The Fun of It

A personal heap of fragments and quotes about teaching and game design

Csongor Baranyai
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read
  1. Setting up an environment, a system for experiencing, learning and enjoyment.
  2. Observing those, who are interacting with it, watching their engagement and their cognitive processes.
  3. Learning from these observations and drawing conclusions, updating the system, tweaking the environment and iterating.
  4. Rinse and repeat.

Let’s imagine a world where we have a game designer who is also a teacher. Who understands the value of both disciplines, who can guide students through explorations of ideas, testing and failing, theorising and strategising, building idea upon idea.
Tracy Fullerton (“Towards An Age of Play”, D.I.C.E. Summit 2015)

Thus my teaching / game design is guided by the following principles:

  • Playfulness, especially as an approach to game development (hacking, modifying, experimenting, etc.)
  • Experimentation and the Permission to Failure, as the basis of understanding and learning by doing
  • Selectable and / or Additional Learning Objectives, for personalised learning
  • Agile Principles, for learning, teaching and project management
  • System Thinking, because everything is interconnected and there often are various solutions

I want to make something I don’t understand.
Davey Wreden (Interview in “GameLoading — Rise of the Indies”)

How does one communicate with interactive media? How does interactivity convey messages and narratives? Where are the possibilities and the limits of interactivity and games?

A game that was about games but function in a way games do. Not as injectors of content, not trying to efficiently move information from a cultural form into a person, but as a context for interaction and questioning and creativity and play and turn the participants temporarily into game scholars and experts and fans.
Eric Zimmerman (“In Defence of Beauty”, DiGRA Conference 2011)

This thing was originally published in “10 Jahre BTK” (2016).

Csongor Baranyai
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