Game Design as Instructional Design

Most discussions of games in education focus on their utility as course components.  Educators rarely take a step back to look at gaming as a design discipline.  Taken together, game design and instructional design might perhaps both be considered sub-fields of engagement design - the design of engaging structured experiences.  The scope of engagement design would include interface design, graphic design, maybe even advertising and merchandizing... theme park design...  and theoretically each of these fields could cross-pollinate the others.  But for now I'm just going to look at one classic work in game design that offers an interesting framework for instructional design.

In _Rules of Play_, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman introduce an analytical framework for thinking about game design that could be transposed to the instructional design field, supporting the creation of better courses revealing a new way of thinking about instructional design that could be used to make courses more engaging.  They suggest three cognitive schemas for understanding games:

  - Games as Rules (essential logic or structure of the option space)
  - Games as Play (human experience and activity within the option space)
  - Games as Culture (the larger social context supporting/supported by the game activity)

Salen and Zimmerman correctly point out that these schemas apply to any kind of design (p. 6).  In instructional design, we can differentiate:

  - Learning Content (the target knowledge or activity/skill space to master)
  - Learning Processes (learner experience and activity options within the space)
  - Learning Cultures (the larger social context supporting/supported by the learning program)

With this shift, it becomes possible to essentially read the entire text of _Rules of Play_ as a treatise on course design.  I'll list two key insights about game design below.  I'll transpose the first into instructional design language, and I'll leave the second unglossed so that you can translate it for yourself.

"The goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play." (p. 33)
>>The goal of successful instructional design is the creation of meaningful learning experiences.

"Meaningful play emerges from the interaction between players and the system of the game, as well as from the context in which the game is played." (p. 33)
>> ...

The three schemas for understanding games include a systematic schema (Rules), an interactivity schema (Play), and a contextual schema (Culture).  There is a 'fractal' reproduction of these three layers within the "Rules" category, giving us three kinds of rules:

  - Constitutive Rules (the rules that make up the game)
  - Operational Rules (rules of play/interactivity)
  - Implicit Rules  (rules of etiquette, good sportsmanship etc.)

It seems to me that this three-level analysis is a superb frame for understanding course design.  There needs to be a fit between the subject matter, the lesson design and the context these are being designed for. So if a course was well-designed to support  constructivist exploratory learning , over a fuzzy and interpretive knowledge area, but the target audience was busy executive managers wanting to learn about something specific, then the course might fail because the Content and Processes don't fit the Culture.  One might either change the Content and Process, or seed the cultural context by repositioning the course explicitly as an "executive roundtable", or something else that would better set expectations and help participants self-select in or out.

Alternatively, if the target body of knowledge is minutely structured and stable, exploratory learning might be counterproductive, forcing students to incur search and trial-and-error costs that are not actually necessary for success with this material.  In Salen and Zimmerman's terms, the Process level would poorly "integrated" with the Content level.  Straight factual opposition and rote learning might actually be the best way for students to approach that learning target (especially if the surrounding culture is supportive of rote learning).

Instead of figuring out "one right way" of teaching, it becomes a matter of "fitness" or integration between three levels of consideration.

  _Rules of Play_ contains 600 pages of analysis on how to design the interplay between these levels in order to produce compelling, engaging, even additive structured social activities.  Recommended reading for anyone in the instructional design field.