eGames: Is imagination the forgotten ingredient?

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.04.006

Computers in Human Behavior

Volume 26, Issue 3, May 2010, Pages 296-301

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2008.04.006 Get rights and content

Abstract

Commercial eGames strive to create seamless transitions between realistic virtual worlds. This condenses the experience and can create more intense engagement. However, there is no evidence that this is essential in eGames used for educational applications. Educators seek nearly opposite attributes. They need materials that can be disaggregated into units small enough to fit within timetables and that can be edited and customised to fit curricula without resort to programming. This paper proposes the alternative of a meta-game – a loose string of game and puzzle tasks in the tradition of heroes’ journeys, tournaments, scavenger hunts, and road rallies. Imagination and symbolism provide the links between otherwise unrelated clues, puzzles, and tasks. Spreadsheets serve as the ideal hub for meta-games. Current spreadsheets include form controls such as scroll bars and buttons, share the same multimedia applications as other office software, and can even create animation. The spreadsheet has the versatility to fill the niche of the cardboard box as a plaything. Research is reviewed that supports a role for eGames with less overt reward and more left to the imagination.

Section snippets

The cardboard box as a learning object

How many generations have said the equivalent of “When we were kids, we used to be happy playing with a cardboard box. Kids today need to have it all spelt out for them…”.? This, of course, ignores the fact that the versatile cardboard box is itself a technological marvel invented some years after the camera, locomotive, and telegraph. Not every country today can turn a tree into a cardboard box. It is an extremely adaptable educational tool in the right hands.

The archetypal adaptation of the

The spreadsheet – a modern ‘cardboard box’

But there is a ‘virtual cardboard box’ sitting under our noses capable of drawing students’ attentions away from the best-produced eGames. It is the ‘white collar cousin’ of the computer game – the ubiquitous, utilitarian spreadsheet. It was the spreadsheet that spawned the personal computer revolution. Games were originally packaged as stand-alone devices. It was not until a decade after the spreadsheet made a PC mandatory on the office desktop that the PC’s capacities grew to the level that

Letting imagination fill the gaps

The spreadsheet thus provides a blank cardboard box for the imagination. It can become a simulated castle, locomotive, spaceship, rap studio, doll house, or stage. Storyboard scenes can be populated with cartoon balloons and clip art characters. With the correct period graphical background, the spreadsheet with slider controls can form the hub of a game. The controls can be dressed up with graphical surrounds coloured with fill effects to match the backgrounds. It can become a Roman general’s

The meta-game in education

Such a loose stringing together of games and quests can be termed a ‘meta-game’. Essentially it is a structured set of clues and puzzles which directs players on a hero’s journey or mission. Clues can be obtained from books, the Web, a virtual world, an eGame, from other students, or from solving puzzles. In the school classroom this would merely be an extension of the traditional student project, directed research, or Web Quest to incorporate some of the motivational, social, and integrative

Conclusion

Successful authors have long warned against leaving too little to the imagination. As Stephen King (1981) put it: “What’s behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself”.

The cardboard rocket cockpit, like countless toys before it such as the “wealth” traded to Tom Sawyer, reminds us that imagination is quite capable and eager to fill in the ‘reality gaps’. The spreadsheet has now closed the ‘programming gaps’ that might have

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