Games+and+Fun+(defined)


 * What is a game?**

Can a multiple choice quiz be a game? Consider something like sporcle.com or BBC's anatomy matching. All that's needed for something to be a game is apparently rules for actions and a score, at least according to Wikipedia. Given the variety of games, from single player to multiplayer, from board games and strategy games or arcade games and role playing games, it seems unlikely that we could identify the generalized educational affordances of the entire set of activities we call games.

Historically games arguably play a central role in enculturation. Children play games like war or dollhouse to mimic the activities of adults for which they ultimately must prepare. Civ IV or Wow, the equivalent of war, and Sims Online or TirNua, the equivalent of playing house, have the obvious educational affordance of simulating adult activities.

The STEM Video Game Challenge - promoted by the federal government - defines a //game// as follows:

"A voluntary activity structured by rules, with a defined outcome (winning, losing) or other quantifiable feedback (e.g., points) that facilitates reliable comparisons of in-player performances. Klopfer, Osterweil, & Salen (2009) in //[|Moving Learning Games Forward]//, go on to define a "Digital-learning game" as: ...differing from both games of entertainment and games for training, targets the acquisition of knowledge as its own end and fosters habits of mind and understanding that are generally useful or useful within an academic context."

This definition eliminates simulations and digital visualization tools that are not true "games," and it remains broad enough to include ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) and other activities more traditionally defined as "video games" (or those that possess elements that make them video game-like).

Fun is not just something funny. Fun is not just leisure time activities. Work can be fun. In fact almost anything can be fun. According to Csíkszentmihályi even assembly line workers can have fun on the job (he called it "Flow") by establishing hourly goals and trying to beat their best time. If work can be fun, then games (like professional sports) can be work. It is also possible to put contextual constraints on a situation such that activities that would normally be fun "must" be done at a certain time and place (for example), rendering them not fun. An example of this might be a teacher who requires his class to play 40 hours of World of Warcraft as homework or receive a grade of F. Some students who might normally enjoy playing WoW might now find the exact same activity onerous.
 * What is fun?**

Games tend to be student centered, while K-12 education is not.
 * Other Intro stuff**

Utilizing these definitions, environments such as Second Life are interesting because they are no longer understood as //games//, so much as they are considered simulated environments (although they encompass game-like capabilities).
 * Additional Thoughts:**

A note on the definition of education (from Wikipedia): "Education is in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another."

Defining a game as a structured system, with quantifiable feedback, draws clear parallels to educational systems. When defining gaming in the fashion above, with the appreciation of the education definition above, combining education and gaming does not seem as daunting a task. Essentially, all one needs to create educational gaming is an environment that has the following qualities:
 * Structure
 * Quantifiable feedback
 * Formative
 * Communication of Knowledge

One thing that seems to be necessary with productive educational gaming is the facilitation of metagame learning principles (i.e., connecting the in-game educational events to the meta-educational concepts).