At a time when videogames are everywhere, we still cherish the memories of the board games or traditional games that we played with friends and family members. Interestingly most of these games, even though create room in our house of memory for being playful and fun, have values and significance beyond just fun. They are immersive, experiential, participatory, where knowledge and skills are built into characters, objects and environments. They are social, help us to enter into a game-space, an alternative world, bring in agreed and shared ideas of rules, boundaries, goals and insights in a safe environment, enabling us to think laterally, give us lessons of how to do problem solving or conflict resolution in a playful manner and through this process, transfer of learning also happens. They are perfect examples of learning happening through both engaging and effective ways, with life skills, strategy and social emotional skills being intertwined in the design of the experience of the games. Eventually they are networked communication systems that make complexity and collaboration, which are not really easy to learn or grasp, very simple.

         

          This course enabled one to delve deeper into the narratives and design of different kinds of games, by making people play them, embodying them and experiencing them, collecting, curating and creating them. Games were considered as improvised conversation to journey between the self and the society. The students de-constructed games that they played in the class or the ones they are familiar with, by learning tools of design thinking, systems thinking and storytelling in order to understand the history, context, structure, narrative devices, architecture, mechanics and underlying design principles behind the games. They then either re-constructed already existing games/simulations, by altering the context or the meaning, or constructed new games by bringing in real-life scenarios, with case studies of real people, with real problems and real context or use storytelling devices to use texts or references to create games for addressing a real situation. Through the process of designing the game from ideas to artefacts, they learnt how to imagine, create, explore, think, question, find patterns, and navigate between the parts and the whole. 

 

          This blog shows the journey of the students through this course that was facilitated by D.EPICENTRE at Ahmedabad University, for the Independent Study Period 2017.

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