recategorising games.
I have started to think more deeply about my previous post on games and genres and why it is that location-based games and games in general still resort to the same old themes and I began to recall my first MA essay was all about the fact that educators believe games could be good for learning, but have difficulty finding a common language that will let them speak directly to game developers and turn learning objectives into a game. (In fact, communication between anyone other than fellow developers seems to be an issue in a way because I heard a slightly similar conversation at the Game Writers Conference at BAFTA last week where writers wanted to find ways for narrative to be better integrated with games).
Game developers tend to talk about game in terms of Genre: Action, Adventure, Puzzle (ignore the discussion about whether they're classed as "official" games for the moment), Mystery, Sim/Sport, Role-play, Strategy, Platform...maybe? and all the imbetweens. My argument is that these genres are grey at best, with games frequently crossing genres, and they help very little in establishing the appropriate kind of game according to learning requirements.
There has been some attempt to establish which game genres are most appropriate for which kinds of learning. The most convincing solution is provided by Richard Van Eck, who has a stab at matching taxonomies: Bates' game genres to Gagne's intellectual skills and Bloom's taxonomy. Click to see it in full
From "What are we playing at?" What it means to integrate games into the curriculum and why we should. Richard Van Eck, Associate Professor, Instructional Design & Technology, University of North Dakota
It looks a bit square hole round peg. I think we probably need to take a new look at how we categorise games as a whole in order to fully understand them. Before I sign off this evening..there's another argument which is that most of our problems would be solved if we could simply come to some agreement about the most basic terminology. There may be something here too, however different disciplines have always used alternative words to describe the same thing depending on their perspective. This may well be a fundemental flaw in the way human beings have always communicated with each other, however I think the real issue at the moment for educators is not that they speak a different language to game developers when it comes to talking about games, but rather they have no meaningful words at all to describe games in relation to learning.
