Game Design Commons^™

The Art Of Motion, Audrey Caleb, Selina Shang

SACAD: John Heinrichs Scholarly and Creative Activity Days

Animation is an integral part of our daily lives. From entertainment, to advertisements, to medical visualizations and everything in between, it permeates our world. But what makes animation so compelling? Why do we connect with it so well? And what makes it visually appealing?

Humans are story driven creatures, and so we gravitate towards time-based media—it’s the perfect vehicle for telling stories. Our goal was to explore the variety of styles and tools used in animation, research the 12 principles, understand the process of creating a work from start to finish, and successfully demonstrate the science and art of animation.

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

Understanding The Student Perspective Of Art History Survey Course Outcomes Through Game Development, Joshua Yavelberg, Kelly Donahue-Wallace

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This heuristic, design-based research study examines student perceptions of their learning experience in the art history survey course as manifested through a game design process. With the purpose of improving upon the lecture model of the standard art history survey, two sections of a capstone class of interdisciplinary art and design students—who had all taken the survey as part of their degree programs—selected learning objectives and designed games to accompany the introductory class. The researchers used the game design process to understand first how students perceived the survey class, its learning objectives, and the students’ experiences. Then the investigation addressed …

Acts Of Meaning, Resource Diagrams, And Essential Learning Behaviors: The Design Evolution Of Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

Lost & Found is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed for teaching medieval religious legal systems. The long-term goals of the project are to change the discourse around religious laws, such as foregrounding the prosocial aspects of religious law such as collaboration, cooperation, and communal sustainability. This design case focuses on the evolution of the design of the mechanics and core systems in the first two tabletop games in the series, informed by over three and a half years’ worth of design notes, playable prototypes, outside design consultations, internal design reviews, playtests, and interviews.

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

Lost & Found: Order In The Court -- The Party Game, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The second game in the series, Lost & Found: Order in the Court …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Medulla: A 2d Sidescrolling Platformer Game That Teaches Basic Brain Structure And Function, Joey R. Fanfarelli, Stephanie Vie

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article explores the design and instructional effectiveness of Medulla, an educational game meant to teach brain structure and function to undergraduate psychology students. Developed in the retro-style platformer genre, Medulla uses two-dimensional gameplay with pixel-based graphics to engage students in learning content related to the brain, information which is often pre-requisite to more rigorous psychological study. A pretest posttest design was used in an experiment assessing Medulla’s ability to teach psychology content. Results indicated content knowledge was significantly higher on the posttest than the pretest, with a large effect size. Medulla appears to be an effective learning tool. These …

Individual Differences In Digital Badging: Do Learner Characteristics Matter?, Joey R. Fanfarelli, Thomas Rudy Mcdaniel

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Badge use has rapidly expanded in recent years and has benefited a variety of applications. However, a large portion of the research has applied a binary useful or not useful approach to badging. Few studies examine the characteristics of the user and the impact of those characteristics on the effectiveness of the badging system. This study takes preliminary steps toward that cause, examining the effectiveness of a badging system across two web-based university courses in relation to the individual differences of the learners. Individual differences are examined through the lens of Long-Dziuban reactive behavior types and traits. Results revealed differences …