Good Video Game Design

I located an article pertaining to good video game design on USM's library article database, Academic Search Premier. The title of my article is Pac-Man Meets the Minutemen: Video Games by Los Angeles Latino Youth.  This article caught my attention because it is based on Latino youth reconstructing the basic game from the 1980s, Pac-Man to tell a story of their surroundings.

This article starts out with informing my that the youth attend an after-school animation class, a part of the Open Play project at the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California (USC).  USC collaborated with the Learning Games Initiative to study pedagogical and cultural uses of computer games.

I learned that Katynka Martinez used the basic video game design of pioneer video game to help guide students to learn about geography, power relations, and the allocation of resources in their neighborhoods.  These students were growing up during the age of GTA and Guitar Hero, among other video games.

Martinez started out having the students draw maps of their neighborhoods and surroundings.  The students went into detail about life's experiences they had faced growing up in these neighborhoods.  Then he incorporated the video game he once grew up placing into this study.  Martinez also spoke about the video game Grand Theft Auto with the students because it can be compared to the neighborhoods they lived in in Los Angeles.  These students created a newer version of Pac-Man.

Martinez also discussed the demographics of races in current video games and asked the students how they felt about being stereotyped in these video games.  Surprisingly, the students description of these racially biased video games were remarkable.  One student talked about the skylight of one video game that some would be offended by because of the background and objective of the game's play.

These students used the lack of backstory in Pac-Man to turn it into a vivid story telling of the things they had and would face living in urban, densely populated neighborhoods near MacArthur Park.  The students chose music their were familiar with for backdrops, the maps drawn in the beginning of the article for the maze, and their lives for the narratives in the text boxes.

Martinez then goes to conclude the article stating "it is essential that today's youth learn to deconstruct and read video games as they would a novel or poem in school."  Also, I agree with Martinez about engaging We can use this to keep a student's interest in learning while keeping it fun with their input.  We need to learn what we can give to video gaming that students can take from it.

There is also a website where we can view the games the students created.
http://iml.usc.edu/laproject/