Serious Games authoring tool…

I’m a passionate advocate of Serious Games. I’m not really keen of the term per se but the meaning and promise it carries matches my beliefs.

It took Lego almost 60 years (when Ole Kirk Christiansen first started creating wooden toys)to become a solid toy company. In 1916 these toys were seen as just vulgar artifacts. Nowadays parents refer to Legos like great tools for constructive learning.

Games also offer a great opportunity for the user to learn. We can’t promise WHAT exactly they will learn [since games deliver a extremely personal experience] but it foster a great deal of brain activity and research has evolved towards the proof of video games stimulating dopamine release.

Chris Brannigan’s Thinking Worlds moves us a step further towards technical independence to Serious Games development. It’s not perfect, yet, but one can already experience some evolution towards independent game production.
http://thinkingworlds.wordpress.com/

Video Games and Learning

Karl Kapp in “Don’t Play Video Games: Make Them” quotes Rafael Fajardo’s “Computer games as liberal arts?” as an example of a constructivist learning tool. 

When I was writing my research (before getting a real job) on Learning and Play Styles, one of the things I looked at was: one’s motivation to play a video game. To understand why someone wants to play a video game, you have to understand their personality. What is it about their personality that tells about their reason to play?

In a domino effect persective, the faculties acting introspectively what affects our motivation comes from our Personality.

The chain goes like this:

Personality > Motivation > Preference > Expectation > Player Type (style for game genre and game play) > Enjoyment

What Karl Kapp mentioned in his article about the Scratch (MIT) example is in my opinion a description of his own personal learning experience. Scratch does offer an opportunity for constructive learning. But he had the Motivation and the background knowledge ready to a certain type of video game design experience. 

Some friends from Teachers College Columbia University released a wordpress blog called Game Design Concepts that I think it’s worth to take a look at.