Feb 132022
 

Um texto interessante, e fica aqui uma cópia porque tem acesso restrito.. enfim:

“Why have students—many of whom are video-game players—so disliked the virtual learning environments of their colleges and universities? JT Torres asks and suggests some answers.
By JT Torres
December 8, 2021

The pandemic forced many of us to move into hybrid, technology-mediated teaching, and as we continue our voyage into such spaces, one thing that we in higher ed should remember is that many students have long been quite good at navigating hybrid environments. Really, it’s about time formal education finally catches up.
In his landmark 2003 book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy James Paul Gee detailed the ways video games do a better job of facilitating literacy learning than education institutions. Almost 20 years later, his analysis has become incredibly relevant. It would seem that the move toward more hybrid learning environments should have captivated a student demographic primed by video games. But instead, students—many of whom are video-game players—have often hated the virtual learning environments of their universities. Somewhat ironically, the video-game industry is experiencing a resurgence. Prophetically, Gee wrote, “The theories of learning one would infer from looking at schools today comport very poorly with the theory of learning in good video games.”
Now is the perfect time to revisit the principles of why video games are so good at teaching and learning in ways most virtual classes don’t seem to be. Below is a summary of some of those principles.
Storying content. Gee discussed meaning as being situated in specific contexts. Knowledge, in other words, only becomes meaningful in certain situations. For instance, I might know the nutritional content of eggs, but that doesn’t mean I know how to scramble them or even prepare a nutritious breakfast. In video games, the concepts and skills a player learns have specific uses in particular moments. Those situated meanings require players to recognize the patterns that indicate how to best apply their newly acquired knowledge. Typically, situated meanings are created via stories. Within those stories, players assume an identity that motivates them to make use of whatever the video game is teaching them.
Applying newly learned skills and knowledge. Video games make frequent use of interest-based interaction with knowledge, promoting self-directed mastery. Very rarely do video games ask players to passively listen to and absorb information—instead, they deliver information in usable chunks. At each stage, players practice applying their new learning, first to familiar situations and progressively to novel situations, facilitating transfer.
Providing just-in-time feedback. Players typically receive information at the time they need it. Say a player in a particular game is threatened by an oncoming storm. Right at that moment, the game teaches the player how to construct shelter. Other video games might rely on social interactions, often facilitated through popular apps like Discord or GameFAQs. This approach encourages collaboration, allowing players to actively seek information from others when they require it most.
Encouraging risk. Of course, the consequences of failing in a video game are much lower than failing an expensive college class that could perhaps even influence one’s career. The low-stakes challenges of video games empower players to try new strategies and discover novel approaches to problem solving.
Rewarding failure. When players take risks and fail, they still learn. On a metacognitive level, players realize a gap in ability or knowledge that might motivate them to persist. On a pragmatic level, they learn not only what doesn’t work but also what might work with modification, the foundation of self-regulation.
These principles remind educators that the virtual wheel does not need to be reinvented. We don’t have to be tech savants to understand what grabs students’ attention and inspires them. We don’t even have to use video games or gamify classrooms. Below are some practical translations of the above principles that can work in our classrooms right now, even without Zoom wizardry.
Frame content with culturally relevant themes. If meaning is situated in specific contexts, then one way we can engage students is to consider the stories that matter to them. We can do this by activating prior knowledge, such as personal experience, or asking students to share stories of their potential relationships with the course content. For example, an economics professor introducing the topic of monopolies might ask students to consider how they would shop for items if they wanted to boycott Amazon. Good video games invite the players to also shape the story. Zoom can encourage collaborative story shaping (i.e., learning) through hybrid or online groups. The economics professor could set the narrative stage: let’s boycott Amazon. In groups, students could design a plan for only consuming from markets not influenced by Amazon. As they realize the difficulty of effectively doing so, the professor can explicitly illustrate the principles of monopolies.
Create moments for students to use newly learned skills and knowledge. Active learning has long been a trend, but it isn’t always understood. To be clear, active learning should not replace direct instruction, which, of course, is effective. Certainly, video games have moments when the action pauses and information is directly communicated to the player. But it’s combining the two types of learning together—explicit instruction alongside opportunities for application—that create the strongest learning environments. Experience does not need to be taken literally. Fiction, a simulation of reality, can also be an experience. By broadening the concept of “experience,” virtual environments can expand notions of active learning. For instance, students might role-play imagined experiences. Simulating or role-playing experiences immerse students in the task by motivating them to learn the means to succeed at the task.
Provide brief checkpoints. Students usually have to complete an entire assignment before receiving any kind of formal feedback. If assignments are broken down into tasks, the way they are in video games’ War and Peace–length epic quests, then instructors can make quick observations of what students are doing, such as through polls. Based on what the instructor sees, they can adapt subsequent class activities. This not only helps educate the students, but it also saves time for the instructor, who then doesn’t have to provide detailed feedback on each student’s final major assignment. Assessment checkpoints can also be social, potentially enhancing student agency. Just as players flock to Discord for help, students could engage each other in some social space. These spaces can be structured—a Padlet with guidelines and examples for students—or open-ended hangouts. Peer review can both save time and be more dynamic in virtual environments.
Require reflection. When students begin to take social control over assessment, they become more reflective about their own learning. Reflection doesn’t always happen on its own, however. It must be structured as part of the experience. The low-stakes and learn-from-failure approach to video games is one way to encourage such reflection by offering multiple attempts accompanied by instructor or peer feedback. One suggestion for translating that approach to classrooms comes from the Stanford Life Design Lab. In it, students generate hypotheses about newly encountered knowledge, and then they test their hypotheses in the attempt to rethink problems and solutions.
Stay active. There are many ways to incorporate active discovery, but these strategies must again be guided by explicit instruction about how to reflect on and learn from the risks and failures. The flipped classroom is a good model for pairing explicit instruction with virtual experience. Instructors can deliver much of the direct instruction via video or the college’s LMS. Then students can spend the freed-up time in hybrid breakout groups trying to solve a relevant problem.
Technology itself cannot improve or damage learning. It’s our use of it that matters. There are indeed bad video games, and by bad, I mean games that people did not play. There are also many good ones, and what we need are good course designs so that people want to play and learn from them, too.

+infos(fonte): LINK

Jul 062021
 

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games

Foi publicado o livro com o titulo “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games“, em que:
“Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games, Edited By Deniz Denizel, Deniz Eyüce Sansal and Tuna Tetik
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Gamesis a collection of contemporary research and interpretation that explores the narrative structures in video games and ludonarrative content design in related media. Featuring coverage of a broad range of topics, including narrative theory, game studies, history of video games, and interdisciplinary studies, this book is ideally designed for scholars, researchers, intellectuals, media professionals, game developers, entrepreneurs, and students who wish to enhance their understanding of the relationship and correlation of video games, narrativity, and aesthetics.”

do qual destaco:
“An Analysis of the Real-Time Strategy Games: The Nineties Extract, Pedro Rito
Abstract: This chapter aims to perform a scoping review related to video games of the genre Real-Time Strategy. Several video games have been associated with the strategy genre, and different titles have appeared on the market over time, some of which have a more military aspect and are usually associated with the subgenre of real-time strategy. These types of games tend to be more dynamic as opposed to turn-based because they feature time-based gameplay and choices about unit building. The difficulty of controlling all elements of the game makes them more attractive to players, with a high degree of uncertainty and complexity. Decisions are not perfect and most often are made abstractly. There has been a profusion of research work that makes use of RTS to develop AI or to build knowledge repositories with options that are made during games by players. The review that is made in this paper demonstrates the diversity of the formal elements that make up the RTS, identifies some of the initiatives that make use of RTS for research on certain topics, as well as the challenges that arise for game designers when making the choices they have to do.
Keywords: Video Games, Real-Time Strategy, Motivations, Game Design, Formal Elements, Military Aspect, Scope Review”

+infos(editora): https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/74563

+infos(amazon): LINK

Sep 052019
 

Call for Chapters: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games

Proposals Submission Deadline: September 18, 2019
Full Chapters Due: January 16, 2020
Submission Date: May 10, 2020

Introduction

Each period creates its particular aesthetics. Developments in the scientific and technological fields affect art forms and accelerate their evolution. In time, the leading art movements of an era generate and exceed their own saturation of thresholds, transform their ‘deep-and-singular’ selves into ‘shallow-and-multiple’ selves. An art form that evolves by its internal dynamics and statics reaches the threshold of saturation, and finally becomes a ‘springboard’ upon which another art form can take further steps. This is how art forms evolve in interaction. In this context, video games have rapidly covered the path that cinema has taken over a long period.

By advancing through its evolution, video games now represent many narrative systems that provide a semantic reserve of form and content for both their own medium and the other mediums. These narrative systems have been inevitably subjected to the effects of technological developments. Meanwhile, concepts such as Mimesis, Diegesis, and Katharsis, which have remained valid since Aristotle, have dominated the narrative channels throughout the history of art given the enigmatic attractiveness of their singularities. As in everything, the principle of dialectic antagonism, which carries and expands all the layers of meaning by adding new particles as time progresses, stood against these concepts by revealing alternative systems like Brechtian, Modern and Postmodern narratives, particularly in theater and cinema. On the one hand, it can be claimed that there has always been a single narrative idea and it embodied in various mediums; on the other hand, it can also be claimed that each media could have inevitably created its own narrative system. In both cases, it is certain that almost every piece of art which conveyed by many other mediums or branches formed their own ontologic “present,” while feeding on the unalterable knowledge of the past. Sometimes by standing alongside the things they show, sometimes by standing up against, or sometimes by being only neutral observers to them.

Evolutionary big leaps in the history of art have always taken place with a dimensional expansion and Every successful thing goes beyond its predecessor. As the predecessor of video games, cinema took the first big leap and replicated the unique features of many previous art forms and synthesized them. The dimensional expansion here manifested as (detection of) movement. Afterward, video games replicated mostly all the features of cinema and others and synthesized them. The dimensional expansion here manifested as interactivity. Since video games synthesize unique features of various art forms, they have the qualified characteristics of expressing many meanings, elements, contents and methods that convey and construct narrative systems in various ways.

Objective

In this project, our Editorial Advisory Board and we will endeavor to read video games as one of the most potent and evolutionary representatives of narrativity, from a narrativist perspective without missing valuable arguments of ludologist perspective. As a collection of critical and cultural studies, this book aims to provide valuable knowledge of relevant theoretical and conceptual frameworks in both game studies and the theory of video games. This book also aims to be a manuscript that reassesses and interprets intensive topics of the history of video games from a contemporary and multidisciplinary perspective. I’ll be written for scholars, researchers, practitioners, and professionals who want to enhance their understanding and imply the knowledge of the relationship and correlation of video games, narrativity, and aesthetics.

Target Audience

The target audience of this book will be composed of scholars, researchers, practitioners, and professionals studying and/or working in the fields of game studies, history of video games, art and other arts, media arts, social and communication sciences, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies, media studies, critical and cultural studies, narration arts like cinema, theater, literature, photography and music, and game design.

Recommended Topics

Welcomed Topics Include (but also a combination of) the following:

• Analyzes through Narrative Discourse of Gerard Genette upon video games.
• Analyzes on video games with Erwin Panofsky’s Iconographic method.
• Linguistic Competence of Video Games: Emergence and maintenance of meaning codes, components, patterns, and systems.
• The appearance of Classic, Modern, and Postmodern narrative in video games.
• Exchange of narrative elements between art branches and video games.
• Analogical narrative design in video games.
• Relativist narrative design in video games.
• Perspectivist narrative design in video games.
• Structuralist narrative design in video games.
• Formalist narrative design in video games.
• Interpretivist narrative design in video games.
• Stylist narrative design in video games.
• Sophisticated content design in video games.
• Games that have complicated plots/superimpose narrative layers.
• Reading video games as a “representation system.”
• Games that replicate/transform cinematographic aesthetics.
• Games that replicate/transform photographic aesthetics.
• Games that replicate/transform literal aesthetics.
• Games that replicate/transform theatrical aesthetics.
• Games that replicate/transform musical aesthetics.
• The appearance of archetypes on video games/video game archetypes.
• The appearance of stereotypes on video games/video game stereotypes.
• The appearance of Kitsch, Pastiche, and Parody on video games.
• Mimetic, Diegetic, and Cathartic manifestations in video games.
• Epic, Poetic, and Didactic manifestations in video games.
• Theoretical analysis of narratology through video games.
• Historical analysis of narratology through video games.
• Sociological analysis of narratology through video games.
• Psychological analysis of narratology through video games.
• Anthropological analysis of narratology through video games.
• Dialogue, monologue & inner voice in the context of video game narrative.
• Narrative aesthetics through acting & dubbing in video games.
• The aesthetic function of the narrator in video games.

Submission Procedure

Scholars and researchers are invited to submit on or before Sept 18, 2019, a chapter proposal of 500 to 750 words (excluding bibliography) clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter and an author information 200 to 300 words. The authors will be notified by Oct 05, 2019 about the acceptance of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by Jan 16, 2020. All interested authors must consult the guidelines for manuscript submissions at http://www.igi-global.com/publish/contributor-resources/before-you-write/ prior to submission. All manuscripts are accepted based on a double-blind peer review editorial process. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project. 

Note: There are no submission or acceptance fees for manuscripts submitted to this book publication, Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games.

All proposals should be submitted through the eEditorial Discovery®TM online submission manager.

Publisher

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the “Information Science Reference” (formerly Idea Group Reference), “Medical Information Science Reference,” “Business Science Reference,” and “Engineering Science Reference” imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2020.

Important Dates

Sept 18, 2019: Proposal Submission Deadline 
Oct 5, 2019: Notification of Acceptance
Jan 16, 2020: Full Chapter Submissions
Mar 15, 2020: Review Results Returned
Apr 12, 2020: Revised Chapter Submission
May 10, 2020: Final Chapter Submission

Project Link
https://www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/4302

Editors

Deniz Denizel 
Bahcesehir University
deniz.denizel@comm.bau.edu.tr

Deniz Eyüce Şansal 
Bahcesehir University
deniz.eyucesansal@comm.bau.edu.tr