Judy Robertson is the third author in our Guest Blogger series. She’s a lecturer in computer science at Heriot-Watt University, and is Principal investigator on the EPSRC funded Adventure Author project. Since 2003 she has lead many game making workshops for children at the Edinburgh International Science Festival and for Edinburgh City Council. She’s got a few things to say about kids and games.
We have just finished an eight week project where a class of thirty 10 year olds made their own computer games as part of their normal ICT lessons. At the end of the project we asked the children to tell us about their experiences. Euan said “It was the best thing I’ve done.”; Jack noted “It was an opportunity. Not everyone gets to do this”; and Nadine, who normally struggles a bit with school said “It was so cool. I love it!” Her teacher was surprised at how capable Nadine was at making her game, and also how good she was at helping the other pupils. The project allowed Nadine to shine, and for others to see her in a new light.
But why is it the best thing that Euan has done in his (albeit short) life? And why doesn’t everyone get to do it? I’ve decided to go all evangelical and declare that making games should be for everyone. What’s more, it should be a regular part of normal classes in school. Not everyone can be a professional games developer of course, but everyone can learn from making a game, however humble.
Much has been made of the educational possibilities of playing games in the classroom, particularly by James Paul Gee, who has nobly dedicated many hours to playing games in the name of educational theory. What I am talking is about is slightly different. In the case of making games, children are producers rather than consumers of games technology. No longer are games something which you buy in the shops; now they’re something which you can create and then invite your friends to play. It’s based on the constructionist tradition of learning through building, with the added benefit that your friends are genuinely impressed with what you’ve achieved. The children we’ve worked with have learned a tremendous amount, not just about technology, but about storytelling, creativity and learning. They’ve learned to solve problems independently, to contribute to groups, and to give and receive constructive criticism. They have hypothesised about what might be causing bugs in their game, and worked out how to fix them.
There are many different creative projects which might have this beneficial result, but game making is particularly effective for two main reasons. One is that children are extremely interested in games, and attach a high value to them because of their prominent place in popular culture. The second reason is that games are complex, and wallowing in complexity is good for brains. Players encounter that complexity, as Gee and Johnson have both argued, but designers have to deal with the complexity at a higher level. They have to anticipate what players are likely to do and engineer the behaviour of the game to fit with the player’s preferences. Yet, in the particular game development toolkit we are using, it is very easy to build a simple but satisfying game quickly. A little more effort invested in learning the software tool will result in a slightly more complex game, and so on. For more on the motivational and learning affordances (Judith Good’s terms) of game making, see this.
Often when I am waxing evangelical about this, audience members will look dubious and raise some objections. One of the most common, as you would expect, is the violence issue. A fervent psychiatrist once told me that I was just reinforcing the violence in current games and that the games made by kids would be violent too. Well, as it turns out, he’s wrong. This nicely expressed in a comment by a class teacher who said of one of her pupils “She was like me. She through that all games had to be about blood and guts and mayhem, but [when she got started] she realised it was possible to weave a softer story”. We’ve had around 300 children make their own games with us over the past few years. Although I have seen many, many fights with big red dragons, I’ve also seen an astonishing array of other ideas, ranging from the spiritual to the satirical.
If you’re interested in an analysis of plot lines created by teenagers, have a look at this. A related point will be familiar to anyone who has encountered stories written by children. All kinds of dreadful bloodthirsty events happen in kids’ stories, but thankfully they tend not to escape from the page to the playground. As some teenager game makers used to tell me scathingly: “People think we don’t know the difference between violence in the games and real violence. Well doh! We’re not that stupid.”
Another common objection, which may be of more interest to this conference, is that it would disadvantage girls if game making was introduced in the classroom. Again, this doesn’t appear to be true. All the girls involved in the recent project reported enjoying game making. As we have also noticed in our summer workshops, the girls perhaps have less of a passion for games to start with (or are less anorak-y about it, you might say) but they exhibit the same intense concentration and effort as the boys. The girls may have less knowledge about games to bring to their own game making, but they can learn this by talking to their more experienced peers. As Hannah put it “Just listen to what other people in the group are talking about, and change them to suit your own game and your own interest, or whatever”. It certainly doesn’t seem to be the case that girls find it harder to use the software than the boys, or produce poorer games. Their games are different from boys’ games in some aspects, but this reflects differences in preferences and interests rather than lack of skill. We’ve done some statistical analysis of the features of boys’ and girls’ games, and two results seem to be consistent across age and educational setting.
Firstly: girls write more conversations between the player and game characters than boys. Secondly: boys include more enemy characters than girl. Neither of these results is particularly unexpected. There are, however, some gender differences in their approaches to the creative process which I find more interesting. The boys tend to be more ambitious in their plans and therefore are less likely to finish their games than girls.
To put it another way, the girls appear to be more realistic in managing their expectations in line with the time available. Some boys start with grand visions which they scale back when they realise that an aspect of the game is either infeasible or too difficult to complete. By contrast, the girls seemed to adopt an incremental approach, moving on to implement more complex ideas after earlier successes with simpler game features. There may also be differences in the extent to which girls and boys take on board peer feedback to improve their games, but I haven’t done the analysis yet. Does anyone care to speculate either way?
To end my sermon, then, I would encourage children to think of games as something they can make (as well as play); teachers to think of game making as an educational treasure chest; and the public in general to give both children and games the credit they deserve. Games technologies offer infinite possibilities if we have the imagination to use them. Children will accomplish amazing things if we have the courage to let them.
