"You be Ponyta, I'll be Knuckles." or, Introduction & History of Play
For as long as I can remember, I've always played the horse. Indeed, it probably stemmed from my own little girl fascination with all things equine. When it came time to pick characters to play, my favorite cousin Matty would always choose the hero with the best weapons or powers. Lucky for me, sword or no, Link still always needed his faithful sidekick Epona.
INTE 5320, Games and Learning is a way for me to explore my own facilitation with games, and shine light on my own gameful learning, and how I can implement more gameful thinking in my own curriculum development and professional life working with kids.
I come from what I believe is a unique gaming perspective...that is, one that is rather more interested in watching other people play games than playing them myself. Ever since my earliest interactions with PC and Nintendo games, I have always latched onto the stories and characters and feeling of the game, rather than with a desire to play or "beat" them myself. I attribute this mostly to my interactions with my favorite cousin growing up.
Matty was a year older than me, and an ideal playmate. We liked all the same things, (we both got Poo-Chi Robot Dogs one Christmas, along with matching copies of the I Can Be an Animal Doctor) and were inseparable for years and years in my youth. Perhaps most importantly, Matty was creative, and he could inject imaginative play into just about any game we took upon ourselves to play. He was very good at video games (of course, my 8-year-old-self thought Matty was good at everything) and though I never felt the desire to reach out and take a controller or a mouse myself, I wanted to understand the motivations of the characters on the screen, and I grew enamored with the same heroes, sidekicks, villains (and yes, horses), that my cousin did.
Having no gaming systems in my own home, my fascination with game-watching came at the general confusion and consternation of my parents. They really only questioned my motives when I blew around the house like a hurricane (gotta go fast!) or when I ended up in their bed due to nightmares after watching Matty play Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland. (That werewolf chase through a haunted, blue-pixeled forest plagued my dreams. After several forays into my parents bedroom I was forbidden from watching that game ever after.)
Watching these games was a way for me to connect and contribute socially with my favorite cousin, and more importantly, gave us a platform upon which to further our own imaginative play. The couch cushions became Bowser's Castle, we waved sticks around casting fanciful spells at Hogwarts, and we tried with every tool at our disposal to pry Chaos Emeralds out of the sidewalk in front of my house. To this day, that bit of quartz remains stubbornly in the ground. This type of play was imaginative, creative, and engaging. I remember it among my most treasured memories. More than anything else, it gave me a sense of belonging. I believe this idea, the idea of collective, social and inclusive play, is needed now more than ever. Graphics have gotten smarter and sleeker and more diverse—but unless it is also inclusive and mindful, then what have we gained?
My adoration of game watching continues today, to the bafflement of many (as well as myself). I love nothing more than watching YouTube Play-throughs of indie or popular games as if they full-length films. I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to this activity. As a writer, the character development through dialogue, action and reaction is something that intrigues me most perhaps because I am seeing real people react in real-time to actions and sequences playing out on screen. Though the Horrorland’s of the mid 90’s have long gone, my fascination with horror games has not stopped, though I myself have gotten a lot braver. I still relish the snarky badguy, (think Portal 2’s GLaDOS) and the environments so stocky and grainy in the past have given way to the stunning vistas of Skyrim. Nor, should we neglect to mention the beautiful scores that accompany them all. For me it is all a strange and guilty pleasure.
In this course, I hope I can learn more about what draws players to play, and what this means for learning. In an increasingly technological age, I know my curriculum will need to catch up to stay relevant. I want to engage with the theory, and expand my knowledge towards a more succinct learning opportunity.
For my 8-year-old-self, playing meant taking art and imitating it, expanding upon it, and engaging socially with one of my favorite people. As I develop in this course, I hope I can learn to retain that sense of imagining and make my professional career working with kids a more playful endeavor. There are Links in this world, and there are Eponas. They are both equally important.
Matty and I, zooming around the galaxy.