Video Games & Human Development
Video Games & Human Development 1 Running head: VIDEO GAMES & HUMAN DEVELOPMENT Press Play to Grow! Designing Video Games as Trojan Horses for Catalyzing Human Development Moses Silbiger, M.A. John F. Kennedy University, Pleasant Hill, CA Video Games & Human Development 2 Learning can and should be hard fun! - Clark N. Quinn, e-learning & video game designer, Quinnovation. We are already the most overinformed, underreflective people in the history of civilization. Is it possible the twenty-first century needs a new kind of learning and a new kind of leader to help us …? Perhaps [we can] begin building not simply an information highway but a transformation highway. - Robert Kegan, professor & developmental psychologist, Harvard University. My main intention in this paper is to explore new and alternative video game designs to promote overall and healthy human development based on specific methodological frameworks, and how to make these video games to be both conceptually, technically, and economically feasible to be designed and produced. It is also my intention to propose video games that can simultaneously (or specifically) adapt to different audiences, types, and styles of players, balancing entertainment and developmental purposes by using skillful and integrative strategies based on a proactive Trojan Horse approach. In other words, these purposes will not necessarily need to be explicitly presented within the video games, but just put in motion through underlying and customizable developmental tools intrinsically embedded in their structural design, in contrast with a top-down”, “forced upon” or preaching approach. In order to explore these developmental potentials, I have been engaged in an ongoing 11-month long mixed-methods research 1, composed by six different methodologies designed to investigate the psychological, technical, cultural, systemic, and social aspects of video games and the gaming world – and how to start incorporating developmental tools in video game design.
[Show full text]