I'm in the Gaming Zone

I took a little advice from the comments section and Aric left a website that gave a lot of "gaming" options. I am a fan of puzzles and card games, but since those are off limits I decided to go for a killing one! I played Kingdom Rush for a long time, my other homework was not impressed. The strategy behind this game is to protect your kingdom. I tried and tried, but failed to be good at the game. I pushed past this fact though, and reflected some of the other qualities of the game.

One thing that I enjoyed about the game was that it was really easy to understand. Now this doesn't mean it was easy, like I said above, I wasn't good at it. It was easy to do though, I think that this is important when using gaming in education. The task needs to be challenging but the object needs to be easy. Like a math problem, you want the problem to be hard but you don't want the calculator to be hard to run. One thing that turned me away from the game was the lag that it had. I'm not sure if that is because it was free? Or I was live streaming the UNI game in the background? I don't know, I do know that it bothered me.

Looking at the review the game, I found out the game at a lot to offer that I did not know. I am not a gamer so seeing that the graphics were in fact really good made me feel better. I was also amazed by the amount of levels and the details put into each one. I didn't make it very far in the game so I missed out on a bunch of these features! Although I wasn't very good at the game I was definitely in the "Flow", which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has come up with. I will pay someone to teach me how to say that man's name, he has hit everything spot on. Why didn't I think of that first, I mean after reading and watching that you are kind of like duh! When playing the game I wasn't self conscious, I wasn't worried about looking stupid--I was worried about moving on and getting to the next level no matter what! I do agree that time also disappears, I mean I played for what seemed like a few minutes and it was about two hours!

Honestly, I am not sure about how playing this game affected me. I don't really get into gaming. I will have to play some more games throughout the week, and maybe even search for more educational games. I can't see myself using this in my class so I am struggling to see how this really affected me. It was a fun game, it was challenging, and free (which is always a benefit). I do think that it allowed me to think critically about something that would in all other situations be fairly trivial. In most gaming situations I am not thinking about how it is changing me as a person, but today I was put that that challenge. I challenge you all to help me out, what types of games would you use in your classrooms?