approach to prepare themselves through strategic discussions on the practical exercises, where coordination and management of the tasks are central. In particular, the external design grammar strengthens the development of the users’ democratic skills through active decision-making processes that require both meta-understanding of the situation and social construction of knowledge to achieve success.
The internal and external design grammars have a close relationship as they both complement and transform each other. It is important to gain knowledge of the situated meaning of the whole system to understand the situated significance of the individual elements ‒ how they can/should be combined to achieve the best performance. One consequence of this relationship within the educational game design is that it forces the students to create different discussions about the content, which subsequently add subnarratives to the game. In order to achieve active learning, the students must thus understand and operate within both internal and external design grammar. To learn in the game, the student at ACTM needs to be able to reflect, be critical, and be able to manipulate the internal and external design grammar of the game at a meta level.
The following section unfolds how the concept of “progress” known from World of Warcraft (see Chapter 6) can support the development of Relfective Practice-based Learning by connecting the internal and external design grammar. The purpose of the next Section is thus to argue how game theory is linked to Practice Theory.
8.3. THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS
One of the design principles, the concept of “progress”, is used by gamers to explain the process they are undergoing when the game’s challenges are to be overcome (see chapter 5 and Section 6.3). Progress can be understood as Dewey’s concept of sequential learning consisting of iterative or organic cyclic processes of exploration
Figure 38 - The external grammar points toward social learning and should be prioritised over the internal design grammar to support developing 21st competencies.
Transactions and Inquiry Professional
Identities Democratic Dialogues Trajectories Professional Values
Strategy Discussions
Aesthetic
Experience Curriculum
Activities Trial and Error
Being Doing
Design Grammars
External Internal
and reflection (Gyldendahl-Jensen & Dau, 2019). The PhD project’s game design must, therefore, challenge the students through an experimental and sequential process consisting of reflection processes, knowledge creation, and the generation of new ideas and strategies based on the facts and suggestions that arise as a consequence of the experimental approach to the proposed solutions (Gyldendahl-Jensen & Dau, 2019).
The goal is, through the use of gaming principles, to create progress that initiates the feeling of experienced autonomy as the students create and explore their learning trajectories by working with the game. How this is handled in practice through the developed game design is further elaborated later in this Section.
Figure 39 – The connection between Practice Theory and the pre-study in the external design grammar and the connection between game theory and the concept of progress in the internal
design grammar.
Based on the analysis of MMORPGs, this thesis argues that the game mechanics that characterise World of Warcraft and create “progress” have some similarities with the learning principles described through the lens of Practice Theory (see Chapters 4, 5 and 6) (Kim et al., 2009; Ravyse et al., 2017), especially if the design process focuses on avoiding reducing the complexity that characterises World of Warcraft to a simple
“drill-and-practice thinking” based on only points, levels and badges (Gyldendahl-Jensen & Dau, 2019).
One of the assumptions presented in Chapter 1 is that a connection between Practice
External Design Grammars
Practice Theory
Reflective Practice-based LearningPre-Study
Internal Design Grammars
Game Theory
World of Warcraft / MMORPGProgress
Game Theory
World of Warcraft / MMORPGTheory and game theory can create an experience of “progress” as it is known in World of Warcraft and thus a learning process that supports the development of analytical and reflective skills. As described earlier in Chapters 5 and 6, progress is characterised by being a sequential process that connects in-game actions with a critical reflection where the theoretical insight is used to devise strategies for new in-game actions through an exploratory process (Gyldendahl-Jensen & Dau, 2019). This means that the prototype, through its design, equates the concept of progress with a teaching process based on Practice Theory and thus Reflective Practice-based Learning.
Progress is created primarily by the internal design grammar’s game mechanics finding its depth through the external design grammar. It is essential that the students, through an understanding of the external design grammar, understand how to create a strategic mapping to challenge their actions in the internal design grammar. The students thus need to be able to manipulate and explore the content by discussing and reflecting on the game’s challenges (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2013; Gyldendahl-Jensen
& Dau, 2019). From a design perspective, it is, therefore, essential to work with time as part of the aesthetic experience. This means designing activities that are focused on professional content, discipline and activities aimed at initiating reflections and meta-strategic discussions. In practice, there will thus be a difference between game time in general and event time, where the latter in particular connects directly to the execution of missions or quests. The game must, therefore, contain different time gaps with a different commitment to the internal and external design grammar (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2013). As described in Chapters 5 and 6, “aesthetic experience” can be defined as active participation towards a final goal, which at the same time is also experienced as satisfaction through interacting with a variety of different activities (Dewey, 1980; Gee, 2007; Nardi, 2010; Waks, 2011). This means that the developed educational game includes activities that focus on translating breaks or time wasting into valuable activities for the project, as well as activities that play with the idea of
“game over” or reset time (see Section 6.8). It sets demands for the content of the design as well as how the individual game mechanics complement and influence each other with the aim of supporting the students’ process by combining different types of quest activities to create a process-oriented trajectory (Chai et al., 2013; Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al., 2013; Thong et al., 2016). Thus, the feeling and experience of progress in the project become a success criterion of the game by having the students focus on curiosity and exploration rather than a single focus on winning. On top of that, the game challenges them to demonstrate a high degree of autonomy by setting their own goal through some meaningful way-finding. Thus, the game must be able to kick-start and strengthen a natural autonomy that drives the project to completion, more than it is about the student completing all the game’s tasks and levels.
Based on the desk research of both Game-Based Learning and World of Warcraft, the internal design grammar will thus consist of the following six game mechanics:
quest, level, mission, crafting, achievement and game over. The selection of these six design principles for the internal design grammar is based on an ongoing sketching
process and development of design schemas as described in Section 3.4. When the six selected design principles are coupled with the external design grammar, it is this PhD’s argumentation that it creates an experience of progress in the project and hence a learning process that supports the development of reflective, analytical and autonomous skills.
Figure 40 – A model for how the theoretical aspect from phase 1 informs the design grammar of the educational game.
Based on Figure 40, the six paragraphs below describe how the selected design principles create a link between the external and internal design grammar. The six paragraphs will be further elaborated in Section 8.4.
1) The principles of level up aim to create an increased motivation through a gradual disclosure of the content of the semester that stimulates a curious behaviour.
2) The principles of quest aim to support autonomous behaviour by allowing the students on their own initiative to combine the activities of the game to create a personal and meaningful learning trajectory.
3) The purpose of the principles of crafting is to help the students to gather knowledge, ideas and thoughts and subsequently, through an analytical approach, challenge the existing normative understanding of the project and the profession.
4) The principles of mission aim to support the depth of the student analysis process in the project through an explorative and inquiry-based project.