I spent a lot of time with Mark Oehlert at the GDC last week and he sums up much of our conversations better than I can.
Check out this post in particular. My favorite clip…
Gaming comes from play and art and music - from a creative place. Where does instructional design come from? There are a few probable fathers but chief amongst them is World War 2. The real drivers were the need for effeciency and effectiveness. Not exactly the most forgiving or indulgent of parents. So now we come to present day and shocker!...processes derived from a need to have a conscript military force rapidly trained in set patterns...are breaking down in the face of generational and technological changes that were never anticipated or dreamt of at the dawn of ISD (at least not by instructional designers).
Mark also points us to Jesper Juul’s dictionary of video game theory. Check this out from the dictionary…
When players learn or improve their playing a game by learning not to process the individual pieces or states of the game, but rather thinking in terms of high-level chunks (collections of pieces and states) instead. (Newell & Rosenbloom 1981, 42)
"The master [of chess] has acquired an immense memory for chess positions, organized as a collection of chunks. His ability for immediate perception and sort-term memory of chess positions depends directly on how many chunks are used to encode a position. [...] By implication, master players must spend an immense amount of time with the game, in order to acquire the large number of chunks; this seems to be well supported by historical data." (Newell & Rosenbloom 1981, 50)
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t this part of adult learning theory? Go ahead a read the definitions for learning and information reduction. Very interesting.