I talk to people more and more about their interest in game based learning and adding it to their learning mix but before they start I always ask them to spend some time playing some computer games. You don’t need to spend thousands on games and hardware, there are many games that you can play for free on the web. If you have an iPhone, iPad, HTC or iPod touch investing £10 will get you a good range of games, you’ll also find a huge number of games for free. Try to pick a good range of games from adventure, puzzle, action, racing etc… don’t just buy games or genre that you like and try to use game on different platforms if you can. http://www.miniclip.com/games/mini-golf/en/  - is one of our favourites, still great to play and it's over 10 years old.

Disclaimer: Dear IT team. We are not responsible for your employees using up the company bandwidth playing computer games!

At the start just play the games, don’t think too much about it, no need for deep evaluation, just play them. Don’t spending hours and hours fixed in front of the screen and take a break – it’s good for you and keeps you fresh. Before the next session that you have start to think about the games that you have played think about:

- Did you enjoy playing them?
- What did you enjoy?
- Did you want to keep playing?
- Did you get frustrated?
- Was there a character?
- Did you like the character?
- Did you like the graphics?
- Was it easy to play?
- Was it easy to pick up?
- Was it over too quickly?
- Was there a narrative within the game?
- Was playing the game rewarding?

Write down a few notes and then ask a colleague to do the same exercises. You may be thinking what is the purpose of this? Without delving in Game Theory (that’s for a future article), it is really useful to start to understand why people enjoy playing computer games and these questions will provide a good basis for future specification work that you might do. If you have a pilot group of learners get them to play the games and understand what they like. Once you start to understand the elements of computer games that people enjoy you can then think about how you could integrate this into your own game based learning project. It might be exploration, problem solving, reward, recognition – game design is a skill and a successful game based learning project needs an understanding of game design and theory as well as learning and development.

It is quite likely that your list of games contains recent releases; think about how the elements that you have found were also in the games that you played years ago. Think back to your first experience of computer games, depending on the age of the readership we might be starting at Pong, going through Manic Miner and heading up at Mario Kart!

Think about the elements that are consistently coming up in your play tests and were also in the games that you played the first time around. How did the games get people really excited and engaged? When did a simple Pac Man game go viral around the world with over 5 million hours of work time across the world? You can read http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10153286  for more.

If this is the first time that you have played computer games you’ve know started to understand why people like to play games and what you need to think about in your own projects (games and e-learning). Games are fun, it’s allowed and if you’ve been able to integrate game design and theory into your projects is that not a good thing?
 

Scott