Category Archives: games

Lecture “First and Second Order Games” at the HAW

On tuesday, December 15th, from 18:00 to 19:30 I will give a lecture with the title “Spiele erster und zweiter Ordnung – Lernen zwischen Konvention und Innovation” (“First and second order games – Learning between convention and innovation”). I will … Continue reading

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Learning facts and rules

Facts are man-made, as the etymological origin ‘facere’ suggests. The creation of this kind of knowledge, facts, follows certain meta-facts, called rules. One can see a vague anaologon to declarative and procedural knowledge, “knowing that” and “knowing how”, both calling … Continue reading

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Games and the “best way” to tell stories

Torsten Meyer (thanks!) just sent me a link to a recent interview with game designer Peter Molyneux, published in the “Tageszeitung”, the title translates as “Fable-Gamedesigner Peter Molyneux: A visionary and charlatan” Molyneux is quite enthusiastic about interactive-adaptive stories as … Continue reading

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Serious game “Tiebranimes” to download

Nearly ten years ago I attended a seminar about “Kinderspiel – Kinderspiele: Theorie – Empirie” (“Children’s Play and Games: Theoretical and Empirical Views”), where one possible task was to create a learning game. I was flabbergasted that the three other … Continue reading

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First Faculty Research Day

This wednesday there will be a presentation of projects and initiatives stating research interests of members of our faculty. As it seems, my poster (german) will be up, too, to give a slight and very superficial overview on Game Based … Continue reading

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Topological Metaphors for Structuring Games (I): Storyspaces

This is a short summary on “Storyspaces and Rulespaces” from the MA in ePedagogy Design I’m currently working on. Wey-Han Tan (April 2008) StorySpaces Stories give in-game experiences context and contingency. There are abstract games like “Tetris” or “Add’em up“, … Continue reading

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Topological Metaphors for Structuring Games (II): Rulespaces

This is a short summary on “Storyspaces and Rulespaces” from the MA in ePedagogy Design I’m currently working on. Wey-Han Tan (April 2008) Rulespaces Rules define the boundaries of the player’s actions and give them direction and jurisdiction. As shown … Continue reading

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Creating cognitive tension – and then what?

I stumbled upon this entry in the great BoingBoing-blog, an excerpt from a longer Smithonian article: Steve Martin explaining a special method of eliciting laughter from the audience, in comparision to the usual comedian’s technique of creating tension and releasing … Continue reading

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Three learning theories mini games

For my seminar “Games, Play and Education” I’ve scraped together (via skinning, modding, recontextualisation) three minigames. These should serve as an intro to the three learning paradigms of Behaviourism, Cognitivism and Constructivism and their possible realisation in games via their … Continue reading

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Gaming: A cheat mode for reality

I’ve noticed that rubberbanding (aka levelled gameplay or dynamic game balancing) is a good metaphor to describe what Lev Vygotsky, a russian educational scientist, described as keeping a learner in the ‘zone of proximal development‘. This means that the environment … Continue reading

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