Safe spaces and dangerous spaces in games
I was thinking about safe spaces and how they work in games, and this is just going to be a brief meditation.
I think safe spaces are a basic need for people, and that games should respond to that by giving players the opportunity to act without risk. But a friend of mine in a discussion of safe spaces mentioned the idea of dangerous spaces and I think that there's a valuable concept in there, that people need to be able to enter spaces to put themselves at risk and open themselves up in order to grow. As I'm typing this I'm thinking of the episode of Steven Universe where the gems compose a test for Steven and it is insufficiently dangerous, and it's very disappointing for him.
Anyway, when attempting to design a safer space, I think it makes more sense to look at the aesthetics of expression and abnegation--letting people be themselves and spend time without concern. Whereas when designing a dangerous space, the aesthetics of challenge and dominance, and probably discovery are more focal.
I think a number of good games see a range of these spaces as part of their appeal.
Monster hunter, with its distinctions between offline play, local play with friends, online play, and challenge quests.
Minecraft does a great job with its flexibility between casual servers and hardcore servers.
WoW distinguishes leveling, questing and daily quests from instances and group quests segueing (sp?) into harder raids and arena.
Pokemon I think is disappointing to me on this metric. The single player game is very much a safe space, but online play is an extremely competetive dangerous space. A middle ground like some kind of MMO group questing would be an excellent addition to pokemon and I think that sentiment is widely shared.
Then of course let's bring this around to classrooms as games.
Reading assignments can be safe spaces, homeworks middling, and big tests and presentations can be dangerous spaces. There's actually a lot of design room along these dimensions, and I think that helps explain why a good teacher can easily access tools to make things work, if they can spend enough time with individual students.
In online courses, I think the safe spaces get expanded on well--easy in-lecture auto-graded questions are great for continued engagement without too much fear of failure.
On the other hand, middling spaces where homework and group work happen can be much more difficult as online cohorts are difficult to organize, and dangerous spaces get almost trivialized. Presenting a topic to peers is an excellent challenge for a learning experience, but it is very difficult to integrate into an online course--of course large lecture courses already lose this, and the right sorts of action-puzzles in a more gamelike environment could help immensely.
This definitely seems like one dimension where what I've seen of Udacity's courses with the final programming projects is superior to other online courseware (for example a coursera course on cryptography I did) where there is not a strong challenge to showcase learning at the end.
I think safe spaces are a basic need for people, and that games should respond to that by giving players the opportunity to act without risk. But a friend of mine in a discussion of safe spaces mentioned the idea of dangerous spaces and I think that there's a valuable concept in there, that people need to be able to enter spaces to put themselves at risk and open themselves up in order to grow. As I'm typing this I'm thinking of the episode of Steven Universe where the gems compose a test for Steven and it is insufficiently dangerous, and it's very disappointing for him.
Anyway, when attempting to design a safer space, I think it makes more sense to look at the aesthetics of expression and abnegation--letting people be themselves and spend time without concern. Whereas when designing a dangerous space, the aesthetics of challenge and dominance, and probably discovery are more focal.
I think a number of good games see a range of these spaces as part of their appeal.
Monster hunter, with its distinctions between offline play, local play with friends, online play, and challenge quests.
Minecraft does a great job with its flexibility between casual servers and hardcore servers.
WoW distinguishes leveling, questing and daily quests from instances and group quests segueing (sp?) into harder raids and arena.
Pokemon I think is disappointing to me on this metric. The single player game is very much a safe space, but online play is an extremely competetive dangerous space. A middle ground like some kind of MMO group questing would be an excellent addition to pokemon and I think that sentiment is widely shared.
Then of course let's bring this around to classrooms as games.
Reading assignments can be safe spaces, homeworks middling, and big tests and presentations can be dangerous spaces. There's actually a lot of design room along these dimensions, and I think that helps explain why a good teacher can easily access tools to make things work, if they can spend enough time with individual students.
In online courses, I think the safe spaces get expanded on well--easy in-lecture auto-graded questions are great for continued engagement without too much fear of failure.
On the other hand, middling spaces where homework and group work happen can be much more difficult as online cohorts are difficult to organize, and dangerous spaces get almost trivialized. Presenting a topic to peers is an excellent challenge for a learning experience, but it is very difficult to integrate into an online course--of course large lecture courses already lose this, and the right sorts of action-puzzles in a more gamelike environment could help immensely.
This definitely seems like one dimension where what I've seen of Udacity's courses with the final programming projects is superior to other online courseware (for example a coursera course on cryptography I did) where there is not a strong challenge to showcase learning at the end.