$20 games bin
Walking with the wild onesI have a student who lurks around the local games store and buys games in the marked-down sales box for our computer club. He keeps burying some titles deeper into box so that we have a reasonable chance to buy them with our rather meager club funds as the prices are marked further down and hit the $20 mark.
One day we splashed out and bought the computer game "Oblivion - The Elder Scrolls IV". This screen shot from the game shows a wealthy character with her pet wolves, companion mountain lion and in the background, a beggar asking for alms.
I recall that Gee mentioned in a lecture of a computer game where students figured out how to structure events and an outcome so that the native Americans managed to win the game. History isn't so much about what happened as what might have happened.
There is some merit in an approach that links the virtual spaces that students enjoy exploring with reality. This is more than just turning education into entertainment. MIT professor Henry Jenkins remarked after dancing with some students in a world that they had constructed in SecondLife.
"We have to think of ways to use games not just to escape reality but to re-engage with reality" link
I have seen some oblivion mods under development rebuilding the worlds from Tolkein and another mods involving piracy and slavery. In theory, it would be easy to create an Oblivion mod of a political prisoner / convict, trying to escape Port Arthur, Tasmania. If we toss into the mix all the wild fantasies held by them about the countryside then we may have a computer game that could be both entertaining and educational.
It would be one thing for a teacher to build this kind of game from scratch, and another for students to do the research and build this environment themselves, drawing upon the suite of tools, programming mods that use of the games physics engine, constructing quests by reflecting on relationships, building in all the trajectories that a character might reasonably follow. As Lindy remarked on a mailing list:
"Watch out for this digital modeling clay of the future"