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Documents
Whitepaper10 pages
Digital Games for Education: When Meanings Play
"Digital Games for Education: When Meanings Play" explores the intricate relationship between game design and educational outcomes, using the development of "Contagion," a web-based game for 10-15 year olds on contagious diseases, as a case study.
- The authors argue that educational meaning is embedded in every element of a game's design, including character selection, art, narrative, programming, goals, and play itself, not just its subject matter.
- The project Contagion, built in Macromedia Flash for ages 10 to 15, covers four infectious diseases (SARS, West Nile Virus, Avian Flu, and AIDS) and was developed through design-based research at Simon Fraser University and York University.
- The authors found that their initial character art and pronoun choices reproduced gender stereotypes, and they revised toward more ambiguous, "marked" characters.
DiGRAJan 2007
Report8 pages
Effect of Video Games on Children's Aggressive Behavior and Pro-social Behavior: A Panel Study with Elementary School Students
This panel study investigated the effects of video games on aggressive and pro-social behavior in elementary school students.
- A panel study of 780 Japanese fifth graders (384 boys, 396 girls), surveyed two to four months apart in late 2001 and early 2002, found no significant effect of video game use or violent content on aggressive behavior, departing from several earlier correlational findings.
- Violent game preference was negatively associated with pro-social behavior for all participants and for boys specifically, and greater weekday play predicted lower pro-social behavior among boys.
- Exposure to pro-social scenes was positively associated with pro-social behavior, while exposure to neither violent nor sexual scenes significantly predicted aggressive behavior.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper7 pages
Gender in Play: Mapping a Girls' Gaming Club
This document presents an ethnographic study exploring the micro-interactions of a girls' gaming club in an elementary school in Toronto, Canada, to understand how boys' privilege and girls' educational disadvantage in video games are maintained.
- The study's core finding is that girls' participation in gaming, even in girls-only spaces, is tenuous: in a 30-second clip from a Greater Toronto Area elementary school, two boys' interruption of a girls-only session prompted immobility and silence from the girls, while one girl's gesture effectively invited the boys back into control.
- The authors argue that conventional textual ethnography flattens the multimodal communication involved in such interactions, and they introduce the MAP (Multimodal Analysis Program) tool to chart gesture, posture, speech, and proximity as coordinated "semiotic scores."
- Survey data cited in the paper show female participants typically describe their gaming as spectatorship or play with male relatives, rather than as independent play.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
From Gamers to Scholars: Challenges of Teaching Game Studies
Zagal and Bruckman's paper examines the pedagogical difficulties of teaching game studies at the university level, drawing on interviews with twelve instructors in the field.
- Students' deep but narrow gaming backgrounds can boost motivation and supply rich analytical material, yet they often impede critical reasoning, as learners cling to genre-specific assumptions, dismiss older titles, and conflate skilled play with analytical insight.
- Instructors report that students resist perspectives that challenge their identity as "gamers," which makes it harder to foster the detached, critical stance that game studies requires.
- The field's relative youth, lack of an established canon, and practical access problems (platform obsolescence, time demands, uneven prior exposure) structurally compound the difficulty of teaching it.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
Serious Games in Language Learning and Teaching: A Theoretical Perspective
The document, "Serious Games in Language Learning and Teaching: A Theoretical Perspective," conceptualizes the design of game-based language learning materials through an educational design theory framework.
- The paper is a theoretical, conceptual work (produced under the 'Serious Games on a Global Market' project, 2007–2010) that presents its claims as hypotheses rather than empirically established findings, reporting no quantitative data beyond one cited survey.
- Its core argument is that serious language-learning games can support meaningful communicative language use, drawing on educational design theory, project pedagogy, and social semiotics, and framing language teaching's shift from drill-based structural approaches through cognitive models toward socio-cognitive and communicative paradigms.
- The main empirical anchor is a 2002 SAFT survey of 9- to 16-year-olds, which found children learn about the Internet mainly from friends, then parents, their own experimentation, and teachers last, leading the authors to argue that games should build on children's informal competitive, interactive, and social play.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
Play: A Procrustean Probe
"Play: A Procrustean Probe" explores the transformative impact of digital games on play and media consumption through the lens of McLuhan's tetrad.
- The report applies McLuhan's media tetrad as an exploratory lens rather than a rigorous scientific method, arguing that computerization transforms play in ways that challenge prevailing critiques of gaming.
- Against claims by Berger and Putnam that gaming is inherently isolating, the analysis argues that digital games deepen solo play through computational complexity while also enabling large-scale multiplayer interaction, as in MMORPGs.
- The author traces solitary play back through board games, pinball, and solo role-playing books, contending that isolation is a longstanding feature of play rather than a novel digital corruption.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper9 pages
Team Structure in the Development of Game-Based Learning Environments
This study examines optimal team structures and collaborative practices for developing digital Game-Based Learning Environments (GBLEs), advocating for a multidisciplinary, user-driven approach.
- Learning, content-area, and game-design expertise was frequently insufficient or underused across three case projects (Gameli 1.0, Gameli 2.0, and the Social Responsibility and Peatland Adventure projects), with learning and content experts often relegated to consultancy roles rather than responsible positions.
- The authors propose a general early-stage team structure comprising a management team, pre-production and production teams that include game design and software engineering expertise, and a design partner team representing end users.
- Pre-production is framed as the period for building shared understanding of project goals and common ground for implementing the final product, which underpins the argument for giving learning and content experts substantive roles from the outset.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters
The document explores gameplay design patterns aimed at enhancing the believability of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) within interactive game environments.
- Believable NPCs depend on players adopting an intentional stance toward them, which requires qualities such as self-awareness, self-impelled action, emotional expression, natural language use, and persistent traits.
- The authors argue that gameplay believability must stay consistent with narrative believability, and they propose new gameplay design patterns, in the format of Lankoski and Björk's existing collection of nearly 300 patterns, to fill the gaps they identify.
- A close case study of Claudette Perrick, a shopkeeper in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, shows partial believability: she displays initiative and goal-directed responses to theft and a basic sense of self, but fails to react to unwitnessed thefts, ignores physical disruptions, shows no lasting physical consequences, and cannot meaningfully alter her life trajectory.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Literacy and Learning: Alternative Pathways into Participatory Culture
This ethnographic study explores how youth engagement in video game creation within a community design studio fosters digital literacy and participation, particularly for urban youth and English language learners.
- The study argues that building video games offers an alternative route into participatory culture, cultivating design skills and critical awareness as a counterpoint to passive media consumption, and addressing the participation gap, transparency problem, and ethics challenge identified in Jenkins' work.
- An archival analysis of 11,926 files collected over two years at a Los Angeles Computer Clubhouse found Scratch was the most-used design software, accounting for 643 files or 5.3 percent of the total after excluding saved web images, which dominated the corpus.
- Preliminary indications suggest programming complexity and community expertise grew in the second year, though the authors stress these trends are provisional because analyses of programming sophistication remain ongoing.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper9 pages
A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games
The document outlines a novel methodology, centered on a "Values Cards" tool, designed to help game designers systematically identify, analyze, and integrate human values into digital games.
- Games inevitably embed human values such as equality, justice, generosity, and competition, in their mechanics, representation, and the prior experiences players bring, much as other media do.
- The Values Cards exercise is presented as a practical tool that lets game designers identify and discuss these embedded values, and it is positioned as the first step in the broader Values at Play methodology of discovery, translation, and verification.
- Designers can gain conscious control over the values their games convey by examining both the positive and negative expressions of those values.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper9 pages
Pervasive Persuasive: A Rhetorical Design Approach to a Location-Based Spell-Casting Game for Tourists
The document outlines the design and implementation of REXplorer, a pervasive, location-based spell-casting game launching in June 2007 in Regensburg, Germany.
- REXplorer, a location-based pervasive spell-casting game, launched in June 2007 in Regensburg, Germany, using the city's roughly 1,000 medieval and Gothic landmarks (many UNESCO-listed) as its stage to persuade tourists toward situated history learning and exploration.
- The authors define persuasion as the intentional shaping of player behavior and build their "pervasive persuasive tactics" on formal and dramaturgical design rather than on conventional game mechanics alone.
- The design uses a GPS-equipped smartphone in a shell with a custom gesture-based detector device, a personalized geo-weblog, and a walkable city-core layout in which 29 paranormally charged sites serve as graph vertices, with an on-screen control fallback for older players.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper7 pages
Notes Toward a Sense of Embodied Gameplay
Peter Bayliss's "Notes Toward a Sense of Embodied Gameplay," presented at DiGRA 2007, argues that gameplay is best understood as an embodied phenomenon arising at the interface, the point where player and game meet, rather than as an escape into a virtual world or a purely formal rule system.
- Gameplay is framed as an embodied phenomenon arising at the interface where player and game meet, rather than as an escape into a virtual world or a purely formal rule system.
- The paper proposes a three-layer model of the interface (material, software, and conceptual) and critiques the 'immersive fallacy' that treats play as transport into a game world.
- Flow is distinguished from immersion: flow expands the player's sense of self and draws the game into the player's world, while immersion transports the player into the game's world.
DiGRAJan 2007