Can you ever be too young to game?

It seems that with a new(ish) year, the GET blog has brought on a new lot of student bloggers. One of the first posts, from the new authors, briefly discusses ageism in video gaming. Now I have no actual statistical support to back up this statement, but (as far as I can tell) positive connotations regarding age of a gamer (skill, ingenuity etc.) decreases as the video-gamer gets older, yet increases (barring edition wars) as the pen-and-paper grognard grows older. All child gamers under the age of 13 are universally despised.

- jatori

Games and Learning

Still focusing on (RP) gaming as a field of academic study, I stumbled across the following, which may be of interest to some:

Mission critical at Quest is a translation of the underlying form of games into a powerful pedagogical model for its 6-12th graders. Games work as rule-based learning systems, creating worlds in which players actively participate, use strategic thinking to make choices, solve complex problems, seek content knowledge, receive constant feedback, and consider the point of view of others. As is the case with many of the games played by young people today, Quest is designed to enable students to “take on” the identities and behaviors of explorers, mathematicians, historians, writers, and evolutionary biologists as they work through a dynamic, challenge-based curriculum with content-rich questing to learn at its core. It’s important to note that Quest is not a school whose curriculum is made up of the play of commercial videogames, but rather a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.

You can find out more about Quest to Learn here. And over here, you can read about one of my previous forays in using video gaming in teaching (though it was teaching 4e).

- jatori

Fall of the arcade

Imagine returning to a popular shopping center in your home town, going up the first escalator, then the next, all in anticipation of getting down and dirty on DDR and when you reach the top…

I don’t know if this is just the trend of “small cities” or if it’s happening globally, but here in PE, South Africa, the arcades seem to be crumbling.  Out of the whopping 3 larger arcades, there remains only 1 in this city.  It started with the fair “Captain Fantastic”.  Although only have a small selection – most aimed at preteens, the arcade was a welcome break from following your mother or big sister around the mall.  Captain seemed to diminish over the years, slowly being replaced by Milky Lane.  The last time I looked, only a smidgen of the Captain remains.

Recently “Funtasia” ceased to exist, and instead now stands a popular music and media store.  Are arcades too dark, too dingy, too dodgey?  Where else are parents supposed to leave their kids whilst going about their business?  In queues to play a PS3 game for 5 minutes?  Or at home where they socialize with RSI from “ergonomic” controllers?