Game and play

Why children play? Is the action of play equals to a game? Do children learn when they play? According to psychologist, the answer is Yes. Therefore, understand the relation of game and learning can help us understand the role of game in learning.

It’s not easy to define game since non-English languages tend to have just one term for what the English call “play” and “game”. Take Chinese for example, when Chinese people say “Yu-Hsi”, it could mean “I am playing” or “I am gaming”. In this case, the word “game” and “play” become a synonym.

Holsbrink-Engels (1997) also gave us examples. For instance, In Dutch, “Spel” is used for both play and game, and so are “jeu” in French, “Spiel” in German, “gioco”

in Italian and “uego” in Spanish. The English word “play” is related to the experience of pleasure; the word “game” is related to competition. Games are contests among adversaries (players) operating under constraints (rules) for an objective (winning, victory or pay-off).

Prensky (2001) thought that play as well as game has many meanings and implications. The OED provided 39 numbered definitions of play, each with many subcategories. With such a wide variety of meanings, turn our focus to the theorists may be more helpful to the study. Johan Huizinga(1938), in his book of Homo Ludens, characterized play as a free activity that is consciously outside of “ordinary” life and is “not serious” . Play, he said, absorbs the player “intensely and utterly”. It has fixed rules and order, does not have any material interest or profit, and encourages the formation of social groupings.

Roger Caillois (1961) , in Man, Play and Games, defined play as an activity that is not obligatory, has its own space and time, is uncertain in its outcomes, creates no material wealth, is governed by rules, and has elements of make-believe and unreality.

Therefore, from these definitions of play above, play is something one chooses to do;

play is intensely and utterly absorbing play promotes the formation of social groupings.

Play, in its diverse forms, constitutes an important part of children’s cognitive and social development (Csikszentmihaly, 1990; Provost, 1990; Rogoff, 1993; Rosas et al., 2003). In the context of cognitive development, playing is considered fundamental to

the stabilizing processes that are essential for the development of cognitive structures.

It is indiscernible for cognitive development by way of assimilation and accommodation processes. Through playing, children rehearse basic cognitive operations such as conservation, classification and reversibility (Piaget, 1951).

Playing is above all, a privileged learning experience. As Vygotsky (1979) stated, a child learns through playing with others, creating and improving his or her zone of proximal development, because playing often involves more complex activities than those the child experiences in daily life. In correspondence with this idea are Bruner’s (1986) findings that children normally use more complex grammatical structures while playing than they do in real life situations. As such, playing offers the cognitive support needed to develop higher order mental processes.

Playing initiates the symbolic use of objects and is therefore considered the first form of symbolization (Piaget, 1951). Thus, playing constitutes the first step towards abstract thinking (Vygotsky, 1976).

What is a game, then? Like play, game is a word of many meanings and implications.

Huizinga (1938) stated that a contest is also play and distinguished the following crucial elements of a game: an informal act or activity; occurring within certain temporal and spatial boundaries; developing according to freely chosen, but afterwards committing rules; the goal is the activity itself; the activity is accompanied by a feeling of tension and/or enjoyment and the consciousness that the activity is different from real life.

Dempsey, Haynes, Lucassen and Casey (2002) gave a more precise description: “A game is a set of activities involving one or more players. It has goals, constraints, payoffs, and consequences. A game is rule guided and artificial in some respects.

Finally a game involves some aspect of competition, even if that competition is with oneself”.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) was probably the first academic philosopher to address the definition of the word game. Wittgenstein demonstrated that the elements of games, such as play, rules, and competition, all fail to adequately define what games are. Wittgenstein concluded that people apply the term game to a range of disparate human activities that bear to one another only what one might call family resemblances.

Piaget defined game as assimilation of stimuli from outside world and put them into adaptation system. Piaget made comments on games only in terms of their effects on children’s development. However, in today’s changing educational system, it can be said that games may be effective on every age group by shaping them appropriately during developmental period (Donmus, 2010).

Prensky (2001) and Huizinga (1938) regarded games as a subset of play. The Encyclopedia Britannica provided the following diagram (figure2.1) of the relation between play and games which also showed that games are a subset of play. However, Salen and Zimmerman (2003) stated that “play” also can be seen as a subset of the concept “game”

Figure 2.1 The relation between play and games. Adapted from Encyclopedia

Games are a common form of playing. All games have properties, rules and procedures that must be mastered in order to become a “player”. The understanding of the underlying concepts of games plays an important organizing role in cognition, similar to that of a story schema (Schank, 1990), in that it requires a mental frame work which includes goals, conditions, players, and resolutions. Since playing games is a natural activity for children, it is considered an excellent example of situated or

“anchored” learning through authentic situations (Choi & Hannafin, 1995; Herrington

& Oliver, 1999; Rogoff, 1993).

Playing changes as children grow up, following the course of cognitive development.

The games played, their rules and meanings change as a child grows up. Once a child reaches school age, she or he is able to understand and follow the rules involved in structured games. Even though such rules are also present in learning situations found in a school setting, teachers usually view them as different and tend to separate school from play (Rieber, 1996).

Gadamer (1975), a philosopher, in his Truth and Method, told us that play equals to game. Play has a special relation to what is serious. It is not only that the latter gives it its "purpose": we play "for the sake of recreation," as Aristotle said. More important, play itself contains its own, even sacred, seriousness. Seriousness in playing is necessary to make the play wholly play. It is the game that is played -- it is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The real subject of the game is not the player but instead the game itself. What holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there is the game itself.

From this point of view, play equals to game for the playing field on which the game is played is, as it were, set by the nature of the game itself and is defined far more by the structure that determines the movement of the game. Therefore, it’s not important that who is the subset, play or game; what really matter is that they have the same quality (for example, the back and forth movement, transformation into structure) and it’s hard to clearly separate them apart.

According to Juul (2003), a game is a rule based formal system with a variable and quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are assigned different values, the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable. The game definition he proposed contained six parameters: (1) Rules (2) Outcome (3) Value (4) Effort (5) Player’s attachment (6) Negotiable consequences (Ang & Zaphiris, 2008).

Game with educational purpose is educational game. Educational games are generally targeted to young people who are viewed as “averse to learning” by educators ( Belotti, Berta, De Gloria & Primavera, 2009). Educational games are activities that

provide students the opportunity to reinforce the previous knowledge by repeating it in a more comfortable environment. Donmus (2010) thought that Educational games are software that helps students to learn the lesson subjects and to develop their problem solving skills by using their desire and enthusiasm to play.

When discussing about educational game, serious game cannot be neglect. “Serious games” is a term which has been adopted in recent years to describe games with educational benefits (Blackman, 2005). Clark defined serious games by stating: "We are concerned with serious games in the sense that these games have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement." ( Abt, 1975).

A growing number of buzz words have been further used to attempt to categorize different styles of education gaming, such as “edutainment”, “game-based learning”

and “immersive learning environments” (Sawyer & Smith, 2008) . In truth, serious gaming is not a new phenomenon, and, in fact, computer games have been exploited for training applications ever since their emergence in the early 1980s.

So, the terms ‘‘serious games’’, ‘‘game-based learning’’ and ‘‘digital educational games’’ --widely used synonymously-- mark the initiative to use the potential of digital games to actively engage players for learning (e.g. Brannigan & Owen, 2006;

Gee, 2007; Ritterfeld, Cody & Vorderer, 2009). Though game, play, computer game, digital game, serious game, and educational game may have slide differences, and some may argue about their hierarchy, their essence is the same: serve for specific purpose -- to educate.