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电子游戏该如何给孩子们带来正面影响?

发布时间:2013-10-31 15:07:04 Tags:,,,,

作者:Sagi Schliesser

与所有的父亲一样,我也希望把最好的呈现给自己的孩子。与所有的家长一样,我想提供足够健康的环境去培育他们成长。但是应用却并未带有营养成份标签,所以我经常发现自己不能判断孩子们正在接触的内容是否合理。这便是个大问题。

和休闲游戏市场保持联系比与Kardashians(游戏邦注:一位美国社会名流,娱乐界名媛,电视名人,模特和商人)保持联系还要困难。有人估算休闲游戏在明年将获得86.4亿美元的收益,并且大多数休闲玩家都是孩子和年轻人。这对于作为家长的我们来说是个巨大的打击:面对着无数可选择的游戏以及日益繁忙的生活,我们该如何有效判断哪种内容才是有价值的,而哪种内容则是垃圾?

kid(from gamezebo)

kid(from gamezebo)

这一问题困挠着包括我在内的一些人;除了作为父亲(这是我最重要的工作),我还运行着一家面向孩子们创造应用的成功游戏工作室。当我们最初创建TabTale之时,我和合作伙伴都明确不会进入教育类游戏市场,但我们也同样也不想创造那些自己不希望孩子接触的内容。

为了解决这一问题,我们想要围绕着新的想法而为开发者,零售商,评论者,教育者和家长们树立一份指南。为了做到这点,我们与来自纽约大学的电子游戏学者一起创造了一份电子游戏价值核对表,以帮助人们辨别一款游戏的价值所在。

我们被自己的发现所震惊了。尽管许多游戏经常被家长和教育者认为是浪费时间的垃圾,但是我们却发现许多游戏拥有塑造孩子们认知能力的属性。以下是我们所学到的结果:

我们可以与电子游戏维系在一起:我们发现电子游戏可以成为一种有效的教育工具,因为游戏创造了学者所谓的“认知”,即让玩家可以以游戏角色的角度去看世界。比起面对抽象挑战,年轻玩家需要在特定故事的背景下解决特定的问题,而这将让学习体验变得更具体。

打开探索之门:谁知道按照自己的条件去探索世界具有教育意义?比起只是让玩家解决问题并不断前进,电子游戏让玩家能够探索世界所设计的不同解决方法,并尝试各种替代选择。这便是一位游戏设计师所提出的“空间可能性”,而它所允许的学习类型(想象,个性化,意义)正是我们所珍稀的。

结构问题:游戏设计的最大成就是基于玩家遇到越来越复杂问题的相继次序—-每次的问题解决都是基于之前所吸取的教训,并通过解决了问题而获得奖励。换句话说,不像中学那样总是将大量信息输进年轻人的脑子里,期待着他们能够记住大量数据,电子游戏是采取更具结构性的方法,让玩家可以利用学到的内容去解决下一次的挑战,并且每次的解决过程都能立刻产生结果。

这种结构类型创造了一种基于表现的环境,并引出了玩家的系统思考,提高了他们的模式识别,并让他们能够立即理解环境。简而言之,游戏提高了我们所期待的成功的成人在如今受技术驱动的社会里通过竞争而拥有的所有特征。

infographic(from gamezebo)

infographic(from gamezebo)

如果你仍然担心游戏时间会将孩子变成受算式驱动的思考机器,别担心:电子游戏如此成功的一大原因是因为它们能够传递强烈的情感影响。这点不容被忽视:游戏和教育同样都是基于经验性,这种吸引力不只是传达到思想里,同时也会传达到心里。如果哪些内容感动了我们,我们便会将更多注意力投向它,而游戏也变得更加擅于传达强大的情感并通过这些情感去突显智力挑战。

孩子们会回到学校,但这并不意味着他们将停止玩iPad和iPhone。知道这点的话,我们不仅需要将注意力放在他们的教科书和家庭作业上,同时也可以专注于他们在休闲时候玩的有益游戏,我们需要保证自己可以引导他们去玩那些与学校作业一样有奖励性和激励性的游戏。如果做得好,这对家长和开发者来说便是一种教育体验。我们都会因为正视游戏而获益。

本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Taking Play Seriously: How Video Games Can Have a Positive Effect on Our Kids

By Sagi Schliesser

Like all fathers, I want the best for my kids. And like all parents, I have that innate desire to provide them with a healthy environment that nourishes in every way possible.   But apps don’t come with the equivalent of nutrition labels, and I’m often frustrated to find myself in the dark, unable to tell just what it is that my kids are consuming. That’s a big problem.

Keeping up with the casual gaming market is harder than keeping up with the Kardashians. Casual gaming is expected to mushroom to an astonishing $8.64 billion by next year, and it’s clear that a large portion of casual gamers are children and young adults. This leaves us parents in a lurch: with thousands of titles out there to choose from, and with life growing busier by the minute, how might we tell what’s valuable and what’s dross?

I’d like to think they read Gamezebo like this, too

This question is particularly vexing to someone like myself; in addition to being a dad—my first and most important job—I run a successful gaming studio that produces apps for kids. When we started TabTale, my partners and I knew that we weren’t going to be in the educational games market, but we also realized that we would never want to produce something we wouldn’t like our own kids to play with.

To address this issue, we wanted to put structure around our beliefs that could be used as a guide – for developers, for retailers, for reviewers, educators and parents.  To do this we set out to create a video game value check list to help discern what made a game worthwhile, and partnered with a video game scholar from NYU to do so.

What we found surprised us. Frequently maligned by parents and educators as a frivolous waste of time, we learned that games possessed many attributes that sharpened children’s cognitive abilities.  Here is some of what we learned:

We Can Relate to Video Games: We learned that video games can be effective educational tools because games create what scholars call “identification,” enabling players to inhabit a character and see the world through its eyes. Rather than present abstract challenges, then, young players are asked to solve specific problems in the context of specific stories, which makes the learning experience feel more concrete.

(Digital) Exploration Opens Doors: Who knew that exploring the world on your own terms was educational?  Rather than just demand that players solve problems and move on, video games, allow players to explore the world devising different solutions to problems and trying out a number of alternatives. This is what one game designer labeled “the space of possibility,” and it permits for just the sort of learning – imaginative, personalized, meaningful – that we cherish most.

Structure Matters: The greatest accomplishment of game design is that it is based on a sequential order in which players are met with increasingly more complex problems – each predicated on a previous lesson learned – and are rewarded for solving them. In other words, unlike high school, say, which often unloads a frightening amount of information on young minds and expects them to memorize copious amounts of data, video games take a more structured approach in which everything that is learned is used to solve the next challenge, and every solution yields immediate results.

This type of structure creates a performance-based environment, leads to systemic thinking, boosts pattern recognition, and allows for immediate grasp of context. In short, it enhances all the traits we expect successful adults to possess when competing in today’s technology-driven workforce.

Infographic provided by TabTale

If you’re worried, however, that hours of game play will turn your kids into algorithmically minded machines, fear not: one large reason video games are so successful is because they deliver a tremendous emotional impact. This is no minor point: at their prime, games and education alike are primarily experiential things, processes that appeal not only to the mind but to the heart as well. If something moves us, we’re much more likely to pay attention and care, and games have become very adept at delivering powerful emotions and harnessing them in the service of complex intellectual challenges.

The kids are back in school, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to stop playing with their iPads and iPhones. Knowing this, let’s pay attention not only to their textbooks and homework but also to the seemingly innocuous games they play at their leisure, and let us make sure that we steer them towards games that are just as rewarding and stimulating as the greatest school assignment. Done right, it’ll be an educational experience for parents, and developers, as well. We will all be rewarded for taking play seriously.(source:gamezebo)


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