Games researchers must consider all interactions that emerge from gameplay, not simply those that occur within the boundary constraints of the game as conceived by the game’s designers. These include “meta-game” interactions (e.g., cheat, hint, player community forums) where games are discussed and strategies/play are analyzed outside the game. Peripheral contexts may hold equal or more value than games themselves as they draw on player reflection, analysis, and collaboration.
Published in Chapter:
Stories, Games, and Learning through Play: The Affordances of Game Narrative for Education
Stephen T. Slota (University of Connecticut, USA) and Michael F. Young (University of Connecticut, USA)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 26
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-0513-6.ch014
Abstract
Stories are the mechanism through which humans construct reality and make sense of the world around them. Yet, literature on the effects of narrative in game-based and other learning environments is quite variable, and the relevance of narrative to the learning sciences is not well-researched. Identifying precisely how narrative intertwines with human experience of the lived-in world requires the application of a situated cognition framework to understand user-content-context interactions as dynamic and co-determined. This chapter uses examples drawn from a narrative-structured, game-based learning program to accomplish that goal, discussing in-context, on-the-fly dialogic interactions between narrative “producers” and “recipients.” While there is still much to learn, the leveraging of narrative to help recipients grapple with complex social, cultural, and intellectual issues may be one of the most important—and overlooked—means of inducing game-to-real world transfer.