As I was reading Gee this week, I kept thinking about building worlds. I appreciated the care with which he framed the Pikmin example in particular — and the paths he took in explaining everything necessary to come back to it — as I am still very new to learning about how to view games as learning mechanisms and I appreciate these very clear breakdowns. It’s sometimes hard for me to see beyond 1:1 ratios, because that’s how I learn a lot of things (math, for example: I have a very hard time deviating from examples): through repetition and mimicry, so instead seeing how something can be practiced and modeled in one world (and then leaping to how it could be translated in another) is helping me see past my own inherent limitations. But I have been replaying some State of Decay lately, and thinking about the Sims and Civ, all games in which we build in various ways. In SoD, we construct survival; in the Sims, homes, neighborhoods, and more; in Civ, whole populations. In each case, different knowledge is necessary for the most basic methods of play, but then they branch based on player-created scenarios. We’re not just building the worlds, but building approaches to them within those worlds. I don’t like to play the Sims, so I only build for purity of design; on the occasions when I do decided to “play” for a while, my houses are much different, designed to allow my Sims to meet their needs efficiently, but the houses I prefer to build are elaborate and beautiful, and I don’t care if it takes my Sim three hours of gametime just to get outside. I’ve set different conditions that required reading the situations differently. Just as Gee moves through contextual definitions of words, the game context changes for me as I play in various ways.

I’m very fascinated by all the ways in which we create our experiences, from those intended (as above) to those that are not particularly essential (assigning personal narrative importance to arbitrary things in order to beef up a lacking story, for instance), and I’m often frustrated with games that impose a lot of limitations because there’s so little of that flexibility. But I’m getting off track; what I wanted to say was that I appreciate that Gee spends so much time thinking about all these different ways we operate in the game space, and what it can mean for us.

p.s. man, does Gee have a knack for picking some occasionally eyebrow-raising examples.