I’ve also been reading the book The Soul Does Not Specialize: Revaluing The Humanities and the Polyvalent Imagination. This collection of essays, edited by Jennifer Leigh Selig, takes a hard look at the predominant educational landscape “from primary school through doctoral degree programs both in the United States and abroad” which emphasize “standardization and specialization.” Each essay in the collection makes “an impassioned argument for the importance of education in the humanities which stimulates the mind, nourishes the soul, and gives wings to the imagination.”
Gamestar Mechanic is one example of a game-based learning platform that uses the magic of interactive storytelling--video game design--to bridge the catastrophic gap that undervalues the humanities in education.
Created by E-Line Media and the Institute of Play, with initial funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Gamestar Mechanic is “currently used in over 4,000 schools, with over 350,000 youth-created games published and played over 10 million times in 100+ countries!”
While the statistics are impressive, I’m more enamored with Gamestar Mechanic because it helps to close the increasingly problematic divide between quantitative and qualitative learning. It mediates this dichotomy by teaching game design as a creative discipline that integrates technical and aesthetic thinking.
The separation between what’s technical and what’s aesthetic is a modern construction. I’ve written in a previous post about how the ancient Greeks thought about the “technical”:
The word technology comes from the Greek word “technikon,” meaning that which belongs to “techné.” According to philosopher Martin Heidegger, “techné is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts."
Our modern distinction between technical and aesthetic runs parallel to a familiar educational division between the arts and the sciences. The division has led to the drastically reduced funding for arts and humanities programs.
In an age where everything is reduced to bits and bytes, educational initiatives that demonstrate measurable markers of success are what matter. And of course, “what matters” are those things that can be measured in ways that resonate with binary thinking. This is hardly surprising.
Educational, psychological, and developmental models always tend to mimic the commercial products of their times. In the age of the automobile, for example, Sigmund Freud was preoccupied with “drive” theory. Today, we describe the mind like a computer, distinguishing between nature’s “hard-wired” personality traits and nurture’s software-like programming.
Metaphors, signs, and symbols are useful. As the building blocks of language, they let us articulate our experiences through a shared system of meaning-making. What’s more, metaphors are all we have. We re-present the universe through analogies that make social, technological, and medical accomplishments possible.
Unfortunately, we sometimes forget that metaphors have us more than we have them. This is why, at the risk of sounding extreme, I’d like to suggest that the image of the binary digit (bit) has a hold on humanity. In what could be considered an overdependence on metrics and analytics, we’ve come to privilege things can be easily divided, bifurcated, and separated into oppositional categories. Black and white. Right and wrong. Yes and no. Republican and Democrat. The unintentional prejudice of a computational metaphor system that is dependent on just two values--one and zero, on and off--casts a wide cultural influence.
Fortunately, innovative game-based learning systems like Gamestar Mechanic are harnessing the power of computational technologies and offering new integrated ways to think about how a child’s emotional and creative self-expression fits into our educational categories, disciplines, and curricula. “Knowing how to put together a successful game,” they argue, “involves system-based thinking, problem solving, collaboration, art, storytelling, and digital media literacy.”
Gamestar Mechanic is a web-based game design platform that involves three components, separated into three different sections of their website:
- Quest involves playing through an interactive narrative experience. Through a combination of comic-book-style introductions and mini-games, players can earn components they then use to create their own games. The design of the quest section of gamestar mechanic is impressive because it is not only about rewards, but also about unlocking new game making components and learning how those characters, avatars, enemies, and obstacles fit into the system as a whole. The mini-games and interactive adventures teach the principles of game design that can be used in “the Workshop.”
- Workshop is where players design and create new games using the components that have been unlocked through the process of play. Here, players apply the lessons of the quest. In the spirit of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, players become heroes. In an interactive narrative, kid-game-designers take a journey full of tests, trials, and obstacles. Eventually, they are rewarded with an “ultimate boon.” They return to the workshop carrying a new game piece and new knowledge about how to use it. Even it better, players share their new skill with the community at large in “Game Alley.”
- Game Alley is where kid-game-designers share and publish their games for a community of game “mechanics.” Game Alley forces young game designers to ask, “Who is the audience?” The audience is a community of users who provide feedback by rating and reviewing the games. Players can give 1-5 star reviews of their peers’ games. They rate the difficulty; and they can leave comments for the game designer. I was surprised at how constructive the comments were. In a community of 5-12 graders, I would’ve expected juvenile exclamations like “boring,” “awesome,” “lame,” etc. Instead, my 7-year-old has received concrete suggestions about what would make his games better.
Overall, Gamestar Mechanic is impressive. Clearly it was created “with the understanding that game design is an activity that allows learners to build technical, technological, artistic, cognitive, social, and linguistic skills suitable for our current and future world.” It teaches pretty sophisticated “systems thinking,” or systems-based problem solving. “Game mechanics” learn to adjust settings and manipulate the relationship between components within a particular framework.
In addition, Gamestar Mechanic encourages social interaction. The ideas don’t stay isolated within a kid’s head. Instead, kid-game-designers create and share their learning experience with peers. In this way, they are motivated by relationships; kids are inspired to think of game creation as a way to articulate and express themselves. Likewise, they are motivated to interpret other people’s games and comment accordingly.
It seems to me that game design is one way that the arts and humanities continue to manifest. In a world of non-linear communication modes of self-expression take on new forms. The personal essay, the autobiography, and the self-portrait are no longer sufficient by themselves. Intelligent educational models need to consider how to provide meaningful creative and interpretive skills that embrace interactive social technologies. Leaders in so-called “soft” subjects need to see video games as a new narrative genre so that the arts and humanities become the priority in education. After all, it is through the arts and humanities that we get a grip on metaphors and they lose their grip on us. Gamestar Mechanic is a great start.
Although Gamestar Mechanic is designed for older kids, my 7-year-old has had no problem navigating his way through it.
Jordan Shapiro is author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to Maximum Euphoric Bliss and co-editor of Occupy Psyche: Jungian and Archetypal Perspectives on a Movement. For information on his upcoming books and events click here.
