Research Questions

After carefully reviewing the related literature, conducting action research to collect

relevant data from various sources, systematically analyzing the data, and examining the final

results, I summarize the findings to answer each of my research questions in order to draw

insightful conclusions about this study.

This investigation was guiding by two research questions:

1. How can game-based art pedagogy using the game structures of MARC create a

critical art structure that involves complexity thinking and systems?

2. Can the experiences of playing, critiquing, and making games and interfaces,

specifically video games and computer-human interfaces, facilitate a critical

awareness of how game structures (systems, rules, rewards, consequences,

probability, etc.) can be understood and represented for students through game-

based art pedagogy? If so, how are the experiences from making games

supportive of complexity thinking?

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Response to Research Question One: MARC and Critical Art Structures

How can game-based art pedagogy using the game structures of MARC create a critical

art structure that involves complexity theory and systems?

Framing game concepts using MARC or designing games around everyday life or social

issues, tabletop games can quickly be prototyped to investigate complex systems. Tabletop games

with complex structures and player agency engaged students more than games with less complex

structures. These more computationally complex games gave players more choice and strategy in

their actions. Yet when students made tabletop games, they did not make games with choice and

agency for others, rather remaining experts of their games as designers. In future iterations of the

tabletop curriculum students should consider the agency of the player, focusing on creating games

where players make decisions rather than their actions be determined solely by the roll of the

dice. Tabletop game examples like the Exquisite Corpse can show students how tabletop games

can be cooperative, inventive spaces, while games like Flux Chess can be used to show games as

systems of learning and discovery for players.

Through the experience of playing, critique, and making tabletop games, students moved

on to become creators of their own video games, assembling and developing methods and

strategies for their ideas to become interactive, participatory, and complex works. Presented

through the language of MARC, students were introduced to a method for understanding the

abstract and complex nature of how objects can behave and interact. Used as a way to

conceptualize game objects and actions, the terms of move, avoid, release, and contact took on

multiple meanings and relationships for students inside the video game environments and as an

outside application for real world scenarios. For students MARC performed as a way to frame

programming functions in video games, a tactic to understand how games work, allowing for

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students to develop a critical awareness to methods of cultural production and how these methods

could articulate social issues.

The terms of MARC were interconnected, where an object that must be “avoided,” could

also be “released,” and “moving.” The “avoid” object necessitated “contact” with another object,

such as the player, to understand why it must be avoided. Students understood how MARC could

be viewed in everyday contexts and in other game contexts. Often students made the “avoid”

object or “contact” object correlate to the player in contexts that reflected other games like Plants

vs. Zombies, or a World War II battle in the Call of Duty series. Viewed through the lens of de

Certeau’s strategies and tactics, the terms of MARC was a strategy for students, open to multiple

interpretations, that encouraged to students develop tactics, to make diverse games based on the

same set of tutorial instructions and code.

The tutorial game initially constrained the students’ gameplay by having the player move

up and down and the computer controlled character on the opposite side of the screen releasing an

object to avoid and an object with which to make contact. Students devised tactics for their video

game concepts within the structure of MARC, using common tropes such as sports, aliens,

zombies, superheroes, and soldiers. Other students developed games outside of these tropes using

objects like food, veterinarians, and hippies. Because of the popularity of casual games like

Bejeweled (2001), Diner Dash (2003), Farmville (2009), Plants vs. Zombies (2009), and Angry

Birds (2009), the tropes of video games has grown to include playful, everyday objects and

characters, providing examples to students to think about everyday objects like food in fantastical

game scenarios.

Students took the basic concepts of MARC and made personal decisions to change the

forms of complexity in their games. When students moved beyond the tutorial, they changed their

game systems, determining the level of complexity by creating new rules, game objects, and

behaviors. The systems in the games also became more complex by changing the game

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probabilities to include additional systemic functions and features like health bars, gravity,

portals, changing objects, and artificial intelligence. Curriculum design and pedagogical strategies

can facilitate the exploration of complexity by encouraging students to expand their knowledge

base, and demonstrating how course content is interconnected to other academic subjects and life,

and allowing students to play and learn from taking risks or failing.

The playing, critiquing, and making experiences stayed with many of the students as they

described in interviews three months after the course ended. Several students saw how the unit

operations embedded in the game code related to activities they experienced outside of the

course, particularly how everyday physical and social actions could be mapped onto a game

experience. The concept MARC was understood as a tactic for deconstructing the games students

played outside of camp and in the structures of other activities such as learning English grammar,

making friends, and how one interacts with the environments.

The instructors also learned about systems, methods of deconstructing systems, and

reconstructing systems using game-based art pedagogy and MARC. Helping students complete

their games, the instructors thoroughly learned how the tutorial was constructed. Deconstructing

the tutorial, the instructors found that the release object was repeatedly understood as a projectile,

in part because the release object was realized as a visual manifestation, not as a conceptual or

emotional object without a visual component. Using the same iterative process for creating

games, the instructors played with the release object within the parameters of the written tutorial,

testing and retesting the curricular component as part of the action research and game-based art

pedagogy process.

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Response to Research Question Two: Gamemaking and Complexity Thinking

Can the experiences of playing, critiquing, and making games and interfaces, specifically

video games and computer-human interfaces, facilitate a critical awareness of how game

structures (systems, rules, rewards, consequences, probability, etc.) can be understood and

represented for students through game-based art pedagogy? If so, how are the experiences from

making games supportive of complexity thinking?

In game-based pedagogy, students learned by building on their prior experiences with

games. First, students experienced the systems of games through play, developing strategies and

tactics for playing different types of games. Students critiqued each of these games, describing

what was fun, challenging, interesting, boring, difficult, required skill, etc. Playing and reflecting

on games, students articulated their understanding of these simple and complex game systems,

determining what characteristics best described these games.

Framing the relationships between the elements of a game, students were asked to

understand the significance of game actions and how game elements are impacted by the actions

of players and other objects. Using the barcode and museum games as examples, students were

exposed to physical games using concepts inspired by Dadaist art interventions, Situationist

dérive and détournement, and the Fluxus performances as disruptive principles by turning

academic and museum spaces into game spaces, destabilizing the traditional meaning held for

those spaces. The contemporary examples from Improv Everywhere, and the games Cruel 2 B

Kind, and Pac-Manhattan showed how the conventions of everyday space are challenged with

our interactions in physical space and the social constructs we follow. The contemporary and

historical game examples and the class experience of playing physical games in public spaces,

introduced students to creating new forms of play in physical space, and how digital technologies

like barcodes and can be layered to augment the reality of our physical spaces. Creating play in

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these spaces viewed as having fixed meaning, the liminal space between games and conventional

systems of society expanded.

Students learned, deconstructed and reconstructed systems and developed their

understanding of complexity through the process of playing, critiquing, and making games. These

three processes of playing, critiquing, and making, involved an analysis of the systems that

students experienced through play, and revealed their knowledge and experience with these

systems. Students deconstructed these game systems by critiquing what made these systems

interesting, challenging, obtuse, easy, etc.; and devised new ways that these games could be

organized and played. Because games require a willingness to participate, introducing students to

unfamiliar games and systems through the act of play challenged them to accept the foreign

within the participatory, open environment of a game. For example, when a student in the Penn

State course questioned the value of playing a physical game that was cooperative rather than

competitive, she questioned how could a system exist outside of her cultural frame of reference.

This discussion presented games as possibly possessing values outside accepted cultural norms,

requiring active engagement to understand a game having unfamiliar values. The voluntarily

participation and acceptance of the game rules created a “magic circle” for dialogue, making

games as a space for open discussion, allowing for diverse values and qualities in life.

In future iterations, more examples of cooperative games can be used to reinforce

underrepresented forms of play. The physical games originally found in The New Games Book

(1976) are used in university game curriculum to devise meaningful play around social issues

(Pearce, Fullerton, Fron, & Morie, 2007). Many popular video games like Contra (1987), Boom

Blox (2008), the Call of Duty series (2005–present), and Rock Band (2007–present) have

cooperative modes of play. Video games like World of Warcraft (2004–present) require player

cooperation to advance. Playing and discussing games without adversarial positions showed

students nontraditional ways to understand games and reward systems.

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To connect the ideas of complexity thinking between physical games and video games,

we can look to the guiding questions for future iterations of physical games in chapter four. By

asking students after playing physical games to think about ways systems are all around us, where

everyday routines are potential game scenarios, the process of connecting physical games to

video games begins. Describing how the video game actions of MARC can be found in the

actions of everyday life, students reflected how the systems and properties that affect our physical

lives, (e.g. gravity, health, and speed), are embedded in the complex interactions of all types of

games. As described in chapter four, the student Sam saw the massive amounts of programming

needed to turn real world interactions into video game actions. In doing so, Sam realized the

complexity of our everyday world, easily masked by our ability to make complex decisions

within the structures we rooted in our lives.

It is in the critique of games that students deconstructed game systems, understanding the

components and media of games by reviewing, testing, and playing the systems they experienced.

Students visibly showed interest in games with complex structures by the types of tabletop games

they enjoyed and disliked. While students showed they preferred playing commercial tabletop

games with complex systems and player choice, students needed more experience and practice to

make tabletop games with the same level of complexity.

Within a game space, particularly ones that are advantageous to those with special

knowledge, experiences, or physical abilities, a game may not be enjoyable or seen as a game for

those not in the same position. Players who appreciate games like Scrabble (1948), Pictionary

(1985), Trivia Pursuit (1982), or arm wrestling enjoy a specific kind of play. Yet discussions

about the value of play provided a setting to question what may be seen as a normal, enjoyable

practice for one person, may not be understood or enjoyed by another, breaking down barriers for

understanding other positions. Through class discussion and presenting examples of different

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kinds of play and game systems, new cultural frames of reference for games and life are

developed.

Artists using commercial video games created critical art structures in artwork like Velvet

Strike14 (2002) to create counter-military graffiti in the on-line game Counter Strike, and Eddo

Stern’s Tekken Torture Tournament15 (2001) players suffer an electrical shock when their

character receive damage in the video game. These artists comment on the medium of video

games by subverting the systems of play. Video games labeled as “serious games” are made to

raise awareness of social issues like the genocide in Darfur is Dying16 (2006), the Israeli-

Palestinean conflict in Peacemaker17 (2007), and assist medical research through protein folding

in the game Foldit18 (2008). In future iterations, examples like these can be emphasized more to

show how video games approach critical issues and the problem-solving skills required to deal

with the complexity of our world.

By making games, students attempted to provide the necessary content for others to

understand how the systems of their games worked. Critiquing their peers’ work, students

delivered a rationale for the aesthetic qualities of the games, the game systems, and the

experience of play. Students learned how the systems in the tutorial game were made and

function, reconfiguring the game to use their own images, ideas, narratives, and sounds.

Students were not required to make video games about particular social issues although a

few students did. Games that focused on fantastical or historical elements were inspired from the

content of the games students played at home, using what they learned in the course to understand

how the games they are so passionate about are made. The video games that explored social

14 Velvet Strike http://www.opensorcery.net/velvet-strike/ 15 Tekken Torture Tournament http://www.eddostern.com/tekken_torture_tournament.html 16 Darfur is Dying http://www.darfurisdying.com/ 17 Peacemaker http://www.peacemakergame.com/ 18 Foldit http://fold.it/portal/

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issues used subjects that were personal, like the treatment of animals, healthy eating choices, and

the proper care of electronics. Because students were familiar with the cause and effect

relationships of these issues, they could easily invent the objects needed for the game. Making

games based on social issues can be developed further as an area of investigation throughout the

curriculum by carefully examining the interconnection between game objects, how they affect

each other’s values, emphasizing the complexity of relationships. When students already have

experience making games and understand the interconnection between game objects, they have a

frame of reference for deeper analysis, allowing them to create games with distinct critical

meaning.

While non-competitive games were seen as unusual, students created video game

consequences that were highly individualized, some using fantastical ideas and game tropes like

being eaten by zombies and invaded by space explorers; others used metaphors with educational

meaning like stealing and poor eating choices. These metaphorical differences did not necessitate

a difference in students’ critical awareness to the game structures in everyday life, rather the

games showed the individualized positions towards what students wanted to make their games

about.

Implications of This Study

The participants of this study saw examples of how games are designed and made,

through physically playing, using paper prototype methods, and computer tools. By making

games, students were put in a creative situation with an expectation to make a system(s), present

the system(s) to others, and see how those systems were understood and valued. From this

process, students developed an understanding of how their game’s systems could translate into

other games and parts of their daily lives.

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Results of this study showed that after completing the course, a significant number of

students expressed they would continue to make games (Table 4-1) and gained confidence to use

technology and knowing how games are made (Table 4-2), yet did not show more desire to go

into technological careers and take technology-based courses (Table 4-3).

Table 4-1: Pre & Post Survey–Likelihood of Making a Game

Pre-Survey How likely are you to work on a game making project with a computer on your own?

Answer Options Response Percent

I am definitely planning to do this 14.0%

I likely will 37.0% I might 21.0% Not Sure 17.0% Not at all 11.0% Post-Survey How likely are you to work on a game making project with a computer on your own?

Answer Options Response Percent

I am definitely planning to do this 40.0%

I likely will 29.0% I might 11.0% Not Sure 19.0% Not at all 2.0%

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Table 4-2: Pre & Post Survey–Ability to explain how to make or modify a video game

Pre Survey I can explain how to make or modify a video game level.

Answer Options Response Percent

I definitely know 11.4% I know 13.6% I’m not sure 25.0% I might not know 11.4% I don’t know 38.6% Post Survey I can explain how to make or modify a video game level.

Answer Options Response Percent

I definitely know 27% I know 56.8% I’m not sure 10.8% I might not know 2.7% I don’t know 2.7%

Table 4-3: Pre & Post Survey–Likelihood to Take Future Classes that Focus on Computers or Technology

Pre Survey How likely are you to take classes in the future that focus on computers or technology?

Answer Options Response Percent

I definitely would 17% I would 48% I’m not sure 15% I might not 17% I wouldn't 3% Post Survey How likely are you to take classes in the future that focus on computers or technology?

Answer Options Response Percent

I definitely would 27% I would 25% I’m not sure 21% I might not 25% I wouldn't 3%

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Our society does not require everyone to go into technological careers; however, the

capacity to understand or write the code for our digital age is viewed by some as important to

contemporary society (Rushkoff, 2010). While the number of students enrolled in computer

science fluctuates (Markoff, 2009), other areas of study like the art classroom can support and

promote programmed environments like video games for learning and expression.

Because the other instructors in the study did not teach games to youth before, reflecting

on the curriculum, as part of game-based art pedagogy and action research process, was

revelatory. They found that students understood games and systems immensely, and the

instructors understood games in a new light by thinking about them as curriculum. Having in-

depth knowledge of current or popular video games was not necessary for developing instruction.

Because video games are so popular with students, they gladly shared their knowledge and

opinions on what they knew about games, developing confidence as “amateur experts” (Gee &

Levine, 2009, p. 50).

The instructors placed high value on the quality, production, and originality of the

students’ games, awarding significance to the uniqueness and the games’ playable qualities and

embedded themes. A student creating unique work is something that an instructor may strive for

and project onto their students; this, however, may not be a student’s goal or intrinsically

motivate them. Instead, a student might choose to explore how the ideas and complexity of the

technical systems they observe and know work, revealing what is behind the curtain of artistic

production. Having technically sound art skills can be a motivating force behind developing

artists. Supporting or encouraging these idea are the Advanced Placement art exams, which place

the principles of design and photorealistic techniques as important criteria (The College Board,

2011). Allowing for students to develop their interests is important; yet part of the teacher’s role

is providing opportunities to encourage students to mature technically and conceptually. Framing

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critical questions through a game-based art pedagogy asks students to face their conceptual and

technical abilities as challenges rather than requirements.

The iterative process of developing curriculum found in game-based pedagogy and action

research is recommended for both pre-service teaching experiences and in the continued

education for teachers currently in the field of art education. Developing curriculum is like

developing a game, where the basic parameters of a lesson are developed, and the teacher and

students play within the space known and understood by the lesson. Ideally, discussing the

failures and successes of teaching and curriculum can be done with colleagues, but the

assessment process as a personal reflection to be implemented in the next iteration of the lesson is

value added.

It is important to recognize that the curriculum was written to be inclusive of a variety of

ability and knowledge levels, not fixed on specific ages or stages of development. The video

game tutorial was designed so that students from ages 8 to 13 could achieve success by

completing the game within the timeframe of the course, using periodic checkpoints to show

game development progress. The study included a range of cognitive dissonance, such as students

identified with dyslexia and Asperger’s Syndrome on the autistic spectrum participated in

multiple classes without specialized instruction. Self-directed incentives offered those that went

beyond the tutorial, the additional unit operations found on the game cards. If students didn’t

follow the proper unit operations in their computer code, it was likely that their games didn’t

work, a direct response to their actions. Within the limitations of the assignments, students could

play freely, choosing the focus of their game, and how the audience played.

Key to the implementation of game-based art curriculum is developing strong support for

increased parental involvement and awareness of the value of making games as a form of

personal expression and discovery. The parents and guardians of the students participating in the

courses were viewed as being generally supportive of their child accomplishments in the game

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course. However, one parent indicated her support for the course was affirmed by the educational

reputation of the Smithsonian, not the course content. Because games, specifically video games,

are seen by the general public as potentially corrupting to children, like rock and roll music and

comic books were in earlier eras, it is important to include communication with parents regarding

the learning goals in making and critiquing games. Because many parents have not made games

or programmed, a related school experience does not exist. To educate parents, students could

teach the parents how they made their games, or have parents complete the same task in a

workshop or game-like test.

Making video games allows students to see how the systems of the games work in code,

putting the many variables at play in games into plain sight. Without giving preference to digital

forms of making, game-based art pedagogy values physical, tabletop, and video games in a game

curriculum. Game-based art pedagogy supports the iterative process of teaching, feedback,

analysis, and restructuring of lesson plans and teaching for future iterations. This iterative method

is not limited to games, but it is also useful in the curriculum development for other studio

practices.

Suggestions for Further Study

In the future I plan to continue researching how students understand complex systems by

making games. It is important to see how students differentiate systems that require a specific

knowledge base such as factual information or vocabulary, and those systems that knowledge and

skills are learned through play such as pattern recognition, planning, and cooperation. I believe

asking students to observe, reflect, and create systems based on critical frameworks, promote

opportunities for empathic understand and awareness of existing systems and structures and

generate new structural forms.

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While making games may be seen as radical art curriculum, I intended this work to be

used in schools as they function now, pragmatically positioning this curriculum as incremental

change to education rather than radical reform. The curriculum of the study was designed to be

open and flexible, allowing for it to be changed as an iterative process of curricular development.

Within the individual elements of the curriculum: physical games, tabletop games, and video

games, I suggest using and developing examples of games that present the commonalities of

diverse systems, and how game spaces encourage thinking about systems complexly.

Any of the curricular components could be rewritten, revised, and developed in entirely

different ways, particularly the relatively new practice of video game development. For example,

the tutorial could be rewritten as a quest-styled narrative, where students develop a series of

spaces that the player must visit to finish the game. Move, avoid, release, and contact could still

be relevant for students to understanding game actions, while other metaphors, such as “create”

suggested by the new media instructor, could be included. Like other game rules, game-based art

pedagogy is open and flexible allowing for nearly infinite ways to make and play.

Most of the students came to the course wanting to know how to make games,

unconcerned with the instructors’ art education philosophy or disciplinary perspective. Over

15,000 schools in the United States teach media analysis and production often in art classrooms

(Hobbs, 2004), yet few art teachers teach making digitally interactive works like games. From the

art education instructor response to seeing games fitting into a school art curriculum and pre-

service teaching as a method to teach about painting or sculpture, more work needs to be done to

also show art educators how games are part of the continuum of art history and art making

methods. While games have been used as the pedagogical framework for art assignments by

teaching information about the history of art as a game (Osmundson, 2000) and to frame art

making assignments in painting or drawing (Gude, 2007), the making of games is also a form of

art production.

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Many art educators given students assignments to create landscapes, still-life drawings

and paintings, wheel-thrown pots, or figurative sculptures, but never question the value of the

tropes used repeatedly in these assignments. Rather, the focus for these exercises is on the way

the artists render the works and the ideas behind the objects. Students making their first video

games must also be given the same consideration of learning games as a medium for making,

playing with the material (Gude, 2007) to understand the processes involved to make a working

game, and ideas imparted to students by the methods of creation. Teaching topics in a game

context that involves the everyday, such as sibling rivalry or bullying may not have obvious art

historical context, while examples of these important issues can be found in visual culture that

may have more impact or relevance to students.

The playful pedagogy that Paul Duncum (2009) advocates for the field of art education

asks art teachers to accept and embrace the transgressive nature of much of children’s popular

culture. This should also be applied to making video games in the art classroom. Shooting was

not a term used or suggested in the instruction or game tutorials, yet the release object was still

perceived by instructors and parents as a transgressive act of shooting. Even though “release” was

changed to “create” in the curriculum, students still understood and chose to use the game

mechanic as having properties of a projectile. Citing Bakhtin (1993), Duncum positions that

students have the right to make decisions like this in their games “with a recognition, that they,

not their teachers alone, possess the power to think, feel, and act according to their own volition”

to their work (Duncum, 2009, p. 241). While educators and parents may have concerns for

students using the shooting trope in their games, and certainly new and different game ideas and

examples should be developed, a student may not see the shooting/release object as transgressive

within the culture of games or society; rather students are learning a game mechanic that has

multiple applications within games. However, because tropes like shooting are so embedded in

the culture of video games, a concerted effort should be made to explain how these tropes can be

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repurposed and have multiple applications with the choice of language and examples used in

class.

For future iterations of the game class, the curriculum booklet I designed (Appendix A)

shows examples of game-related work of early 20th century art movements like Dada, Surrealism,

Fluxus, and Situationism along with descriptions of contemporary artists using games as their

medium. Questions are posed in this booklet that ask students to reflect how MARC and several

game cards (Appendix C) can be used as a conceptual framework for their games. The questions

asked students to think about the multiple definitions and ways move, avoid, release, and contact

can be understood. While the release object comes from the player, it moves towards the system

or other objects the system creates. This enables the student to think of ways to create agency for

the player in their game. For example, release is described as “something that you let go, often to

transform, or change something else that encounters the release object. It is an action that creates

change or protects (a bird, a button, trash, scream, a feeling, fireballs, trash, etc.).” This definition

of release and examples are intended to inspire students to think of different ways they could

actualize these concepts.

I plan on continuing to develop the curriculum and use game-based art pedagogy,

specifically games as tools for personal narratives, applying critical analysis of how decisions,

social structures, and other systems are made and affect society. Although the metaphors of

MARC can not be used for every situation or concept, more work could be done to use MARC as

a way to frame and explore personal and societal associations to demonstrate cause and effect, the

interaction of relationships, and how game structures can be used to present and support social

justice. While many games use competition as the primary form of play, through the critique and

making of games, players and creators must look at games from multiple vantage points,

understanding their cultural value and how games are received.

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From the choice of images, themes, and narratives in the student games, additional

research into the use of the MARC framework and how it is understood and manifested with

different audiences (gender, ethnic, age, socio-economic groups) can be pursued. Because the

MARC concepts were open to interpretation and the evidence that different audiences prefer

playing divergent games (Pew, 2008), the students understanding of the terminology of MARC is

worth continued study. Making games can be one component of continued assessment and

support for digital tools and media accessible to developing artists, or towards a long-term

evaluation of students understanding emergent complexity.

The game card questions asked students to think about the properties of these commonly

found game elements such as a timer. The question asked “what are ways that time is something

that you would want to avoid or have contact with? How could we move time? What would that

look like in the game?” As with the MARC terms, these questions were written to help students

think of ways their games could function. While students received this booklet in class, it was not

a focal point for discussion and was not used to collect data, rather it was reference material

students took home. As an adjustment to the presentation of the current curriculum, this content

can be presented throughout the course, focusing more on games that explore normative behavior,

interventionist methods, and subversive actions.

The way players interact with a video game is not limited to what is seen on the screen or

programmed in the game. The buttons, joysticks, mice, and cameras that players use to play video

games continue to be an area of exploration and investigation for video game companies and

game designers (Patton & Kenyon, 2010). Because the physical actions a player must perform to

play a game have unique, modifiable properties, rather than fixed to how the game was designed,

I developed a series of buttons and interfaces that would allow students to design how games are

physically played. These buttons were modular; enabling students to determine where the buttons

were placed and what type of physical action they wished to be associated with the player’s

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movement (Figure 5-1). For example, if a student wanted the game to be played on the ceiling,

use a piece of clothing, or shout game actions, they could put these properties into their game

using the device I designed.

When students in the course completed the video game tutorial and felt they were done modifying

their game, students were allowed to use the buttons I designed to create their own physical game

interface. Because of the limited amount of time and resources of the study and the locations

used, the metaphoric development of MARC in the form of physical representations of video

game actions by creating game interfaces was tested with students, but not investigated

thoroughly as part of the study. A separate assignment and study focused on physical game

interfaces would provide more time and support for students to think about how the body is

connected to what we do in the virtual world and how physical limitations can be addressed.

One method to investigate physical interfaces with video games is students designing a

game that only uses one button. This curricular component offers another vantage point for

students to understand video games and how they are played. By making video game interfaces

limited to one button, students are challenged to think about how a player interacts with video

Figure 5-1: Student Designed Game Interfaces

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games, what are the conventions of video gameplay, and the connections to how we physically

move to play these games (Brock & Schonstal, 2011; Perner-Wilson & Satomi, 2007).

While a video game curriculum can be expanded in art education, information and

advocacy over the value of making games needs to be presented to parents and other stakeholders

in how the critiquing and making of games develops an understanding of relationships between

objects and ideas, and how interactions can be traced to reveal and critique complex relationships

and systems. Driven by the public perception that games are a medium for children’s

entertainment, the value of making games and what can be learned from that process must be

separated from the content of playing games. For example, a written note (emails or a course

blog) can be sent to parents at the beginning of class or throughout the course, describing how the

curriculum uses games to expose, examine, and critique systems and structures, showing students

how complex, emergent systems can be understood and made as game environments. It can be

explained to parents that this game-based art pedagogy honors and values the history of art,

inspired by the game practices of the Dadaists, Surrealists, Fluxus, and Situationists. Students-

made games can be considered a form of action research, an iterative process of theorizing,

testing, and receiving feedback to the game systems they have created. Through this iterative

process of making, students are taking part in an educational reform that supports

transdisciplinary learning, as a way to problematize and problem-solve complex and emergent

issues.

Difficulties that art educators may face if they teach games include: parents seeing

shooting and violence as the defining component of video games, perceiving game graphics as

the only art in games, making games about other works of art, or only labeling games as art that

remove entertainment or escapism in the gameplay. However, avoiding the medium of games in

art education because of possible competitive or combative elements, qualities of mass

production, or commercial appeal, does not support a dialogue for change or develop new ways

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of thinking within the field. An understanding of fairness, limitations, and improvisation is in the

DNA of games, lending them to be the subject of an open discussion about methods, motivations,

and values of play. Moving beyond the conversation of what can and can’t be art opens up the

mediums, materials, and messages available to use for cultural exploration and discussion (Bolin

& Blandy, 2003).

There is evidence from the student answers in the study that learning went beyond how to

make aliens or make a character shoot. Students understood that the making of games was more

than these individual objects or actions, that games are an assembly of larger more complex sets

of systems that requires interaction between game objects. We as art educators should invest in

situating video games as part of the art curriculum, connecting the empathetic and imaginative

processes of science, social studies, and math across the curriculum. Games like Crayon Physics

Deluxe (2009), PeaceMaker (2007), and Angry Birds (2009) show how gravitational physics, the

history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and trigonometric arcs can be playfully made into game

content.

Art education academics and policy makers call for changes to include contemporary

concepts, objects, and practices in making (Bolin & Blandy, 2003), and the value of “media arts”

as part of arts education policy appeared as early as the 1980s (Bequette & Brennan, 2008). If art

educators persist in nesting games and other forms of material and visual culture within what are

deemed safe and traditional art education materials and subjects, the value of art education will be

seen as protecting the “high culture” of a predigital era; periods of art that are historically relevant

but educationally focused on out-of-date methods of production and presentation within a rapidly

changing society.

To “text someone” would be a questionable grammatical statement about writing ten

years ago. However similar to language, the methods in which we communicate change rapidly in

our contemporary digital culture. Fully 97% of teens in the United States ages 12-17 play video

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games (Pew, 2008). While trends are often embraced by youth first, this is a cultural shift that is

not a short-term trend. We, as art educators, need to be lifelong learners, taking cues from these

changes in culture, actively engaging and responding to these changes. Art educators need to be

adaptable in our content, methods, and ideas of art and media education, as we challenge the

cultural changes in our daily lives.

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Appendix A

Art Game Booklet

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Appendix B

Game Maker Tutorial

***This game example is adapted from Chapter 2 of

The Game Maker’s Apprentice. (2006, Apress)***

The left side of the screen shows the different types of resources that make up the game:

sprites, objects, backgrounds, sounds, and rooms. These are currently empty, but the names of the

resources appear as they are added to the game. The menubar along the top of the window

contains all the commands that allow us to work with resources–although most common tasks can

also be accessed using the buttons on the toolbar.

We’ll begin by using that Create Sprite command to create a new sprite.

*NOTE: Although you can always resize an image when making a sprite, it’s good to have

your image already sized down to about 128 pixels tall or wide (whichever is the larger

number) when you bring it into Game Maker. Small sprites should be 32 pixels, a medium

sprite should be 64 pixels, and a large sprite should be 128 pixels.

Creating a new sprite resource for the game:

1. From the resources menu choose create a sprite. The sprite properties form appears like the ones shown in figure 2–3.

2. Click the Name field, where it currently says sprite0. This is the default name created by game maker for the new sprite, but you should rename it to player_sprite.

3. Click the Load Sprite button. This opens the standard Windows file requester.

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4. Select your player image using the file requester.

*NOTE: Always avoid using spaces and punctuation in names for resources as they will

continue to confuse game maker when you try to use some of its more advanced functions

later on. You can also use the underscore (_) symbol instead of spaces, which is usually

found on the same key as the minus symbol (press Shift and the minus key).

5. Click OK to close the form.

That player sprite should now have been added to the list of sprites in the resource list. If

you ever need to change a resource, you can reopen its properties form by double-clicking on its

name in the resource list.

The check mark next to the Transparent property means that the background of the

player sprite is see-through. Most sprites are set to transparent so that these surrounding

rectangles will be filled in around the sprite as it appears in the game.

*NOTE: Game Maker works out which color to make transparent based on the color in the

bottom leftmost corner of each image. This is worth remembering as you create your own

sprites.

Creating the remaining sprites:

1. From the resources menu, choose Create Sprite. 2. In the Name field in the sprite properties form, type the name system_sprite. 3. Click the Load Sprite button and choose the image that is the system. 4. Click okay to close the display properties form. 5. Now create an avoid_sprite, contact_sprite, and release_sprite. Give each sprite an

appropriate name.

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This completes all sprites needed to create the beginning game.

Objects

Sprites don’t do anything on their own; they are just pictures of the different elements in

the game. Objects are the part of the game that controls how these elements move around and

react to each other. We’ll begin by creating our first object to tell Game Maker how we want the

system_object to behave.

The system_object

Following steps create a new object and assign it a sprite so that Game Maker knows how

it should look on the screen.

Creating a new object and assigning it a sprite:

1. From the resource menu choose Create Object. 2. In the Name field, give the object a name. You should call this one system_object. 3. Click the icon at the end of the sprite field and a list of all the available sprites will appear

select the system_sprite sprite.

*CAUTION: Always make sure that you gave your object resources names that are

different from their sprite resources. Ending up with an object in the sprite both called

“player,” or two objects called “avoid,” can confuse game maker when you try to use its

more advanced functions later. Adding prefixes like “sprite_” or “object_” to names is a

good way to achieve this without having to think of new names.

Events and Actions

Game Maker uses events and actions to say how objects should behave. Events are

important things that happen in the game, like when objects collide or when the player presses a

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key on the keyboard. Actions are things that happen in response to an event, such as changing an

object’s direction, setting the score, or playing a sound. Game Maker games are basically just a

collection of objects with actions to tell them how they should react to different events. So to set

the behavior of an object in Game Maker you must say which events the object should react to

and what actions they should do in response.

The system_object’s lists of events and actions are currently empty. We are going to

begin adding an event to an action that will start the system_object moving up the screen at the

beginning of the game. There will also be an action that reverses the vertical direction of the

system_object in the event that collides with the edge of the screen. As a result, the system_object

will continually move up and down between the top and bottom of the screen.

Adding a create event for the system_object:

1. Click the Add Event button. The Event Selector appears as shown here.

2. Click the Create Event to add it to the list of

events.

3. Next you need to include the Move Fixed action in the list of actions. To do this, press and hold the left mouse button on the action image with any red arrows, drag it to the empty Actions list box and release the mouse button. An action forum will pop up and ask for particular information about this action.

*NOTE: Whenever we use an action in the instructions, that actions image is shown in the

left margin to help you find the correct one.

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4. Select the up arrow and enter a value of 8 for the speed. This will make the object moved vertically 8 pixels (tiny squares that make up a monitor display) for every step that it takes.

5. Press OK to close the action form and it will be included in the list of actions.

*NOTE All of Game Maker’s actions are organized into tabbed pages of icons on the right

of the Actions list. Browse through the different actions to see all of them and hold your

mouse over one to reveal its name.

This event should start the system_object moving upward. Now we’ll add an event to

reverse the system_object’s vertical direction when it collides with the edge of the screen. This

event is called the Intersect Boundary event because it gets called when the object’s Sprite

intersects the screens boundary by being partly in and partly out of the screen.

Adding an intersect boundary event for the system_object:

1. Click the Add Event button.

2. Choose Other from the Event Selector pop-up window and select Intersect Boundary from the drop-down menu that appears. This action will then be added and selected in the list of events.

3. Include the Reverse Vertical action in the list of actions for this event.

4. Nothing needs changing in this box so click OK.

These are all events and actions we need for the system_object right now. You can switch

between the different events by clicking on them in the Events list. The selected event is

highlighted in blue and the actions for that event are then shown in the Actions list. You can edit

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the properties of each action by double-clicking on them but were done with the system_object

for now.

5. Click OK at the bottom left of the form to close it.

The player_object

Now it’s time to turn our attention to the player of the game. Begin by creating an object

for the player in the same way as for the system_object.

Creating a player_object:

1. From the Resource menu, choose Create Object. 2. Give the object a name by entering player_object in the Name field. 3. Select the player_sprite sprite from the drop-down display menu.

The player also needs actions to make it move up and down the screen, but this time only

when the appropriate keys are pressed on the keyboard. We do this by using keyboard events.

Adding keyboard events for the player_object:

1. Click the Add Event button. 2. Choose the Keyboard event select <Up> from the pop-up menu (to indicate the up arrow

keys).

3. Include the Move Fixed action in the Actions list. 4. In the action form, select the upward direction and set Speed to 16.

5. Repeat the previous process to add a Keyboard event for <Down> key and includes a Moved Fixed action with a downward direction and speed to 16. The Object Properties form should now look like the one shown in figure 2–12.

We just need one more event in action to make the Player’s movement work

correctly. Our Keyboard events will start the player moving by pressing the arrow keys, but

there are currently no events to stop it from moving again with the keys are no longer

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pressed. We use the Keyboard, <no key> event to test for when the player is no longer

pressing any keys.

Adding a no key event for the player_object:

1. Click the Add Event button. 2. Choose a Keyboard event and select <no key> from the pop-up menu.

3. Include the Move Fixed action in the Actions list for this event. 4. Select the center square in the action form, to indicate no movement, and set Speed to 0. 5. That’s all the actions we need to make our player to move up and down, so click OK to

close the Object Properties window for the player_object.

CAUTION: When setting a Move Fixed action with a speed of 0, you must also select

the center square of the direction grid. If no direction square is selected at all, then the

action is ignored!

Rooms

Our player and system_objects are all ready to go now, but in order to see them we need

to put them into a level. Levels in Game Maker are made using rooms, and putting objects into a

room defines where they will appear at the start of the game. However, not all objects need to be

there at the start of the game, and they can be created on the fly as well (power-ups, for

example). Let’s create a new room.

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Creating a new room resource:

1. Select Create Room from the Resource menu. A Room Properties window will appear.

2. Click the settings tab in the top left of the window.

3. Enter a name for the room in the Name field. Call this one room_first.

NOTE: If there are sliders along the edges of the room grid, then the window is not

currently large enough to see the entire room. Maximize the Game Maker window and

Room Properties form to see more of the room, or use the sliders to scroll around the

entire room.

4. Enter a caption for the title bar of the window when the game is running. Think of something that is descriptive of the game or the level you are making.

Now we can place our objects in the new room.

1. Click the objects tab in the top left of the form. You should see that the player_object is already selected as the object “to add with left mouse.”

2. Click on the room grid with the left mouse button. An instance of the player_object will be placed with its top-left corner at the point at which you click. The position you place the player becomes its starting position in the game, so put just one player close to the left boundary of the room area. If you add it in the wrong place, use the right mouse button to remove it again.

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3. Click on the player’s image on the objects tab (or on the image of the pop-up menu next to where it says object_player) and select the system_object from the menu that appears.

4. Place an instance of the system_object close to the right edge of the room, but make sure that the whole sprite is completely inside the room–otherwise this event will not work correctly!

TIP: You can also click and hold the mouse button to move instances within a room.

Our very first version of the game is now ready. Click the green checkmark in the top-left

corner of the window to close it and you can see the result of your labor.

Save and Run

It’s always a good idea to save your work as often as possible–just in case your computer

crashes. In case you haven’t already worked it out for yourself, the steps for this process are given

here. However, in the future you’ll have to remember to save your work regularly yourself! This

works in the same way as most programs.

Saving your work and running the game:

1. Choose Save from the File menu (or click the disk icon). 2. The first time you save the game, you will be prompted for a location and filename in the

normal way. Note that Game Maker files always end with the extension .gmk. Save this game in a place where you can easily find it again (on the desktop, for example).

3. To run the game, select Run Normally from the Run menu. After a brief pause, a game window should appear.

You should now be able to move the player up and down using the arrow keys, and the

system should float up and down by itself. If your game doesn’t work in this way, then you might

want to check through your steps. You may need to make sure that the game window is selected

(by clicking on it with the mouse) for the keyboard to work.

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Although we now have a running game, it’s not much fun to play yet as there are no

goals or challenges. We’ll spend the remainder of the tutorial turning it into a playable game.

Press Esc to stop the game.

TIP: Pressing F4 while the game is running will maximize the game to fill the entire screen.

Press F4 again to return to the windowed version.

Instances and Objects

So far we have two object resources in our game and two characters appearing on the

screen. However, there is an important distinction to be made between object resources and

instances of objects that appear on the screen. It may seem odd, but now that you made player

and system_objects, you can put as many instances of player_objects and system_objects on the

screen as you would like. Try it–go back and place more player_objects and system_objects in the

room. If you run the game again, you will find that they all behave in exactly the same way as the

original instances! (Don’t forget to remove them began afterward using the right mouse button.)

A good way to think of the relationship between objects and instances is to think of objects as

cookie cutters and instances of the cookies that you make with them. You only need one cookie

cutter to make any number of cookies, yet the cutter defines the appearance of all of the cookies.

From now on we will talk about instances and objects in this way, so it is important that you

understand the difference.

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Avoid, Contact, and Release

To create some challenges and goals, we’re going to need to bring our remaining objects

into the game. Let’s start by giving the player the ability to release something as a way to stop the

avoid objects.

The release_object

To create the release_object you’ll need the release sprite. If you didn’t get around to

making an release_object earlier, here are the directions one more time, just in case.

Creating the release_object:

1. Select Create Object from the Resource menu. 2. Call the object release_object. 3. Select the release sprite.

We now need to think about how we want release_objects to behave. When the player

creates an release_object, we want it to move across the screen toward the system _object and be

removed when it reaches the other side of the screen.

Adding the release_object’s events:

1. Click the Add Event button and choose the Create event.

2. Include the Move Fixed action in the Actions list. Select the right arrow to indicate the direction and set Speed to 32 (the release_object fly fast!)

3. Click the Add Event button again, select Other events, and pick Outside room.

4. Select the main1 action tab and include the Destroy Instance action in the Actions list. In the action window that pops up, simply click OK. The release_object Properties window should now look like this:

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5. Click OK to close the release_object Properties window.

CAUTION: It is always a good idea to make sure that instances are deleted when they’re

not needed any more (when they go off the edge of the screen, for example). Even though

you can’t see them, Game Maker still has to spend time updating them, and too many

instances will eventually slow down the program.

Now we need to tell the player_object to create instances of the release_object when the

player presses the spacebar. We do this in a similar way to the events that make the player move,

but this time using a Key Press event rather than a Keyboard event, Keyboard events happen as

long as the player continues to hold down the key, but Key Press events happen only once when

the key is first pressed. Using a Keyboard event for the release_objects would create a

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continuous stream of release_objects and make the game too easy, so that’s why we’re using Key

Press instead.

Creating a Key Press event for the player_object:

1. Double-click the player_object in the resource list (not the player sprite). This will bring back the Object Properties window for the player_object.

2. Click the Add Event button. Select the Key Press event and then choose <Space> from the pop-up menu.

3. Select the main1 action tab and include the Create Instance action in the Actions list.

4. In the action window that appears, we need to specify which type of instance to create and where on the screen it should be created. Select the release_object from the menu, and select the Relative checkbox. The x and y values you see are screen coordinates, which are used to indicate positions on the game screen. Screen coordinates are measured in pixels (the tiny squares that make up a monitor display), with x values indicating the number of pixels horizontally (or across), and y values indicating the number of pixels vertically (up and down). We need to select the Relative option because the release_object needs to be created on the screen in front of the player, in other words, relative to the player’s position.

5. Click OK to close the action window and click OK again to close the Object Properties window.

Test the game now to check that you can use the spacebar for release_object, and

that they appear in the correct position.

The Avoid object

The avoid_object will work in the same way as the release_object, except that

avoid_objects fly from right to left and are created by the system_object. We call them avoid

objects because we want the player to avoid them. Also, to make avoid_object a bit more

interesting, we’ll start some moving diagonally as well as horizontally. Those that head

diagonally for the top or bottom of the screen will need to reverse their vertical direction when

they intersect the boundary–like the system_object does. We’ll also need to remove avoid_object

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when it goes outside the room, like the release_object. Next we provide the steps you need to all

of this; notice that we’ve started to shorten the steps that you should be familiar with by now.

Creating Avoid objects

1. Create a new object called avoid_object and give it the avoid sprite.

2. Add a Create event and include the Move Fixed action.

3. Select all three left-pointing direction arrows and set Speed to 12. Selecting more than one direction causes Game Maker to randomly choose between them when an instance is created. The action window should now look like the picture to the right.

4. Add an Intersect boundary event (in

the Other events) and include the Reverse Vertical action in it.

5. Add from the Other events, Outside

room and include a Destroy Instance action in it.

The avoid_objects will now bounce back and forth between the top and the bottom of the

screen, but we also need the avoid_object to react when it comes in contact with other object

instances. For this we use a collision event, which happens when two sprites of different objects

touch each other on the screen. The first collision event we need is for when an avoid_object

comes into contact with a release_object. This event should remove the avoid_object, and

increase the player’s score. There are a number of different actions dealing with scores, health,

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add lives in the score actions tab. As soon as the score changes, it will automatically be displayed

in the game window caption.

Adding an event to the release_object for colliding with the avoid_object:

1. In the release_object, click the Add Event button, choose the Collision event, and select the avoid_object from the pop-up menu.

2. Include the Destroy Instance action from the main1 action tab and choose (Other).

3. Also include a Set Score action from the score tab. This should automatically appear below the Destroy Instance action in the Actions list. Lists of actions like this are carried out one after another, starting from the top of the list and working down.

4. Enter a value of 100 in the Set Score action window, and click the Relative property. This property makes the action set the score relative to the current score, so 100 will be added to the score rather than setting the score to 100. (See below)

If an avoid_object comes into contact with the player, then the game is over. When this

happens, we want to bring up a high-score table and (when appropriate) let the player enter their

name. After showing the high-score table, we want to restart the game. Conveniently, Game

Maker provides a Show Highscore event that handles most of this automatically.

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Adding an event to the player_object for colliding with the avoid_object:

1. Add a Collision event for colliding with the avoid_object.

2. Include a Show Highscore action from the score tab. 3. Click OK to keep the default settings for this action’s properties.

4. Also include a Restart Game action from the main2 tab. This action has no properties.

5. The object properties window for the player_object should now look like the next image (see below). Check that you have included all the player_object’s events. We’re done with this object for now, so click OK.

That’s it for the avoid_object, but we still need the system_object to create instances of

the avoid_objects in the first place. However, we don’t want the avoid_objects to appear at

regular intervals because this would make the game too easy. Instead we want there to be a

random chance that an avoid_object is created at each “step” of the game.

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A step is essentially just a short period of time in which everything on the screen moves a

very small distance. There are normally 30 steps in every second, so we only need there to be a

very small chance that an avoid_object is created in each step. We achieve this by using a

Test Chance action, which acts like throwing a die with many sides. In each step we throw the

die, but only one side will trigger the chance action and create an avoid_object. In this way, we

create a steady, but unpredictable, flow of avoid_objects.

Adding a step event to the system_object:

1. Double-click the system_object in the resource list to bring back its Object Properties window.

2. Click the Add Event button, select the Step event, and choose Step again from the pop-

up menu.

3. Include the Test Chance action from the control tab. Set the sides of the die to 50 in the action’s properties.

4. Also include the Create Instance action in the Actions list for this event. Set the properties to create an avoid_object and select the Relative option, so that the avoid_object is created relative to the system’s position. The event should now look like the picture below.

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The Test Chance action is an example of a conditional action. Conditional actions

control the action that immediately follows them so that it is only performed if some condition is

met. So in this case the Create Instance action is only performed if the Test Chance

action rolls a 1 using a 50-sided die–otherwise it is skipped.

Click OK, save your work, and run the game to test it. Avoid_objects should now be

appearing, and you should be able to remove them with your release_objects to increase your

score in the window caption. When you are eventually come into contact with an avoid_object,

the high-score table will be displayed and the game restarts. How long can you last?

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The contact_object

We now have a game with two goals: removing avoid_objects and seeing how long you

can keep playing without an avoid_object coming into contact with the player. However, it’s still

not much fun to play as it is far too easy to provide any real challenge. To increase the challenge,

we’re going to occasionally have the system_object make contact_objects along with the

avoid_objects. If the player uses a release_object to remove a contact_object, the player will lose

300 points, but if the player comes into contact with a contact_object the player will gain 500

points. This will mean that the player will have to be much more careful about when they use the

release_object, increasing the challenge of the game.

Creating a new contact_object and its events:

1. Create a new object called contact_object, and give it the contact sprite.

2. Add a Create event for the object and include a Move Fixed action in it. Set it to move left with a Speed of 8 (slower than the avoid_objects to make the game harder).

3. Add an Outside room event (in Other events) and include a Destroy Instance action from the main1 tab. The contact_object should now look like the picture below.

4. Close the contact_object.

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Open the release_object to subtract points for destroying a contact object:

5. Add a Collision event with the contact_object and include a Destroy Instance action (Choose Other).

6. Include a Set Score action in the collision event with a value of -300 and the Relative property selected. This will subtract 300 from the player’s score.

7. Close release_object.

Open the player_object to gain points for getting a contact_object:

8. In the player_object, add a Collision event with the contact_object and include the Destroy Instance action (Choose Other) in it.

9. Include the Set Score action with a value of 500 and the Relative property selected. This will add 500 to the player’s score. The player_object should now look like the picture below.

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10. Click OK to close all the properties windows.

Now we need to make the system randomly release contact_objects as well as

avoid_objects. This is the same process as we did for the avoid_objects except we will use a value

of 100 for the die so that they are created less often.

Editing the system_object to randomly create contact_objects:

1. Reopen the Object Properties form for the system_object. 2. Click on the existing Step event to select it and view its actions.

3. Include another Test Chance action in the Step event. Set the sides of the die to be 100 in the action’s properties.

4. Include the Create Instance action below the new Test Chance action in the Actions list. Set the properties to create a contact_object and select the Relative option.

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That completes the second phase of our game! All the gameplay elements are now in

place. Save the game and carefully test it to make sure it works correctly.

Backgrounds and Sounds

Intersection we’ll finish off the look and feel of our game by adding background

graphics, sound effects, and music. As you’ll see, these finishing touches have quite a dramatic

effect on how professional the game appears.

A Background Image

The first improvement we’ll make is to add a background to the room. Backgrounds are

another type of resource, like sprites, rooms, and objects. You need to create an image that is

exactly the same size as the game window (640x480 pixels). This needs to be loaded into a new

background resource, which can then be assigned to a room.

Creating a new background and assigning it to a room:

1. Select Create Background from the Resources menu. 2. Call the background background_first, and click the Edit Background button. 3. Draw a background with the drawing tools and click OK to close the Background

Properties window. 4. Reopen the properties form for the room by double-clicking on it.

5. Select the backgrounds tab in the Room Properties form. Click the menu icon to the

right of where it says <no background> and select background_first from the pop-up menu.

6. Close the Room Properties form by clicking the green checkmark in the top-left corner of

the window.

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Background Music

The next step is to add some atmospheric music. Sounds are another kind of Game Maker

resource for including both sound effects and music. We need to create a sound resource for the

music and then set up an action to start the music playing. We’ll include this action in the Create

event of the system_object so that it starts playing at the beginning of the game, but it would

work just as well in the player_object too.

Creating a music sound resource and playing it in the system_object:

1. Create a sound file using http://aviary.com/online/music-creator and save the .mp3 as Music.mp3.

2. Select Create Sound from the Resources menu and call it sound_music. 3. In the properties form that appears, click Load Sound and select Music.mp3.

4. Close the Sound Properties form by clicking OK.

5. Reopen the Object Properties window for the system_object.

6. Click the existing Create event to select it and view its actions.

7. Include a Play Sound action (main1 tab) in the Create event. 8. In the action properties, select the music sound and set the Loop property to true. This

makes the music loop back to the start when it finishes.

9. Click OK to close the action, and click OK again to close the system_object.

Sound Effects

Adding sound effects is another way to enhance the atmosphere of a game, but they also

help to inform the player about their actions. For now, we’ll just add two sound effects to our

game: one for removing an avoid_object and one for removing a contact_object. The

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contact_object sound effect should be different than the avoid_object so that the player instantly

knows they have made a bad decision.

Creating and playing sound effects for getting rid of Contact and Avoid_objects:

1. Create a new sound resource called sound_avoid.

2. Create an avoid.mp3 file from sounds on http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html.

3. Close the Sound Properties window.

4. Reopen the Object Properties form for the release_object and select the existing Collision event with the avoid_object.

5. Include a Play Sound action in the collision event and select the new sound. Leave the Loop property set to false.

6. Repeat the previous steps to create a sound resource for contact.mp3. Include an action

to play it in the release_object’s collision event with the contact_object.

Congratulations!!!

Congratulations on completing your very first game using Game Maker! When you’ve

finished a game, you can turn it into an executable by choosing Create Executable from the File

menu. Executables don’t need Game Maker to run, so it’s easy to give them to your friends or put

them on a website.

Now that you’re a bit more familiar with Game Maker, why not try making some changes

to the game to see what effects they have? You could add new objects to the game, or try

changing the movement speeds of the different objects. This can have a big impact on the

difficulty of the game, as can changing the number of sides on the dice in the Test Chance

actions. Balancing the settings for all these parameters is one of a game designer’s most important

jobs.

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Appendix C

Game Cards

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Appendix D

Camp Survey

Pre-Course Survey

1. Your ID:________________________________________________ Please circle your current grade level: 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th Please circle the number that best represents your response to each question. 3. Suppose you could download some software and install it on your computer, so that you could play a new game. How easily do you think you could do this? 1 2 3 4 5 Could not Probably could Not sure Likely could do this Could definitely do at all do this do this 4. How likely are you to work on a game making project with a computer on your own? 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all I might do that Not sure Likely Am definitely planning to do this 5. How likely are you to create content for the Web (For example, YouTube video, personal Web sites, avatar, 3D model, game)? 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all I might do that Not sure Likely Am definitely planning to do this

6. How likely are you to take classes in the future that focus on computers or technology? 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all I might do that Not sure Likely Am definitely planning to do this 7. How would you describe what a system is? Give an example: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

8. How does the system you described work? Write out how the system works. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Post-Course Survey

Your id:_______________________ Please choose the number that best represents your response to each question. Suppose you went home and wanted to download Game Maker and install it on your computer, so that you could run it at home. How easily do you think you could do this? 1 2 3 4 5 Could not Probably could Not sure Likely could do this Could definitely do at all do this do this 2. How likely are you to work on a video game making project on your own? 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all I might do that Not sure Likely Am definitely planning to do this 3. How likely are you to create content in any virtual world or on the Web in general (movies, web pages, animation, etc.)? 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all I might do that Not sure Likely Am definitely planning to do this 4. How likely are you to communicate with other people on-line? 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all I might do that Not sure Likely Am definitely planning to do this 5. How likely are you to take classes in the future that focus on 3D computing, multimedia, video games, or computers and technology in general? 1 2 3 4 5 Not at all I might do that Not sure Likely Am definitely planning to do this 6. Describe how the game you made shows movement, avoidance, release, and contact (MARC)? 7. Does your game show a type of system? If so, what does the system do? _______________________________________________________________________

8. After completing the class exercises, do you think about systems differently? 1 2 3 4 5 Disagree Somewhat disagree Neutral Agree Strongly agree

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9. If so, how? _______________________________________________ 10. What did you learn about making games?__________________________________________

11. Do games have similarities to activities in your daily life (i.e., getting up in the morning, the school lunch period, after school activities)? 1 2 3 4 5 Disagree Somewhat disagree neutral Agree Strongly agree

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Appendix E

Three-Month Post-Survey Questions

Student Questions:

• Have you made any games since camp? If so, what are they about (describe them).

• Remember we talked about MARC (move, avoid, release, contact)? Can you think of an example of that in daily life?

• Remember we talked about systems?

SECONDARY QUESTIONS:

• What was the thing your remember most about game camp?

• What ideas did you get from going to game camp?

o What did you learn from game camp?

o If you could do camp over what would you do differently?

FOR PARENTS:

• What kinds of camps did you send your child to this summer (Please list):

• I introduced games in camp as this (EXPLAIN19) did your child show any evidence of

this in conversations?

• In camp I taught about systems (EXPLAIN20) did they show any signs of understanding

that?

• What would you like to see from this game camp that is valuable education for schools?

19 A verbal explanation of how physical games, tabletop games, video games, and MARC were used in the course. 20 A verbal explanation was given to show how the interacting parts of the games were viewed as systems in the study.

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Appendix F

Recruitment Flyer

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Appendix G

Smithsonian Physical Game

Find as many animals as you can that fit 3 of the following characteristics.

Mammals

Can fly

Vegetarian

Spots

Has more than 3 colors

Stripes

From Africa

From Australia

More than two legs

Larger than you

Carnivore

Smaller than you

Has Eggs

Has claw

You can see an animal and the animal it eats

in the same room

Dinosaurs

Scales

Larger than you

Carnivore

Smaller than you

See through it

Lives in packs

Has Eggs

Vegetarian

Can fly

Has claws

You can see an animal and the animal it eats

in the same room

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Birds, Insects, & Reptiles

Feathers

No legs

Larger than you

From Africa

From Australia

Carnivore

Smaller than you

Has a queen

Has Eggs

Vegetarian

More than two eyes

Shiny

Has claws

Live in Salt water

Can breathe in both water and air

Has wings but can’t fly

Special characteristics that helps it eat

You can see an animal and the animal it eats

in the same room

Ocean life

No legs

Larger than you

Carnivore

Smaller than you

Has Eggs

Vegetarian

Has no eyes

Shiny

Has more than 3 colors

Has claws

Special characteristics that helps it eat

You can see an animal and the animal it eats

in the same room

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Gems & Minerals

From the moon

From space

Is harder than wood

Is softer than wood

Is multicolored

Is cut by a human

Is formed by volcanoes

Is used in electronics

From Africa

From Australia

Shiny

Can be used as money

Looks like candy (name the candy)

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Appendix H

Tabletop Version of Video Game Tutorial

Vita of Ryan Patton

Education

Ph.D., Art Education, The Pennsylvania State University, (August 2011) M.S., Art Education, The Pennsylvania State University, 2004 B.A., Art History and History, The University of Iowa, 1997

Select Related Professional Experience

Instructor, 2006 – 2011, Penn State University Interdisciplinary Digital Studio Capstone II, Spring 2011 Instructor – Visual Images on the Web, Summer 2007 – 2010 Instructor – The Visual Arts in the Elementary School, 2007 – 2009 Instructor – History and Theory of Digital Art, Spring 2008 Instructor – Visual Culture and Educational Technologies, Fall 2006 Instructor, 2002 – 2011, Smithsonian Associates, Washington D.C. Instructor – Cyberanimation, 2002 – 2010 Instructor – Video Games: Design & Play! 2006 – 2011 Art Teacher, 2003 – 2006, New York City Public Schools

Select Scholarly Publications

Patton, R., & Kenyon, M. (2010). Physical computing and video game art education. In R. W. Sweeny (Ed.), Digital visual culture: Interactions and intersections in 21st century art education (pp. 190-196). Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Patton, R. (2010). Obstructing the view: An argument for the use of obstructions in art education pedagogy. Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 30(1), 49-59.

Patton, R., & Sweeny, R. W. (2009). Citysneak: Play, pedagogy & surveillance. In A. de Souza e Silva & D. Sutko (Eds.), Hybrid reality and location-based games: Reconfiguring social and urban networks via locative media (pp. 204-216). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Patton, R. (2005). “Why” Project: Art in the Aftermath. Visual Arts Research, 31(1), 35-80.

Select Professional Presentations

Patton, R. with Sweeny, R. W. (May 2009). CitySneak: Play and Pedagogy in Spaces of Surveillance. International Communications Association Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

Patton, R. (April 2009). Wii Art Education: Video Games, Physical Computing and Art Education. National Art Education Association Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Patton, R. with Sweeny, R. W. (August 2008). Practical and Theoretical Issues Regarding Video Games in Art Education. International Society for Educators in the Arts in Osaka, JP.

Patton, R. (March 2008). History of Games in Art Education. National Art Education Association Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Patton, R. (March 2006) Why Project: Art in the Aftermath. National Art Education Association Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

Honors/Distinctions

Recipient of Penn State University Alumni Association Dissertation Award, 2011 Recipient of Penn State University Graham Fellowship Award, 2006-2007