Empowered Learning in Games (7384)

Empowered Learning in Games (7384)

Yupei Duan

University of Missouri

Author Note

Yupei Duan, Ph.D. student at the School of Information and Learning Technology, University of Missouri.

This practice is one of the assignments of 2023FS-IS_LT-7384-01 Designing Games for Learning

Contact: yupei.duan@mail.missouri.edu

Mentor Game Details

I picked Predynastic Egypt(“Predynastic Egypt,”) as my first mentor game, which is a turn-based historical simulation strategy game. It is designed to lead the players to travel back to 7000 years ago to establish an empire according to unite the tribes, villages, and cities in ancient Egypt, starting from a couple of hunters and collectors. Clarus Victoria is the game developer an independent game development studio from Russia(Clarus Victotia Official Website). The game’s target audience should be older than primary school students who need to be equipped with basic reading abilities.

Hundreds and thousands of years passed in a couple of hours. My learning experience was impressive. It seemed like I was in charge of a country. As a curious and novice country governor, I conducted a lot of trials and errors with the sacrifice of life, resources, and time. This is also a good opportunity for me to check my ordinary life with similar thoughts in the game. For example, I am a new Ph.D. student in the USA, which is a totally different life from mine in China. I need to explore while keeping my safety as the first priority. Then, how do I manage my time and energy while holding many different hats at the same time: I have 9 credits of courses, I am a Graduate Research Assistant working on two different projects, I am a father, a husband, and a son…How to budget my time and money? How do we do things more efficiently? How do I keep myself on the right track to reach my main goals? They are all exactly similar thinking skills and strategies I can polish in the game. I am living my valuable life just like playing this valuable game. 

The game gave me a lot of knowledge related to the history, religion, civilization, and geographical features of Ancient Egypt. The players can also use it to train their management skills and calculation ability. The game’s final objective is the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt. The players must carefully calculate how to distribute the workers, think about which actions should be taken when natural disasters happen, ponder which strategy would be the most proper when the adhered troops offense, etc. As a solo game, Prehistoric Egypt depicted an authentic scene of Ancient Egypt tribes, it showed the resources a tribe in need, a development goal that drove the whole tribe to be boomed, a bald heart, a game player wants to be a manager should have. The players will need to manage all the items and people he or she has wisely in the game in each turn. The players will have enough time to think about the actions they need to do between two turns. The game doesn’t have a time-counting function. The beautiful background music and neat action sound help the players immerse.

I didn’t find any specific associated materials with this game, but I saw there were many articles that introduced the game’s complete achievement guide while introducing Ancient Egypt’s history and civilization very detailedly(Predynastic Egypt – Complete Achievement Guide). The related instructional or learning materials could be made based on them.

Gameplay Experience

My limited understanding of Ancient Egypt came from my middle school World History course and movies like The Mummy Returns. This game gave me another change to go back to the Ancient Egypt. I used around 5 hours to go through the whole game in the  first round, which was 220 turns in total.

The game hooked me for the first time, and it cost me more than four hours to explore and do experiments. Hundreds and thousands of years passed in a couple of hours. My learning experience was impressive it seemed like I was in charge of a country. As a curious and novice country governor, I conducted a lot of trials and errors with the sacrifice of life, resources, and time. This is also a good opportunity for me to check my ordinary life with similar thoughts in the game. For example, I am a new Ph.D. student in the USA, which is a totally different life from mine in China. I need to explore while keeping my safety as the first priority. Then, how do I manage my time and energy while holding many different hats at the same time: I have 9 credits of courses, I am a Graduate Research Assistant working on two different projects, I am a father, a husband, and a son…How to budget my time and money? How to do things more efficiently? How do I keep myself on the right track to reach my main goals? They are all exactly similar thinking skills and strategies I can polish in the game. I am living my valuable life just like playing this valuable game. 

On its surface, gamification is simply the use of game mechanics to make learning and instruction more fun. It seems “fake” artificial or like a shortcut. It’s not. Underneath the surface is the idea of engagement, story, autonomy, and meaning. Games give experiences meaning, they provide a set of boundaries within a “safe” environment to explore, think and “try things out.” Games provide motivation to succeed and reduce the sting of failure(Kapp, 2012, p. 21).

I just had minimal accomplishments in my first round. I didn’t use a lot of time to accomplish the game’s main goal, but I did a lot of trial and error to explore the virtual world. I was not aware of the struggles in the game, and everything was smooth.

When I reviewed this game, I thought there were some possibilities to increase learning opportunities by playing. For example, some background knowledge could be distributed to the learners before the game to let them understand the basic knowledge about the world 7000 years ago, e.g., the religions of the local people, the common terminologies related to ancient Egypt… Besides that, a handout listed clear learning goals and a detailed guide could be helpful to the learners who other elements of the game could easily abstract, but not related to the instructional objectives.

Principles of Learning

Prof. Jim Gee pointed out three different categories of principles on gaming(Chris Thorn, 2013). In the game Predynastic Egypt, I found it contained the following principles:

Category one: Empower Learners

• Co-design. The players can select the choices to continue their ancient Egypt story. 
• Customization. The play’s name (or nickname) will be shown in the game. 
• Manipulation. The player is creating his or her own country. 

Category two: Problem-based Learning

• Pleasantly frustrating. I failed in the first round but knew the game rules better and would like to try again to reach my main goals in the games. 
• Just in time and on demand. The hints were the friendly guide to continue the game. The buttons the player should press were highlighted on each step.
• Fish tank. Initially, there are just a few elements, and the number of elements will rise while the players are getting more and more familiar with the game setting. 
• Sandbox. Safe but feel dangerous when the attacks happen. 

 Category three: Deep understanding

• System thinking. Like governing an actual county, it is a system that needs system thinking. 
• Situated learning. The game brought me to Ancient Egypt 5000 B.C. 

Player Type

The reason why I selected this but not the others is that Prehistoric Egypt fits my game-playing preferences perfectly. As an explorer, I love the games that contain more Alea (Chance) and Mimicary (Simulation or Role Play) as Caillois’ Patterns of Play introduced to me(Kapp, 2012, p. 211).

The past two weeks were fantastic for me, both for my real life and for my game life. Games are the ideal learning environment with built-in permission to fail, encouragement of out-of-box thinking, and a sense of control.

Four years ago, I started my virtual learning journey at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies as a master’s degree pursuer. I experienced the virtual learning environment at Townsend Hall as a game. Now, I am an on-campus Ph.D. student who can sit in Townsend Hall physically to meet the elite staff and faculty at SISLT, which is another game for me. I want to continue my games.

References:

Chris Thorn (Director). (2013, November 13). Jim Gee Principles on Gaming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aQAgAjTozk

Clarus Victotia Official Website. (n.d.). Clarus Victoria. Retrieved September 5, 2023, from https://clarusvictoria.com/

Kapp, K. M. (2012). The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education (1st edition). Pfeiffer.

Predynastic Egypt. (n.d.). Clarus Victoria. Retrieved September 5, 2023, from https://clarusvictoria.com/predynastic-egypt/

Predynastic Egypt—Complete Achievement Guide. (n.d.). Retrieved September 5, 2023, from https://gameplay.tips/guides/9556-predynastic-egypt.html