Children challenging the design of half-baked games: Expressing values through the process of game modding

Abstract

In this paper we look at the potential educational value of placing children in a dual role of identifying and changing rules and values embedded in digital games by hacking them. Children's participation in the design of learning technologies is a difficult challenge to address, due to limitations in children's domain-knowledge around which these technologies are developed. Their role in the design process is thus usually limited to that of a user or tester. In this paper we discuss the role of children as "hackers" of what we call 'half-baked' games. By hacking a pedagogically engineered half-baked game in order to improve or change it, children are expected to challenge the values, the mechanics and the rules of a fully functioning, but faulty, or inappropriate game originally designed to provoke students to modify it. This discussion uses an example of children modding such a game provocatively called 'PerfectVille', which was specially designed to raise problems around the issue of urban sustainability. The game itself was designed with the use of a GIS rule-based authoring tool for game design called 'sus-x'. The children grappled with both value-laden issues and concepts embedded in the tool they used. The issue of taking children's values into account but also of helping them to build understandings of wider contested societal values can be addressed by studying the process by which children design and change games affording such experiences. It also illuminated their own perspective and values, which they embedded in the games.

Modifying games with ChoiCo: Integrated affordances and engineered bugs for computational thinking

“…Our method consisted of combining a number of diverse didactical techniques, tools and approaches to learning. We elaborated the idea of questionable socio-systemic games integrating concepts and values (Kynigos & Yiannoutsou, 2018) and gave students didactically engineered half-baked games to make changes to by modding them. We used black and white box techniques (Kynigos, 2004) so that the students would handle a mix of generic and higher order building boxes allowing them to grapple with technically, structurally and semantically complex digital artefacts.…”

“…ChoiCo: a game designer of simulation games ChoiCo (Choices with Consequences) 2 is an open source, online authoring tool for, playing, designing and modding choice driven simulation games. ChoiCo design is based on a microworld for learning about sustainability through playing and modifying elements of city-based games, called SuS-x (Kynigos & Yiannoutsou, 2018). With our focus on game modding for CT, we extended SuS-x idea to an online environment that integrates new affordances and supports the design of a wider range of games.…”

“…The “modder” therefore has both roles of player and designer. Several studies have shown the benefits of modding as learning activity in enhancing student meaning expression and skill development (El‐Nasr & Smith, 2006; Kynigos & Yiannoutsou, 2018; Sotamaa, 2010).…”

“…To provoke modifications, we designed the game as a half‐baked artefact, ie, artefacts with didactically engineered “bugs” aiming to challenge the users to modify or to extend them (Kynigos & Yiannoutsou, 2018, Grizioti & Kynigos, 2018). In our design, students play with a half‐baked simulation game that has faulty behaviours engineered in the rules, the content and the values, inherent in gameplay.…”

“…To address and discuss this task, we designed and developed a game authoring system which we call ChoiCo-"Choices with Consequences" 1 (see also Kynigos & Yiannoutsou, 2018). We consider a digital game as a complex system of interrelated and overlapping computational ideas bound together to form the game mechanics.…”