Learning to Compose Games and Tell Stories in the RPG Maker Community
Trevor Owens
Wed., June 09, 5:00–7:00, Great Hall
Every day, several hundred members of the RPG Maker Community read through a new set of project development posts on the community’s forums. In each of these posts, amateur game designers share 500–1000 word game proposals for community critique. These posts include elements of traditional composition, like the proposed games setting, characters, and storyline. They also include elements unique to games as new media, like the proposed game’s mechanics, artwork, and audio. Over the next few days, each of these proposed projects receives extensive feedback from the community. After substantial revision, refinement, development, and continued engagement with the community, some of the community members will complete these games and share them with other community members.
This poster documents how this community collaboratively transitions game players into critical and thoughtful game composers. To demonstrate this process, discussions in this community were textually analyzed to accomplish three goals. First, to document the kinds of composition activities community members are engaged in. Second, to describe the rules and process the community has developed to engage in a critical dialog about those composition activities. Third, to document the roles that different community members take on in guiding and teaching other members. This analysis documents the informal, multi-modal, self-directed, composition education these community members are engaged in.
This analysis is grounded in approaches to understanding the role community plays in learning that occurs outside school environments. Most directly, this involves an analysis of the RPG Maker community as a community of practice (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991). To analyze this community of practice, text analysis of community discussions and the community’s rules to document community’s process and roles was employed. While many studies of games and game communities use surveys and interviews, analysis of game discussion “in the wild” has become an established approach for understanding how players explore, understand and interpret games (Gee, 2003). Analysis of discussions in game forums provides an entry into the argumentation and habits of mind of game communities (Steinkuehler & Chmiel, 2006) and a portrait of player agency in interpreting games (Schott, 2006). These studies illustrate how player discussions express the cognitive models of players outside of formal learning environments or experimental settings (Hutchins, 1995).
By characterizing critical process and assumed community roles which construct the RPG Maker community, this study also offers fruitful insights into new modes of composition and the motivation and goals that support community participants engagement. Game communities, like the community of modders working on refinements to Sid Meier’s Civilization, have already been examined and explored as exemplars for new formats for learning environments (Squire & Giovanneto, 2007; Owens, in press). The study of the RPG Maker community provides insight into a community of practice deeply concerned with both traditional and new media composition activities. This study demonstrates how the RPG Maker application and community help participants cultivate their own voice to tell their own stories through their writing, artwork, and game design exhibited in their compositions.
References
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Owens, T. (in press) Modding the history of science: Values at play in modder discussions of Sid Meier’s Civilization. Simulation & Gaming.
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Steinkuehler, C., & Chmiel, M. (2006). Fostering scientific habits of mind in the context of online play. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Learning Sciences, USA, 723–729.