Abstract :
[en] In non-formal and lifelong education, game creation workshops are often used a means of learning (Aranda & Sánchez-Navarro, 2008). But what entails this design process when it is imported into an academic context? And what are the specificities of video games created in this context in terms of content and form? Our presentation, rooted in the didactics of media and game studies, addresses these questions through the case study of a Digital Storytelling course in the Bachelor of Communication Sciences at the University of [anonymized]. This course aims to equip learners with insights in how stories are told via digital media. For two years, it has focused on the development of a short video game by students with the help of the minimalist development software Bitsy. In the course scenario, sessions dedicated to didactical content from media studies and narratology alternate with practical game development sessions (as frequently used in the sociocultural field). As such, the orientation of the class can be described as mixing “constructionist” (Kafai & Burke, 2015) views on game design as a means for learning, with “self-reflexive” (Gualeni, 2016) accents in games, as a tendency of games produce a discourse about game creation. To answer our research questions, we will focus on the description and evaluation of creative output by the students, i.e. the games themselves, and of other student-produced, ancillary materials, such as game design documents. As the content to be learnt in the course (and thus to be transposed into the games) is subsumed in concepts related to media studies, we will assess how this transposition occurs. Among other aspects, we will explore the depth of integration (its central or peripheral status in the communicational structure of the game; Daneels et al., 2022), the cognitive levels (Forehand, 2005) involved, as well as the rhetorical operations (metaphor, citation, personification, etc.) that take place for the integration to happen. Next to the analysis of the students’ games, we aim to propose an analysis grid informed by pedagogy, game studies, and semiotics that can be used for assessing learning activities using game creation for acquiring conceptual knowledge.
