Abstract
The effort to develop specific games to help specific learning is a serious and promising endeavor. Like any serious endeavor, it requires application and concentration over generations. The experience of one generation must be made available to help the next avoid certain pitfalls and traps. The author’s experience, which includes some deliberate research and some theorizing, has led him to identify traps that menace the computer game designer, from and for history, but also in other fields. The traps discussed here include going too quickly from good idea to game, the neglect of the variables of time and feedback, the desire to communicate a right answer, the desire to be fun, and the trap of cool technology, particularly the fascination with graphics.
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Pierre Corbeil holds degrees from the University of Toronto (Canada) and from the Université de Montréal (Québec). With a career in war gaming, historical games,and inter cultural games, he became interested in entrepreneurship and has published a collection of games on that subject, Entreprendre par le jeu. Recently, he received NASAGA’s coveted Ifill-Raynolds Award for Lifetime Contribution to the field of gaming. He believes games favour invention over classification and defines history as the illusion of reality recreated generation after generation. He still plays war games and writes science fiction novels.
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Corbeil, P. Developing concepts and tools useful to electronic games from and for history. Comput Game J 1, 5–16 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392324
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392324