Drawing This All Together
The MDA Format allows users to recycle and retune and integrates well with online presence. Key here is the MDA’s iterative approach to design and tuning, allowing instructors and designers to reason about particular design goals and to anticipate how changes will impact each aspect of the framework, the resulting designs / implementations, student engagement, and course learnings. Moving between MDA’s three levels of abstraction allows us to conceptualize the dynamic behavior of game systems as well as that of interactive, gamified online courses. The following graphic depicts the flow of course development using the MDA format for game design:
In some ways, instructors/course designers need to work on all three areas of MDA at once, while keeping in mind the components of online presence as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as they design. In some instances the aesthetics might inform dynamics and mechanics, but it may not be possible to actually design the class presentation or appearance without knowing the mechanics (the rules and resources) to use, and the mechanics both spring from and lead to the dynamics (the activity that occurs). All of this leads to the student’s experience of aesthetics (components of engagement).
The complexity of course design, i.e., integration of gamification, can vary from the course site being a place just to spend time while students interact generally with content to having more of a social framework where students interact with one another along with content, to full immersion using a narrative. The MDA framework not only serves to inform game design, it also informs course design during gamification, providing course designers/instructors with a method of decision-making and validating these decisions while enhancing the course. Aligning gamification with the three presences noted in the Community of Inquiry gives designers and instructors an additional framework to further validate their decisions. Syncing these two frameworks, then, provides instructors and designers with a more solid approach to both designing and validating the learning outcomes while making a course while increasing engagement. Further application of both frameworks allows for course evolution and future enhancements.
So....what shall I do? What are my next steps ?
References
Hunicke, R., LeBlanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004, July). MDA: A formal approach to game design and game research. In Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI. Retrieved from http://www.aaai.org/Papers/Workshops/2004/WS-04-04/WS04-04-001.pdf
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