Appendices

Chapter Four

Summary of tool used

Piskel - a graphical editor used to create pixel art sprite characters;
Audacity - a desktop based application to record and edit audio using audio effects and filters like delay and echo;
freesound.org - an open repository of audio files which could be downloaded, used directly or altered using Audacity;
Sonic Pi - an education music application allowing the creation of music using text coding;
Bfxr & jsfxr - web based tools to create sound effects aimed at game production;
Scratch - while scratch was not use for game production, I encouraged participants to use its intuative graphical editor to create backgrounds for the game;

Summary of Game Template structure

Creating the project from first principles is relatively complex both semantically and practically. In the domain of web technology, starter templates consist of pre-built collections of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and other configuration files which allow users to avoid initial configuration and thus accelerate adding features to projects. For example the Next.js web framework comes with a large range of starter templates based on common requirements of web sites [@nelson_best_2023]. Phaser starting templates available from the website share this aim of providing scaffolding by providing a downloadable zip of files which when extracted are already interlinked correctly [^5].

Game states and functions to create the game loop (see glossary) are included natively in the phaser framework [@faas_introduction_2017]. Game states allow designers to deconstruct games and game code into collections of sub-units (states) [@kostolny_digital_2017]. For example a simple arcade games may only had an insert coin state, a play state and a game over state. A game coding framework like phaser shields its users from code complexity by providing a game state manager and associated functions out-of-the-box, meaning that lots of underlying code is already written and hidden from view. To increase simplicity for my participants the starting template I created had only one game state called PlayState. It followed the following structure: a beginning section out side of a function declaring variables; a preload function which loads assets into the game; a create function which sets up the initial game; an update function which listens to and responds to user input. The following illustration from the step-based instructions illustrates the structure for participants, including the possibility to create new game states e.g. a game over state.

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4.x - Game states and function structure explained in the Glitch Game Makers manual created for for P2 and P3

Summary of interactive Bartle test.

As part of attempts to try to build into the program, activities which help build the participants sense of their own identities of game makers or more generally digital designers.

I introduce a warm-up activity trialled in P2 where participants took part in an interactive the Bartle test (what kind of game player are you).

A Bartle test is …

$\ Illustration 10: Bartle Player Type Test$ }

It took the form of an as extended spectrum line/grid activity [FIND DESCRIPTION SOURCE]. The process of exploring identity in this way surfaced the cheekiness of some young people and the pleasure they took in demonstrating their playful mischievousness. I began to make journal notes on this subject and talk to other games study practioners. I began to ask the question can the surfacing maker types (as per player types) encourage awareness and celebrate the emerging practices that the community was producing.

The process was adapted so players moved to a different quadrant of the room based on their response to the question. The process allowed young people to see how their response differed from that of their parents. The process was very engaging and quite revealing. Parents responded that the process gave them new insight into the digital identities of their children.

After the results were revealed, I then proposed as facilitator that my observations were that there different game maker types. I read out the different types and asked them to place themselves in a two-dimensional grid based on their self evaluation of what kind of game maker they were. Other family members were then invited to comment to see if they agreed with this interpretation.

The process of exploring identity in this way surfaced the cheekiness of some young people and the pleasure they took in demonstrating their playful mischievousness. I began to make journal notes on this subject and talk to other games study practitioners. I began to ask the question can the surfacing maker types (as per player types) encourage awareness and celebrate the emerging practices that the community was producing.

As an example some players created impossible or overly easy game levels. They appeared aware of implications for game balance but is taking pleasure in this seeming destruction of the key challenge of the game as an act of disruptive play. They seem to take pleasure from ignoring concepts of what should be done to maintain game balance and from the sense of shock from their current audience her parent. Going against this convention is a type of playful destruction in this context. The process mirrors play theory concept of playing against the game or dark play [@sutton-smith_ambiguity_2001].

Below I outline how I designed to encourage this behaviour.

In and early tentative attempt to define in broad strokes the types of game maker behaviour and underlying goals. In doing this I have taken inspiration from Bartle’s game player types [@hamari_player_2014]. I translated player types to maker types based on notes in my observation journal and extracts from screen capture data. The following list of *Game Maker *types:

Social makers: form relationships with other game makers and players by finding out more about their work and telling stories in their game -
Planners: like to study to get a full knowledge of the tools and what is possible before they build up their game step-by-step
Magpie makers: like trying out lots of different things and happy to borrow code, images and sound from anywhere for quick results
Glitchers: mess around with the code trying to see if they can break it interesting ways and cause a bit of havoc for other users

My rationale for this process was to promote awareness of pluralistic programming process [@papert_epistemological_1990]. I wanted to try to communicate a message to participants that when you are learning something hard it is of value follow your own working preferences and try to discover a creative style that suits you.

Discussion on Player types - moved from chapter 6

DATA REQUIRED FROM VIDEO!?

Below I outline how I designed to encourage this behaviour.

My rationale for this process was to promote awareness of pluralistic programming process [@papert_epistemological_1990].

I wanted to try to communicate a message to participants that when you are learning something hard it is of value follow your own working preferences and try to discover a creative style that suits you.

Limits of discussion findings - what to put in

Vignette featuring Toby’s activity

The vignette is included as a principle appendix.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vYeVxYaRMTWPDOHwC4DEGYAkGPRIDX7wLiz0l8b7LWc/edit

Vignettes of drama process

Vignette 4.1.a - Introducing a drama process

The participants have entered the room and chosen a laptop to work on. Some of the children play web-based games or reviewing the games that they have made previously. The session progresses with a warm-up game which includes many false starts, changes of rules, development of tactics, appeals to be serious, full throated laughter and many restarts and which ends in good hearted failure. The transcript below picks up at this point.

Mick: Ok. So I’ve got a surprise. I don’t know if you know but as part of our Home Ed club we did a page of different games. So it’s on glitch.com and it’s called Glitch Game Club and it’s on there, there’s one for Home Ed Winter 2019 and here are all the games that we made. We made a lot of games. 15 games. This has not gone unnoticed because I got a message through this account. This is kind of a story now. We are entering a story. You have to use your imagination. We got a message and it was an audio message. If you guys take your fingers off your keyboards and have a listen to this audio message which is quite unusual as I don’t think it was from anyone on … this … Earth.

Greetings Earthlings, we have an important message for the Glitch Game Makers.
We are the Weean. You would call us an alien lifeforce. We like to think of ourselves as friendly space cousins.
We can see your Internet from space. We are contacting you because we know you are making games on the Internet.
We are on our way to the Planet Earth, and we have an important mission for you. We are an Intergalactic Rescue team. We know you have problems on your planet. We can help.
But we need to find out one thing first. Are you worth it? After we are gone will you also be able to help yourselves? Or are you already doomed to make the same mistakes again?
You must pass this challenge. Make some games showing problems you have on earth. In the games also include ideas for how to solve them.

We have some guidelines:

  • Make a game about a big or small problem for your planet to solve. If you can let us play it each week as you go along.
  • Give us an update each week by recording a group update.
  • Show you can work on your own but also work as part of a team.
  • We will also send you text messages with some mini-missions sometimes. Be sure to tell us how you do.

Please now get started and come up with a new game about solving a problem on Earth.

Mick: I couldn’t understand all of it but I tried to write it down as best as I can. So from what I’ve work out they’ve looked at our games and they’ve come up with a challenge for us. They are coming to Earth so they need to find out if we are worth saving. And the way that they are going to decide is by playing the games that we come up with. And they are going to set us little challenges. So. yeah, that’s the story. (with heavy irony) I’m pretty sure it’s true. (Mick and others laugh).

Mick: So all they’re asking us to do is to come up with a game. We’ve got four sessions. They want a new game because they’ve already played our old games. It’s got to be something about the problems of the world. I’ve got a lot of problems. It could be big problem or a small problem. It could be about your problems. But also ideas on how to solve them.
And yeah. That we can work by ourselves but also work as part of a team. So we’ve got to give them a report by the end of each session as well. That’s our mission.

Vignette 4.1.b - Session reflections and secret missions

This second extract comes from the following session in phase four. In three of the four session the last 10 minutes of each session involved giving a progress update to the aliens.

In my journal notes for phases prior to using the drama process, I documented that the occasional end of session debriefs as go-rounds had limited success in terms of amount and quality of participation compared to these sessions. The video and audio recordings document rich feedback from individuals and pair teams, near complete participation and productive elements of interaction as the feedback progresses.

In previous iterations, my omission of end-reflection in sessions stemmed fomr a lack of time in sessions and reluctance to shift learners away from making activities to reflective activities. I found the need to maintain the drama narrative served as a high motivation factor to complete reflection activities.

To begin the reflection session I ask participants to gather around a particular computer which the aliens are monitoring which helped moving participants closer to each other and stop their coding activity. It is of value to review the grouping of participants in the still image in the vignette above in Fig 5.x.

The simple clustering of participants so they were side by side and talking to a disembodied audience via a computer seemed to make the feedback process less daunting for students. One of the younger participants Richie is participating on the margins but clearly following proceedings as his facial reactions to ongoing contents of feedback. He later participates more actively when reflecting on his process than in previous sessions. Even participants that were initially reluctant to share back and had never shared back publicly before in sessions, chipped in after other family member had started the process for them.

Mick: Ok are you guys ready to share back if you could come to this side of the room we are going to get Mark and Edward to share back first. Everyone can share back using this computer that the Weean are watching if that’s alright. organiser

Mark: All we’ve done today is just get a background in and then we were just working on the one that the Weean had sent us about dropping the coins in. Now that the Weean have sent us the code we need for basically dropping stuff.

Mark: The idea is planting trees. about dropping seeds. So we want to drop those and have some enemies that are tweening randomly around and also taking them away. The idea is to have a timer to drop a certain amount in a certain time frame or you can’t go through to the next level. And the next level would be you go around and water all the trees. And the third one is you have to look after them all making sure they are not getting chopped down again by that tweening enemy. So we’ve got the concept and everything now and we’ve got the code So we should be able to make a bit of a jump forward now this week. It doesn’t look like we’ve got any where but we have. (Mark laughs and others follow). So we’ve got the the background in and we know what we need to do about scrolling as well because we want to scroll across.

Mick: That’s great. Is there anything that you think you definitely want to be able to do for next time that you might want help with?

Mark: Oh yeah. We’ll we’ve got a bit of space where we can work on it before we next come in so we’d like to ask the Weean some more questions. Is that the best way to do it?

Mick: Yeah for sure and I can see that you guys have been talking to the Weean, Here this project here in your home page called Talking to the Weean allows you to talk to the Weean. So you can go in there, click on Edit Project and if you click on this bit here that says WEEAN and then Markdown you can actually just ask questions in here.

(Mick reads out the following extract the organiser screen containting a text chat with the fictional alien audience)

Ed: Weean what’s it like up there?

Weean: It’s cold and very big but quite tranquil.

Ed: What is your name?

Weean: We are are the Weean we have no name, we are all the same.

Ed: That must be hard at xmas. (Mark and others laugh and smile.)

Weean: It is. It sure is.

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Mark: That’s tickled me that.

Mick: So there you go. You can have a conversation there with the Weean in there using mark up code you can copy what’s there. Nadine can you talk through what you have added to your game? Is yours called “No Toby Allowed” now. (Laughs from all)

Nadine: I’ve not really done much today as I was busy doing stuff with Toby’s

Dan: We noticed.

Nadine: We’ll I’ve changed the platform a bit.

Molly : You had a secret mission though didn’t you?

Nadine: Oh my secret mission was to change someone’s game, their character or something and see if they noticed. And I think they did notice.

Dan: We did. We did notice.

Molly : You couldn’t not notice.

Mick: It feels like you took the spirit of the mischievous thing and just turned up the volume. (All laugh.)

Molly: Sprite!

Mark: We also had a secret mission.

Mick: What was that?

Mark: Ours was to change the sound on somebodies game.

Nadine: Oh was it?

Mark: Did you notice?

Molly: Did you notice?

Nadine: No (laughing) (Incomprehensible many people talking or laughing at same time)

Mark: Play it now!

Richie: You definitely noticed. (Points to Mark and Ed) You definitely noticed my bit.

(Nadine goes to the keyboard and starts to play her game)

Nadine: I can’t hear anything different (Everyone laughs)

Mark: I thought you were going to go- Aaahgh! But you didn’t say anything.

Mick: So that’s interesting. some people notice some people didn’t.

Commentary on Vignette 4.1.b

Commentary on side missions

Full table of side missions.

Your Alien Mission (social)	Your Secret Alien Mission:
Find out the names of 3 games that are being made.	Change the variables at the start of someone else’s game to make it play in a funny way.
Make a list of characters in two other games being made.	Change of the images in someone else’s project to a totally different image and see if they notice.
Find out the favourite computer games of 4 people.	Change the level design of the first level of someone else’s project to make it impossible but try to change as little as possible to do that.
Find out who plays the most computer games per week in your group.	Change of the images in someone else’s project to a very similar but slightly different version and see if they notice.
Find out what other people are planning. Give some friendly feedback to one other person / group. Why don’t you try…	Add a rude sound to someone else’s project.
Ask 2 different groups if they have thought about what sounds they are going to put in their game.	Swap over some sounds in someone else’s project and see if they notice.
Find out from three groups if they are going to try any totally new ideas.	Delete all of the code of someone else as they are editing it and see how they react. Then help them get it back using the Rewind function.

In the transcript above of vignette 4.1.b we see that in the end-of-session reporting back participants engage in a lively discussion about the secret missions they had been given. Encouraged by her mother Molly, Nadine shares that she has been highly engaged in a disruptive secret mission. Dan and Toby express playful frustration. Mark and Ed contribute by sharing their more subtle disruption and Richie is keen to have his rude noise mission noticed and commented on. Some public missions had a noticeable impact in this session particularly in stimulating a discussion among parents around which arcade games they played as youths.

Side missions or side quests are also used in open world games are used in part to appeal to different kinds of players and are often models on Bartle’s taxonomy of game player types [@bartle_hearts_nodate]. In this phase, parents Molly and Mark both used the prompts of the social missions to take a break from their creative work using the software toolset to talk to other parents and children.

Mark: Right we’ve got a background in. Do you. Do you want to reply to the Weean.
Ed: Yes. (Ed starts to type very slowly)
Mark: (after some time) While you do that I’m going to go do my mission.
Ed: What's your mission?
Mark: To find out about other people's favourite games.
Ed: Alright.

Exploring documentation and accessing technical help within the drama frame

To do this in a way that encouraged other participants to join in, I created a project in the shared coding project area with a webpage that could be edited and viewed by participants. When in the vignette 4.1.b Mark asks “We’d like to ask the Weean some more questions (to overcome coding blockages), is that the best way to do it?”, he is referring to this project webpage. The process of writing down a text request encourages the adoption of professional practice of asking a written question to overcome a coding problem and thus builds experience of using technical terms. Undertaking it in-role potentially addresses the barrier of asking for help by de-personalising the process.

Dan and Toby also received written help from the aliens to implement a pattern of creating random movement in their pac-man clone game. For this pair, the process of following a code suggestion from the aliens gives the parent opportunity to deconstruct the code in detail to explore coding concepts. In later discussion, Dan uses the fiction of the alien when asking a clarifying question.

"Mick, do you think the aliens would mind if we get rid of the switch statement and replace it with some if-thens? They're just showing off these aliens aren't they?"

Here the text dialogue with the aliens is used as a mediating artefact first by the facilitator to share help in-role, and then by a parent to suggest a modification to the code syntax to create more readable code structure for novices.

While this aspect of the drama process was introduced by the facilitator, in alignment with the understanding of Sannino’s concepts of transformative agency through double stimulation (TADS) participants transform the function of the alien conversation to their own purposes. This theme is developed in the next section.

Playful dialogue with the aliens unrelated to game making

The process of asking the aliens for technical help within a code project sparked a playful process of informal chatting with the aliens.

This chat began to fulfil a function of building insider rapport, creating a fun atmosphere, celebrating the completion of games in the absence of a public showcase, and signposting the achievements of other participants. For some pairs, while the child interacted in the live chat, parents performed final tweaks to code projects and challenges. Two parents in particular worked hard debugging more complex elements of the game with facilitators and peers. Other parents engaged with the chat and encouraged their children to get feedback from the aliens about their game in particular.

The process started with supportive and celebratory messages posted from the alien. The impact was significant with the young people with 5 out of 7 engaging by writing messages and all mentioning the interactions verbally during the session.