Kurt Squire recently published in a recent issue of Educational Researcher (November 2006) a paper entitled From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience. Â Squire points out, “As research and development initiatives proliferate, educational researchers might benefit by developing more grounded theories about them. This article argues for framing game play as a designed experience. Players’ understandings are developed through cycles of performance within the gameworlds, which instantiate particular theories of the world (ideological worlds). Players develop new identities both
through game play and through the gaming communities in which these identities are enacted.”
The paper goes through several examples of recent games such as America’s Army and Full Spectrum Warrior that are both simulations and hypothetical worlds that offer desiged experiences. Education would be wise to investigate these games, as they naturally have characteristics fruitful for learning (e.g. learning by doing, experiences that enable students to develop “situated understandings”, immediate feedback and reinforcement, identity development as expert problem solvers, etc.).икони