There is a lot being said about games. There is even more being said about Web2.0 – but while keynotes are dropping one liners – I recommend you have a listen to these two – Doctorow and Gibson. These are more likely to influence game-designers than eLearning theorists.
For a lot of classroom learners, they way in which they use a ‘tool’ is not that remarkable, and not that far removed from 1980’s ideas of what technology is for, typically by people such as Taylor (1980), and a quote from Pappert rings true of todays classroom technology – “that simply injecting any single idea into an otherwise unchanged school situation would not have transformative effects”. We have to look at games, perhaps as Pappert did around LOGO as “the growth of a culture around a new technology”.
Playable 