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Integral Research
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Press Play to Grow!
How Could Video Games be Designed to Facilitate
Personal and Spiritual Growth?
A Mixed Methods and Integral Study |
As entertainment becomes a trillion-dollar-a-year industry worldwide, as our modern era increasingly lives up to its label of the "entertainment age," and as economists begin to recognize that entertainment has become the driving force of the new world economy, it is safe to say that scholars are beginning to take entertainment seriously.” - Amazon review of the book Psychology of Entertainment (Bryant & Vorderer, 2006).
Games are great motivators—sometimes you can’t tear players away from their session. How would it be if we could harness that motivation for the cause of education? - Donald Norman, professor, Northwestern University and author, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Norman, 1994).
Games are the most elevated form of investigation. - Albert Einstein, scientist and "chess player".
Abstract
According to contemporary research on education, successful learning involves various complementary attributes. In his book Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games (2005), the educational designer Clark N. Quinn, one of the exponents of the use of video games for E-learning, comments about their relationship with education. He says that “learning is at its best when it is goal-oriented, contextual, interesting, challenging, and interactive. These same winning characteristics also define the best computer games, which suggest that the most effective learning experiences are also engaging. Learning can and should be hard fun!” (Quinn, 2005, back flap). Although video games tend to intrinsically embrace those attributes and sometimes go even beyond, video game designers still face specific challenges to design learning practices that successfully incorporate the fun of play.
Building upon this timely discussion, this research suggests expanding the educational goals referred by contemporary learning scholars and game designers (Gee, 2007, 2003; Bogost, 2007, 2006; Prensky, 2006; Johnson, 2005; Quinn, 2005; Aldrich 2005, 2003, and others) to directly embrace not only education related to teaching information (traditional orientation), learning processes (cognitive and social orientations) or technical skills (training orientation); but also education related to facilitating personal and spiritual growth (transformative and integrative orientations) - as explored by contemporary scholars, philosophers and developmental researchers such as Wilber (2007, 2000), Esbjörn-Hargens (2007), Torbert (2004), Cook-Greuter (2002), Beck & Cowan (1998) and Kegan (1994), among others.
By introducing some of those developmental concepts through E-learning, a few online academic courses and Web 2.0 ventures seem to be pioneering the use of technology as a developmental learning media. However, only a few significant initiatives (often indirect) seem to be emerging in the realm of video games. In fact, the main reason of this exploratory research was to investigate and propose alternative game designs that could incorporate developmental education and practices. In this way, video games could be also used by all kinds of educators, coaches and spiritual leaders, potentially facilitating individual and collective human potentials to unfold.
In this research exploration, a mixed methods approach was used including 6 different quantitative and qualitative methodologies. As part of that, it interweaved First- (Subjective), Second- (Inter-subjective), and Third-person (Objective) methods of inquiry. This approach was chosen with the purpose of bringing together the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative research in order to compare, validate, complement, and/or contrast quantitative results with qualitative findings. In order to explore these aspects from a theoretical framework, a brief introduction to the Integral Theory & AQAL (Wilber, 2007, 2000) - embracing various dimensions of life and reality- and Integral Play Theory (Gordon & Esbjörn-Hargens, 2007) - bridging play and personal development - was then presented.
Using Integral Theory (AQAL) and Integral Play Theory as frameworks, various studies were conducted, including Systems Analysis (Educational system as related to Integral Play); Empirical Survey (Comparative analysis of 150 people from 3 groups related to the topic); Academic and Media Research; Interviews and Discussions with lead integral thinkers (Wilber; Zeitler and others) & lead game designers (Erickson, Bioware and others); Personality Type explorations (Enneagram, Myers-Briggs), Personal development tests & assessments, Phenomenological (experiential) Accounts and Participant-Observer attendance at the world's biggest Game Developers Conference 2008.
The potentials of video games for facilitating personal and spiritual growth were not only confirmed, but also deepened and expanded into powerful and useful developmental video game design practices, insights and ideas. The results of those 6 methodological analyses brought various surprises and confirmations, raised timely challenges and issues, and pointed into various untapped potentials and applications. Taxonomies of video game “play” and video game players were also explored, based on developmental spectrums of human growth and potential. Data showed that there could actually be a fairly good market for those kinds of video games. Their creation would require intentional shifts in current paradigms and patterns of video game design, as well as an application of some basic concepts of the integral model by video game designers - including personal and spiritual growth theories and practices - so that they could directly incorporate them in their creative process.
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