Using game design to discover your potential
Game Lab affiliate researcher Konstantin Mitgutsch will be with us in May to discover our superpowers!
He is running an innovative and creative workshop that uses game design and play to help participants understand their skills and abilities: their superpowers!
His recent Medium post links this work to his exploration of game design, transformative experiences, learning, and life coaching:
This idea of personal Superpowers began to emerge a few years ago at MIT, while I was studying how people learn through passion. At the time I was focused on gamers, asking them to chronicle all games they’d played at various stages of their lives and then to tell me their personal stories.
The extent to which the content of the games impacted how people made sense of their stories surprised me, but after years of exploratory research and hundreds of biographies, an even more surprising insight emerged: While sharing their gaming experience, the players disclosed all of the personal strengths they had developed over time. Interestingly, these weren’t common skills like problem-solving, communication or creative thinking, but instead referred to qualities like getting the bigger picture, channelling fictive characters or constructive playful leadership. However, these strengths seemed to be trapped within the games, with players knowing neither how to apply them to other domains, nor even how to communicate them to other people.
You can register for the May 21 workshop via Eventbrite.
As Studio Manager for the MIT Game Lab, Rik Eberhardt spends his days playing Tetris: with people, boxes, tasklists, equipment, and time. When not staring at a spreadsheet trying to fit in another computer purchase, a last minute event budget, or placing undergraduate researchers on a Game Lab project, he's chipping away at spreadsheets on his DS, reproducing pixel-art in Picross and Picross 3D. His favorite moments on the job are working on projects with student workers and having fun social interactions forced on him despite his busy schedule. Contact him about research projects at the MIT Game Lab at gamelab-request@mit.edu