Scott Fisher

MacArthur-funded research on game design as educational software by Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman and Peter Seung-Taek Lee:

You arrive at the Core, a desolate city cloaked in strange vaporous clouds that seem to rise up from underground. Your traveling companions, a ragtag band of half-organic, half-mechanical “Creatures,” recognize this place as their lost city, a once buzzing, whirring streetscape of mechanical games where they were gainfully employed as part of the urban machinery. Your mission, as an expert game mechanic, is to use your Creatures, which you picked up at an intergalactic labor-vending machine, to reinvent a game once played in this land—or build some kind of weird, new hybrid.

This scene, enacted with a little journalistic license from a grant proposal, describes a possible opening sequence for Game Designer, an educational software program currently under development that introduces junior high school kids to the craft of video-game design. Part of a three-year research and development project backed by a $1.2 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the program’s loftier goals are to help equip students with a foundation of technical, artistic, cognitive, and linguistic skills—which some educational researchers argue are neglected by current standardized test-based curricula. For teenagers it will be seen more as an opportunity to stop thumbing Game Boys surreptitiously under their desks and openly test their well-honed gaming skills in the classroom.

The Principals of Play | Metropolis Magazine