Wiki-what?!

Can you believe there's a wiki being compiled based around gamification?!
So far my favourite part of it has been the generic classification of player types and if you're interested some of the academics and details behind those types, you can find them here.

Guess what I am? ;D

Constructing your world

Remember back in elementary school when we had to make castles? Who didn't love that! Some used lego, some plain ol' cardboard - I even remember some marshmallow castles.

Awesome, right? It just gets better. Imagine, if you will, being able to explore these structures to scale. Minecraft and Terraria step up to the plate. You can build whatever you want. Well, almost whatever. But people have figured some things out.

Behold! Castles and then Castles.
It doesn't stop there; you'll notice that in both these cases there were multiple people (or at least their avatars) running around in these worlds. People often work together to make even BIGGER projects. Engineering projects, Mega construction projects. No one person could ever do some of these alone, so they set up servers and invite others to join in.

These are games. People do this stuff for fun. No one made them do it and it doesn't happen for any specific real-world purpose, most of the time. But it happens. Spontaneously.

Jane McGonical, or how I learned to love Games.

To pair itself very nicely with the previous video I posted, there's also this book I read. I might even call it one of the most amazing books I have read. It makes me hopeful, energized, and inspired - wow that sounds hokey. But I love it!
Jane McGonigal's site has videos, shows you the book, and so on

The book DOES talk about teaching, but not JUST about teaching. We can use games as tools and not just video games either, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Games are useful because they're fun and we want to play. When it comes down to it, people work at video games in spite of the inherent frustration of the challenges. I won't go into the details right now about the why, but it's at the start of the book. Then we expand on the concept and talk about how we can use games to improve our individual lives and our lives as a community, local all the way to global.

She outlines the history of gaming, the evolution, the difficulties, blah blah blah. Good read, but anyway. What I really love are the examples she gives of how gamification can helps us improve our lives (For really REAL examples!): here, here and here.

Have you used any games to help you do anything? I usually use it to avoid doing work, but that's just habit.

Extra Credit's synopsis of video games and learning

One of the basic premises of my entries will be "Gamification."

Why? Because it is a rich seam of possibility. I'm going to keep this entry short and instead offer you this show's take on the subject:



This series is also a great tool for delving into many topics and their relation to video games, all from an well-written and relatively objective perspective. For now this is a splendid jumping-off point to some more in-depth ideas as I continue.

More to follow.

Quick edit: Extra Credit has moved to Penny Arcade and can be found at
http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits