Language

A week ago we had the first annual Boston Game Jam at MIT in The Education Arcade. I've already written a summary of the game I created during the Jam (Conflict Diamond). Now, I've written a guest blog for Henry Jenkins talking about the role of game jams in the industry and summarizing this particular jam. We've been getting a lot of coverage for the jam, from Slashdot to Gamasutra to Blue's News to VH1 to Little Gamers. The success the Jam enjoyed this year ensures that it will become a tradition.

Crossposted at The Education Arcade.

This is an off-topic article (not directly about cross-platform or mobile gaming) about my experience playing World of Warcraft to learn Spanish. This is the continuation of my thinking with Ravi Purushotma at MIT about how to use commercial off the shelf games as language learning tools (see our GDC 2006 presentation video and Ravi's thesis). The basic premise with all of this work is that commercial games are already localized into many languages and that language educators and game developers can use these resources to cheaply create entertaining learning experiences. Blogger Katelyn Olmstead, a co-conspirator in this experiment, has already begun her own series on playing WoW to learn Spanish. Her first article focuses on the technical challenges we faced getting the Spanish version set up in the US.

This post is a short tangent from my usual theme of extending MMOs onto cell phones. My underlying desire with that theme is to improve the game experience for all players and to use these games to improve education (I'm designing educational games right now). I particularly like the multiplayer component of MMOs in the context of education, because so many of the things people want to learn to do involve interacting with other people and because anything we do has more meaning in a social context. So, I've been thinking about MMOs for education for awhile (particularly to teach languages). One property of using any kind of game for education is that assessment is built in -- the game knows if you're succeeding or not. However, I did not consider using these games to improve the sometimes-bane of every student's academic existence: standardized tests. These tests are, after all, basically the assessment without the learning.