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What does it mean for a game to engage players in academically meaningful play? Much has been written about the integration of educational learning within the design of games in terms of intrinsic/endogenous design. While these framings capture the positioning of learning within games, they provide less insight into what might distinguish design choices that are powerful in terms of both learning and gameplay from design choices that might be limiting from one or both of these perspectives. In this article, we therefore propose a framework for thinking about academically meaningful play that builds upon and extends more general ideas about meaningful play (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003). The proposed framework focuses on (a) discernability of choice outcomes, (b) integration of choice outcomes into unfolding game state, (c) meaningful choices grounded in core academic ideas, and (d) thematic and challenge access. We analyze three academic games that focus on geometric transformations as comparative cases to consider the potential affordances of the proposed framework for analyzing the implications of design choices.
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Choice Poetics by Example
Choice poetics is a formalist framework that seeks to concretely describe the impacts choices have on player experiences within narrative games. Developed in part to support algorithmic generation of narrative choices, the theory includes a detailed analytical framework for understanding the impressions choice structures make by analyzing the relationships among options, outcomes, and player goals. The theory also emphasizes the need to account for players’ various modes of engagement, which vary both during play and between players. In this work, we illustrate the non-computational application of choice poetics to the analysis of two different games to further develop the theory and make it more accessible to others. We focus first on using choice poetics to examine the central repeated choice in “Undertale,” and show how it can be used to contrast two different player types that will approach a choice differently. Finally, we give an example of fine-grained analysis using a choice from the game “Papers, Please,” which breaks down options and their outcomes to illustrate exactly how the choice pushes players towards complicity via the introduction of uncertainty. Through all of these examples, we hope to show the usefulness of choice poetics as a framework for understanding narrative choices, and to demonstrate concretely how one could productively apply it to choices “in the wild.”
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- Award ID(s):
- 1659745
- PAR ID:
- 10253886
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Arts
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2076-0752
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 47
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7030047
