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Dana Montello Journal #7

750
While playing games can be useful in both scholarly and social arenas, designing games forces users to confront the ultimate question of how should the world be made. As a scholarly pursuit, designing allows for raw material to be shaped in a far more novel and interactive form than book. While knowledge is bestowed upon a reader by a scholar in a book, the ability to make a game and make a user playing the game a collaborator can increase the flow of knowledge and provide a method of feedback for the scholar. Did the game get played in the way intended? Was it fun? Was it meaningful? Did it convey the point or did the user come away with an entirely different lesson? These questions about the scholar's game grant a great deal more feedback than a review of a book. In addition, game-creation forces the scholar to constantly consider the audience in a different way than book-writing. In short, while the designer is given complete control of the rules and how things interact, they must form a sort of symbiotic bond with users, understanding that their scholarship only exists insofar as it can be transferred.

As far as designing games a social exercise, nothing causes us to look at rules quite like making them. We design fairness but also success. While we play a game, success means the most, but designing means fairness and how things play out for multiple users suddenly becomes important. A user cares only about their path (or those closest to them), but a designer cares about all paths and has to design a game to consider everything. This consideration of all possible choices and ramifications can carry on into the world of social change, granting them not only a hopefully higher social consciousness, but an understanding of how to change the rules of the game that we live in. Designing games helps us to learn how to design life.

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