Game Design

“Game Making Is Harder Than I Thought”: Game Design Driven By Children’s Own Interests Rinat Levy-Cohen (Fordham University), Camillia Matuk & Shashank Pawar (New York University) THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK • Game Design involves the practice of a wide range of skills including system-based thinking, design thinking, game logic and rules, and storytelling (Salen, 2007; Zimmerman, 2010). • Learning-By-Design fosters the activation of prior knowledge to develop new knowledge through a collaborative and reflective design process (van Breukelen et al., 2016). • Interest-Driven-Learning assumes that learners are motivated to learn when they are involved in learning activities that stem from their own interests (Edelson & Joseph, 2001). RESEARCH QUESTIONS What influences children’s game designs? What do children learn from and about game design? METHODS • Thirteen 14-year old maker club members (8 males, 5 females). • 4 design teams (3-4 students in a group). Game Design Workshop • Week 1 @ University (90-min) Intro to the MDA Framework (Hunicke, LeBlanc & Zubek, 2014) through discussion, game mods, scavenger hunts, small design challenges, and game design ideation. • Week 2 @ Maker Club (45-min) Design teams continue to work on game designs guided by a game design packet and their maker club teacher. • Week 3 @ University (90-min) Two rounds of physical prototyping and playtesting with given materials and group reflections.

DATA & ANALYSIS • Pre and post-questionnaires, facilitators’ field notes and reflections, audio recordings, children’s design artifacts, and post-interviews (data triangulation). • Grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). Below we present one case study. RESULTS GROUP A (Nina, Erika, Irina, & Ilana) (pseudonyms) Initial game design: a board game that connects to an app. Their narrative was about a kid who is grounded and the game is to try and help him escape his room by “cracking a code” sent as a text message. Game Design Influences Children’s Beliefs about Games: Participants believed that among other qualities, good games are competitive, fun, and nurture a sense of community. Personal and Shared Experiences: Group A designed a game that was inspired by the game Escape-theRoom and by a project in their engineering class. The “Makeability” of Designs: Makeability seemed to be determine by the available materials and by the skills the children perceived to be necessary. Second Game Design: Group A changed their game design on seeing the physical prototyping Materials during the 3rd workshop. Their new game was a board game with a path and colored cards.

Learning From and About Game Design Changes in Game Definitions: Participants seemed to developed an understanding that game design is cognitively demanding and that user experience (e.g. fun) is a crucial component of game design. Changes in Perceptions of Game Making Skills: For example, Erika shifted from thinking that game designers need hard skills that can only be gained through formal schooling, to valuing soft skills that anyone can gain through experience. Thinking Like Game Designers: Without explicit support from the workshop, this team had reasoned, with apparent success, through the empathy stage of the design process. A Socio-Technical Engineering Mindset: This group independently learned the importance of anticipating and observing human behavior while playing with a game design was well as how it would shape social interaction (Salen, 2007).

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DISCUSSION + FUTURE RESEARCH Participants struggled to make the leap from planning to prototyping digital elements of their game. The available materials and the skills children perceive to be necessary have strong influences on their design processes. Educators must carefully consider both the materials and the support they provide in order to help children successfully pursue their interests. Future research might explore how introducing prototyping materials early in the design process might influence game ideas.