Gamification as Responsible Experience Design

Disrupting the New Norm and Fostering a Hero’s Journey

Dr. Sylvester Arnab 1 Comment

Within the domain of educational technology, new pedagogical approaches and technologies have been “disrupting” the status quo of teaching and learning practices, which have in turn become mainstream and then been accepted as the “new” norm. In recent years, digital platforms, ranging from e-learning and simulation platforms to digital games and mobile applications aiming to enhance engagement, have provided alternative means and options for the way learning content is delivered and consumed. However, there is danger that a learner’s focus is further fragmented by these “disruptions.” Furthermore, dependence on different online and digital platforms for facilitating learning could lead to disconnections between learners’ engagement with the different sources and disparities between the virtual/digital and real knowledge, capabilities, confidence and self-awareness (Warburton, 2009; Arnab et al., 2011). Continue Reading →

Offworld Trading Company

Growing Up with Strategy Games

Rob Parker

I write this, Mr. Johnson, because your work resonates with me. I respect you and I think when you write, you aim for the same targets I do. On paper, Offworld Trading Company is exactly the type of game that sparked my interest in strategy games in the first place. It’s receiving some very positive press and has already sold over 100,000 copies. That’s great. I hope it does well for you. I won’t be buying it, though. It has to do with your company’s co-founder and president Brad Wardell. Wardell’s decision to associate with a group of people that have had demonstrable and undeniably negative effects on the gaming industry is something I have a lot of trouble with. While that group may adopt the language of platform holders to hold their harassment at arm’s length by calling it the work of “third-party trolls,” they still provided the platform for those abuses to be carried out and are unable (but more often unwilling) to take responsibility for that. Continue Reading →

Free to Be Useless

Jesse Porch 1 Comment

It was a huge encouragement to read Luca Morini’s wonderful article on play as the “bulwark of uselessness” on May 4th. Having a deep understanding of and appreciation for play is a crucial part of human culture and society, and as Luca notes the freedom to be playful–to enjoy things for their own sake–is often sacrificed on the altar of “usefulness”, leading not to the enhancement of human culture but to its diminishment. To echo Luca’s use of Huizinga: “The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation…We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, because play is irrational.” Continue Reading →

America is Sick

Actualizing potential state failure with The Division

Douglas Fry 1 Comment

According to The Division, America is very, very sick. The nation is stricken with “Green Poison,” a fatal, highly contagious disease. New York City, ground zero for this devastating pandemic, has fallen into chaos and ruin. Quarantined survivors are forced to scavenge through the garbage bags and abandoned cars that fill the streets. They are trapped by their protectors, a Joint Task Force (JTF) comprised of police and military personnel that impose endless checkpoints, martial law, lethal measures in the event of non-compliance. Backed by agents from the secretive Strategic Homeland Division, the JTF exchanges near-constant gunfire with the violent groups that roam the crumbling city, killing at random. The Division is a portrait of America on the cusp of outright failure as a functioning state. Continue Reading →