Contrary to the stereotypes about gamers, nearly 50 percent of people now playing games are female, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Even more surprising, there are more adult women playing than there are boys under 18.
From an article in the NYT about “Twine”, a game platform that is more text than graphics but can contain them, and link anywhere.
The quote above doesn’t define what is a “game” and what isn’t; partly because it’s a hard word to define exactly. In the most general sense, a game is not much different than a process. A game can be very simple: “Tag, you’re IT”, or every elaborate, and much of human behavior can be perceived as some sort of game.
Game is another way of saying that humans create narratives and stories that explain and define their experience and their lives. In a sense, gameplay is another way to just say “being alive in a cultural context”.
We can study myth to find story and character and roles throughout human history and culture; we find that this is part of a process whereby humans create meaning…and that meaning is the engine for much of human behavior.
Since learning is the “name of our game” here at PSA, we want to deploy those activities that create meaning and thus “drive learning”.
Twine allows you to instantly publish your game so that anyone with a web browser can access it. The egalitarian ease of Twine has made it particularly popular among people who have never written a line of code — people who might not even consider themselves video-game fans, let alone developers. Chris Klimas, the web developer who created Twine as an open-source tool in 2009, points out that games made on it “provide experiences that graphical games would struggle to portray, in the same way books can offer vastly different experiences than movies do. It’s easy to tell a personal story with words.”
“Video games”, while heavily dependent on kinetic immersion into “action”, also have at least some elements of narrative; Twine however is very low on the kinetic immersion, and very high on the narrative elements. Understanding the uses of “gamification” involves grasping how both work to support learning.