Conference Report: Nercomp - Panel Discussion - third session

In this session various instructional designers will presented their analysis of some popular video games and in the process identified features and structural elements that could be adopted in higher ed curriculum.

Eileen McMahon (the event organizer) and Scot Osterweil chose two games each for the three panelists and the panelists researched and played the games and then made a short presentation on them. For each game the panelists had to pick three aspects of the game that would translate well into an education setting (either directly as the game, or as concepts that could be extracted and applied elsewhere). [I think this was a very successful format. It covered a lot of ground quickly and was working from real-world data.]

The panelists were:

Jason Gorman, Instructional Designer, Simmons College

Heather McMorrow Gretzinger, Instructional Designer, Lesley University

Michael Palumbo, Instructional Designer, Eastern Conn State University

Scot was the moderator.

Jason Gorman was the first to speak. His games were Super Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog. A copy of his presentation is available at http://www.nercomp.org/data/media/games_092607.ppt

Super Mario - this game is a BIG DEAL. One of the best selling games of all time, likely the best franchise of all time. There’s a lot of culture around the game

3 things about Mario that could be translated into an educational setting:

• multiplayer sequential competition. Competing together creates opportunities for collaborative problem solving and informal learning. Even though there was competition between the players, there was also helping each other against the game - the game is the common enemy. Great informal learning
• scaffolding goals and skill progression
  • well paced progression of difficulty
  • time pressure
  • short and long term goals with multiple rewards
  • true mastery is clearly possible - particularly useful for rote learning (it’s exactly the same each time)
  • [NOTE: The main character keeps dying! This could really put off some players.]
• the music is immersive and catchy… and INFLUENTIAL
  • lo-fi beat compliments graphics and game play
  • memorable tune loops in your head
  • self-promotes synthesis in a musical theme
    • lots of examples of popular music created based on video game music (SM music in particular)

Jason spent a lot of time talking about Super Mario, so his review of Sonic was quick and high level.

Sonic the hedgehog: largely similar play

• faster, better, stronger
  • stimulating, have to take risks and make leaps to survive
  • forced into uncomfortable situations
• multiple paths to success
  • lots of free play
  • multiple difficulty setting
• VERY easy to learn

Heather McMorrow Gretzinger then talked about Boxing (on the Wii) and Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time. A copy of her presentation can be found at http://www.nercomp.org/data/media/video%20game%20presentation.ppt

Boxing on the Wii

She describe the graphics as “incredibly rudimentary” [I would have said 'iconic'], but didn’t find they detracted from the play. This game is engaging - it draws the audience into participating. She talks a lot about the feedback loop, from human action to avatar action.

• visual progression of game provided
• highly kinesthetic
• sound effects motivate and support game play (makes it very energizing for players and audience)

The feedback is a very useful concept to bring into the classroom [but not specifically game related, I think]. Very visual feed back is also good. [This is more game specific - entertaining idea / mental image of grade as health meter... :) ] The social-ness is also good. Interesting observations on varying peer explanations based on gender. People new to the Wii still treated it like a regular old controller until they got a chance to play with it. [Learning through play/experience]

Her second game was Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (one of the highest selling games of all time) [also, among my friends who play such games this is generally considered the best of the Zelda franchise, and one of the best period in the whole CRPG genre]

This was a shift from 2D scroller of earlier Zeldas to free 3D

• lots of surprises along the way
  • knew what the goals were, but there were little incentives along the way (from side quests to coin collecting)
    • player set sub goal - e.g. get enough money to get item X
  • plenty of practice opportunity, lots of opportunity to save and learn from your mistakes)
• music motivates and supports the game
  • follows the oral tradition of story telling ; learn from those around you and repeat back

She found that being able to play video games socially was important.

Mike Palumbo “I learned to do my job by doing it”, a sentiment / experience that is very relevant to games. His two games were Luxor and Tycoon: NYC. A copy of his presentation can be found at http://www.nercomp.org/data/media/gamesPalumbo.ppt

Luxor - 2004 (by Mumbo Jumbo)

Luxor is a casual game, with a style based on the early 80s arcade games. It’s mechanic is similar to Columns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columns_(video_game)), but slightly spiced up and wrapped with a tiny bit of frame tale. Play is based on matching, spatial relations, timing, pattern recognition

• clear rules and scoring
• engages logical, spatial and kinesthetic intelligences
• success depends on skill mastery

Tycoon: New York City

This is a simulation (takes a situation and make it as realistic as possible). The player is given the task of starting businesses in Greenwich village. They’re is given seed money and they’re off - they have to figure out all the principles of business themselves.

• incremental increase of info and expectations
  • as skill increases so do objectives
  • after basic skills are set then competition is introduced
• safe to fail at new skills with little penalty
  • chance to rectify (freedom to fail, plus the freedom to fix things)
• opportunities to excel

Questions and Discussion

Question: any thought about using a game to teach teachers about gaming?

Jason - let them dissect the black box

Heather - ‘it was a big leap for the student teachers to accept games as a useful teaching tool. Maybe tried to introduce them too early in the course. It was a real challenge for them’. Some people totally disengaged - freedom to fail != freedom to participate? Can education support the freedom to participate?

Mike - using games is a really hurdle

[Games have a really, really bad rap. Sad.]

Question: how do you apply the qualities of these game (or create a game?) actually to develop a game that teaches?

Heather - ability to redo a test, to learn from failure, etc. Is it about the grade or the learning. ‘cheat codes’ for school?

Question: How/why does one become a gamer and who plays games?

Heather - you become a gamer through peer pressure and association

Scot - “the major player of casual games are middle aged women”

Question: Do people spend too much time playing games, are they worth while?

Heather - definitely feels that her husband wastes a lot of time gaming

Mike - games are a leisure activity, and people play a lot of games on the computer

Discussion:

[I didn't catch it all, but I managed to get down a few highlights.]

Scot: We shouldn’t try to make games work. Instead we should try to make work fun.

Interesting example of time when parents worried that their kids read too much. Then TV. Now it’s switched to games.

[ASIDE: interesting topic for discussion would be mitigating the negative aspects of games]

Talk about Webkins. An interesting space with an economic gateway. However, collecting things has always been a thing kids do that costs money.

Scot: marketers have gotten more sophisticated about connecting to younger and younger kids.

Conference Report: Nercomp - Learning From Video Games: Designing Digital Curriculums - second session

The second presentation was by professor Asgedet ‘Segi’ Stefanos, Ed.D., of College of Public and Community Service at UMass Boston, on The Researched Benefits of Electronic Games. Segi organized her presentation around Howard Gardener’s multiple intelligence framework. [I have to admit I'm a bit dubious as to the validity of the larger theory, and I think using it to organize research on games in education misses some important ways in which games are useful.]

[I've had a difficult time writing a post on this presentation because I think it wasn't very good. I've waffled about how much opinion and commentary to include and finally decided to be up front about my impressions - this is a blog and part of the point is to give my views on things, not just to report.

Segi seemed like and interesting, smart, and nice person and I wish her well in her research (More research on games! Yes!), BUT I think she needs to improve this presentation if she's going to use it again, and I think her research would benefit from dedicating some time to playing a bunch of games.]

Video and computer gaming is a new/recent area of research for her. [It felt like she's done a lot of secondary research but not much looking at and playing with games. Whether that's actually the case I don't know, but it's the impression I got from the general statements she presented.]

So, for each kind of intelligence in Gardener’s list she presented some points about how video and computer [Are they the same thing? I don't think so, but they're closely related]. The various points indicated ways in which games could potentially be of benefit to that area of intelligence, but she didn’t get into how or example games.

Logical/Math Intelligence

• ability to modify game rules is a feature of gaming.
• complex skills are taught in games
• failure in problem solving leads to better decision making

An interesting point she raised is that cheat codes are a local modification of rules. ‘Cheat’ is a very pejorative term and doesn’t mesh well with many educational goals, but exploring them can be useful and appropriate. Also, players get and take info from many sources (actual guides/docs, other games, general experience/knowledge, community) and do very complex reasoning.

Musical

• Sound explorations develop listening strategies and the capacity to pay attention to their own musical sensation

Kinesthetic / body

• Interactive media can shrink the distance between the representational act and the factual behavior. This can have a positive impact in terms of learning.

Spatial

• Video games facilitate representational competence: visual skills, mental rotation, and spatial visualization.
• Visual selective attention is developed through video game play. I.e. people figure out what’s important watch and what can safely be ignored.

Interpersonal

• teams working towards a common goal learn from each other
• the presence of others in a game influence the action of the individuals
• role playing and interrelationship between game characters enhance social skills
• turn taking / non-aggression through watching

Intrapersonal - capacity to understand ones self

• games have clear and achievable goals that are easily accessible (and have immediate rewards).
• they are intrinsically motivating because they balance challenge and skills [they are intrinsically motivating, but I don't at all believe that having a balance of challenge and skill is the primary reason why; at best that kind of balance is a necessary but not sufficient requirement]
• video games can increase concentration and improve productivity for increasing tasks [but can they do it for anything other than video games?]
• self confidence is developed through skill appropriate challenges

Naturalist

• games can help learners see interconnections between geography, economics, politics, etc.

Linguistics - sensitivity to spoken word

• no research [that the speaker could find. She had never heard of text adventure games nor any of the work done on / with them - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_adventure_game is a good place to start poking around]

She concludes that they have the capacity to draw on the 8 intelligences framework, and that they can be effective tools for learning and curriculum development.

[This talk seems like a good example of why educators are dubious about games. There are a lot of claims, but not much indication of how, why, or even if transfer occurs out of games and into school or the rest of life. This reminds me of science writers who talking about nano-computing and super-miniature circuits - they equate the capability of making a NAND gate to creating a pill-sized super-computer in the next few years.

ALSO, if transfer does occur, then that says interesting things about violent games.

Using the 8 intelligences misses out on what I think are some very useful and interesting aspects of gaming. Two that come to mind off hand are exploration of the potentially complex moral and ethical questions that arise in games (both within the game and at the meta game level), and the philosophical exploration of what is a game and why play them.]

Conference Report: Nercomp - Learning From Video Games: Designing Digital Curriculums

ETA: a copy of Scot’s presentation can be found at: http://www.nercomp.org/data/media/ScotO_10.01.07.pdf

The first presentation of the day was by Scot Osterweil, inventor of Zoombinis video game and director of the Education Arcade at MIT.

Scot is a self-described game designer. Also, he says “I will assert things I haven’t proven” - in some cases he will be presenting his [educated] opinion.

Education arcade designs learning games. The games they design are aimed at upper elementary through secondary. Scot believes that what applies to younger learners also applies to older learners - the same issues apply. The interesting issue is that for the 2nd or 3rd time in the history of computers people are getting very excited about games in learning. The last few years have seen lots of research and talk. The trend in generally in favor of the idea that there’s learning in games. BUT, the notion of game as an educational tool is faulty.

1. Learning happens in play, BUT
2. Learning (at least of the desired sort) doesn’t AUTOMATICALLY happen

Just as it’s easy to write a bad book it’s easy to design a bad game. Also, calling an activity a game doesn’t guarantee that anything worthwhile will happen.

Play is prevalent through the animal kingdom, from kittens and puppies wrestling to kids playing with dolls, or discovering gravity by dropping a sippy cup. He quotes from Johann Huzinga (Homo Ludens), who posited that civilization emerged from play. Worth reading the full text, if one is into that sort of thing.

He then gives an interesting example from The Children’s Machine by Seymour Papert 1993. In this example children use rods and clamps to get a ball from one end of a table to the other [I think that's what the goal was, but it's not really relevant in any case]. There were three group

• group 1, instructed on how to use rods and clamps, then given a goal
• group 2, plays with rods and clamps, then given a goal
• group 3, control, just given goal

Group 2 got the goal most quickly. The point of the example is that sometimes explaining things doesn’t give as much benefit as simple playing with them.

He gave another example from his own childhood of discovering the principles of addition (though he didn’t know what it was at the time) by playing with block. The revelation was that two small squares put together were the same size as a rectangle, and two rectangles put together were the same size as a long piece, and finally that was the same size as four of the small square pieces. That understanding was later helpful when he was being taught addition in school.

The larger principle at work here is that through informal play we create scaffolds for the things we later learn more formally in school and life.

Play has no agenda - players’ motivations are entirely intrinsic and personal. He posits [possibly backed up? Though up front about presenting some of his own thoughts he wasn't exactly clear about which parts were opinion and which not] that for play to be play there are four necessary [but not sufficient, I think] attributes, which he calls the four freedoms of play. These freedoms are:

1. 1. freedom to experiment - players must be able to do (or not do) what they like
2. 2. freedom to fail - players learn in the process of failure
3. 3. freedom to try on identities - players need sometimes to be serious and sometime less so, play is a safe environment to try different ideas
4. 4. freedom of effort - (see Peter Iope, studied schoolyard play, kids culture) players need the choice to try hard or relax our effort, they can’t enter into play with the idea that they must play hard all the time (even though they often do).

Important point: fun isn’t non-stop mirth and giggles, it can be hard work. Example in golf: It’s very hard, especially at first. Miss the ball, then barely hit it, then hit it badly, then don’t hit it well enough. People voluntarily accept difficult strictures for ‘fun’, BUT only if we can be playful. Part of the play is figuring out what club to use when, etc. (there are a continuous regime of challenges as ones mastery increases).

He goes on to say the Four Freedoms of Pay == The Four Freedoms of Learning, BUT, not the four freedoms of school as currently implemented. We haven’t figured out how to give students enough space in their learning to fail or try out different identities. There’s not much encouragement on any level of education to be an experimental learner.

Play has no agenda (motivation is intrinsic and personal). So, how do we channel play into learning activities? That’s where games come in. The promise of games is that through real play the player will build new cognitive structures and ideas of substance. With the new mania for games there’s a tendency to stuff facts/content into a game - e.g. Grand Theft Calculus. [meet the new educational game, same as the old educational game...] Without playfulness a game is just going through the motions. They look like a game but they’re really just dressed up quizzes,

Spelling Bee vs Scrabble - spelling bees aren’t really a game, they’re a contest based on memory. In scrabble it helps to know arcane words, but it’s not the whole game. You’re shuffling tiles, and your PLAYING. Discussion happens on questionable plays, etc. There are little victories inside the game (good triple score, good word, personal best, etc.). There’s lots of ways to have some success, and there’s room to fail. [though it's worth noting that some people dislike scrabble because it feels too much like just a spelling contest... different folks like different things].

Another example: Most college physics major can enumerate all the forces of motion, but when asked to list all the forces affecting a ball in flight they can’t - i.e. they don’t realize that what they’ve learned applies in the real world. A football player doesn’t know it formally either, BUT they do know it intuitively. This isn’t to say that everyone should play football, but take that physics major outside and throw a ball around while talking about gravity and parabolas, etc. It’s not a game per se, but it introduces experiment, experience, and playfulness into learning.

How should we think about learning games

• Games should engage players with reasoning and process relevant to their studies
  • logic
  • ethics
  • design
  • scientific inquiry (”all games are about scientific inquiry” [I'm not yet convinced, but I could be..])
  • historical inquiry
• Games should engage with places, ideas, and themes that matter
  • discussion of Huck Finn - it’s entertainment, BUT it’s also a vehicle for literature, history, ethics, etc. It engages the readers with ideas and is useful even though the exact content may not match
  • Civilization, SimCity - has a problem in that the game is a black box and people might get the wrong idea (i.e. mistake the model for reality, also the model incorporates elements meant to increase play value), HOWEVER, they still are useful despite their limits. Dissecting the black box can also be useful

Then Scot walked us through a quick(-ish) demo of a game with educational components. The game is one he designed about 10 years ago. It was published and has sold over a million copies. It’s called The Zoombini’s Logical Journey, though that was a decision on the part of the publisher and not at all the name Scot would have chosen (he’d have preferred something more poetic and fun). It is marketed (and themed) to kids, but it’s really 8-adult. Through out the demo we were to keep in mind: Narrative, Activity, and Structure

The frame tale is that the happy Zoombinis were exploited by Bloats. The Zoombinis escape and the player takes up the game at that point. The lead in story makes the players become invested in the Zoombinis. Also note: Zoombinis are small, plucky, and determined - matches target audience. Through the process of making little Zoombinis players learn about data structures, DB design, basic combinatorics, etc. HOWEVER, it’s not explicit! Players just play around, and they figure it out implicitly.

The first puzzle in the game involves crossing a chasm. The puzzle is presented with out direction, just an image and users can mess around. The image suggests that the Zoombinis need to get across this chasm using one of two bridges. The UI is very intuitive and has lots of cues. The player has to figure out which Zoombinis can safely cross which bridge. This is a general principle/form of the game: the player is presented with unknown, arbitrary rules and needs to figure them out. This is a good analogy for life in general. This promotes strategic thinking.

Some key features/points:

• The game lets you fail - partial success, there’s some reward for effort and making progress, but doesn’t encourage failure.
• Plus the game progresses in difficutly as the players improves.
• There are rewards for high success.
• It differentiates between effort reward and success reward.
• It’s VERY easy to get invested. The demo was only about 5-10 minutes, but even in that short time pretty much the entire audience was drawn in.

NOTE: Players may learn unintended strategies and meta gaming - e.g. make all the Zoombinis the same and many of the puzzles get a lot easier (though some become impossible).

The structure of the game requires clarity of understanding for successful completion. This games does get complex enough to be quite useful at the college level. The relevant part is the structure and design of the game, not the specific content.

A big criticism of games in education - does transfer [from skills/ideas in game to school or the rest of the world] actually occur? No (formal) idea, no studies have done.

“The best place for games is as preparation for formal learning”; Games are a scaffold.

Then discussion (the talk had shifted towards a more interactive format at this point) moved more to game design. Scot posited his theory/views on play styles:

• m-style, very cometitive, score/progress driven
• f-style is more character and story driven

HOWEVER, though styles are different the quality of play is largely the same. Being competitive means lots of different things to different kids. Studies on girls not liking competition may be flawed. E.g. when any/many characters die as a necessity in the course of play, that puts of many f-style players. The m- and f- of course correspond to male and female, but it’s not a strict division.

No one likes setbacks, BUT that [alone] doesn’t mean difficult should be eliminated. “I didn’t like the part where I couldn’t get them across the bridge” doesn’t means that part should be removed. It’s a communication failure/mistake between the person asking the question and the person answering. If it was all easy and all always successful then that wouldn’t be fun either.

The game was designed largely in paper and pencil. Designer acts as the computer. Can use some simple tools for prototyping. Can use flash for actual game these days. Flashy 3D is a requirement for a very specific set of games (NOTE: not even gamers, just the games themselves). 2D is fine for many/most.

Then, we ran out of time. Too bad, I would have enjoyed hearing more from him, on games in education, on game design, or both. The MIT Education Arcade seems very cool.