Playing Games, Designing Games

Here is a very interesting reblog from the MacArthur Spotlight Blog. Designer and theorist Katie Salen is suggesting ways that complex role playing games can help kids think like game designers. Here's the url and here's the reblog: http://spotlight.macfound.org/

And do go to the spotlight blog for a larger conversation, including with Jim Gee and others:

Jul 12th: Katie Salen: Gamestar Mechanic Project FAQ Part 2: Gamestar Mechanic is a complex project, one that has required everyone on the team to challenge their own thinking about the real role gaming can play in getting kids to think like game designers. As the lead designer on the project my greatest challenges have been negotiating the different expectations and needs of the various stakeholders and maintaining a creative vision that honors the limitations and possibilities of the software development process. Significant, I think, was our decision to begin testing with kids using an extremely rough interaction prototype, this prototype modeled the basic game making activity we were after, but lacked most of the features we envisioned for the final application. The prototype was buggy, pretty ugly, but deeply engaging, which was the point after all. Betty, Alex, and Robert will be posting some on the workshops we have been running with kids over the past few months, in subsequent posts. In order to get to the point where we could build a prototype our team had to come to some consensus about the values, knowledge, and practices the game would model. Have some questions about where are thinking ended up? See part 2 of the Gamestar Mechanic FAQ below.