Recommended: Engineering Play
Interest in the research and design of digital games for learning has been accelerating over the past ten years. Various groups—including private corporations, the MacArthur Foundation and the White House—have provided incentives for researchers to tap into the immense success of the video game industry and find ways of using games to re-invigorate the waning motivation among students in schools today. Among the arguments in support of using games is that games are simply better suited for the Millennial generation who has grown up with technology. At the same time, integrating games into a traditional schooling environment can be challenging because games do not fit easily into the school’s institutional system, which has its own concerns for evaluation, grade benchmarks and other accountability measures. It is against this backdrop that Mizuko Ito’s Engineering Play is set.
The premise of the book is simple enough. Basically, his thesis is that we think we know more about the world than we really do, and that there are “Black Swans” out there that exist beyond any models of forecasting we can build. The Black Swan notion comes from the belief people had for centuries - that all swans were white because no one ever saw a black swan, until they discovered it in Australia. Because people tend to imagine the world based on their empirical observations, people tend to have a “confirmation bias” that makes them notice things that fit their worldview, and ignore what they can’t fit in.