"Good Morning. You All Have an F." - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 8

Middle Game: The Shift
The middle game is wide open. The overall course of the game may have been
charted, but here many options present themselves. The number of possible
positions is great. The players have any number of decisions to make.

By the time the blog was up and running, I was in the middle of teaching a
second class called “ Multiplayer Game Design � for the spring 2010 semester.

This class is the subject of Levels 5 and 6.

You could think of the first class as an alpha. By the second iteration, we were in
closed beta. These are software development terms that mark important mile-
stones in the development of the game that focus on testing game elements.

During the spring semester, I was also in the process of writing a book for
Cengage called Practical Game Design: A Toolkit for Educators, Researchers, and
Corporations to help nongame developers face the daunting task of creating
games that have gone by a number of different designations over the years:
educational games, serious games, persuasive games. Each is its own slightly
different animal. My personal favorite for an umbrella term for all such
endeavors is applied games , proposed at the 2010 Game Education Summit by
Dr. Vinod Srinivasan of Texas A&M University

' s Department of Visualization.

Dr. Srinivasan argues convincingly that is a familiar word to us, and it

has been successfully used in a number of fields. Wikipedia describes applied
math as

“ applied �

that branch of mathematics typically used in the application of
mathematical knowledge to other domains

“

� ; and science as the “ application of

scientific knowledge transferred into a physical environment. What are these

games, if not an application of game design knowledge to other domains like
education and persuasion, transferred into environments that may be physical
or at least virtually physical?

�

There are two distinct groups of developers creating games in the rapidly
expanding field of applied games. The first comprises educators, students, and
businesspersons who are not familiar with basic game design and development
techniques. The second group is composed of commercial game designers who are
equally unfamiliar with the particular requirements of serious educational games.
Practical Game Design was going to provide the information and tools to fund,
staff, design, and develop sensible, practical, producible video games, virtual