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Martin Owen, Futurelab

The full version of this paper is available to download in pdf format - see box below. On this page you'll find the introduction.

Introduction: what this paper is and isn't about

There is a current interest in the value of computer games for education (see Prensky 2001); Gee 2003; Kirriemuir and MacFarlane 2004). This results in really important questions about computer games and learning theory, motivation, pedagogic practice - how people might learn from games and how they might be used in practices. This paper will not explore these issues. The paper starts from an implicit notion that games are good for humans because they have been sustained as a human activity for a long, long time, and that the introduction of computer mediated games has not materially altered an almost implicit human activity in some form of structured play. In fact this article will not specifically distinguish computer games as a particularly special case.

This paper is intended to describe the components from which games are constructed. It is prompted in the first instance by the development at Futurelab of new formats of games, and the need for advice and guidance for designing and constructing games by considering some of the affordances of previous games. This paper is based on what one finds when one begins to dissect games. The paper does not describe how games work as such in a way that the work of Juul (2003) or Crawford (1982) provide. The descriptions they valuably provide are more systemic - more in the nature of the physiology rather than the anatomy of games. The paper draws no distinction between recent concerns in the study of games between game play or what has been termed ludology and the narrative or fantasy elements of computer games (see Andrews 2004). These factors are treated similarly in the anatomy as (potential) parts of describing what games consist of. The paper also makes no attempt to describe motivation to play games, or what or why people may gain from engaging in games as described in the work of Gee (2003). The review does not constrain itself to computer games in that new formats can draw on elements that have been previously in board games, field games or card games and so on. The paper does not discuss simulation in any depth, however, many complex and rich games are some form of simulation.

There are also new emerging formats of games that we would want to address. Games using augmented reality form some new categorisation - games in which there is an element of field play where the reality of the field is augmented by the use of mobile, wearable computers that collect and deliver information about players' locations and information appropriate to their location in the game field. This has currently been implemented in the educational game Savannah, where students role play as a pride of lions on a field that has overlaid information about a virtual African environment. It is as a contribution to what we can make in these new formats that this dissection has been made.

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