Bill Guschwan speaks about "Flipped, Agile, Gamiformed Pedagogy for Game Design" at the 2012 Serious Play Conference ABSTRACT: I define a serious game methodology that I use at Columbia College to teach introduction to programming and the senior capstone game design class. I define "gamiform" as a method that constrains, facilitates, and motivates user behavior around a goal. Gamiforming as applied to education is a set of serious game techniques using the guiding philosophy that education is a form of life with a goal. One gamiforming technique guides student behaviour by constraining the space around a pedagogical goal. Another gamiform technique facilitates face-to-face contact through in-class quizzes and peer-to-peer discussions. For software teams, Scrum meetings are situated around a fictional campfire in order to increase energy of the team. Another gamiforming technique facilitates creativity by using the McCarthy technology protocols, which emphasize emotional alignment and self-awareness. Gamiform is an appropriation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's "lebensform" and science fiction’s "terraform".

1. Flipped, Agile,
Gamiformed
Pedagogy for Game
Design
Bill Guschwan
Columbia College

2. 2012 Columbia Capstone Videogames
http://brokenthegame.com/
http://www.fearlesspdp.com/

3. Overview
Gamify vs. Gamiform
Flipped Constructivist vs. Traditional Classroom
Agile vs. Traditional Game Development
Flipped, Agile, Gamiformed Model of Game
Development
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4. Gamiform vs. Gamify
Gamiform is gamification using a metacircular
evaluator (ME) as an epistemic game to elicit optimal
intrinsic user behavior for an activity
Gee and Shaffer
Star Trek Terraform, or forms of life (Wittgenstein
lebensform)
Aristotle’s and Nagarjuna’s Formal Cause

5. Beyond Gamification
Gamiform is a specific type of gamification.
Gamiform affords binding of multiple roles in a
unified game space.
Forms and Captures emergent roles and capacities.
Gameful (Jane McGonigal) or Meaningful Games
(Amy Jo Kim) or Player Experience Design (Nicole
Lazzaro)
http://blog.superbetter.com/gameful-design/
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6. Metacircular Evaluator
2 part process: evaluation and apply
Input to Apply is output of Eval and vice versa.
Iterative and recursive
Build Eval first part first

7. Evaluator as Embedded
Assessment Game
“Assessment as / for Learning” Formative
R E Bennett
Game design as Application

8. Metagame (Eval)
Metagame uses drama theory.
Game with a focal point, goal has no solution but an
agreed endpoint. It is an on-going re-design of the
game.
It focuses on evaluation of apply part. It works on the
“how” of the apply part.
Metagame decides how the game is designed, how the
roles of players interact, and how they decide on a
focal point.
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9. Game (Apply)
Game is the Apply part of ME.
Game (Apply) and Metagame (Eval) is Gamiform.
They must communicate and interact iteratively.
Metagame persists with the Game when in
production.
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10. Gamiform Tetralemma
Nagarjuna and Aristotle.
1 It is a drama theory metagame. (Formal)
2 It is a game we design. (Material)
3 It is both a drama theory metagame and a game we
design (Efficient: Formal plus Material)
4 It is neither a drama theory metagame nor a game
we design (Final: Efficient produces Final)
1b It is the GAME we play.
Order is important
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11. GameDesign Tetralemma
Whiteboard Exercise
Yin Yang 4 Part
BeachBall example
2 flies, a bee, and a beachball
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12. Types of Assessment
Dungeon and Dragon
Characters, Quests, XP
Award Experience Points
Class Dojo iPad app http://www.classdojo.com/
Reward Experience Points for Quests
Use Scrum stories
Peer to Peer points
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13. Gamiform Examples
Parkinson’s Cognitive Assessment
Game: Tapping mouse game to assess cogfunction
Meta-game: Bind roles for clinician, researcher, patient
Pilates and Life over Cancer Game: Physical corrective
exercise
Meta-game: Bind role to optimize for Breath
Intro to Programming
Game: Learn programming
Meta-game: Bind roles such as reading code, sharing
code, helping
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14. Roots of Gamiform
Self is extended in space.
William James,Mikhail Bakhtin, Erving Goffman,
Marshall McLuhan, Martin Heidegger
To manage people you BIND roles to environment in
time.
“Person and the Situation”, Ross and Nisbett
Kurt Lewin: Action research
 Spiral of steps, ... composed of planning action fact-finding
about the result of the action (see citation below)
Paulo Freire
Lave and Wenger, “Community of Practice”
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15. Dialogic Self
The individual consciousness, lies on the borderline
between oneself and the other... The word in language
is half someone else's.
It becomes one’s "own" only when the speaker
populates it with his own intentions, his own accent,
when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his
own semantic and expressive intention.
 On Dialogism and Heteroglossia (the other(s)' word)
From Mikhail Bakhtin

16. Affordance Space
Need to provide an affinity space
James Gee
Alternatively, affinity space is an affordance space.
You can think of an app as a space
Verb as the canvas, nouns as the forms, and adjectives as
the color (Foucault, Order of Things)
Game is an app that is designed to create space
Space is integral to games
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17. Epistemic Game Goal: Develop
team
Communication patterns: Most important predictor of a
team’s success
 Team has Energy, Engagement, and Exploration
 http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-
teams/ar/1
McCarthy protocol:
 Team = Software
 Requests, Hi bandwidth communication, and shared vision
Evaluate is Pre-production
 Cerny method
 Get 2 finished levels
Apply is Production
 Scale product

18. Game Design Goal:
Hunting vs. Herding
Verb as the canvas, nouns as the forms, and adjectives
as the color
Pre-production verb is Hunting for Fun
http://204.15.199.90/~davidkhu/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/Cautionary-Tales-from-the-
Kalahari-1991.pdf
Strategy: Opportunistic and “Emergent”
Develop from a series of rapid response to activities
which show promise
Production verb is Herding
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19. Goal of Pre-Production (Hunting)
Metagame
A drama unfolds through episodes in which
characters interact.
The episode is a period of preplay communication
(hunting) between characters who, after
communicating, act as players in a game that's
constructed through the dialogue between them.
The action that follows the episode is the playing out
of this game; it sets up the next episode.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_theory

20. Team Tools or Mechanics
Evaluation Apply
 McCarthy Protocols:  Help protocol
Professional communication  Meet protocol
 LARG rules

21. Team Tools or Mechanics
Evaluation Apply
 Emotional Kanban: Emotional  Checkin

22. Team Tools or Mechanics
Evaluation Apply
 Scrum: Engagement  Scrum checkin: what have
you done, what are you
working on, and what is
blocking you

23. Goal of Game Design
Great Games.

24. Pedagogy
Evaluation Apply
 Constructivist  Exercise: Campfire and
 Create an affinity space talking stick
(James Gee)
 Allow multiple Subject Matter
Experts to join “space”
 Rhizomatic vs. Hierarchy
 Games are affinity spaces
 Reggio Emilia, Paidea

25. Class Pedagogy
Evaluation Apply
 Live Hunting Roleplaying  Demonstrate Dungeon Master
Game (LHRG)  Exercise:
 Instructor is dungeonmaster  Salsa circle to incant
 Hunt is for fun
 Enter imagination zone:
 Students are characters
Personal alignment and call /
 Grades response
 Level up with Experience Points
(XP)

26. Metacircular Evaluator
 In other words, organizational life consists of learning (hunting) and
performance (herding) following each other in an endless cycle of what
ought to be a creative process of "continual improvement." Strategy is an
intermediate product in this process;
 as an output of the learning organization, it articulates what the
organization has learned and coordinates its experience. As an input to the
performance organization it specifies goals and tasks, and informs its
behavior.
 In short, strategy is at the nexus of the twin organizational structures of the
woven matrix (tantra) and the twin cognitive structures of text and context,
information and meaning, the "melody" and the "rhythm" that are required
to resolve the existential tensions. (David K Hu, p 84)
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27. Useful Links:
www.seriousplayconference.com
www.seriousgamesdirectory.com
www.seriousgamesassociation.com
Contact:
sbohle@seriousgamesassociation.com