601364 news 1516905712 1516906166 <![CDATA["Taking on Serious Topics in Children’s Entertainment Games" published in ACM Computers in Entertainment]]> Children negotiate their relationship with the world around them and create meaning as they play. For them, all play is serious. Games offer children a space that supports learning on their own. Moving from the typical to the atypical game, from simple problem solving that increases cognitive skills, to social problem solving that teaches empathy, is a shift that can happen through participation in narrative dialogue. Social value in a game can exist when the cognitive load is not in computing numbers but in the challenge of uncovering the more intriguing stories beyond the surface of coded messages.

The following article presents preliminary ideas for game designs that were developed by a group of EU Erasmus students this past spring, partially in response to the Manchester Bombings, when tasked with the challenge of creating physically engaging entertainment that addressed social responsibility through narrative.
 

]]> 2018-01-25T00:00:00-05:00 During a three-week course on game design at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw, Erasmus students from eight different European countries addressed themselves to playing, talking about, and designing games for children. The theme of social responsibility pushed them to think about their own cultural and social backgrounds and consider how issues that exist currently in their lives can be brought to younger children in understandable ways.

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