Pedagogy and Gaming notes
Over the last couple of days I had the luck to read "How Learning Works," a brief, college lecture course focused book on research-supported techniques to aid teaching efficacy.
My underlying philosophy has been and still is that games are learning experiences and learning experiences are games, therefore going into things my expectation is that there would be large amounts of crossover between generally accepted principles of game design and those of pedagogy. Here I provide a brief summary of my thoughts on applying the bullet points of the book to the world of game design, and/or vice versa.
Chapter 1: Student's prior knowledge can help or hinder learning
(Or: Player's previous experiences can help or hinder enjoyment)
As a principle this seems clearly applicable; consider for example playing Spec Ops: The Line with or without having played many modern shooters.
Prior knowledge must be activated to be used; times for activation are related to the game design pattern of "on demand vs just in time"
prior knowledge comes in types, in particular four are:
declarative (what)
procedural (how)
strategic (when)
and justifying (why)
From personal experience, games which relied on me having prior knowledge that I did not have include Digimon Adventures, Knights in the Nightmare, and Disgaia, all of which I put down and did not complete.
Inappropriate prior knowledge can confuse students. This rears its head in elemental RPS fairly often. Also the intense disappointment I and some others felt in the nature of the twist in Bravely Default came from exploitation of inappropriate assumptions without giving the player reason to question these assumptions.
Diagnosing prior knowledge is important, but few games build significantly on prior knowledge, tending to introduce things from the ground up using tutorials.
Tutorials could allow experienced players to speed through content and access advantages while bringing new players up to speed.
Some games try to do this (I'm remembering League's self assessment for new players) and others do it terribly (ages long mandatory pokemon tutorials in the sixth identical game, the tutorial in NeverWinter Nights which moved you up two levels that you otherwise simply missed out on making the game very difficult)
Brainstorming prior information is a good way to assess; this could make a cool tutorial sandbox, wherein there are achievements for almost every possible action allowing the player to try things out safely and with lots of encouragement.
Patterns of error: MOBAs come to mind as games whose problems are often centered around being bad at identifying systematic patterns of errors, as one rarely practices individual skills (zoning, warding, last-hitting) in isolation. DamageMeters allows some amount of this to be identified in WoW.
link to previous courses: some games reference other games (hearthstone->magic, Bravely Default -> Final Fantasy) but it's uncommon--I think this is actually bad and should be remedied, but it also is unpalatable to games since it restricts their audience.
Games rarely reference prior knowledge and every day events, this is understandable but I think one can imagine these sorts of things benefitting a game.
Much prior knowledge is assessed and trained well in games, much better than in classrooms, but part of that is because games are often simple. Complex games can do a bad job of this--Knights in the Nightmare and Monster Hunter come to mind.
Games often do a good job testing players' reasoning and allowing them to utilize accurate knowledge, and giving them adequate time for practice.
Asking players to justify their reasoning is interesting, but is rarely practical in many game environments. On the other hand, talking through games of chess is nigh-universal for new players.
Chapter 2: How students organize knowledge affects how they learn and apply what they know.
How players organize knowledge affects how they play and adjust to new levels.
The differences between expert and novice knowledge here seems trivially transferable.
Boundary cases are common in games; introducing new mechanics alongside circumstances in which they're necessary.
Comparing deep features in games is difficult, because few games have many deep features. Most have maybe one or two which constitute the entire game experience.
This leads me to a design exercise, creating a game in which a central theme is drawing on the interactions between different systems/contexts/mechanics. Some inspirations: Dominion, Cribbage, MOBAs.
Chapter 3: Students' motivation generates, directs, and sustains what they do learn.
Well here's a central point of interest in games for pedagogy.
The motivation equation: motivation = value * expectancy / (delay * impulsiveness)
delay is low, and value and expectancy are HIGH in games, which makes player motivation high. Getting grades on homework and ESPECIALLY autograded assignments try to emulate this.
some bad value/expectancy games:
end of a long combat in D&D, value lowers.
end of a game of yahtzee where everyone only has a couple rolls they can go for, or at the end of darts where you only need bullseyes, expectancy lowers.
Subjective value they break into three categories. I'll relate these to the aesthetics of play:
Attainment value - Challenge, Competition, Discovery, Narrative
Intrinsic value - Discovery, Expression, Sense Pleasure, Fantasy, Narrative, Abnegation
Extrinsic value - Fellowship, Competition, MAYBE fantasy
extrinsic values are clearly lower than attainment value which is below intrinsic value. This is exactly the opposite of education, and basically an equation I'd like to balance.
In order for students to be motivated, value must be:
visible, achievable, and supported
That is, when students see that they can achieve value and will be appreciated and supported in doing so, they will be motivated. Players face the same circumstances--being unable to see the goal in a level is frustrating, and getting beaten by other people at fighting games or MOBAs is frustrating (inspiring defiance rather than motivation) whereas a good group in WoW or monster hunter supports each other.
connecting to student interests is sort of trivial for games...
games feel like constant practical tasks, except when cutscenes or tutorials overwhelm players.
Relevance of games to outside circumstances and their extrinsic value is EXACTLY what I'm interested in enhancing.
Identifying and rewarding successes is very powerful in games, especially achievements contribute to this.
Alignment of learning/play objectives with layout of a class or level is highly important in both designs.
Appropriate levels of challenge are also shared design conceit.
Early opportunities for success are rampant in good games. IIRC Extra Credits praised God of War 1 for the opening level in which you fight a leviathan as it destroys a ship. Rad.
Targeted feedback makes for good games; it's frustrating when you can't distinguish errors, for example in complex MOBA circumstances or fighting game combos.
Being fair in evaluations is easy in any game with systematic rules, especially computer games. Teaching math and programming benefits often from similar circumstances.
The framing of success and failure is significant, and toxic gamer culture ruins this experience often.
describing successful strategies is helpful for players (WoW raid briefings) as much as it is for students (exam study guides)
providing flexibility and control to students is recommended--allowing them to fulfill the expression aesthetic.
players are generally given the opportunity to reflect at the end of levels or matches and with cooldown periods. This enforced reflection time can be frustrating but actually is probably very good for players. I've had some bad experiences going on tilt playing match after match of league or hearthstone.
Chapter 4: To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.
expert blind spots are a problem I've encountered in writing game rules--for example the distinction between "in play" and "in hand" is pretty clear to me from various card game experiences, but isn't necessarily obvious to someone who doesn't have that experience.
Focusing attention on key aspects--some games, like Zone of the Enders, spend time focusing on every new mechanic introduced. However it's important only to focus on KEY aspects, otherwise (like in ZoE) the gameplay will drag out and the levels will feel artificial. Also including mechanics that aren't focused on allows for players to distinguish their playstyles.
Diagnosing weak or missing component skills, and provide isolated practice of component skills--these tasks are almost totally absent from MOBAs (as previously mentioned) which results in probably 90% of the difficulty of those games.
Games like Prince of Persia where you can play a given piece of a level over and over, or the general tendency of games to allow you to save before approaching a difficult section, does a good job focusing on sections of the game where there are lacking component tasks.
Applicability of different skills is often artificially obvious in games, with things that can be set on fire a different color os some such. This could be an interesting avenue of attack, beginning by labeling things in graphical ways to get the association, then fade away that graphical association as the player/student practices and recognizes deeper features.
Generalization to larger principles and identification of deep features are often weak within games, but can occasionally be powerful across multiple similar games. The example of "It's Super Effective!" as a meme comes to mind--the idea of a matchup being favorable and easing the difficulty of a task is a good concept and carries over to many circumstances. However within the game of pokemon, the concept is pretty narrowly applicable.
Chapter 5: goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback are critical to learning
players desire formative rather than summative feedback. In almost no game do you not learn until the end of a level how well you've done. Games are full of formative feedback, and games which don't have enough (like WoW raids) are given extra (like damagemeters) by players on their own initiative
Challenge level appropriateness, explicit goals, opportunities for practice, and scaffolding of new skills are all very common and thorough and central to good game design.
Setting clear expectations of practice may seem somewhat inapplicable to games... but the number of levels before a boss or the rate of random encounters in an RPG sets these expectations implicitly!
Good and bad role models are rarely provided in single player games, but are commonly encountered naturally in MMOs.
As one progresses through a game the goal of the game is refined. This is poorly done in some games (again MOBAs come to mind) but great in others (Minecraft survival begins with fairly open and basic goals but progresses naturally into players' desires developing and refining)
Balancing good and bad feedback: here I think game design gives an obvious rejection of a learning principle, which rejection is backed up by psychological evidence. Games tend to have vast amounts of positive feedback, whereas negative feedback is only necessary to the extent that failure is recognized. League of Legends has consistently reduced the penalty for dying, because dying is already sufficiently unpleasant and a notice of poor performance. Whereas one gets positive feedback on every minion last hit, every crit, every successful ability.
While much of the research on feedback is reliable, guesses have been in the range of 3-11 times as much positive feedback as negative (Fredrickson/Losada) or 5.6 times as much (Harvard Business Review)--calling this "balancing positive and negative feedback" rather than calling it "Emphasize positive feedback and allow students' failures to speak for themselves" seems perverse.
peer feedback is limited to multiplayer games, and can actually be problematic with different player communities (more on this next chapter!)
group level feedback makes little sense for most games, at least within game. DMGs are essentially this for D&D.
Asking players to specify how they've used feedback seems like a difficult design challenge, as feedback tends to be implicit and constant in games rather than explicit and episodic as it is in classes.
Chapter 6: Students' current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.
Anyone who argues this is untrue of games has never played games with other people. I think this is one of the most central issues facing gaming today, and is being actively addressed by people like community managers. Notable in the process are Anita Sarkeesian and Riot games for making serious strides to address these issues in gaming.
The book provides some brief models of intellectual development and development of social identity:
intellect:
duality -> multiplicity -> relativism -> commitment
as a case study, pokemon:
duality: some pokemon are good others are bad.
multiplicity: any pokemon can be strong in the right circumstances
relativism: various pokemon fill different niches and roles, and some fill broader niches or fill those niches more effectively.
commitment: I have chosen this team of six pokemon for these reasons and I beat the elite four and battle train
social identity:
naive -> acceptance -> resistance and/or immersion -> disintegration -> redefinition -> internalization
It also mentions some other aspects of development which are less fully explored:
purpose
emotions
autonomy
relationships
integrity
different games emphasize different levels of development--this may be worth doing some case studies in. Should games outline more explicitly the circumstances they expect of their players?
Classroom climate:
climate can be explicitly marginalizing, implicitly marginalizing, implicitly centralizing, or explicitly centralizing. Games are overwhelmingly implicitly or explicitly marginalizing, with some exceptions. This is also true of, and rejected by, teachers in classrooms, and is obviously central to "#GamerGate"
Some factors of climate are:
stereotypes - consider the rewrite of starfox adventures
tone - consider depression quest versus god of war 3, and why mario gets less flak than GTA
player interactions - consider online guides or guilds in WoW versus shit talk in DotA
content - presence (or lack thereof) of heroes that are not white males.
Make uncertainty safe: for example, give players the opportunity to succeed with "weak" pokemon, i.e. use of pikachu against misty. Introduce a new character as slightly overlevelled for the area you're currently in.
resist a single right answer: pokemon has done this well (possibly too well, as it often restricts people from moving from multiplicity to relativisim)
Examine Assumptions about players! Games don't do this, and it's awful!
be mindful of low ability cues-don't explicitly ask people if they're black/female/trans even if those people might have a harder time
do not ask individuals to speak for groups - include more than one example of minority characters, be sure they have personalities beyond being black or female (cough sue storm)
reduce anonymity (riot's tribunal, reputation on accounts, interguild communication in WoW)
model inclusive attitudes
use multiple and diverse examples (monsters in FF inspired by japanese, european, native american, african mythology)
make sure content does not ignore player issues or brush them under the rug (most games are fucking awful at this)
chapter 7: to become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their own knowledge and skills, plan their approach, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies as needed.
While this is true in games for successful players, the sort of holistic and long term views implicit in this principle are largely ignored by games in my experience. Some suggestions:
Make goals explicit: I've had a frustrating time and given up on Legend of Zelda games because I had to search for small, subtle visual clues.
Have players implement a plan that you provide: many games do this with linear plots; one could think of the process of playing a game as the process of implementing a plan.
Have students create their own plans: This is ridiculously underutilized in games. It exists very rarely in some, like eldritch scrolls, where the content can be explored in different orders. Pathfinder character creation comes to mind, where there are loads of abilities that you'll get in slow progress and all rely on a hierarchy of gaining power.
This also happens in Pokemon, when a pokemon is acquired for the purpose of training it to evolve and be powerful later (butterfree, gyarados, alakazam come to mind)
Overall, I was able to find powerful lessons for game design in almost every bullet point of this book, and that information feeds back occasionally from games to give insight into education. I would expect education to be more thoroughly researched than games, as it's an older and more prestigious field, but games clearly accomplish many of these goals more successfully than classrooms do.
I think my conviction that gaming and learning experiences are essentially the same is reinforced, but the divide between the practical industries of gaming versus education in our world is disappointingly wide.
An additional copy of the exercises I mentioned:
This leads me to a design exercise, creating a game in which a central theme is drawing on the interactions between different systems/contexts/mechanics. Some inspirations: Dominion, Cribbage, MOBAs.
Applicability of different skills is often artificially obvious in games, with things that can be set on fire a different color os some such. This could be an interesting avenue of attack, beginning by labeling things in graphical ways to get the association, then fade away that graphical association as the player/student practices and recognizes deeper features.
different games emphasize different levels of development--this may be worth doing some case studies in. Should games outline more explicitly the circumstances they expect of their players?
My underlying philosophy has been and still is that games are learning experiences and learning experiences are games, therefore going into things my expectation is that there would be large amounts of crossover between generally accepted principles of game design and those of pedagogy. Here I provide a brief summary of my thoughts on applying the bullet points of the book to the world of game design, and/or vice versa.
Chapter 1: Student's prior knowledge can help or hinder learning
(Or: Player's previous experiences can help or hinder enjoyment)
As a principle this seems clearly applicable; consider for example playing Spec Ops: The Line with or without having played many modern shooters.
Prior knowledge must be activated to be used; times for activation are related to the game design pattern of "on demand vs just in time"
prior knowledge comes in types, in particular four are:
declarative (what)
procedural (how)
strategic (when)
and justifying (why)
From personal experience, games which relied on me having prior knowledge that I did not have include Digimon Adventures, Knights in the Nightmare, and Disgaia, all of which I put down and did not complete.
Inappropriate prior knowledge can confuse students. This rears its head in elemental RPS fairly often. Also the intense disappointment I and some others felt in the nature of the twist in Bravely Default came from exploitation of inappropriate assumptions without giving the player reason to question these assumptions.
Diagnosing prior knowledge is important, but few games build significantly on prior knowledge, tending to introduce things from the ground up using tutorials.
Tutorials could allow experienced players to speed through content and access advantages while bringing new players up to speed.
Some games try to do this (I'm remembering League's self assessment for new players) and others do it terribly (ages long mandatory pokemon tutorials in the sixth identical game, the tutorial in NeverWinter Nights which moved you up two levels that you otherwise simply missed out on making the game very difficult)
Brainstorming prior information is a good way to assess; this could make a cool tutorial sandbox, wherein there are achievements for almost every possible action allowing the player to try things out safely and with lots of encouragement.
Patterns of error: MOBAs come to mind as games whose problems are often centered around being bad at identifying systematic patterns of errors, as one rarely practices individual skills (zoning, warding, last-hitting) in isolation. DamageMeters allows some amount of this to be identified in WoW.
link to previous courses: some games reference other games (hearthstone->magic, Bravely Default -> Final Fantasy) but it's uncommon--I think this is actually bad and should be remedied, but it also is unpalatable to games since it restricts their audience.
Games rarely reference prior knowledge and every day events, this is understandable but I think one can imagine these sorts of things benefitting a game.
Much prior knowledge is assessed and trained well in games, much better than in classrooms, but part of that is because games are often simple. Complex games can do a bad job of this--Knights in the Nightmare and Monster Hunter come to mind.
Games often do a good job testing players' reasoning and allowing them to utilize accurate knowledge, and giving them adequate time for practice.
Asking players to justify their reasoning is interesting, but is rarely practical in many game environments. On the other hand, talking through games of chess is nigh-universal for new players.
Chapter 2: How students organize knowledge affects how they learn and apply what they know.
How players organize knowledge affects how they play and adjust to new levels.
The differences between expert and novice knowledge here seems trivially transferable.
Boundary cases are common in games; introducing new mechanics alongside circumstances in which they're necessary.
Comparing deep features in games is difficult, because few games have many deep features. Most have maybe one or two which constitute the entire game experience.
This leads me to a design exercise, creating a game in which a central theme is drawing on the interactions between different systems/contexts/mechanics. Some inspirations: Dominion, Cribbage, MOBAs.
Chapter 3: Students' motivation generates, directs, and sustains what they do learn.
Well here's a central point of interest in games for pedagogy.
The motivation equation: motivation = value * expectancy / (delay * impulsiveness)
delay is low, and value and expectancy are HIGH in games, which makes player motivation high. Getting grades on homework and ESPECIALLY autograded assignments try to emulate this.
some bad value/expectancy games:
end of a long combat in D&D, value lowers.
end of a game of yahtzee where everyone only has a couple rolls they can go for, or at the end of darts where you only need bullseyes, expectancy lowers.
Subjective value they break into three categories. I'll relate these to the aesthetics of play:
Attainment value - Challenge, Competition, Discovery, Narrative
Intrinsic value - Discovery, Expression, Sense Pleasure, Fantasy, Narrative, Abnegation
Extrinsic value - Fellowship, Competition, MAYBE fantasy
extrinsic values are clearly lower than attainment value which is below intrinsic value. This is exactly the opposite of education, and basically an equation I'd like to balance.
In order for students to be motivated, value must be:
visible, achievable, and supported
That is, when students see that they can achieve value and will be appreciated and supported in doing so, they will be motivated. Players face the same circumstances--being unable to see the goal in a level is frustrating, and getting beaten by other people at fighting games or MOBAs is frustrating (inspiring defiance rather than motivation) whereas a good group in WoW or monster hunter supports each other.
connecting to student interests is sort of trivial for games...
games feel like constant practical tasks, except when cutscenes or tutorials overwhelm players.
Relevance of games to outside circumstances and their extrinsic value is EXACTLY what I'm interested in enhancing.
Identifying and rewarding successes is very powerful in games, especially achievements contribute to this.
Alignment of learning/play objectives with layout of a class or level is highly important in both designs.
Appropriate levels of challenge are also shared design conceit.
Early opportunities for success are rampant in good games. IIRC Extra Credits praised God of War 1 for the opening level in which you fight a leviathan as it destroys a ship. Rad.
Targeted feedback makes for good games; it's frustrating when you can't distinguish errors, for example in complex MOBA circumstances or fighting game combos.
Being fair in evaluations is easy in any game with systematic rules, especially computer games. Teaching math and programming benefits often from similar circumstances.
The framing of success and failure is significant, and toxic gamer culture ruins this experience often.
describing successful strategies is helpful for players (WoW raid briefings) as much as it is for students (exam study guides)
providing flexibility and control to students is recommended--allowing them to fulfill the expression aesthetic.
players are generally given the opportunity to reflect at the end of levels or matches and with cooldown periods. This enforced reflection time can be frustrating but actually is probably very good for players. I've had some bad experiences going on tilt playing match after match of league or hearthstone.
Chapter 4: To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practice integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned.
expert blind spots are a problem I've encountered in writing game rules--for example the distinction between "in play" and "in hand" is pretty clear to me from various card game experiences, but isn't necessarily obvious to someone who doesn't have that experience.
Focusing attention on key aspects--some games, like Zone of the Enders, spend time focusing on every new mechanic introduced. However it's important only to focus on KEY aspects, otherwise (like in ZoE) the gameplay will drag out and the levels will feel artificial. Also including mechanics that aren't focused on allows for players to distinguish their playstyles.
Diagnosing weak or missing component skills, and provide isolated practice of component skills--these tasks are almost totally absent from MOBAs (as previously mentioned) which results in probably 90% of the difficulty of those games.
Games like Prince of Persia where you can play a given piece of a level over and over, or the general tendency of games to allow you to save before approaching a difficult section, does a good job focusing on sections of the game where there are lacking component tasks.
Applicability of different skills is often artificially obvious in games, with things that can be set on fire a different color os some such. This could be an interesting avenue of attack, beginning by labeling things in graphical ways to get the association, then fade away that graphical association as the player/student practices and recognizes deeper features.
Generalization to larger principles and identification of deep features are often weak within games, but can occasionally be powerful across multiple similar games. The example of "It's Super Effective!" as a meme comes to mind--the idea of a matchup being favorable and easing the difficulty of a task is a good concept and carries over to many circumstances. However within the game of pokemon, the concept is pretty narrowly applicable.
Chapter 5: goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback are critical to learning
players desire formative rather than summative feedback. In almost no game do you not learn until the end of a level how well you've done. Games are full of formative feedback, and games which don't have enough (like WoW raids) are given extra (like damagemeters) by players on their own initiative
Challenge level appropriateness, explicit goals, opportunities for practice, and scaffolding of new skills are all very common and thorough and central to good game design.
Setting clear expectations of practice may seem somewhat inapplicable to games... but the number of levels before a boss or the rate of random encounters in an RPG sets these expectations implicitly!
Good and bad role models are rarely provided in single player games, but are commonly encountered naturally in MMOs.
As one progresses through a game the goal of the game is refined. This is poorly done in some games (again MOBAs come to mind) but great in others (Minecraft survival begins with fairly open and basic goals but progresses naturally into players' desires developing and refining)
Balancing good and bad feedback: here I think game design gives an obvious rejection of a learning principle, which rejection is backed up by psychological evidence. Games tend to have vast amounts of positive feedback, whereas negative feedback is only necessary to the extent that failure is recognized. League of Legends has consistently reduced the penalty for dying, because dying is already sufficiently unpleasant and a notice of poor performance. Whereas one gets positive feedback on every minion last hit, every crit, every successful ability.
While much of the research on feedback is reliable, guesses have been in the range of 3-11 times as much positive feedback as negative (Fredrickson/Losada) or 5.6 times as much (Harvard Business Review)--calling this "balancing positive and negative feedback" rather than calling it "Emphasize positive feedback and allow students' failures to speak for themselves" seems perverse.
peer feedback is limited to multiplayer games, and can actually be problematic with different player communities (more on this next chapter!)
group level feedback makes little sense for most games, at least within game. DMGs are essentially this for D&D.
Asking players to specify how they've used feedback seems like a difficult design challenge, as feedback tends to be implicit and constant in games rather than explicit and episodic as it is in classes.
Chapter 6: Students' current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning.
Anyone who argues this is untrue of games has never played games with other people. I think this is one of the most central issues facing gaming today, and is being actively addressed by people like community managers. Notable in the process are Anita Sarkeesian and Riot games for making serious strides to address these issues in gaming.
The book provides some brief models of intellectual development and development of social identity:
intellect:
duality -> multiplicity -> relativism -> commitment
as a case study, pokemon:
duality: some pokemon are good others are bad.
multiplicity: any pokemon can be strong in the right circumstances
relativism: various pokemon fill different niches and roles, and some fill broader niches or fill those niches more effectively.
commitment: I have chosen this team of six pokemon for these reasons and I beat the elite four and battle train
social identity:
naive -> acceptance -> resistance and/or immersion -> disintegration -> redefinition -> internalization
It also mentions some other aspects of development which are less fully explored:
purpose
emotions
autonomy
relationships
integrity
different games emphasize different levels of development--this may be worth doing some case studies in. Should games outline more explicitly the circumstances they expect of their players?
Classroom climate:
climate can be explicitly marginalizing, implicitly marginalizing, implicitly centralizing, or explicitly centralizing. Games are overwhelmingly implicitly or explicitly marginalizing, with some exceptions. This is also true of, and rejected by, teachers in classrooms, and is obviously central to "#GamerGate"
Some factors of climate are:
stereotypes - consider the rewrite of starfox adventures
tone - consider depression quest versus god of war 3, and why mario gets less flak than GTA
player interactions - consider online guides or guilds in WoW versus shit talk in DotA
content - presence (or lack thereof) of heroes that are not white males.
Make uncertainty safe: for example, give players the opportunity to succeed with "weak" pokemon, i.e. use of pikachu against misty. Introduce a new character as slightly overlevelled for the area you're currently in.
resist a single right answer: pokemon has done this well (possibly too well, as it often restricts people from moving from multiplicity to relativisim)
Examine Assumptions about players! Games don't do this, and it's awful!
be mindful of low ability cues-don't explicitly ask people if they're black/female/trans even if those people might have a harder time
do not ask individuals to speak for groups - include more than one example of minority characters, be sure they have personalities beyond being black or female (cough sue storm)
reduce anonymity (riot's tribunal, reputation on accounts, interguild communication in WoW)
model inclusive attitudes
use multiple and diverse examples (monsters in FF inspired by japanese, european, native american, african mythology)
make sure content does not ignore player issues or brush them under the rug (most games are fucking awful at this)
chapter 7: to become self-directed learners, students must learn to assess the demands of the task, evaluate their own knowledge and skills, plan their approach, monitor their progress, and adjust their strategies as needed.
While this is true in games for successful players, the sort of holistic and long term views implicit in this principle are largely ignored by games in my experience. Some suggestions:
Make goals explicit: I've had a frustrating time and given up on Legend of Zelda games because I had to search for small, subtle visual clues.
Have players implement a plan that you provide: many games do this with linear plots; one could think of the process of playing a game as the process of implementing a plan.
Have students create their own plans: This is ridiculously underutilized in games. It exists very rarely in some, like eldritch scrolls, where the content can be explored in different orders. Pathfinder character creation comes to mind, where there are loads of abilities that you'll get in slow progress and all rely on a hierarchy of gaining power.
This also happens in Pokemon, when a pokemon is acquired for the purpose of training it to evolve and be powerful later (butterfree, gyarados, alakazam come to mind)
Overall, I was able to find powerful lessons for game design in almost every bullet point of this book, and that information feeds back occasionally from games to give insight into education. I would expect education to be more thoroughly researched than games, as it's an older and more prestigious field, but games clearly accomplish many of these goals more successfully than classrooms do.
I think my conviction that gaming and learning experiences are essentially the same is reinforced, but the divide between the practical industries of gaming versus education in our world is disappointingly wide.
An additional copy of the exercises I mentioned:
This leads me to a design exercise, creating a game in which a central theme is drawing on the interactions between different systems/contexts/mechanics. Some inspirations: Dominion, Cribbage, MOBAs.
Applicability of different skills is often artificially obvious in games, with things that can be set on fire a different color os some such. This could be an interesting avenue of attack, beginning by labeling things in graphical ways to get the association, then fade away that graphical association as the player/student practices and recognizes deeper features.
different games emphasize different levels of development--this may be worth doing some case studies in. Should games outline more explicitly the circumstances they expect of their players?