Creating an alternative gaming classification system

These are my notes from a presentation about Creating an alternative gaming classification system at the 21st Century Learning @ the West Lake Expo held Oct 31 – Nov 3, 2009 at Xi Hu, China, also known as West Lake. West Lake is in the center of Hangzhou, China, which is about an hour by bus southwest of Shanghai. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS. Drs Yi and Ren are sharing this presentation in both Mandarin Chinese and English, providing their own translations. VERY IMPRESSIVE.

Dr Yi Li’s email: liyixinxiang [at] gmail.com
Educational Game Research Center, Nanjing Normal University

E-game rating systems of some countries focus on negative classification
– USA: EC, E, T, M, A, RP
– Japan: entire age, 12+, 15+, 18+
– Korea: entire age, 12+, 15+, 18+
– China: entire age, 12+, 15+, 18+, dangerous level

Only the negative factors were considered in these evaluations: violence, pornography, horror, gambling, vulgar dialog, drugs, alcohol use, etc.

Problems to address
– lack of regulatory measurements tools to regulate the producing of electronic games
– potential educational factors in electronic games that could be addressed

Some countries in places like England want to suggest a new evaluation system

Our basic ideas
– the standpoint to construct the rating system should be the educational perspective
– the attitudes we should hold should with respect to electronic game evaluation and rating: being positive and proactive
– a multi-dimensional approach of grading and classification should be used

The way to establish the appraisal system
– grading consideration:
– theory about individual cognitive developmental stages
– age
– school division

Classification considerations:
1- Gagne’s theory about study results
2- multiple intelligence theory
3- curriculums offered at school
4- capacity development trained in games

These lead to construction of the knowledge block / the standard of the classification system

To make this classification system more scientific, we adopted the Delphi Method
– we formed a team of 23 experts
– in our team, 15 of the members are experts who do research on the educational significance of electronic games and educational games
– 3 are game producers
– 5 are game players
– the team is consulted using several surveys

2 rounds of surveys
1- preliminary appraisal system to seek experts’ advice, then amend the indicators according to this advice
2- second survey: adopt Lickert scale and ask the experts to give a mark for every indicator in the appraisal system

school division used as a grading standard
– Kindergarten
– Primary school: P1, P2, P3
– Middle school: M
– High school: H

In the classification system, we use the knowledge block as the classification standard (abbreviated as “CS”) (THIS WAS FOR THE INITIAL SURVEY ITERATION)
1- subject knowledge (arts knowledge, science knowledge, other knowledge)
2- skills and strategies (…logic strategies, information literacy)
3- capacity development (cultivation of thinking, self-adapting, individual socialization)

Modification of the classification
– made several changes, subject knowledge classifications were broken out into more categories, for example

Steps of the conversion
– extraction of the key points first, considering what E-games could expose
– second, expect the influence of the indicators in the third level
– the data in the second survey asking for the key experts’ advice

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