Nurturing Lateral Leaps in Game Design

Back in 2011 / 2012, I had the opportunity to write a chapter for the Cambridge University Press title, Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age. My chapter can be found here. You can read most of it via google books here, as chapter 6.

At a high level, the chapter generally deals with questions about the evolution of game making as a process, and how that intersects with research and development into new kinds of games, particularly as that relates to people making new kinds of educational game designs. It broadly synthesizes questions about modularity and knowledge separation I first wrestled with during my open source engine evaluation, questions about process connected to game design innovation I cover in my violent eductional games spiel, and it incorporates, too, a close analysis of the historical evolution of game production processes that I covered in a lecture I gave to students in Professor Constance Steinkuehler's class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the spring of 2010 (which I hope to re-record and put on this website before too long).

I think it's a pretty good synthesis of a lot of the issues I'm currently grappling with about the ecosystem that generates ideas and experiments for educational game design.