One of the elements that is highly frustrating in MMORPGS is the grind. It can be summarized as the (seemingly) pointless activities that the players undertake to acquire the points to progress and engage in the game proper. Typically these are activities that the player can accomplish with relative ease and have become thoughtless and […]
Players In The Classroom
A Multi-player online (MMO) game is very similar to a modern day classroom. They are both created environments with different ways to interact with material that is being supplied, either by the teacher (in the case of the classroom) or the server (in an MMO). They encourage both social interaction and individual work. The system […]
The Importance Of Randomness
Teachers work very hard to remove randomness from classrooms, either through organization of time, activity or the direct assignment of groups to undertake the activity. A classroom is often only seen as effective when the random elements are minimized. But is that always the best option?
Solved Games And Boring Worklives
The more a job inherently resembles a game …. the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Flow, p. 152 Mihaly argues that work can be made to be less boring and more autotelic by introducing some of the elements of games into the workplace. This view is […]
Gamification And Assessment
Very few students enjoy assessment. It is stressful, frustrating, and often viewed as a necessary evil. It doesn’t have to be. Gamification can provide a different way to look at assessment, and to better design the process. In the context of education, assessment is quite definitely a game. It maps almost perfectly onto the three […]
The Trap Of Certainty
Students like to know where they stand in relation to each other, and in relation to their grades. The ability to see where you currently are, relative to your skill in a subject, provides excellent feedback and goal setting opportunities. However this knowledge can be a double-edged sword when it comes to student performance. This […]
The World Is But A Game
What is a game? To understand gamification and its impact on teaching this is possibly one of the most fundamental questions. It is also surprisingly difficult to answer. One possible way of answering is to look at the purpose games fulfill for humans. Games allow us to do many different things. They let […]
What is Gamification?
Gamification is a relatively new term. I believe it was coined by the Conundra consulting company in 2003. Given its relative newness, people are still trying to define what gamification is and, more importantly, what it is not. Karl M. Kapp, in his book The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, defines gamification as “using game based […]
Fudge and my Discovery of Rubrics
I have never been particularly good at maths. This, sadly, has limited some of my enjoyment of roleplaying games. I was sick of “Roll Playing” with the constant modifiers and THAC0s etc. So, I started looking around for another system to use in my games. Searching on the Internet brought me to Fudge, a generic […]