Insightful Puzzle Design: Innovative Distance Education Practices as an Immediate Response to COVID-19

Περίληψη

Games offer untapped learning potential, present in the cognitive spectrum with the facilitation of knowledge, as well as social and emotional benefits educational process. The immense possibilities which games provide on the levels of the three previous sectors establish the need for innovative design practices which foster distance education during the era of the pandemic crisis of COVID-19.

The digital game “The Witness” provides an exceptional example of puzzle design practices, that will be further discussed in the present paper. The name itself indicates a “provocative” contradiction to the dipole of presence - absence, whomever the player is, they explore the game space almost in a documentary manner; as a mere observer, ignoring the past and gradually setting their way towards uncovering the game narrative in the most insightful way.

Insightful puzzle design focuses on providing to undergraduate students of the Pedagogical and Didactical Sufficiency Program guidelines regarding the use of puzzles as educational tools in distance education in two parts. The first one being the players themselves, experiencing the gameplay mechanics of the puzzle game “The Witness” and get accustomed with the ways of presenting original mechanics, while slowly implementing more advanced mechanics and various methods of setting the proper difficulty of each game. On the second part, allowing the undergraduate students to realize their roles as future educators and how insightful puzzle design could assist them into producing their own educational puzzles for pedagogical purposes for distance education practices.

Puzzle insights provided in this paper aim into a playful educational experience, achieved by reducing the feelings of entrapment and threatful defeat. By empowering the individuals on the cognitive, behavioural and affective segments, this analysis focuses on diminishing the detrimental responses that maintain the depressogenic feedback loop, responsible for the feelings of entrapment and threatful defeat in games.