{"id":11083,"date":"2018-01-24T00:46:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-24T00:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/313563"},"modified":"2018-01-24T00:46:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T00:46:00","slug":"video-examining-educational-games-through-the-lens-of-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/01\/24\/video-examining-educational-games-through-the-lens-of-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Video: Examining educational games through the lens of ‘fun’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Video games can be a fantastic learning\u00a0tool,\u00a0but there’s a challenge when designing games that strive to be both educational and\u00a0<\/em>fun. But what is<\/em> fun?\u00a0GlassLab’s\u00a0Erin Hoffman learned this after presenting\u00a0SimCity<\/em> to a group of students.<\/p>\n

“We put the game in front of kids all by themselves in a school setting and they said: ‘well this is pretty fun but we’re not learning anything,'” explains\u00a0Hoffman. “It was really surprising that kids in that particular setting were hungry for learning.”<\/p>\n

In this 2015 GDC talk, Hoffman presents a new theory of “fun,” by positing fun as\u00a0shorthand for a very complex psychological process by which humans convert stress into satisfaction through insight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hoffman describes the concept of “fun” in relation to learning, a concept which she calls ‘sophia’, which is what she’s dubbed the ‘game-learn’ emotion. She breaks down games by emotions and explains how ‘sophia’\u00a0relates to each genre.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Designers can now\u00a0watch the talk completely free via the official GDC YouTube channel!<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition to this presentation, the\u00a0GDC Vault<\/a>\u00a0and its accompanying\u00a0YouTube channel<\/a>\u00a0offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent\u00a0Game Developers Conference events<\/a>, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.<\/p>\n

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC\u00a0already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via\u00a0a GDC Vault subscription page<\/a>. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the\u00a0GDC Vault group subscription page<\/a>. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can\u00a0contact GDC Vault technical support<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Video games can be a fantastic learning\u00a0tool,\u00a0but there’s a challenge when designing games that strive to be both educational and\u00a0fun. But what is fun?\u00a0GlassLab’s\u00a0Erin Hoffman learned this after presenting\u00a0SimCity to a group of students. “We put the game in front of kids all by themselves in a school setting and they said: ‘well this is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}