Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the content in the projects, this defi nes a community built, on social recognition, and
not on moneymaking. Finally all this together creates the perfect fun environment
for people to create, share, learn, and discover their own creative motivation.
Another recent example of a creative technology is
Minecraft
developed by
Markus Persson in 2009 and initially given free to players.
Minecraft
is generally
defi ned as a game, but it's much more than that. Like LEGO it allows any person to
build any world, without having any previous skill or technical knowledge. The
building has been greatly simplifi ed by using a visual approach made of cubes only,
like LEGO pieces, and a basic Boolean logic circuitry. Similarly to
Scratch
it is pos-
sible to create animated and interactive digital artefacts that can be experienced by
the community. Different from LEGO, the entire community is online and can visit
projects and worlds made by others in the moment. Not only can users enjoy these
worlds, but they can also learn how to give shape to new ideas. The community also
shares packages of textures for the building or skins for the characters, helping
people to constantly raise the level of quality of their creations.
These two examples show us that any tool, the simpler it is, need to convince
people to persevere in performing, in order to be rewarded. Also looking at Scratch
or
Minecraft
, we can easily understand that beyond the immediate labels of being a
tool or being a game, the most important feature we can emphasize in them com-
pared with other tools and other games is the fact that both can be defi ned as toys.
Toys defi ne objects designed for the act of play. Toys categorize any kind of
artefact that allows people to interact with, not necessarily with a purpose, but able
to reward the interaction or simply stimulate fun. Together with these aspects,
another high interest in toys comes from the fact that they serve learning purposes.
Consequently, the mixing of fun and learning helps toys rise to the condition of
objects that easily activates engagement in players, which is essential to maintain
perseverance of the use.
Adding to this, we should also say that
Minecraft
could easily be defi ned as a
tool, because beyond permitting people to play in-world, the world can serve the
purpose of simulation, or the creation of scenarios for video and pictures. Tools are
designed to facilitate actions to be performed, to help the process of creation or
deconstruction. Contrary to toys that are normally the objective itself, at the end of
our actions, tools serve more as a means to attain something else. The object itself
is not engaging, but it can transform the activity being performed in a more appeal-
ing one. Being able to perform our task well using a tool, the process to master that
tool can be highly rewarding.
Finally we can also say that Scratch beyond being a tool is immensely used as a
game, more even if we think about the open community galleries, and social reward
systems, that prize achievements done with the tool. Hence a game defi nes a set of
rules commonly designed within an artefact with the purpose to engage players in
the activity. Games are designed to captivate completely the attention of the players
and normally reward the attention with sensations of fun, like toys do. Also per-
forming tasks in games well, being able to master the game rules, can be highly
rewarding as with tools. On the other hand games are very different from toys in the
nature of purpose, because there's always an objective for any action performed.
