Learning Things - Learn to Play: Designing Tutorials for Video Games - page 45

school and playing mindfully with video games. First, we come to
games voluntarily; second, they are catered to our enjoyment, not fit-
ting us to certain outcomes. When games move you, change you, or
otherwise make you think differently about the world, it is through
sheer art and skill, not through prescribed curriculum. It sounds like
I'm really beating on education here, but I'm not. Standardized educa-
tion serves an important goal for individuals, and of course for society,
but it is simply not the same thing as a video game, so please discard
your ideas of comparing them directly.
This brings me to the point of this section: motivation. Why people
are motivated to do things is complicated, debated, and contentious,
as most things dealing with cognitive structures of the human mind
tend to be. While I am by no means going to tell you that I am 100%
right about what I'm about to say, I hope it will provide you context
within which to motivate your players. In order to begin with this
thought, I am going to borrow from a man much smarter than I am—
Professor John Dewey. Dewey was influential in education, and is still
standard reading for people learning to teach. Dewey wrote prolifi-
cally, but the particular bit I want to touch on is how Dewey defines
“experience.”
Through habits formed in intercourse of the world, we also in-habit the
world. It becomes a home and the home is part of our every experi-
ence. […] Yet apathy and torpor conceal this expressiveness by building
a shell about objects. Familiarity induces indifference, prejudice blinds
us; conceit looks through the wrong end of a telescope and minimizes
the significance possessed by objects in favor of the alleged importance
of the self. *
That's quite a mouthful. What Dewey is telling us is that our ordi-
nary experience of the world is not the same as having an experi-
ence. As a somewhat orthogonal design point, we should be asking
ourselves the tough philosophical and game design question “Are
experience points in my game being earned for having experiences or
gathering experience?”
Let me clarify this a bit: in the 1930s, Dewey understood that ordi-
nary and regular experiences become codified by the brain. Sure, he
* Dewey's Art and Experience , p. 108.