Gamestar Mechanic Game Design Challenge (Awards Ceremony)

Alex Games · Elisabeth Hayes · Kurt Squire

This session will consist of a mini game-design contest that will run in parallel to the other sessions at GLS throughout the 2 days of the conference. Conference attendants will be designing games within Gamestar Mechanic, an online game designed to teach middle school children language and literacy skills as they learn key principles of good game design (http://www.gamestarmechanic.com/).

Gamestar Mechanic marries notions of videogame play and design into an overall gaming experience. In doing so, it aims to provide players with opportunities to engage in the Discourse of game designers, referring to the ways of doing, being, and believing that characterize the activity of game design (Gee, 1996, 2005). This is accomplished through a “metagame” where players are rewarded for completing specific game design “jobs” or challenges, which highlight specific principles of good game design.

Under development for nearly 2 years, the game has served as the context for eight different pilot studies to date in the form of game design workshops. More than 200 children across the U.S. have experienced the game so far, providing evidence that it is an engaging platform for play and learning.

In line with recent theoretical frameworks that highlight the importance of embodied experiences as avenues for learning in games (Gee, 2003, p. 48; Shaffer, 2006, p. 9), it is a contention of this proposal that an experiential approach to Gamestar Mechanic would be best suited to help conference participants understand the affordances and learning opportunities it presents. With this in mind, the session will implement a part of Gamestar Mechanic’s metagame in a form of an ongoing game design contest with the following structure:

1. Day 1 of the conference (or pre-conference teacher workshops): An introductory session will take place where participants will get a hands-on tour of the game, as well as of how to design a basic game within it. The rules for the competition are laid out, and those people wanting to participate have a Gamestar Mechanic account created for them. Up to 12 attendees can participate in the competition, and (contingent on student agreement), each one will either be paired with one of this semester’s workshop students or with another attendee in a design team.
2. Somewhere in the conference facility, a room with Internet-connected laptops dedicated to the contest will be made available. Throughout the first day and the first half of the second day, teams will have the opportunity to log into Gamestar Mechanic and work on their games at their leisure. Teams are encouraged to recruit other attendants to play test their games for feedback, but only the team may work on the design itself.
3. The deadline for having their design complete will be noon of the second conference day. After that, a group of judges will play the games and rate them according to a rubric provided to them. The three games with the highest score on the rubrics will be given 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place; the awards ceremony and games showcase takes place at Friday at 4 p.m.