Computer Science 282: Social Aspects of Games, Leisure, and Entertainment

Unit 0: Orientation

This unit is a vital stage in the course that explains how the course works, introduces you to the tools and methods used, and helps you to set up your working environment ready to perform the course activities.

Family enjoying each other’s company. Courtesy Nationaal Archief.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief/6437678899/

Course Overview

COMP 282 is a course about why people play games, their social effects, and how to design them to achieve the social effects that you want. It covers a range of academic and practical issues that allow you to explore the nature of leisure, social gaming, the effects of games in society, and ways that they can be built and integrated into social systems.

There is a very strong focus throughout on reflection and creative individual engagement with the ideas and theories that inform the course rather than dry academic facts: this course is about developing your own knowledge and understanding in ways that you can use as part of the creative process of game design.

The course consists of this orientation followed by four units, which should be attempted sequentially. To help you to manage your time, we provide rough estimates of the time we expect you to spend on each unit. Bear in mind that these are estimates of how long it might take an average student to get an average mark: it will almost certainly be different for you!

Note that the total course is expected to take in the order of three full-time working weeks, or around 120+ hours. We would be grateful if you would keep track of the hours you spend on each task so that we can adjust our estimates accordingly.

The units of the course are as follows:

Unit 0: Orientation (this one): (5–6 hr)
Don’t skimp on this unit as it provides essential information without which you will not be successful in the course.

Unit 1: Games, Leisure, and Society (30–40 hr)
This unit investigates the nature of leisure, its personal and social roles, and its relevance to you. It involves a fair bit of reading and writing, much of which is examining and reflecting on your own experience. Its purpose is to encourage you to think about the nature of leisure, especially games, in a broad social context and to begin to think about underlying patterns, reasons and ways of thinking about things that we do for fun, how they affect us, and how they affect others around us. There is a particular focus on the border between games and other leisure pursuits.

Unit 2: Social Gaming (20–30 hr)
This unit explores issues in games involving two or more people. Once again, it requires a combination of reading and thinking about what you have read in the context of your own experience, with a range of exercises that challenge you to examine ways that the design of games and the processes that surround them affect the ways that people participate in them.

Unit 3: Social Effects of Games (20–30 hr)
In this unit, you will research the ways game playing can affect individuals physically and psychologically, and the broader effects of such effects on society, whether or not the games are intended to be social. As in the other units, there is a personal element to this in which we ask you to think about your own experience, but this unit requires more self-guided research and academic analysis of literature on the subject.

Unit 4: Design and Application (30–40 hr)
This unit requires you to apply the lessons learned in previous units to the design of a social game or game-like system. We do not require you to actually build this game—the purpose is to integrate and synthesize what you have learned into a design, not to write a program. It introduces a framework for thinking about social design to help identify the ways that games can affect and be affected by the presence of people.

The units are not evenly sized—the first and last units are expected to take somewhat longer than the two in the middle—but on average each should take around 30 hours to complete.

As you work through the course you will be producing a number of artifacts, most of which are fairly small but that, in aggregate, add up to quite a lot of work, including

• a learning journal,
• encyclopaedia entries,
• critical comparisons,
• a design for a game,
• various contributions to the group (referred to in your learning journal).

For the most part, you will be sharing these with others taking or teaching the course and, at the end, assembling most or all of them into a single portfolio.

Assessment for Credit

Credit for the course is based entirely on a portfolio of evidence to show that you have met the learning outcomes. Because you may find evidence of every outcome in each unit, there are no individual marks for specific unit work, but you are expected to provide a mapping of the work you have done to the learning outcomes at the end, and a grade will be awarded for each learning outcome.

Formative Assessment

To help you to gauge how you are doing, you may optionally submit your learning journal at the end of each unit for formative evaluation by your tutor. This does not count towards your final marks and is solely intended to allow your tutor to guide you—to help you to know how you are doing and to make improvements if necessary. If you choose to do this, you will need to assemble your work for the unit in question as you would for the final portfolio. This is a little extra work, but we think it will be worth your while to take advantage of the opportunity for feedback.

Suggested Schedule

To help you to spread your work out evenly, we suggest the following schedule, which assumes that you will be taking 16 weeks to complete the course, which is the usual requirement for students receiving financial assistance, and spending around 6–8 hours per week on course activities. Feel free to adjust the schedule to fit your own needs within the 6-month contract period. If you exceed this period, you will need to order an extension to complete the course.

It would also be wise, at least at first, to keep track of how long you actually do spend on the work and, if our estimates differ significantly from the time it actually takes, to adjust your schedule accordingly. Remember that our guess is based on an average student aiming for an average mark, and the chances that you are that particular student are very remote indeed!

General Principles Behind the Course

This course is a little different from what many people will be used to. It is designed using a number of pedagogical theories and models, which lead to the following principles:

Learning Is a Social Activity

We learn better with others. Some of the reasons for this are explained below in terms of motivation, the value of having to express things in ways that others will understand, and the value of wanting to present ourselves in a good light. People are also a great source of inspiration, whether because they think of things differently, come up with things you hadn’t thought of, or even do things badly and therefore remind you to avoid those pitfalls.

We don’t ask you to work with others in teams or working groups, but we do ask you to work in ways that benefit others by sharing what you do and, where possible, offering help and encouragement. We reward help given to others by allowing you to use that as evidence of having met the learning outcomes, so everyone wins in every way. As we observe below, teaching is a great way to learn—the person needing help benefits from the help given and, to cap it all, you can even (if you wish) get marks for it.

Recognizing that everyone is different and not everyone feels comfortable sharing everything, we give you the control to decide how much you share with others. It is possible, if not recommended, to succeed in this course with very little sharing and no direct social engagement at all. We have plentiful evidence that sharing with others benefits everyone’s learning, especially the person who is sharing, but it is up to you. You are in control.

Everyone Is Different

We know that every student starts in a different place, with different knowledge, different skills, different interests, and different goals. Different things are relevant in different ways to different people. As far as possible, we have designed the course to allow you to pursue things that interest you in a way that suits you best. As much as possible, you are in control of the learning process, choosing the time, the place, the pace, and the form that your learning takes.

We have provided exercises that are deliberately designed to encourage you to take ownership of issues and to see how they connect with your past experience and future hopes. Apart from a few basic readings, you get to choose what you study, how you study it, and how you demonstrate your competence. Every student’s work will, of necessity, be significantly different from every other student’s work.

This also extends to the assessment. Rather than giving set assignments, we allow you to assemble evidence from the work that you have done as learning activities into a portfolio, in which you map your work to the intended learning outcomes of the course. The only fixed requirement is that you follow the process and perform those activities. How you perform them and what you do with them for assessment purposes is up to you.

There Is No Better Way to Learn Than to Teach

We put a lot of emphasis on the value of sharing with others. When you know that other people will be looking at your work and you write it with an audience in mind, you tend to do better work, and you tend to think more carefully about how it is presented, which means that you start to think about it from different perspectives. This is a virtuous circle—you learn more and learn better as a result.

While you do have to share things with others as part of the way the course works, you do not have to collaborate or interact directly with others if you don’t have the time or inclination to do so. You can be as independent as you wish. However, beyond the learning benefits of sharing, we do provide a further incentive to engage with others taking the course: you may, if you wish, use evidence of help given to others as evidence of having met one or more of the intended learning outcomes.

Reflection Is a Vital Part of Any Learning Process

Reflection—the act of thinking about what and how you have learned—serves many purposes. The simplest of these is to help you to remember what you have learned. By rehearsing what you did, you are vastly more likely to remember it and the lessons learned from it. Often, the process of reflection helps you to realize things that you missed while you were actively engaged in the process, to link it with other things, to see a bigger picture.

The deeper and possibly more important purpose is to help you learn similar things better next time. By thinking about what you did, why you did it, how it affected you, and what it teaches you, you become a more mature, more capable, learner. This course makes extensive use of reflection, both explicitly in every unit and as an integral part of many of the tasks required.

Motivation Is Crucial

Rewards and punishments such as grades are counterproductive because they provide extrinsic motivation. On the other hand, intrinsically motivated students are many times more likely to be successful. Research shows that intrinsic motivation depends upon being in control, taking on tasks that are only slightly beyond your current level of competence, and learning in a social context where what you do matters to other people. We therefore do as much as we can to enhance your ability to be in control, to provide support and scaffolding to help keep tasks within or just a little beyond your existing level of competence, and to provide social support (both from tutors and from other students) so that you are aware of the presence of others and your impact upon them.

We have tried as much as possible to align the tasks that you perform with the marks that you get. Almost everything we ask or suggest that you do in this course can, if you wish, be used as evidence of meeting learning outcomes. In principle, nothing is wasted. You do not have to perform extra assessment tasks apart from assembling your portfolio and mapping your learning outcomes, which is a valuable learning activity in itself.

The only time grades are given is at the very end of the course although there are opportunities to receive ungraded feedback for every unit as you go along and to use that feedback to make improvements to the final submission if you wish.

We Learn Best When Doing and Creating Things

When we engage in activities that demand creativity and skill, we become more skilful. Activities that demand more of us than passive reading and repetition require us to make connections and to use a variety of different functions of our brains, which helps integrate and accommodate new knowledge. While we do demand a fair bit of reading, every unit of this course requires you to actively do things that we believe will help you to construct your knowledge effectively.

Learning Outcomes and Competencies

COMP 282 requires you to map the work that you do (including, if you wish, your interactions with others, the things that you share such as annotated bookmarks, and other evidence as applicable) to the intended learning outcomes of the course. These are described in detail below.

Upon completion of this course, you should be able to

• analyze games in terms of their social effects.
• analyze the effects of game-like features in non-game systems.
• classify and distinguish a variety of genres of social game.
• analyze the effects of game design on social behaviour.
• design game features to affect social interaction.
• assess the causes and effects of antisocial behaviour in games.
• independently research issues in social games as well as their effects.
• apply theories and models of social behaviour to the design of computer games.
• design a social game.

Using Athabasca Landing

This course, especially in your reflections, makes extensive use of the Landing, a social system that uses the same login ID as Moodle but which is otherwise quite separate from it. We are using this system because it is far easier to give you control, far easier for you to share things with others, and far easier for them to contribute to the course materials. To a large extent, this is a read/write course that treats students as co-travellers on a learning journey rather than telling them precisely what to do and how to do it. In effect, students are also teachers here. The Landing makes it much easier to share the outputs and, for those who would like to do so, to engage with others.

About the Landing

The Landing is a general-purpose social site that combines many features found in other social systems such as blogs, file sharing, wikis, social bookmarking, audio and video sharing, photo publishing, and social networking. Because it is a large and complex general-purpose social system, this means that it may appear bewildering and confusing at first, especially if you come with expectations formed either by focused learning management systems like Moodle, or more open social networking systems like Facebook or Google Plus, blogging systems like Wordpress, or other sharing tools like YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, or Flickr.

The Landing has many of the features of all of these systems but its design and purpose are rather different. It is both a toolkit for building such systems and a learning commons for anyone at Athabasca University. You should expect to see things that are not connected with your course, and we very much encourage you to engage with the broader AU community because everyone learns that way and your experience will be more akin to what might be found in a traditional campus-based university, but there is no obligation whatsoever for you to do so. If you just want to visit the course group and do the course, that is absolutely fine.

Choosing How Much You Share

When you first log in to the Landing and accept the terms and conditions, a personal profile is created for you. This will reveal your name (and, by default, nothing else) to public search engines. If you do not want that to happen, feel free to change that name— it’s one of the options available when you edit your profile. If you do that, it is best that you choose a name that your tutor will recognize as you—perhaps your first name or a nickname that your tutor knows about.

For everything else on the site, from your profile avatar, email address and phone number, to the pages and posts that you create for the course, you decide exactly who gets to see it, from no one at all to the whole world.

Once you have joined the course group, you will be able to limit visibility of almost anything you post to only members of the group, but you are very welcome to use broader permissions if you prefer.

• Inside the group itself, the default permissions are that only the group can see it.
• For posts outside the group, the default setting (configurable in your preferences) is to be visible to logged-in users, but you can change that at will for almost everything you post, when you post it.

There is one exceptions: when commenting on someone else’s post, then your comments will inherit that post’s permissions.

Following People

The Landing has social networking functionality that allows you to follow people. Note that this is not reciprocal “friending” of the sort found in Facebook but the one-way following of the sort found in Twitter. When you follow someone, you can both (optionally) get alerts when they have posted something and use the People you are following permission to make things you post available only to them.

We recommend that you follow your tutor. To do that, find a place where his or her avatar is visible and click the small arrow in the corner of the image; then, from the menu that appears, select Follow.

Using Circles

Occasionally you may wish to limit the visibility of a post to only you and your tutor. To do that, you may use circles. Circles allow you to group people that you are following into separate collections that can be used to set permissions and choose what alerts you receive:

• When you first follow someone, you will have the opportunity to put them into one or more circles. You can do that at any time by looking on your Following display and clicking the small arrow in the corner of his or her avatar.
• Select Circles, which brings up the same dialogue as the one that appears when you first follow someone.
• Create a circle called “COMP 282 tutors” or words to that effect, which you will recognize when you wish to use the circle to limit access to your work. This will then appear as an access permission for any post that you make on the Landing from then on.

Task: Set Up Your Landing Profile

To help build a stronger sense of social presence that makes dialogue easier and smoother, it is a very good idea to configure your profile to say something about you. Profiles make it easier for your tutors and your classmates to know you better, as well as making it possible for others on the site who may share interests, etc., to contact you (if you wish—if not, you can limit access as much as you like).

You are welcome to fill in as much or as little as you like of your Landing profile and to reveal as much or as little as you like of it to anyone that you please, though we strongly recommend that you at least share an avatar with at least the group—the blank anonymous default icons are not great for sustaining a learning community!

To edit your profile, click Your profile on the You menu and look for the Edit profile button.

Your name is the only thing on the site that must be visible, but it can be changed to something other than the default if you wish. Note that it is visible to the entire world, or at least anyone with a web browser and an Internet connection so, if you wish to hide that information, change the name shown in your profile to something more anonymous—but do make sure that your tutor knows who you really are!

We would very much like you to add an image for your avatar and a brief description (a photo is preferable, but any identifying image is fine—the Landing even provides a simple drawing tool if you wish to create one from scratch). You can edit your avatar at any time—there is an Edit avatar button on your profile page for that.

There are many other profile fields to fill in, all of which are optional. The more you fill in, the better, as that makes it easier for people to find you, know about you, and contact you. The AU Courses field is a good one, as is the Location field, and it would be great to list your interests too. Like everything else on the Landing, you choose the visibility settings for every single field in your profile, so it is up to you who sees what. If you don’t let people see something, they will not see it.

Writing Your Reflective Learning Journal

Almost all of the work you will be doing will be recorded in your reflective learning journal.

Your reflective learning journal will be created as a set of wiki pages in the COMP 282 group on the Landing. At the start of the course, you will create a sub-page on the Student Work tab with a page title of your own name (or other title that will allow your tutor to identify you—you do not have to reveal who you are, but you must make it easy for your tutor to find your work). You will click on Add wiki page to create sub-pages. For each unit, you will create a sub-page containing your reflections and the various outputs required for that unit.

The reflective learning journal is the most important part of the course, providing by far the most significant portion of the marks for your portfolio. Quite apart from the outputs of the various tasks you will be called upon to perform, writing your reflections well can make the difference between a fail and an A. Even if the activities you perform in a given assignment are not perfectly performed, your reflections can demonstrate that you have met the learning outcomes and lead to a good mark. More importantly, they are a vital part of the learning process.

Reasons to Reflect

There are numerous reasons that we place a very strong emphasis on reflection in this course, based on decades of educational research and learning theory.

Perhaps the most obvious of these is that, without reflection, learning does not stick very well—it is easy to forget—and, more significantly, cannot be as effectively applied outside the original setting.

Equally important, a university education is as much about learning to learn as it is about learning the topic at hand, and a reflective process encourages you to think about how you learn, why you learn, what works, and what does not. It thus enables you to become a more mature and effective learner, better able to deal with similar problems when they arise again.

Another good reason for reflection is that it allows your teacher to better understand how you are doing, what you did, where you are having difficulties. This can both assist the process and help to improve your grade at the end because it lets the marker of your work see why you did what you did and award marks for process even if the outcome was not perfect.

In a related way, sharing your reflections with other learners means that students can help to teach one another by revealing different perspectives, different ways of solving problems, and different ways of understanding, as well as similarities that can help comfort you when the going is rough: it is good to know that others are grappling with similar issues. That’s one of the big reasons we encourage you to share all of your work in this course: fellow students can teach as much as teachers and, en masse, often more. It’s a big benefit of taking a course with others rather than studying alone. And teaching, as every teacher knows, is the best way to learn anything.

Writing Reflections

There are many different reflective frameworks, but probably the simplest and easiest to remember of these asks just three questions:

What?
What did you do? Explain both what you were trying to do and what you actually did.

So what?
How did it affect you? What was difficult? What was easy? How did it relate to things you have done in the past?

Now what?
What would you do differently if you had to do it again? How has it changed how you see the world?
We encourage you to be creative in your reflections, but, if this kind of process is unfamiliar to you, you might find the following more detailed questions useful as expansions of, or alternatives to, the simpler what?/so what?/now what? framework:

What did I do? This question helps to provide context for the reader, as well as remind you of the process.

What did I do best/worst and enjoy the most/the least? This question can help you to focus on the positive aspects of what you have done and help point you towards things that you might (before submitting your portfolio) improve.

How would I improve this if I had to do it again (product and/or process)? This is a very important question to ask because it gives you an opportunity to show that you have met the outcomes, even if in the exercise itself you did not achieve everything you might have done. It also encourages you to think more clearly about the learning process by thinking about how you learn and what would help you to learn better.

How does this relate to what I already know? This question helps to tie what you have done to your existing knowledge. All knowledge we gain is an active process of construction that links what we already know to what we have learned. By focusing on this aspect, you may be able to show further evidence of what you have learned, as well as consolidating the knowledge in your own mind.

How will I be able to use what I have learned about myself and/or the subject matter in the future? This question provides further help in consolidating what you know with your broader knowledge and interests, as well as making it easier for you to plan how you go about such learning tasks in the future.

Other questions that you may find it helpful to consider include

• What surprised me most?
• What were my motivations for doing this?
• Was it fun?
• Was it just for marks?
• Why did I choose the things to look at that I did?
• How did I feel about this at the time?
• What did I do that was probably a waste of time?
• What did I not do that I probably should have done?
• What was difficult, what was easy, and what does this tell me about myself?
• What am I most proud of?
• What am I least proud of?
• How does this relate to other learning I am engaged in?
• How does this affect me in my everyday life?
• What does how I’ve gone about this tell me about myself?
• Who helped me do this, and how?
• What would have made this task easier?

You certainly don’t have to cover all these things in every reflection: just pick those that apply. These are just questions to help put you in the right frame of mind to reflect, not strict guidelines that must be followed to the letter.

If you are not used to the process, this style of rigorous reflection can feel hard at first, especially as we ask you to share your reflections with others, but it will become a lot easier once you have gone through the process once or twice. Do look at other people’s reflections to get a sense of the variety of ways that people engage with this task, but choose the way that works best for you.

Task: Set Up Your Learning Journal

As the course progresses you will be creating a lot of different outputs, ranging from game designs to stories, reports, essays, and reflections. We will normally highlight when we wish this to occur using the symbol on the left. Whenever you see this symbol, it means that we expect you to write something for the section to which it relates. Do feel free to write at other times too! These are just the required tasks that must be attempted.

We would like you to share most or all of your learning journal in the course’s Landing group as a wiki. Your learning journal will contain subpages with the main outputs you create for each unit. For most units, this will consist of a single long wiki page, sometimes with attached files, though you may choose to create sub-pages of these in order to more clearly organize your work or if you wish to make some parts less visible than others.

How to set up your learning journal for the course:

1. Go to the COMP 282 home page on the Landing.
2. Select Group wikis from the menu on the right.
3. Navigate to the wiki titled Student work (there is also a tab to this link on the course group home page, and it shows up in the group’s featured content page). The Student work wiki page contains further information and instructions on what to do next that may supersede these instructions, should any of the underpinning technologies or labels change while the course is in progress. Do make sure that you read that page in case any of the instructions have changed.
4. Near the top right of the page, you will see an Actions button. From the drop-down list that appears when you mouse is over it or click on it, select Create a sub-page.
5. This will create a new page that will be the main starting page for your learning journal. Note that it is not saved to the system until you click the Submit button at the bottom of the form.
6. Give the page a title. Normally this should be your name or the name that you would like to be known by. Note that others may share a similar name and there is nothing to stop duplicate titles from being used, so you may wish to add further identifying information such as your username to make it easier to distinguish your work from that of others.
7. Write a brief introduction to yourself. This can be as revealing as you like. You might tell people where you come from, why you are doing this course, what your favourite pets are—whatever! Or you could simply provide a sentence or two to say that this is the home page for your coursework. You are not required to provide any information about yourself if you don’t want to share it.
8. Provide some tags in the Tags field of the form, separated by commas, to make it easier for you and others to find it and easier to keep things organized. We ask that everything you write for this course be tagged with at least the tag comp282—this is needed to ensure that others can easily find your work, even if it is not in the expected location—but the more tags you provide the better. You might use other tags for this like coursework or your name. In later units, you will almost certainly want to use tags relevant to the unit you are working on.

By default, the permissions of your page will be set to those of the group so that only other group members can see it. You may make it more public if you wish, up to and including completely public (visible to the whole world). It is acceptable to make it private while you are still working on it, but note that private means that only you can see it, which will be very counterproductive in the long run!

It is possible to make pages visible only to you and your tutor (see Using Circles in the Using Athabasca Landing section). You may wish to do this for some exercises if you are, for example, providing personal information that you do not wish to share with all students on the course.

How to prepare further sub-pages:

As you go through the course, you will be adding sub-pages to the page you created at the start. We recommend that you create the outline structure for this now.

Create a sub-page for each whole unit. To do this from your learning journal page, choose Add sub-page from the Actions button. If you are creating placeholder pages for all the units at once, don’t forget to return to your main learning journal page before creating the next sub-page, or they will be created as sub-pages of the page you are currently viewing. Your unit sub-pages should have descriptive titles like Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3, Unit 4.

You may also find it useful to create a page for your final portfolio.
This is an example of the kind of structure that you may wind up with:

Your Name

Within each journal, you will be creating subheadings that relate to the required tasks, as well as summary reflections and references. You may on occasion create other pages as you go through the course, such as unit portfolios for formative assessment. You may also wish to write things that you would prefer to be more private than others, in which case you can create sub-pages of the relevant journals with different permissions. See Choosing How Much You Share in the Using Athabasca Landing section.

Adding Files

Unless there is no alternative, we prefer that you present work directly in the wiki pages, using the text editing form provided on the Landing, rather than as attached files: wiki pages are much easier to browse than files and make communication and commenting much smoother and quicker.

However, there will be occasions where you will need to insert files such as images or links to them in your pages. You can do this by clicking the Embed content link just above the editing form. You can upload them directly from your hard disk or, if you prefer, use the Group files tool to upload them in advance. Once they have been uploaded, they will be available for you to use in any of your pages, so if you need to use a file more than once, it should already be in the list of available files. If these are images, please use either JPEG (for photos and similar pictures) or PNG (for diagrams and drawings) as these display better on the page than other formats. You may potentially wish to upload video or audio files, which should appear embedded in the page when you save it—most common video and audio formats are supported, up to a size limit of 50MB.

Apart from these types of file, almost everything else will appear to the viewer as a downloadable link when you save the page. If you need to upload other types of file, we far prefer PDF to any other proprietary format as it works consistently and often shows inside the browser itself. We do not like to receive MS Word or other word-processor files and prefer that you do not use them as there is a very high risk that there may be changes in formatting or missing embedded images depending on differences between versions of software used.

Assessment

A portfolio of evidence mapped to course learning outcomes, plus evidence of having attempted all the required tasks accounts for 100% of your final grade.

Here is more detailed information on how your learning is assessed for credit in COMP 282.

Graded by Learning Outcome

The assessment of this course is based on evidence that you provide of meeting its learning outcomes, rather than for specific marked assignments. You may find evidence for each outcome from any or all of the units for the course. This gives you a lot of flexibility as you may find evidence for each outcome from many different sources, and it does not require you to do everything the same way as everyone else.

All Tasks Must Be Attempted

To help you to provide the evidence, there are numerous, mostly small, required tasks scattered throughout the course. All of these must be completed to meet the requirements for assessment but none of them is independently assessed. You do not have to do equally brilliantly on every task as long as you can demonstrate your competence in the relevant area elsewhere, but if any tasks are missing from your submission, you will fail the course. We provide templates with each unit to help you to ensure that you have performed all of the necessary tasks.

Assessed by Portfolio

The evidence from the tasks and, optionally, other evidence from contributions to the group such as bookmarks shared and help given to others, are the raw material for a single portfolio that you will assemble at the end of the course. In this, you will explicitly map the work that you have done to the required outcomes for the course and, based on this evidence, you will receive a mark for each outcome that will contribute to the overall grade that you receive for the course. We provide detailed help with this process in the rest of this assessment documentation.

Formative Feedback (optional)

you may optionally submit work for each unit for formative assessment. There are no explicit marks given for these formative assessments: they are intended to provide you with the opportunity to get feedback as you go so that you know you are heading in the right direction and have the chance to make improvements if necessary before the final submission.

Formative Assessments

While there is only one final marked assessment, you may optionally submit your learning journal at the end of each unit for formative evaluation by your tutor. This does not count towards your final grade and is solely intended to help you to know how you are doing so that you can make improvements if necessary. No marks will be given for these evaluations—not even a pass/fail grade—but the tutor will give you brief feedback intended to help guide you and/or confirm that all is well. We highly recommend that you take advantage of this opportunity: in courses that take a similar approach, those students who make use of formative feedback tend to get significantly higher grades and are happier with the course.

To submit your work for formative assessment, you should collate your work for the unit into a portfolio that follows the same pattern as the final portfolio, mapping the relevant learning outcomes to the work that you have done and collating it all into a single wiki page on the Landing or a PDF file. Submit a link to the relevant page or the PDF file itself via Moodle by clicking on the Formative Assessment link for each unit.

Note that you must allow at least 5 working days (excluding weekends and University or public holidays) for each evaluation, so there is no point in submitting all of these at once, nor in submitting them all near the end of the course contract when there will be insufficient time to get a response. If you submit two within a day of each other, you should expect a 10-working-day response, three will likely take 15 working days, and so on. Note that, on occasion, this process may take longer. When staff are ill or away, each assignment can take up to 10 working days to mark. Make sure that you allow plenty of time for this, and while you are waiting for a response, get on with other work.

This process is in addition to occasional comments that your tutor and other course members may make on your work. We encourage course members to comment on one another’s work and, if your comments show evidence of meeting course outcomes, you may use them as part of the evidence of meeting learning outcomes in your final portfolio.

Avoiding Academic Misconduct

We strongly encourage sharing and welcome intelligent (and properly acknowledged) reuse of ideas, content, and systems, but as for any course at Athabasca University, we very strongly frown upon plagiarism, collusion, and other forms of academic misconduct; in the unlikely event that you feel tempted to do so, we will come down on you like a pile of very sharp bricks.

If you use the work of others, whether explicitly using the same content or basing your ideas on theirs, you must properly list and cite your sources in all cases. It is better to do too much than too little. Failure to properly cite sources may lead to anything from censure and loss of marks in very minor cases of forgetfulness (e.g., if you provide reference to a source in your bibliography list but do not cite at the point at which you use it), to expulsion from the course and a permanent stain on your academic record if uncited work is used. We have access to automated and semi-automated tools for plagiarism detection and may use them.

The good news is that there is plenty of information online to help avoid this happening, including our own Write Site, which offers great advice on the subject, and in our own school and faculty policies. We know that in by far the majority of cases, people who are guilty of academic misconduct are simply unaware of what is correct and how to avoid the pitfalls. If you have not already done so, please visit the Write Site or explore other online sources explaining plagiarism, collusion, and other forms of academic misconduct, and remember that by signing on to one of our courses, you have explicitly agreed that you will behave with total academic honesty throughout.

What if you spot academic misconduct from others?

First of all, tell them about it! In most cases, academic misconduct is unintentional and, if you let people know that you have identified a problem, they will nearly always try to fix it.

If they don’t fix it, tell us! If you suspect a fellow student of academic misconduct, then it is important to inform us of your suspicions, because there is a slight chance that we may not recognize it ourselves, and the reputation of the course (and hence of your own qualification) depends on the course maintaining high standards of reliability and trustworthiness. This is not snitching: it is for your own benefit and for the benefit of everyone on the course to ensure that the highest standards are maintained. Cheating benefits no one: the person cheating fails to learn, and your qualification loses value as a result.

Citation Practice

It is vitally important that when you make use of the work of someone else, that you cite it correctly. Your learning journal for each unit must contain a References section that lists all the sources you need to cite in your journal.

For non-web sources such as books, journal articles, and conference papers, we recommend that you use the APA standard for citation. Information about this can be found at the Write Site.

For web-based sources, it is good practice to provide a live hyperlink to the actual page that you are citing—Snot just the site on which it can be found. You should also make a note of the date when the page was accessed.

Using (not abusing) Wikipedia

This course makes extensive use of Wikipedia articles as learning resources to help frame ideas and discussions. We do this because Wikipedia provides quick and digestible overviews of many topics that are discussed here. Rather than paraphrase such overviews, some of which you may already know or that may be irrelevant to your needs, we think it is more sensible to send you to a source that has been edited by many individuals and is therefore likely to be reasonably clear and reliable.

However, you should never rely solely on Wikipedia as an information source. We like it because it is a great way to get the general gist of many topics, but it is not always 100% reliable and, more significantly, it does not go into any significant depth on anything. It also has a tendency to gloss over big intellectual debates and differences, almost never has anything new to say on academic issues, and sometimes misses important and relevant issues. Where we think you would gain a lot from exploring further, we provide links to other sources, often to academic papers. However, we strongly encourage you to explore further links and references yourself. You might find these within Wikipedia articles, or you might search for topics that suggest themselves in Wikipedia in more diverse places, especially scholarly articles such as can usually be found through Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/). Remember the mantra—“Wikipedia is a great place to start and a terrible place to finish.”

Please note that Wikipedia is a great learning tool and can be very useful as a starting point for research, but it is not a good source to cite. This is not a properly peer-reviewed source, provides too little detail, and it cannot be called upon to provide reliable evidence to back up your own arguments and discussions. In your own work, please do not use Wikipedia articles as referenced resources. Indeed, you should avoid citing any encyclopaedia or dictionary at all, for much the same reasons. This includes Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Collating and Submitting Your Portfolio

Your portfolio should be collated as PDF files, where possible, with links to original web-based sources (such as your reflections on the Landing or to downloadable games, videos, podcasts, etc.) where appropriate.

This should be uploaded to Moodle using the Submit Your Portfolio link.

Mapping Learning Outcomes

You will map what you have done to the intended learning outcomes for each unit. The recommended approach to doing this is to use the unit learning outcomes as headings in your journal and to relate them specifically to concrete evidence of what you have done, either

• by providing hyperlinks, with annotations where needed (typically to pinpoint the section or paragraph of the document that is relevant), to the places where you demonstrate that you have met them

or

• for short pieces of evidence of a few sentences, simply pasting in the relevant content.

You can find the address of any page or discussion to which you have contributed in the address bar of that page—just copy that URL as a link.

The more accurately you can pinpoint the place where the mapping occurs and how it relates to the learning outcome, the better. Remember that this is what the tutor will use when marking your work, so it pays to make it easy to find, and where it may be unclear, to explicitly state why and how it meets the outcomes. In other words, in many cases, you should provide a brief explanation of what part of your work reflects which outcomes and, at the very least, you should indicate which section of the page relates to the specified outcome. The more clearly you can show this, the more likely you are to get a great mark. You might refer to specific paragraphs or even copy and paste whole sentences that show the evidence.

If the evidence is hidden (e.g., accessible only to friends on Facebook or within a game), then it is acceptable to use screenshot images. Due to difficulties in verifying their authenticity, these should usually make up only a small portion of the evidence supplied, unless you have agreed otherwise with your tutor.

If you cannot find much evidence of having met the outcomes, then it would be a good idea to take this opportunity to go back to the work you have done and add to it until they are met.

Relevant evidence might include (but is not necessarily limited to)

• the pages, media artefacts or other objects that you have created.
• the comments you have made on other people’s work
• activities on external sites such as blog posts, YouTube video links or even comments in Facebook (but note that these should be identifiably created during your course contract - we will not accept earlier or later work)
• annotated bookmarks shared with others on the course (note that bookmarks alone are not sufficient evidence—your comments on them are an important part of this kind of evidence)
• your reflections (note that this means you might still gain marks, even when the work itself is imperfect, if you can show that you have learned from your mistakes)

Whatever evidence you provide in your mappings, the key things are

• to make the mapping as explicit as possible.
• to try to include anything relevant.
• to only include things for which there is direct evidence (it’s not enough to say that you watched a relevant program on TV unless you have reflected on it or otherwise referenced it online).

We provide two templates for you to use. The first, Summary Table and Checklist, is intended to help you to gauge your progress and provides typical indicators to help you to evaluate your achievements. The weightings provided are indicative of the relative value placed on each outcome: simpler, more descriptive outcomes carry less weight than those that require greater exercise of intellect or creativity. The second, Portfolio Template, may be used as the basis of your full portfolio. The portfolio is an absolute requirement, while the summary table may optionally be submitted if you feel it would help make your evidence clearer.

Summary Table and Checklist

This table may be used to help you to collate your evidence of having met the learning outcomes and may optionally submitted in your final portfolio as accompanying evidence:

Use this checklist to ensure that you have attempted all the required tasks:

Unit 1

• Task1: What Does Leisure Mean to You?
• Task 2: What Is Leisure?
• Task 3: Reflecting on the Sociology of Leisure
• Task 4: Comparison of Social Motivations in Games You Have Played
• Task 5: Gamified Systems
• Reflections on Unit 1
• Further Reading

Unit 2

• Task 1: Game Comparison
• Task 2: Representing Identity in Online Games
• Task 3: Designing Social Spaces
• Task 4: Reaction to Griefing
• Reflections on Unit 2
• Further Reading

Unit 3

• Task 1: Demographics
• Task 2: Critical Comparison of Research Studies
• Task 3: Comparing Academic Articles
• Reflections on Unit 3

Unit 4

• Task 1: Game Design Proposal
• Task 2: Game Design and Rationale
  • Mockup/description
  • Rationale
• Final Reflections
• Resources

Generic Grading Criteria

While the checklist covers most outcomes, it is important that the overall portfolio is well constructed and complete. The following checklist may help you to ensure that you get the highest grade you can:

To Get an A

• Plentiful evidence provided of having met all the learning outcomes.
• All activities completed thoroughly and successfully.
• Work presented to a high standard:
  • well structured,
  • well laid out,
  • properly referenced,
  • substantially free of spelling or grammatical errors.
• Richly reflective and/or critical insights.
• Notable creativity and rigour in design tasks.

To Get a B

• All outcomes met to at least some extent, most met well.
• All activities completed successfully.
• Work presented to a high standard:
  • well structured,
  • well laid out,
  • properly referenced,
  • substantially free of spelling or grammatical errors.
• Good reflective and /or critical insights.
• Creativity shown in design tasks.

To Get a C

• Nearly all outcomes met to some extent.
• All activities completed, some to a limited extent.
• Work presented to a good standard:
  • reasonably structured,
  • moderately well laid out,
  • fully referenced (though not necessarily perfectly),
  • mostly free of spelling or grammatical errors.
• Limited reflection or critical insight.
• Effective but derivative design.

To Get Less Than a C

Please don’t get anything less than a C! If you perform all of the required tasks with some diligence and care, you should succeed in this course. In most cases, marks less than a C will result from a failure to perform required tasks or a lack of the required effort and time being spent performing them. Do make sure that you have performed all the required tasks and do use the checklist to make sure that you have covered all the outcomes, at least to some extent.

Portfolio Template

This template simply provides a list of headings describing each of the intended learning outcomes for the course. You are welcome to copy and paste it into your portfolio wiki to provide the structure needed to construct the portfolio.

Please provide evidence for each learning outcome, using as much space as you need for each outcome. If you are not submitting the checklist, then for each outcome, provide your own self-assessment of your approximate grade (A, B, or C—do not submit work with a lower grade!).

You may simply provide links to original posts on the Landing in some cases, but please be specific about which part of the post applies to a given outcome—except on those rare occasions that an entire post covers a specified outcome, please provide the relevant subheading(s) and/or a brief extract, especially where only a few sentences are relevant. Feel free to provide as much evidence as you wish for each outcome and feel free to use evidence such as annotated bookmarks, comments on others’ work, discussion posts, and so on to bolster your case, as well as reflections and notes that are not specific to a task. The amount of evidence needed varies according to the outcome: for simpler outcomes such as identifying or describing things, a few sentences will often be enough. For those that require judgement, creativity, skill, analysis or synthesis, we would normally expect significantly more.

Remember: we require evidence of having completed all of the required tasks for each unit, and very strongly recommend that each learning outcome should be addressed to some extent. If you are unsure of what to do or whether a particular piece of evidence is appropriate, use the Landing forums to ask for help.

Your portfolio must be submitted for assessment through Moodle as a PDF file. Use operating system tools or any of many free utilities for this. Alternatively, remember that wiki pages on the Landing may be exported as PDF files directly from the Landing itself. However, complex formatting and images may be lost in this process, so it is usually safer to use desktop tools for this—do check that everything appears as it should before submitting your work.

1. Distinguish between games and other leisure pursuits.
2. Identify what motivates people to play games.
3. Apply sociological theories to game playing.
4. Explain the value of social interaction in game playing.
5. Analyze games in terms of their social effects.
6. Identify game-like features in non-game systems.
7. Analyze the effects of game-like features in non-game systems.
8. Reflect on your own attitudes to games and leisure.
9. Classify and distinguish a variety of genres of social game.
10. Analyze the effects of game design on social behaviour.
11. Design game features to affect social interaction.
12. Assess the causes and effects of antisocial behaviour in games.
13. Reflect on social interactions in games and game-like systems.
14. Describe the demographics of game players.
15. Explain the effects of game playing on players and those around them.
16. Independently research issues in social games and their effects.
17. Evaluate arguments and research concerning the effects of games on human behaviour.
18. Reflect on the credibility of research into the effects of game playing.
19. Apply theories and models of social behaviour to the design of computer game.
20. Design a social game.
21. Reflect on the process of social game development.

Playing Games

We strongly encourage you to play games for this course. In fact, we require you to play games! If you are not already a game player, now is the time to start. If you are already a game player, now is the time to start exploring different genres and styles of games.

This is a course about why people play games, the social effects they have, and how to design them to achieve the social effects that you want. One of the most crucial ways to get that knowledge is through active experience and reflection. Experience without reflection will do little good—it is important that after and sometimes during gameplay, you reflect on how it has affected you, why it has affected you, and how and why it might affect others. It is also important that you write this down, at least in note form. Of course, we don’t want you to spend all of your time playing games, but you will definitely find it useful to play occasionally in order to successfully achieve the tasks we set for you, and, on occasion, we will require you to do so.

Free Social Games and Game-like Systems

There are several occasions during the course where we ask you to engage with social games and similar systems. You are always free to choose appropriate games for this, so if you already have some, do feel welcome to use them. However, we do not wish to make you pay for games. This page contains a list of those that we have discovered that are, at least in financial terms, largely free.

Beware, however, of the useful adage that if you are not paying for the product, the chances are that you are the product. Different systems have different ways of supporting themselves or making a profit. These can include, amongst other things, advertising, in-game purchasing options (add-ons, item malls, etc.), try-before-you-buy or shareware models, selling your details to other companies, taking some processor cycles for a computing task, or using the game as a lure for some further purpose (e.g., joining the American armed forces).

Do read terms and conditions carefully, and weigh up the costs and benefits before signing up to these systems. The appearance of a link here does not imply endorsement of the product by Athabasca University, nor do we have any control at all over what happens at the other end, so, as always on the Internet, exercise care and caution.

If you come across any other free social games or sites offering them, please add them to this list and/or to the course bookmarks, within the “Free games” folder on the Landing.

Sites Aggregating Free Games Links

https://mmohuts.com/: MMOs and MMORPGs as well as some other multiplayer games.

http://www.onrpg.com/games/: Mostly MMORPGs, not all free.

https://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm: Mostly MMORPGs, annotated to indicated prices and profit models (many free or free to begin).

http://www.argn.com/: Alternative reality games.

https://geekculture.co/best-sites-for-free-games/: Geek Culture

Farmville (relies on Facebook account).

https://www.astroempires.com/?ref=yahoo&id=us: A free browser-based space game.

http://www.onrpg.com/: Links to games and communities for online role-playing games.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/best-free-online-game-sites/: Digital Trends

Game-like Systems

https://secondlife.com/: Second Life—archetypal goal-free immersive world.

https://www.roblox.com/: Roblox—goal-free immersive world with a Lego-like appearance and approach to building.

http://www.imvu.com: Avatar-Based Social Experiences.

https://cms.furcadia.com/: Fantasy MMORPG with some goal-free elements and an emphasis on cuteness and creativity more than on killing things.

https://foursquare.com/: Foursquare—gamified location-based social network.

https://stackoverflow.com/: Stackoverflow—gamified Q&A site.

https://www.geocaching.com/play: Geocaching site for location-based treasure hunting augmented by a virtual site.

https://www.tumblr.com/explore/: Gamified blogging.

https://teamtreehouse.com/: Gamified learning.

Copyright Note

All images used here are in the public domain or (in the case of icons) created by the course author. All photos are from Flickr Commons, labelled as having no known copyright restrictions.