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The prevalences of certain ideas of pedagogy have altered during the years in which I have been a coach practitioner.

The model of blocked practices dominated at the beginning. Level 2 started to show us “Stop, stand still”, and that was coaching. That is how you do it. Until you as a coach go out and try that with a bunch of kids. In this case, hate is not too strong a word. They hate it.

Fortunately people at the FA realised this and started to change. As time moved on and the Youth Modules were introduced Guided Discovery became prominent with the idea of the “game being the teacher”. We had moved into Teaching Games For Understanding. Creating environments where players can learn and play at the same time.

I should note that my introduction to small sided games did not come from FA literature but from a desire to understand what methods other parts of the world use. I discovered the Dutch model and the prominence of 4v4. That was the hook. Then came a realisation that the FA were trying to tell coaches to use SSG in Level 2, the work is all built on 4v4 + GK, or 4v4+1, or 4v4 +2 and so on. They had just chosen to do so implicitly through the assessment conditions of the time.

With advent of the Youth Modules a the move towards a more open world of practice became tangible games are (a) comprised of codependent agents, (b) self-organizing, (c) open to disturbance, (d) sites of coemergent learning, (e) open to varying experiences or interpretations of time, and (f) able to evolve their structures in response to feedback (Storey and Butler 2013). This recognised the importance of environment and the affordances that environments can create. Recently the advent of the England DNA has pushed toward a combination of TGFU and a Constraints Led Approach. The 70-30 ball rolling equation leans heavily towards these type of games.

Knowing that participants are involved in coemergent learning the formats of TGFU and CLA both create environments that allow performers to experience perception action coupling that aids the development of decision making as in experimental tasks where perceptual information has been either removed or degraded, performers have been shown to produce significantly different movement patterns compared to those used during tasks that are more representative of the target environment (e.g., Pinder et al., 2011; Pinder, Renshaw, & Davids, 2009; Renshaw et al., 2007; Rojas, Cepero, On~a, & Gutierrez, 2000; Travassos, Duarte, Vilar, Davids, & Araújo, 2012)

These develops feel like strides forward and highly contemporary approaches to player development. Until we consider that while the principles of invasions may remain largely the same the people we coach do not. The world they have grown up in is different. Theirs is a world where technology and the digital is common place.

Enter the Video Game Design approach. There is an instant frisson of excitement and connectivity to the approach extolled by Price, Collins, Francis and Pill. It speaks a language that we know young people understand. Not only young people. As a 38 year old I am more than familiar with the worlds being discussed. The concepts of levels, cheats and super powers are in no way alien.

A recent conversation with an adult footballer in relation to practices immediately struck a chord. Their feeling was that sometimes coaches stay on a certain practice too long. My response was that might be because the coach does not feel that the aim has been achieved. Then I thought about Video Game Design. How do we know that it is time to move the practice on? we know because the level has been completed or the mission achieved. This is not the exact way that it is suggested that the VGD method is used, but it was that thought which made me realise that there is far more to it than merely contemporary.

In the school environment (and therefore PE lessons) we are educated on WALT and WILF, we are learning to and what I am looking for respectively. In essence these are session objectives or topics. Often these are quite off putting. The video games approach proposes changing the language used to something far more engaging. The opening gambit becomes “What is today’s mission?”

By assuming a broad focus, where phases of play are considered interconnected and interdependent (rather than a narrow skill focus), players become “active agents” through the ways in which they interact with the mission, rather than “passive consumers” (Gee, 2007 cited by Price et al)

Within TGFU there are four core pillars, those of sampling, tactical complexity, representation and exaggeration. The video games design approach has it’s four tenets too, those of clue, challenge, cheat and collaborate. There are some cross overs between pillars.

Cheat = Maximum Support

Collaborate = Work together

Clue = Prompt

Challenge = Make the task more difficult

Cheat, clue and challenge might be seen as connected to sampling. Collaborate linking to tactical complexity. The pillar of exaggeration could be connected to the super power element of the video games designs.

The application of a red shell power in Figure 1 is to choose an opposition player to lock in one area of the pitch, with this power lasting for 60 seconds. The outcome of this design results in temporary underload and overload situations, which challenge both teams to consider different ways in which they might approach the game’s mission. For the team with the power, their thought may be “How can we use this power to collect more coins?” while the team without the power might be thinking “How do we minimize the number of coins the opposition collects?” Due to the short-term nature of super powers, players are required to adapt and react to out of balance situations quickly, while considering the game’s overall mission. (Price et al 2017).

These aspects help to create a meta-cognitive environment, allowing our young participants the opportunity to not only learn but also to learn about how they learn.

TGfU and CLA are both considered possible approaches to developing in-action game play behaviors that deemphasize technique-focused practices, where skill does not transfer into a game context. Indeed, it could be argued that both TGfU and CLA scholars largely overlooked meta-cognition development (and its translation into practice) as a fundamental theoretical principle, neglecting the tactical elements of decision making in favor of situated technique. (Price et al 2017).

The use of a pause function, a player triggered time out would display metacognitive awareness, however, whilst taking part in The Talent Equation podcast with Stuart Armstrong, Amy Price admitted that the players tendency was not to use the pause option. The pause was generally coach triggered. None the less, the pause slows the pace of learning for long enough to create a moment (or moments of reflection), Reflection involves the “slowing of the pace of learning” (Moon 2004) and we might consider a general rule of thumb to be that more opportunities for reflection create more opportunities for deep learning.

Listening to the podcast and reading the paper inspired me to look into my own ways of utilising the principles of a video games design approach. Another influence on my decision to embrace the ideas utilised was a conversation with an adult player who expressed concerns that we were possibly not moving practices on quickly enough with too much times being spent on specific tasks. The principles of levelling up struck me as a great way for everyone involved to know that it would be the correct time to progress.

As the game moves from its simplest form (a term of complexity, also used in TGfU’s pedagogical principles) to a more complex form, players experience the opportunity to “level up.” In short, leveling up in digital games demonstrates a player’s competency at performing variations of a specific skill or set of skills. This is typically where assessment is carefully woven into game design, resulting in an explicit approach to understanding both learning and performance, which goes against the grain of implicit and learner-centered pedagogies used for games. (Price et al 2017)

The attacking and defending teams were both given different targets to achieve in order to reach the next level. Five passes into the forwards, five interceptions, five counter attack goals and so forth. The players were told that the use of the concept was being considered but the consensus was that we did not feel that adults would buy into the cheat, clue, collaborate and challenge ideas (though a change in the language might create more positive buy in) nor did the idea of a superpower, however, when the level objective was to score a header or volley a regular goal earned a free kick in a crossing position. This is essentially the earning of an affordance, akin to that of the super power.

Having listened to the podcast and read the paper a number of times it appears that my interpretation of the video games design approach is too task specific rather than being play orientated. However, we are all free to create and design our own software.

Something I intend to keep doing.

Brian Storey & Joy Butler (2013) Complexity thinking in PE: game-centred approaches, games as complex adaptive systems, and ecological values, Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 18:2, 133-149,