Failing at immersion: fancy play buttons

Have you ever experienced a fancy play button? You know what I mean. Its that experience where you are wrapped up in an interesting tale, and the natural ebb and flow of the story is stopped because.. you have to click play again. This annoyance usually runs by the name of "engagement," as if giving a viewer something, anything, to do will make a passive experience transform into something that has engagement. It's especially concerning when it comes to "VR," and we see things fly under the flag of immersion which are really just even fancier play buttons.

Rewards Structures in The Ward Game: An interview with Paul Darvasi

As the second interview in this series, I am excited to interview Paul Darvasi, who is a high school English and Media Studies teacher who teaches at Royal St. George’s College, in Toronto, Canada. Paul is also a doctoral candidate at York University, and a founding member of the Play Lab at the University of Toronto. He researches, writes, and speaks at the intersections of games, culture, society, education, and learning. He also designs pervasive or alternate reality games which he has implemented in instructional settings, and one of those games will be the focus of today's interview.


KM: So I’m excited to talk about the very first time I heard you talk about your classroom. It was at the Games for Education conference in Troy, and you talked about what you did with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Could you provide a brief description of that game here?

PD: Essentially, I used the narrative, setting, theme, and characters from Ken Kesey’s novel to create a 30-day game where my students are immersed in the world of the asylum. I was struck that so many of Kesey’s critiques about Nurse Ratched’s ward, such as the use of authority, coercion, and clockwork organization coincided with some of the worst aspects of schooling.

Reward structures in Gamestar Mechanic: An interview with Scott Price

Today, I’m excited to interview a close colleague and friend, Scott Price. Scott has been helping people play and learn online and offline for over 15 years. After teaching for several years, he entered the game industry with Scholastic and then joined the pioneering studio Gamelab. He moved back into "educational" games with Gamestar Mechanic, the groundbreaking game about game design, which will be the focus of today’s interview. Scott has had QA, IT, Creative, Project and Product Management roles, and has spoken on production, game design, and education at several dozen conferences and events. Scott is now Director of Product with BrainPOP. 

I have previously talked about the idea of rewards in games on this blog, as well as intrinsic rewards in specific. This interview is one of several I hope to have over the next year, as I attempt to connect ideas written on this blog to real world work that others have done.

KM: Ok, so I really want to talk to you about Gamestar Mechanic, a project I know you worked on several years ago. Maybe to start, you can describe briefly what Gamestar Mechanic is for those that aren’t familiar?

SP: Sure! Gamestar Mechanic is an online game and community that teaches game design and systems thinking through gameplay and design. Players follow a steampunk Quest and play 2D platforming and top-down games, eventually hitting levels that they can’t beat.

Playing Megaman with your Mom

Cover Art for Mega Man 2, from Wikipedia. Copyright by Capcom.

This article was originally posted on Esoteric Gaming.

“I’m going to play Mega Man now.”

“Ok, I’ll be free in 15 min.”

I distinctly remember this conversation from my childhood. This conversation was normal in many ways, I was a Nintendo child through and through. I was born the same year that Nintendo was released. I remember seeing the “1984” date etched in the plastic console and thinking, “Yes, this was made for me.”

And Mega Man 2, well, it was just one of those games that stuck with you. It was one of the originators of the classic Capcom formula: play a level, face a boss, get the boss’s special powers after beating them. Of course Mega Man 2 wasn’t the original or the last Mega Man, but it was the one that hooked me as a kid, so it was assumed that anytime I said I was “playing Mega Man,” it was Mega Man 2. This was normal.

But there’s a lot about the exchange that isn’t normal.

The subjective nature of truth

As a scientist, I've spent a lot of time concerning myself with how to convey scientific facts to those outside the scientific community. As a concerned U.S. citizen in the last 9 months, I've spent time trying to figure out what are the political facts of this world and how we trust them. As an educator, I'm particularly interested in how we teach our children to recognize true facts from false ones.

I think I've learned two simple concepts about fact-finding that I want to share. First, as humans, we don't trust facts as being true because the evidence is credible, but rather because we believe the source of the evidence is credible. Second, our default mode as humans is be extremely subjective about how we process information about the world.

I remember being taught about this subject in school.