Colleen Macklin

Principles for designing educational games that integrate content and play and create learning experiences connecting to many areas of learners' lives. Too often educational videogames are narrowly focused on specific learning outcomes dictated by school curricula and fail to engage young learners. This book suggests another approach, offering a guide to designing games that integrates content and play and creates learning experiences that connect to many areas of learners' lives. These games are not gamified workbooks but are embedded in a long-form experience of exploration, discovery, and collaboration that takes into consideration the learning environment. Resonant Games describes twenty essential principles for designing games that offer this kind of deeper learning experience, presenting them in connection with five games or collections of games developed at MIT's educational game research lab, the Education Arcade. Each of the games-which range from Vanished, an alternate reality game for middle schoolers promoting STEM careers, to Ubiquitous Bio, a series of casual mobile games for high school biology students-has a different story, but all spring from these fundamental assumptions: honor the whole learner, as a full human being, not an empty vessel awaiting a fill-up; honor the sociality of learning and play; honor a deep connection between the content and the game; and honor the learning context-most often the public school classroom, but also beyond the classroom.

The play-focused, step-by-step guide to creating great game designs This book offers a play-focused, process-oriented approach for designing games people will love to play. Drawing on a combined 35 years of design and teaching experience, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp link the concepts and elements of play to the practical tasks of game design. Using full-color examples, they reveal how real game designers think and work, and illuminate the amazing expressive potential of great game design. Focusing on practical details, this book guides you from idea to prototype to playtest and fully realized design. You’ll walk through conceiving and creating a game’s inner workings, including its core actions, themes, and especially its play experience. Step by step, you’ll assemble every component of your “videogame,” creating practically every kind of play: from cooperative to competitive, from chance-based to role-playing, and everything in between. Macklin and Sharp believe that games are for everyone, and game design is an exciting art form with a nearly unlimited array of styles, forms, and messages. Cutting across traditional platform and genre boundaries, they help you find inspiration wherever it exists. Games, Design and Play is for all game design students, and for beginning-to-intermediate-level game professionals, especially independent game designers. Bridging the gaps between imagination and production, it will help you craft outstanding designs for incredible play experiences! Coverage includes: Understanding core elements of play design: actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, and playersMastering “tools” such as constraint, interaction, goals, challenges, strategy, chance, decision, storytelling, and contextComparing types of play and player experiencesConsidering the demands videogames make on playersEstablishing a game’s design valuesCreating design documents, schematics, and tracking spreadsheetsCollaborating in teams on a shared design visionBrainstorming and conceptualizing designsUsing prototypes to realize and playtest designsImproving designs by making the most of playtesting feedbackKnowing when a design is ready for productionLearning the rules so you can break them!