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Baroque Baroque revolution: high culture gets game

Published: 03 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This paper documents the design and development of a Flashbased Baroque music game, "Tafelkids: The Quest for Arundo Donax", focusing on the tension between constructing an online resource that an audience aged 8--14 would find fun and engaging, and the directive to include historical information and facts, as well as convey some of the sounds, musical structures and conventions of Baroque music, history and culture through play. We begin by contextualizing the game as a collaboration between our team of university-based researchers and the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, two groups with quite different histories -- and understandings - of educational media design. We introduce the problem of how to go about creating a media artifact that would "make public", in a compelling and playable way, key features of Baroque music. We then describe a design process in which we tried to bridge the representation of "expert knowledge" about Baroque music with some of the mechanics used in popular music-based games. A discussion of these particular challenges in designing a bridge from propositions to play, in effect digitally remediating, Baroque music education, concludes by addressing the broader epistemological question of what and how we may best learn, and learn best, from games and play.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)An Investigation of Digital Game-Based Learning Software in the Elementary General Music ClassroomJournal of Sound and Music in Games10.1525/jsmg.2020.1.2.11:2(1-24)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2020
  • (2010)"Oh-No! Banjo"Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology10.1145/1920778.1920810(215-218)Online publication date: 6-May-2010

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Future Play '08: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share
November 2008
297 pages
ISBN:9781605582184
DOI:10.1145/1496984
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 November 2008

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Author Tags

  1. Baroque music
  2. design-based research
  3. educational/serious games
  4. flash
  5. play and learning

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FuturePlay08
FuturePlay08: FuturePlay 2008 Academic Games Conference
November 3 - 5, 2008
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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View all
  • (2020)An Investigation of Digital Game-Based Learning Software in the Elementary General Music ClassroomJournal of Sound and Music in Games10.1525/jsmg.2020.1.2.11:2(1-24)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2020
  • (2010)"Oh-No! Banjo"Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology10.1145/1920778.1920810(215-218)Online publication date: 6-May-2010

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