“Opening Minds: People Who Make Video Games”

On November 20th, Digital World Institute held a LiveVibe TV event about people who make video games, from game producer to game designer and developer. Host Alex Avelino made interviews with them, which provided a good chance for audience who are interested in games making.

Marko Suvajdzic first shared his idea of Why Games in the Education. He explained some terms one by one, such as: Gamification, Flow Theory, Educational Games,Data Collection and Adaptive Learning.Marko claimed that there were no average students in the classroom, what actually existed were students who above or below that average, players’ situation in a game was also the same. He mentioned that adaptive learning based on that and told us the relationship between games and education. Living in such powerful Internet world, children’s education should be expanded by those beneficial games. My understanding for his words is that even though Flow Theory and Data Collection are useful that we can use to build a perfect database and an optimized game frame, however,interaction is the crucial element.

In order to achieve interactivity, so we have to design a mechanism to help players know his position and to become more competitive, we have to synthesize multiple information to build an educational environment.

Next Sam Sewall introduced his experience as a developer and presented some of his codes on Notepad++. Programming is not easy for everyone. Sam through playing his game helped audience have more clear cognition about developer’s work. A visible box on the top of his game’s interface, served as an educational tool for his teenagers players. “Teenagers could get instrumental information from this box and apply the knowledge they learnt to their reality” he said. During the question and answer session, he explained the meaning of “0”and ”1” for a ten-year-old girl. How many adults could also express their simple inquisitorial emotion to these two numbers? From Sam’s introduction, we know the computer science’s significance in interactive foundation area. Besides, I realized that if we could pay a little more attention in educational game design, sometimes merely add a simple interactive conversation box, a virtual intangible character with some instrumental information, we would fulfill to strengthen our user’s experience in interaction.

Then, Diana and Seunghyuk Jang present their “Exploring Egypt and the Afterlife” for us. They utilized Microsoft Kinect to create an immersive user experience in their game. They introduced their game concept, for an educational use in a museum, to introduce early Egypt’s culture and habits for visitors. From Seunghyuk’s words, a single character design took him around two weeks.He also mentioned in that process he considered details like colors of hairs, eyes and clothes, sizes of bodies and types of multiple accessories. Four characters and four sections included in their game: One is Travel, and another three are Build Pyramid, Wrap the Mummy and Dance, so we could image how great work he had finished.

When players were moving their hands and dancing in these four immersive environments, even as a non-player, I still enjoyed it.

Through this LiveVibe TV show, I experienced the powerful energy on which interactive games link with digital projection. Everything presented in this Activity was in a natural and logical way, so as game designers. When they introduce their works for audience, I think they are also playing again the creator’s role as what they do in their work, the only difference is this time, in the complete reality.