In this blog post, I'm going to reflect on
my learning experience for this part of the blog and identify a couple of the
features of said experience, with a view to giving a better idea of the scope
of what I've done so far. I'll identify some of my own strengths and weaknesses
(albeit from a much more subjective point of view than the SWOT analysis that I
carried out before), and give a bit of explanation of where I'm going to go
with this blog from here. The university-based part of this project is over,
for which I've received an excellent mark.
To being with, here’s a screencast of the
presentation that I did. It basically gives an overview of what I covered in the course of the blog. (14 minutes)
This was a fairly hard project for me to
maintain - not really because of the format, but because of the other pressures
that I had in my studies and the fact that it was much more academically
grounded than I am used to. I like blogging, but I'm not a huge fan of
referencing and research (which seems kind of silly seeing as I'm studying, and
I'm studying to become a librarian). I found the academic grounding pretty eye
opening, however, and I feel a lot more confident in progressing with my
studies now that I've done a bit of actual research into the area I plan to
pursue. The effort has definitely paid off and I am looking forward to pursuing
the idea of gaming as a learning tool.
In terms of the research I did, I realize
it's not completely infallible, but it is still fairly robust. I may not have
been critical enough during my investigation, but there are two reasons for
this - first, I just didn't have the time to undertake a multi-faceted account
of the concept. I had a full study load and - to be blunt about it - a bunch of
other life stuff to look after. It just wasn't practical to take a devils'
advocate approach and look at the downsides of gaming, though I think the
Negative aspects of the SWOT analysis made an excellent attempt.
The second reason I didn't take a more
critical view of gaming in libraries is to do with my own personal viewpoint
and the purpose of the blog. I am a gamer, more than I am an academic or
librarian. It interests me and I can see a lot of benefits for the concept in a
library environment. I also think that there's enough hard data to justify the
medium as a legitimate tool - I'm not so concerned with that as I am
implementing it in a setting where it can be of use. To me, the debate is done
- let's work out how it can best be used. This was a huge challenge in the blog
- at times, it felt like I was a bit of a bull at a gate, wanting to progress
straight to the design aspect of a/the game and skipping all of the background.
The blog is driving towards practical implementation and that design aspect,
not a drawn out scholarly debate about the pros and cons of gaming.
I hope that so far, this blog has provided
a decent starting point for those looking into gaming, from what amounts to
essentially a library patrons' perspective (seeing as I neither work in a
library nor have a particularly strong academic interest in the subject). It
may even serve as a jumping-off point for further research, if someone else
wants to take that up. I'd like to publicly thank my Supervisor, Ann Gillespie and Helen Partridge, the Coordinator
for the course that I began this blog for. Their guidance allowed me to produce
pretty much every entry here thus far and I am appreciative of their time and
effort, especially considering that my chosen subject matter was a bit outside
everyones experience.
Just to cap off the main learnings that
I've gained from this stage of my research -
o Gaming and gamification are valuable and useful tools that can have
a huge payoff when done right
o Story is one of the most important, hard to get right, and valuable
elements of gaming
o As informal learning spaces, games resist quantification but are
qualitatively rich
o Most of the problems involving the implementation of gaming stem from biased or dated perceptions
of the idea of play
These are the major points that I feel bear
mentioning at this stage, in the interest of rounding out and summarizing this
part of the blog. In terms of future direction, I intend to take more of a
design/implementation path here. I want to design games that are of use for
purposes other than entertainment (or even as
well as being entertaining), but I don't want to gamify things - I'm
totally on board with 'gamification' being a bit of a marketing gimmick, and
bastardising the medium into a tepid version of itself. This blog will
hopefully become my vehicle to chronicle my explorations into creating working
game systems and texts, including my reflections on the process. There will be
more referenced posts on the subject, mainly involving the theoretical side of
gaming and the narratological aspects that I've found to be so important to
developing fully functioning games.
Thankyou for reading and I hope that this
has rounded out the academic justification for gaming having a place in the
library, which I've been exploring up to this point. I'm looking forward to
getting into the fun stuff from here on out. Cheers!
