Talk:CETIS 2006 Identity Games and Synthetic Worlds

Thats a very good and accurate summary of what took place.

I just wanted to add that Ernest mentioned Game Maker as a simple tool for creating games. I wanted to remind everyone of this excellent FREE program. You can find it here http://www.gamemaker.nl/. I also recommend the Game Makers Apprentice book shown on that page. I would also recommend Jason Darby's 'Make Amazing Games in Minutes' which includes a version of The Games Factory software.

Patrick Lynch

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It's important not to generalise about COTS games. These are a very diverse array of software, covering all manner of genre, content, and interaction. As an example, the three most-used COTS games in education are Sim City, RollerCoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. Superficially these appear to be similar games, namely simplified business simulations.

However, between them the've been used across a wide array of subject areas in different ways. For example, some US schools have used RollerCoaster Tycoon to illustrate the laws of physics, or as a modelling tool prior to building a scaled model of a rollercoaster. Zoo Tycoon, on the other hand, has been used in several schools to promote on- and off- curriculum discussion of the ethics of keeping animals in such places.

Sara is dead right in "but that teachers face difficulties in selecting games appropriate for use in education, not only in terms of discovering games and familiarising themselves with their content, but also because of the absence of a framework for evaluating their usefulness." The fundamental problem with COTS games is discovering which games are "accidentally useful". Basically, which part of a game, when used in a certain way, is appropriate for a specific curriculum area.

There's also enough research and examples to show that how the teacher understands and uses the game in this way is of paramount importance. See some of this (4Mb Powerpoint) presentation: 

The use of COTS games in education does indeed encounter a number of obstacles; then again, so do other kinds of computer games such as online titles (security and validation) and "made for education" titles (development cost and inferior game quality compared to COTS games). As research organisations have been repeatedly discovering through this decade, there isn't a magic "game" bullet that can easily "enhance" education. A pity. Some of the possibilities of COTS games, as well as the obstacles, have been researched in these two collaborative reports:  

Some teachers have also had significant success with using specific COTS games, through their own initiative and with no external support. For example:   There's also about 40-odd examples linked from the older entries in here: ...so COTS games can and are used in education.

John Kirriemuir

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