Rules Are Broken to Be Made: Broken Games as a Playful Entrée to Design

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Video Games, Participatory Design, and Communication

Abstract

Educators have become increasingly interested in teaching students to think like designers. Game design, in particular, offers unique affordances for situating learners to enact designerly thinking processes. Nevertheless, many forms of teaching design place high demands on cognitive and institutional resources. We offer here a proof of concept for broken games, a concept that emerged from previous iterations of a larger design-based research study on Making and game design. Broken games are partially completed games that serve as objects-to-think-with that simultaneously invite and require participants to think like designers. We conclude from our analysis that particular features of broken games offer unique affordances for learning design and argue they could be used as an alternative entrée to designerly discourses.

Authors

• Taylor M Kessner, Arizona State University

• Elisabeth R. Gee, Arizona State University

• Luis Enrique Perez Cortes, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Arizona State University