Nick Fortugno from gameLab held a workshop (
powerpoint) to bring fundamental game design into the context of designing educational games. Somewhere at the heart of design, Fortugno asserts, are people considering the system: the players and how players interact with variables. “Games are systems,” commented Fortugno, “built out of rules. Out of that comes play.”
Fortugno points out that players introduce themselves to a set of rules they negotiate with. Games have a relationship with aspects such as competition, goals, accomplishment, cooperation, collaboration, and mapping between pleasure and frustration.
In a learning game, Fortugno argues, the player response to content is focused on learning as opposed to emotional feedback. However, when designing educational games, key questions need to be faced: How does that response work? What’s the potential for it? What do we do to achieve it?
In his own classes, Fortugno often has his students play the 20 questions game. During the workshop, groups kicked off the interactive hands-on portion of the session by playing Dungeon Attack, a non-digital prototype, where much laughter was had!
Who killed the card monsters?
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Beth A. Dillon
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