Dispatch from the Digital Frontier: Games as Meaning Makers

Historywas always a perplexing subject for me in college. The texts were dryand the lectures weren’t much better. I could never get a sense ofwhat life was really like for the people who lived the events wediscussed. Since I could establish no “human connection,” historyseemed more like a series of sometimes-disjointed facts than achronicle of the interrelated lives and significant events from aparticular time and place in the past.

SteveTilson’s students don’t share my confusion. Tilson, who teacheshistory at Winona State University, loves his subject and knows howto bring it alive for his students. In fact, Tilson has received a5/5 overall rating on RateMyProfessors.com because of his ability toconnect his students with the history they are studying. How does hedo this? By telling stories instead of giving lectures, complete withaccents, anecdotes, and asides that breathe life and accessibilityinto subject matter, Tilson’s students actually find his class “funto attend,” according to one reviewer.

Everybodytells stories. We tell each other stories to relay information abouta day’s activities, we repeat stories we’ve heard from others asa form of gossip and entertainment, we tell our kids stories to shareour experience and shape theirs, we make up stories to entertain eachother and to put our children to sleep. Stories, it seems, are afundamental form of human communication.

Stories,especially serial stories that build on each other, are a greatmethod for helping learners understand how concepts apply to the realworld. The examples and non-examples that you can model within astory provide context for application and interpretation; storiesoften contain emotion, which serves to attach the learner to thecontent in question. For these reasons, stories can help usunderstand, interpret, and make meaning out of otherwise inaccessibleinformation.

Thejournalism community, interestingly, is beginning to consider thevalue of storytelling in the news business. In an industry devoted tothe facts and nothing but the facts, and despite the reference tonews items as “stories,” storytelling has a tinge of the fancifulin the minds of many journalists. But news consumers in the 21^stcentury are tough customers with many pulls on their attention. Somesay that maybe rethinking the balance between reporting andstorytelling is in order .

Gamesare a form of storytelling, as well. Indeed, as I have writtenpreviously, “[e]very game has a backstory, or a story upon which itis based, and a story line that it follows, even if inferred. Thestory line is not the game play itself, but rather the rationale forthe game play.” (Derryberry, A. Serious Games: Online Games forLearning. San Jose, CA: Adobe Systems Incorporated, 2007.)

Becausegames have a stated goal and rules of play to guide players to thatgoal, well-designed games yield meaningful play, defined as thatwhich “occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomesin a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger contextof the game.” (Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E., Rules of Play: GameDesign Fundamentals. Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: TheMIT Press, 2004.) When game design focuses on learning outcomes,then, while preserving playfulness, serious learning is possible.

Weconstruct games out of a series of choices each player must make. Theoutcomes from one series of choices may, likely will, differ from theoutcomes resulting from other choices. By replaying a game or gamesequence using different choice patterns, players can alter the gameor the game’s results. In other words, players can observe theimpact each individual choice has, and can experience the effects oftheir decisions. When the game’s story ties to real events, playerscan alter internal events to explore how they might have averted adisaster, for example, or why an action taken at an earlier or latermoment would create a different result.

Justas stories help us discover meaning in life’s events, so, too, cangames. Stories, however, are linear; games are not. We tell storiesone at a time, by one person at a time, and they have one ending.Games can interweave stories, games ask the player(s) and thedesigner to collude on the telling of the story, and games can havemany possible outcomes.

Thepurpose of journalism is “to provide citizens with accurate andreliable information they need to function in a free society,”according to the Committee of Concerned Journalists. News games mightjust be the 21^st century venue for telling, interpreting,and using the news to that very end.