Constructing Gameplay Workshop

In his talk at the 2009 playful conference, Russell Davies spoke of the importance of pretend. He explored how when we wear flashy big watches, we a really just pretending to be a pilot and the pretend games we play which makes mundane feel a bit more dynamic. I love this image though, for me it sums up what it is to pretend.

It shows Davies son using his mario doll as a gun. But it is deeper than that. It shows the ingenuity of pretend. In this case of Davies son discovering a way to play with a gun in a house where toy guns are banned. I won’t go into the details of whether or not kids should play with guns as that is not the point. The point is that Davies son transformed a simple doll into a gun as that was what he needed to do in order to play how he wanted to play.

What has this got to do with a Gameplay Construction Workshop?

Firstly, explaining the workshop : it is a workshop which I will be carrying out with fellow students Jonathan Robson and Jill Pearson and a group of afterschool club children. The main outcome of it being to provide us with an insight into how children create games, formulate the rules to play them and then carry out the play.

We will do this by working along side the children in two separate teams, asking them to describe their favourite computer games, how they play them (what the rules are, etc) and then helping them to create physical version of the game using tools from a big box of tricks that we will bring along. The real emphasis here being that we work WITH them as we do not want to be controlling or teaching as this would impair our results, we simply want to aid them in following the workshop.

This will be followed by the two groups having a swap over and playing each others games. It will be interesting to see how the rules are interpreted as well as created and how the overall gameplay works.

So coming back to the question: I think that the notion of pretend is what will fuel this workshop. We want the children to work creatively as teams although with out making them feel like they are working. It is pretend work. Pretend does not mean pointless though, it allows for playful learning.