{"id":1877,"date":"2011-08-25T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2011-08-25T15:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1877"},"modified":"2019-11-19T15:41:51","modified_gmt":"2019-11-19T20:41:51","slug":"school-of-bioshock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=1877","title":{"rendered":"School of Bioshock"},"content":{"rendered":"

You probably didn\u2019t notice this happening, as you read my<\/a> previous<\/a> posts<\/a>, but I\u2019m drawing ever closer to the point where my abstruse Homeric epic<\/a> into Platonic philosophy classics stuff will at last intersect with my pragmatic practomimetic learning<\/a> stuff.<\/p>\n

(Certainly you didn\u2019t notice as you didn\u2019t<\/strong> read my previous posts, but I recommend them (of course I would<\/strong>) as way of figuring out where the heck I\u2019m coming from. Blog posts are great for letting readers take the temperature of discourse on a given subject; they\u2019re kind of terrible at giving the rich context that humanistic inquiry really needs to prove its worth. That\u2019s a \u201cplay the past\u201d issue in and of itself, I think, since we\u2019re all aware these days that we\u2019re in the ludic century, and whatever the story is with \u201cDigital Humanities,\u201d it\u2019s playful<\/strong> humanities we\u2019re all looking for: is there a way to do playful humanities and keep that rich context? If the humanities are the disciplines that do contextual analysis of our cultural heritage, \u201cplay the past\u201d is pretty much a gloss on that whole can of worms.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, I bet you didn\u2019t think I could connect classical video games with classroom game-based learning through Bioshock<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing, though. If we take Plato seriously that the best learning comes from seeing through the closed mimetic system we live in, that it comes from beginning to enquire as to how we can change that system\u2019s ruleset, we need to find a way to do what Bioshock<\/em> does.<\/p>\n

So what does Bioshock<\/em> do?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the claim I\u2019m going to make: the much-discussed ludonarrative dissonance that either constitutes or imbues (depending on your perspective) Bioshock<\/em>\u2019s ethical system does not rob the game of ethical meaning, but rather enacts a decisive and meaningful disruption in the player\u2019s performance of the cave-culture-game. That disruption, I claim, has the power to bring about in the player of Bioshock<\/em> the same sort of ethical reflection enabled by Republic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

From the standpoint of the humanist critique of the institutions of learning in our culture–you know, school–Bioshock<\/em> teaches us both how not<\/strong> to do game-based learning (GBL) and how to find our way to a GBL that gives us nearly magical affordances in the classroom in place of the chocolate-covered broccoli on offer from the gurus of gamification.<\/p>\n

So what I\u2019m going to try to get going here is a Bioshock<\/em>-based defense of practomimetic learning against the charge of gamification. There\u2019s a moment in Bioshock<\/em>, which I\u2019ll discuss fully in my next post, when the player\u2019s control gets taken away and then given back to him or her in such a way as to show that control to be meaningless. I\u2019m going to argue that rather than using game-elements to reinforce the existing ruleset of school (that is, gamifying), we need to use them to re-design<\/strong> that ruleset so as to expose its inadequacy<\/strong>. I\u2019m going to argue that giving points and badges is the opposite<\/strong> of game-based learning of the kind we see in Bioshock<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You probably didn\u2019t notice this happening, as you read my previous posts, but I\u2019m drawing ever closer to the point where my abstruse Homeric epic into Platonic philosophy classics stuff will at last intersect with my pragmatic practomimetic learning stuff. (Certainly you didn\u2019t notice as you didn\u2019t read my previousContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"coauthors":[206],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-1877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1877"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6592,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1877\/revisions\/6592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1877"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=1877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}