Friday, September 28, 2012

Video Game Theory 2


Chapter 3 The Video Game Aesthetic by Eric Zimmerman
Conventional thoughts on literacy were confined to reading and writing, then later branched out with media literacy through music, film, and television.  The advent of the computer and the internet gave rise to a new form of literacy: Gaming Literacy, which the author states will become important in this new century.
The Magic Circle, as it applies to games, is an idea that during play, the game exist within this circle, with its own rules and beliefs, that is apart from the world without.  When applied to video games, the magic circle is more permeable, meaning that the game can be used to see the world outside; how we play learn in the game is applied to the real world.
The author is quick to point out that gaming literacy is not:
about serious games (to teach about math, science, etc).
about persuasive games (to deliver a message)
about training game designers.
Gaming literacy is the ability to understand and create meanings based on systems, play, and design.
System - understanding the individual parts and how they relate, or work with each other, to create the whole.  In gaming literacy this pertains to the underlying rules of the game through algorithms and subroutines.
Play - the action that follows understanding, and sometimes changing or modding, the rules of the game.
Design - the meaning imparted to the game player through the virtual world of the video game and the possibilities that existed within.
The author concludes that games are one way to become literate for a future that is leaning more towards technology and how it relates to information, communication, and learning.  Gaming literacy is but one avenue, with which the experience and learning is applied to the outside world.
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I especially liked the quote in this chapter, attributed to James Paul Gee, "video games are good for your soul."  I wish I could get my fiance to play video games with our daughter and I.  To my fiance, it may seem like just pressing buttons to perform an action on the screen, but I feel it is not that far removed from conventional games.  When kids play tag, dress up, nurse, stick ball, street hockey, etc., the games serve as roleplaying and rehearsal, and through observing or modifying the rules, children look past that imaginary boundary into the outside world, the play acting like a lens.
In Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, I watch as my daughter navigates her garden, planning which parts will have the pinata animals and which will have plants; I watch how she manages the choclate coins (the in game currency), deciding items to buy, and how much to save to aquire the more expensive ones.  In Minecraft, my daughter wants to build a treehouse next to the home I have built in the side of a mountain.  For this game she is planning, on a piece of paper, how to build that treehouse based on the in-game mechanics and she is learning how to allocate the in-game resources for her goal.
There is a lot learning in games, video games is just another way to play.

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