Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
3
if e arnIng t hIngs
A psychologically heavy chapter, Learning Things is devoted to
teaching game developers all about how human beings take in new
information and use it in their daily lives. Teaching and learning the-
ories are linked back to game design and the tutorial is discussed as it
relates to educational practice. This chapter is heavily annotated, as
it is probably the most technically complex in the topic. Developers
will come away with a better understanding of educational and cogni-
tive psychology and how it applies to game development.
The other half of teaching, demonstrated in Chapter 2, is learning.
It is no use teaching someone if they do not want to learn—Dewey
knew this in the 1940s, and it should be known to us now. As we
saw in the previous chapters, Gee and others have pointed out that
games have some special sauce that makes people want to learn, and
this has been appropriated to amazing ends with serious games. More
appropriate to the current topic, though, how can we use that special
sauce to make a delicious tutorial that keeps people engaged with our
game? In this chapter, we will learn how people store information
in their minds, what makes people choose to learn some things over
others, and how we can use good teaching in tutorials to make sure
that people want to learn what we have to teach them about play-
ing our games, which will translate into longer play, deeper engage-
ment, and lasting fun. I will warn you; this is probably the heaviest
chapter in the topic. I will try my best to make it palatable, but there
is some thick discussion of how the mind assimilates information in
here, and some diagrams that might not make sense at first. I'm going
to explain them as they come, and there is a cheat sheet at the end of
the chapter—as always—that will explain all of the terms we've gone
over. Make notes so that you can refer back to them later. The chapter
is also heavily annotated with citations of scholarly material you can
seek out for further reading, if you are so inclined.
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