In July, I presented at the Games, Learning, & Society (GLS) conference in Madison, Wisconsin. GLS is an interesting, enjoyable, and friendly two-day conference that combines presentations and perspectives from academics, educators, designers and developers. It’s a place where you can hear from leading academics studying how we learn from games, talk to teachers who are working with games in classroom, and with designers working on game-related projects. James Paul Gee gave a rousing keynote which Lee Wilson describes nicely in his blog. The GLS site will have webcasts of much of the conference up eventually. In the meantime, you can see the presentations from the 2006 conference now.
My own presentation was challenging: how, in 45 minutes, to get 20 players playing Making History and help them understand how this rich strategy game works. Here’s the problem: When you see an unfamiliar game, your impression is mostly centered on the interface, and figuring out “how to do” things in the game. But the real playing (and learning) experience comes after you figure that out, and start thinking about STRATEGY. I chose to “walk” my players through the start of a scenario while “thinking aloud” about the strategies I was considering, and the choices I needed to make. I was playing the USSR, so geographical distance (and the time required to traverse it) played a big role. It worked well, and I think it’s a good approach for presenting games: focus on the thinking that players must do, not just the interface and what you do.
