About This Project

Patterns of Play: Portraits of Players is a study conducted by Alicia Dudek and Rachel Shadoan in affiliation with Artful Dodger Software that will use both quantitative and ethnographic methods to understand the principles of gaming and how those principles can be applied effectively.

Why?

Why are we studying games? Because we believe games are the key to efficient transfer and mastery of knowledge–if we can just figure out how to use them for that. We’re not the only folks who think this. Here are some thoughts on the subject by James Paul Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Good computer and video games … are learning machines. They get themselves learned and learned well, so that they get played long and hard by a great many people… If a game cannot be learned and even mastered at a certain level, it won’’t get played by enough people, and the company that makes it will go broke…. Of course, game designers could have solved their learning problems by making games shorter and easier, by dumbing them down, so to speak. But most gamers don’t want short and easy games. Thus, designers face and largely solve an intriguing educational dilemma, one also faced by schools and workplaces: how to get people … to learn and master something that is long and challenging— and enjoy it, to boot.

In our case, the results of our study will go towards improving Artful Dodger Software’s games, in particular, i1up, which turns personal achievements in the real world into an online game. So that’s why we’re doing this project. But how are we going to do it?

How?

There’s been a lot of research done about video games. The studies that have gotten the most media attention are those investigating the link between video game violence and real life aggression. However, much research has also gone into “edutainment”, or video games meant to educate. In general, research into education video games entails creating a video game and then testing its effectiveness with users. We will be looking at the problem from a different direction–starting with the users, then deciding what needs to be included in a game to make it effective.

The users we will be looking at are the players of Plant Wars, a game developed by an Oklahoma start-up called Artful Dodger Software. For more about Plant Wars, check out Alicia’s post on the subject, or the Plant Wars website.

We’ll be getting to know the Plant Wars players in a couple of different ways. First, we’re going to analyze the quantitative data representing user’s in-game interactions. Then, we will use the visualizations we create from our analysis to help the players tell us about their experiences with Plant Wars in particular, and gaming in general.

We will also being interviewing and observing players of other games, as well as game researchers and designers.