Developing electronic games for education: Exploring the backstage

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the backstage of Electronic Educational Games production. To this end, the first author accompanied the day to day of ateam involved in game construction, noting negotiations, talk and actions of team members, seeking to observe what they report, which resources they utilize and which educational conceptions they use as basis to attach the label ‘educational’ to a game. These digital artifacts are produced and reach the final consumer as a black box, devoid of registers on what happened during its development. The idea is to open this black box and investigate the educational notions that circulate in the backstage during production. We used as theoretical and methodological framework Goffman’s concepts of actor, facade and backstage for the study of production teams; the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) of Latour for mapping the networks that form the black-box products; and the idea of thick description of environments, following guidelines from Geertz’s the anthropological experience. We verified in the studied institution that current conceptions on the educational nature of games are limited to citations of a few academic authors and the occasional presence of a pedagogue. We indicate the relevance of a further study on the production backstage of electronic games labeled as educational, presenting and proposing a list of questions for future studies.

Keywords: educational games, production backstage, educational conceptions.