Cross Gamer - Learning

Global Game Jam: move mouse to fulfill destiny

Dan Roy — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:03:21 -0700

This weekend was the Global Game Jam , and the Boston site, MIT's GAMBIT , had about 25 developers. My team of 3 made a game called move mouse to fulfill destiny. We tied for favorite game of the devs in Boston, and seem to be picking up some good reviews among the blogs. You can download it from the official site , or play it online here. My wonderful teammates were: Will Jennings - Programming, Design, Art, and Filippo Beck Peccoz - Music.

The press so far:
Independently Speaking - Best of Global Game Jam
Tiny Subversions - Move Mouse to Fulfill Destiny
Play This Thing - Move Mouse to Fulfill Destiny

It also seems to have found its way into a college course:IT University Copenhagen: Game Culture

My Media in Transition Presentation: Constructing Identities of Mastery in Games

Dan Roy — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 08:43:57 -0600

This Saturday I presented at MIT's Media in Transition 5 conference. The presentation covered identity construction, something I've been focusing on in my thesis. Gene Koo, Fellow at Harvard Law, summarized the presentation on his blog. Here's my own shorter summary for the conference program. I also moderated a panel:

Reimagining Identity
Anne Petersen, Perez Hilton and the New Star Production
Thomas Riccio, Trickster Reality
Agnieszka Wenninger, Deleuzian Perspectives on Ownership and Identity on the Web
Moderator: Dan Roy

GDC: Experimental Gameplay Sessions Presents Games from the Boston Game Jam

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:37:45 -0600

Among the many games presented this year at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at GDC were the games we created at the Boston Game Jam at MIT back in January. Darius Kazemi ably summarized our creations for an audience of several hundred.

My GDC Presentation: Labyrinth: Keeping the Play in Learning Games

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:28:55 -0600

Here's a link to a talk I gave last Monday at the Serious Games Summit at GDC on the learning game I'm designing at MIT with Maryland Public Television and Fablevision. The talk was very well received by a packed room. We started the talk by describing the story, presentation, and gameplay, and ended it by letting the audience play a prototype level from the game as a group.

GDC: KidConfidence Interviews Me on Learning Games

Dan Roy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:08:06 -0600

Here's a short write-up and podcast of me being interviewed at GDC about learning games.

Boston Game Jam Summary

Dan Roy — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 22:54:49 -0700

Crossposted at HenryJenkins.org

It's 9 a.m. on Saturday and about 15 professional video game developers from the Boston area are taking their seats in The Education Arcade lab at MIT. They've come alone or in teams of two for the first annual Boston Game Jam , armed with ideas for games involving the Jam's theme of "shifting." They are programmers, designers, artists, and musicians, and they've committed the next 36 hours of their lives to making experimental games. Though developing games is work and they do it every day, there's something special in the air this Saturday. It's an opportunity to leave behind the pressures of the game industry, with its years-long development cycles, escalating budgets, increasing team sizes and specialization, sequelitis, and publisher-developer tensions.

Once upon a time, a single crackerjack programmer or a team of three could bestow their unique vision of gaming on the world with only a few months of work. Development cycles were short. Genres were undefined. Risk was low and creativity was high. The trend in the ensuing decades has moved away from all of this. We've reached the point as an industry where failure on a project costing tens of millions of dollars means lots of lost jobs and maybe a shuttered business or two. In that environment, publishers rely on proven intellectual property and remaking established genres to meet their quarterly targets. When publishers hold the money and the IP, contracted developers have little choice but to live hand to mouth. One missed milestone or delayed contract could be the end for such a developer with no savings.

In addition to the rising budgets and reduced financial risk-taking, individual employees find themselves working on more and more specialized tasks. This assembly line model stifles a lot of creativity. The benefits of feeling like you are part of something bigger than yourself are offset by lack of control over the direction of the project.

And so, these game developers gather at MIT to seize back their creative control. They've come with plans for games they would like to make entirely by themselves. The programmers are no longer just graphics coders or physics coders or tools coders or artificial intelligence coders. They now hold the grand vision of the game, as well is the responsibility for wearing hats normally left to others.

By noon, everyone had settled in with his project and was making steady progress. Max McGuire in particular seemed ahead of the game, as he already had something playful-looking up on his screen. At a game jam, one can always step away from his computer, wander around the room, and become inspired by the ideas and energy of all the other auteurs. A casual observer would notice that screens full of code intermittently give way to intriguing visual representations of progress.

Later in the day, Jam organizer Darius Kazemi warned us that if we didn't have something playable by this evening, we were in bad shape. A couple of teams took this opportunity to step back from their original visions and refocus on something more practical. However, a surprising number of projects were right on track. It seemed we had scoped our projects well to not fall into the common trap of taking on too much.

After dinner, some participants started to call it quits for the day and head home. As the coordinator of the Jam facilities at MIT, I resolved to stay in the lab until everyone was finished. I was quite tired when I walked home at 5 a.m. As most people who have ever been excited about a project can tell you, there are good and bad kinds of sleepy. The energy that I took from the group and from my own creative process had not yet dissipated, and even as I lay in bed exhausted I found my mind eagerly bounding between the possible features I could implement the following day.

That following day began three hours later. In my exhaustion, I must have set my alarm incorrectly, because I was awakened by the ringing of my cell phone. When I arrived at the lab to punch in the door's security code there was already a line of antsy developers. I felt guilty for standing in the way of their work, even early on a Sunday morning.

As the clock drew closer to the 6 p.m. deadline, the entire room tightened its focus. As time ticked features a way, developers became even more earnest to preserve what they could of their initial visions. You could hear the whir of productivity, punctuated by semi-sarcastic exclamations from Al Reed like, "I just realized I don't know how to program." Kent Quirk and his son/teammate Lincoln also had their moments, like when they both leaned in close to the
screen and simultaneously grunted. "Huh?" and "Hmm."

Darius stopped us all precisely at six, and we gathered around the projector to present the creative gold we had mined all weekend with our pickax keyboards (handy tools, those). Max McGuire had managed to conjure up a respectable competitor to Will Wright's forthcoming game Spore , in which you take creatures from their basest existence through the height of civilization and into outer space. The core mechanic is shifting terrain up and down. Impressive, and as fun to watch as to play.

Eric Rosenbaum and Jonah Elgart created a game around shifting rhythms, redirecting streams of beats to create a symphony or cacophony of precautions and notes. It seems like a great game if I could just figure out how to play it.

Philip Tan, who has been flying back and forth between MIT and Singapore for half a year as he sets up an international game lab called GAMBIT, made a game about jetlag. In it, players must manage passengers' moods so that they're in peak state when they hit the ground (hopefully softly). The whole room had listened earlier in the day as Philip recorded the voiceovers for the flight attendants. It was definitely the fifth take of "Coffee, tea, or soda?" where the humor of the flight attendant's annoyance finally came through.

Kent and Lincoln Quirk made the only 3D game of the Jam, in which players shift an avatar between conveyor belts to reach the center of a maze. The tricky part was that if you stayed on the conveyor belt long enough, you would flip over with it... to the dark side.

Al Reed and Alex Rice somehow overcame Al's inability to program, creating a Mario Brothers type game called Squish in which players hop from platform to platform shoving boxes around in an attempt to crush each other. The only explicitly multiplayer game of the Jam, it clearly showed off the potential of humor in social interactions. The hilarity of watching Al's stick figure accidentally squish itself cannot be denied.

Darius, who had originally planned to not make a game and only assist others, had found himself twiddling his thumbs and cranked out a Game Boy Advance game of shifting mazes.

Darren Torpey and David Ludwig created a game about shifting seasons. They made the executive decision that four seasons was far too many, and unilaterally cut it down to two. Personally, I'll miss fall and spring tremendously and can't condone their actions.

Geoffrey Long and I (Dan Roy) created a game about shifting perceptions around the diamond industry. Conflict diamonds, or blood diamonds, have been used to fuel terrible violence for years, and I wanted to educate some consumers who might be unaware what their purchase might be funding.

Jim Ingraham and Duncan Watt contributed art and sounds respectively to all of the projects, and they did so valiantly in the face of our common and impending deadline. Duncan in particular knows how to triage.

Most of these game concepts would never have been made if not for an environment like the Boston Game Jam. At least, they never would have been made within the industry model that only makes space for AAA titles. However, there are promising signs that at least some segments of the industry are shifting back to smaller teams, smaller budgets, shorter development cycles, and wackier concepts. Digital distribution helps here tremendously, as do content delivery models like episodic. Chris Anderson's Long Tail is just regaining prominence in the game industry, and the "hits" of the future may be niche subscription titles. Henry did a number of posts on the rising independent games movement not too long ago that readers may find interesting.

The mood in the Education Arcade lab after giving our presentations was inspired exhaustion. Everyone agreed that they'd like to do the Jam again, with some calling for it every six months instead of annually. Most participants didn't seem to mind that they had just worked halfway through the Patriots-Colts game, even with New England's team represented. We had just had our own game of realizing our visions, in which we proved ourselves as much as played in the sand. I think I speak for everyone at the Jam when I say we are fortunate to do what we do.

Conflict Diamond - Game For Change

Dan Roy — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:46:34 -0700

Download ConflictDiamond.zip (5.6MB Windows executable)

This past weekend we ran the first annual Boston Game Jam in The Education Arcadelab here at MIT. I've written a summary of the event as a guest blog for Henry Jenkins. In this post, I want to describe the game that I created, called Conflict Diamond. It's a game for change designed to draw attention to segments of the diamond trade that support violence. Here is the description of the issue included in the game on its About screen:

Conflict diamonds are most definitely not a girl’s best friend. According to Wikipedia, “A blood diamond (also called a conflict diamond or a war diamond) is a diamond mined in a war zone and sold, usually clandestinely, in order to finance an insurgent or invading army's war efforts.”

Synthetic diamonds are molecularly superior to “genuine” diamonds, but are stigmatized by many consumers as not being “the real thing.” Unfortunately, some “geniune” diamonds fund brutal organizations that not only kill but conscript child soldiers, keep soldiers drugged and out of their minds, and amputate limbs in whole villages. Synthetic diamonds don’t fund these atrocities.

The issue is a complicated one. Most "genuine" diamonds sold do not fund conflicts. There is a certification process by which diamonds can be verified as coming from conflict-free zones, however it is not entirely effective. Ideally, the money coming from the sale of "genuine" diamonds would go to support the lands where they originated, which are frequently desperately poor. In reality, the regions where diamonds come from in Africa remain impoverished, due to corruption and other factors. Synthetic diamonds do not support poor African villages, unfortunately, but since "genuine" diamonds don't actually support much growth either, that's not a crucial factor in deciding which kind of diamond to buy. In fact, any growth "genuine" diamonds do support in these troubled territories is undone many times over by the conflicts they also support. One can argue that getting verified diamonds from conflict-free countries like Canada is the best option, because it supports local industry without also supporting violence. However, synthetic diamonds are a legitimate choice for consumers, and promoting verified diamonds over synthetic ones reinforces the stigmatization synthetic diamonds have already suffered. The desire for "genuine" diamonds in turn supports the conflict diamond market.

You can read more about this issue at RealDiamondFacts.org.

The game I designed to educate consumers on this issue asks players to take on the role of a diamond salesman facing both financial pressures and consumer attitudes. Players choose one of two salesmen to role-play. One salesman only sells synthetic diamonds, and the other only sells "genuine." As each salesman makes sales, he gains experience and eventually increases his ability to sell more and more expensive diamonds. The synthetic diamond salesman begins life with a lower salesmanship level, representing the added challenge of selling synthetic diamonds to consumers. If he tries to sell a diamond above his level, there will be a high probability that the consumer will respond, "Synthetic? I'm not interested." On the bright side, he can more cheaply restock his diamond inventory. The "genuine" diamond salesman begins life with a higher salesmanship level, since it's easier to sell "genuine" diamonds to consumers looking for "the real thing." However, he must pay more to restock, and when he tries to sell a diamond above his level consumers may respond, "I don't want to fund violence." In reality, consumers are rarely aware that they are funding violence. The game is suggesting how they might respond if they knew more about the issue.

As a game, the play experience is pretty thin. The Boston Game Jam only allowed me 36 consecutive hours, so I wasn't able to implement many features. I would be surprised if players played for more than 5 or 10 minutes. However, I think the simple act of adopting the perspective of both the humanitarian and financial pressures may help players see the issue in a new way.

Credits:
Dan Roy - design, programming
Geoffrey Long - art
Duncan Watt - sound

Screenshots (click thumbnails for larger images):

Warcraft Teaches Spanish

Dan Roy — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 22:54:49 -0700

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.

We picked World of Warcraft for several reasons. One, because it's an MMO, it's immersive and social and it elicits lots of playing time. Two, because it's WoW, it's popular and well known, with high production values. Three, because it has a highly customizable interface, and we saw potential for integrating translation and annotation features.

I play with a Spanish client (interface) on servers in Spain, so the other players all speak Spanish. Katelyn alternates between Spanish and English clients on the Spanish servers. Ravi plays with the German client on Spanish servers.

I have intermediate Spanish skill, so I can understand just about everything in the game if I read slowly and keep a computerized dictionary handy. There are a few ways that I expose myself to Spanish while playing the game. First, there are certain key words that come up over and over again which I learn easily. Second, every quest has a couple of paragraphs of the story text. Third, chatting with other players through text or reading their chat transcripts in real-time exposes me to natural, imperfect language production (natural in the context of the game, at least). I'll examine each of these learning situations in more depth now.

Some keywords in the game show up over and over again, and I learn them easily. These words relate to my character's primary actions, like resting, hitting, taking damage, and casting spells. I also learned all of my character's traits, like strength, stamina, and intelligence. I learn all of the parts of my character's body which can be protected with armor, such as head, chest, shoulders, legs, and feet. I learn the names of all of the creatures I encounter in the world, both real and fictional, including boars, wolves, bears, and crabs as well as Troggs and Murlocs. Fortunately for me, as a game designer, even these game-specific, fantasy names are relevant to my vocabulary. I learn all of the different professions players can adopt in the game, including tailoring, leatherworking, mining, fishing, cooking, and herbalism. I learn the names of the fantasy races, like orcs, elves, humans, and dwarves. Again, all of these words I learn easily without any extra effort on my part. It would be difficult to play with the Spanish interface and not learn these words.

Quests offer players opportunities to practice reading Spanish, but they are easily skipped. Each quest comes with a few paragraphs of story and instructions, where a computer-controlled character (NPC) in the game world requests that the player's character perform some services. Reading this text slows down play significantly. When playing in groups, other group members may become impatient and ask a player who is reading slowly to hurry up. If the player reads quickly enough or is sufficiently motivated to learn the language, these brief stories provide entertaining, grammatically-correct interludes with a fairly wide vocabulary. I read the text for every quest I do, frequently two or three times. I read it once when I get the quest, once when I begin the quest (which could be hours or days later), and once when I finish the quest. While reading, I switch back and forth between WoW and computer translator Ultralingua (ALT-TAB on Windows), typing in words I don't understand to see translations. I think this functionality could be built into the game's interface as a tool-tip pop-up, eliminating the need to type the unknown word. Because of my skill level with Spanish and because of the similarity between Spanish and English, I only need to look up a handful of words for each quest. Ravi, who plays with the German interface, struggles more, since German and English vocabularies differ more. Katelyn also struggles with the vocabulary and different grammatical forms, and generally forgoes reading the quest text entirely.

Chatting with other players in Spanish is perhaps the most compelling way to become more comfortable with the language. Unfortunately, I have spent the least time with this activity so far. Partly, this is because Katelyn, Ravi, our friend Lori, and I all play together, so we rarely require the skills and services of other players. We are too self-sufficient as a unit. However, the few interactions I have had with Spanish speakers have felt the most meaningful and have given me the biggest rush, in terms of language learning. So far, I have only communicated via text, but I hope to set up a guild which incorporates voice chat as well (probably via Skype or Teamspeak). I hope to write more about this in the future.

My initial impressions of WoW as a language learning tool are mixed. On the one hand, there is a high percentage of time spent in the game not learning the language. For this reason (and many others), use of a game like this would probably not find its way into classrooms. On the other hand, the game does encourage a long-term commitment to language learning. For some, slow and steady may be better than nothing at all. Players who enjoy the game and language will find play an easy, fun, and rewarding way to learn as a complement to other learning activities. Chiefly, the game includes very little spoken word (unless using voice chat with a group), so players may need to look elsewhere for ear training.

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet

Dan Roy — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:16:43 -0700

Type: Book

URL: Amazon Book Listing

Notes:

While reading Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, by Sherry Turkle, I had many thoughts about the nature of the real versus the virtual, about identities. Specifically, how people construct and explore and access identities. How they start fresh when they tire of old identities. And, how they combine the best parts of distinct identities.

Real v. Virtual

As more people spend more time in these virtual spaces, some go so far as to challenge the idea of giving any priority to RL at all. "After all," says one dedicated MUD player and IRC user, "why grant such superior status to the self that has the body when the selves that don't have bodies are able to have different kinds of experiences?" When people can play at having different genders and different lives, it isn't surprising that for some this play has become as real as what we conventionally think of as their lives, although for them this is no longer a valid distinction. (14)

If you can accept that real life doesn't automatically get priority, you can understand that when real-life needs pull you away from virtual lives it can be, at the very least, inconvenient. Extending these lives to connected, mobile devices can keep the prioritized life available, whichever it may be.

Turkle interviewed an interior designer:

I feel very different online. I'm a lot more outgoing, less inhibited. I would say I feel more like myself. But that's a contradiction. I feel more like who I wish I was. (179)

Who says that the self in real life is more real than the online self? Just as one group of friends can make you feel one way and another group, perhaps family, can make you feel another, an online environment can bring out certain aspects of your personality more easily than real life. As people realize they can access other sides of themselves, they will appreciate online worlds more.

We are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real. (23)

We talk about real lives and virtual lives, but what are the differences? Is an experience or an emotion in a virtual life less real? Real life can be defined by what we do in our virtual lives. We talk about virtual currencies being tradable for real currencies and thus taking on real value. But, the experiences we have in virtual lives need not even be traded. They are real from the beginning.

Identity Accessibility

Matthew’s life on MUDs was always available to him. Matthew could play as much as he wished, all day if he wished, every day if he chose to. There were always people logged into the game. There was always someone to talk to or something to do. MUDs gave him the sense of an alternative place. They came to feel like his true home. (192)

For those people who choose to play this way, mobile access to online lives can free them from the tethers of the desktop PC.

When I want to write and don't have a computer around, I tend to wait until I do. In fact, I feel that I must wait until I do. (29)

When Turkle wrote this in 95, most computers weren't mobile. So, if a writer relied on a computer, she wouldn't write until returning to a desktop. These days, computer-bound writers can carry laptops. The same is true now of online game identities. Players must wait until they return to their desktops to resume interaction with these identities. By extending them to mobile devices, we untie identity and location.

It is hard for me to walk away from a not-yet-proofread text on the computer screen. In the electronic writing environment in which making a correction is as simple as striking a delete key, I experience a typographical error not as a mere slip of the attention, but as a moral carelessness, for who could be so slovenly as not to take the one or two seconds to make it right? (29)

This feeling may translate to accomplishment-driven online identities. Players may feel compelled to play more, because they can and therefore less powerful online identities could represent laziness to some players.

Identity Construction

The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create. (180)

Children don't learn natural language by learning its rules, but through immersion in its cadences. Similarly, today's most popular software is designed for immersion. You learn by playful exploration. (61)

This extends to learning about yourself and who you want to be. Playful exploration of your identity leads to one you're proud of, that feels good. Traditional class systems in MMOs require players to choose a major part of who they will be when first creating a character. Perhaps experimenting with the different play styles after creating a character but before committing to a class could help players come closer to identities they're proud of. Committing to a class at any point doesn't feel playful. Should MMOs require less commitment and give more flexibility? Should players be allowed to swap roles more fluidly? They can certainly do so now by creating new characters, but this of course requires them to step away from their main identity of which they are most proud. In real life, switching careers in middle age is often rewarded, with colleagues in the new career respecting the expertise one brings from her old career. Could MMOs codify that a warrior-turned-healer brings a perspective to the role that a pure healer might not, giving credit to the player?

Sandy, an MIT faculty member, spoke to me of the many happy hours he had spent as a child of around five with a beloved broken radio.

The different patterns could help you figure out the arrangements that they needed to communicate with each other. And it was a great thrill to have thought of that. I can remember that there was this tremendous charge I got from that, and I thought I would spend the rest of my life looking for charges just like that one.

Several things happened to Sandy in the course of working on that radio. He came to see himself as the kind of person who was good at figuring things out. And he came to develop an aesthetic of exploration, categorization, and control. In other words, Sandy with his radio is Sandy the child developing the intellectual personality of Sandy the modern scientist. (78-9)

By experimenting with a new identity, that of the tinkerer, Sandy had a chance to see himself as the kind of person who was good at something. That's what MMOs can do -- give players chances to see themselves as good at something.

Since many people simply choose to play aspects of themselves, MUDs can also seem like real life. A MUD can become a context for discovering who one is and wishes to be. In this way, the games are laboratories for the construction of identity, an idea that is well captured by the player who said:

You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. It's easier to change the way people perceive you.

The anonymity of most MUDs provides ample room for individuals to express unexplored parts of themselves. Creating screen personae is thus an opportunity for self-expression, leading to her feeling more like her true self when decked out in an array of virtual masks.

MUDs can be places where people blossomed or places where they get stuck, cod and self-contained worlds where things are simpler than in real life, and where, if all else fails, you can retire your character and simply start a new life with another. (184-5)

Fresh Start

In grade school and junior high Gordon wasn't happy and he didn't fit in. He describes himself as unpopular, overweight, unathletic, and unattractive: "Two hundred and ten pounds with glasses." The summer after his sophomore year in high school Gordon went on a trip to India with a group of students from all over the world. These new people didn't know he was unpopular, and Gordon was surprised to find that he was able to make friends. He was struck by the advantages of a fresh start, of leaving old baggage behind. Two years later, as a college freshman, Gordon discovered MUDs and saw another way to have a fresh start. Since MUDs allowed him to create a new character at any time, he could always begin with a clean slate. When he changed his character he felt born again. (189-90)

It's ironic that Gordon discovered MUDs as a college freshman as a way to have a fresh start, because entering college is another way to start fresh. In fact, my own experiences starting fresh more often came from switching schools and jobs than from creating new characters in MMOs. However, I think the principles of starting fresh are similar in both real and virtual contexts.

Integrating Identities

My mother died when I was 19 and a college junior. Upset and disoriented, I dropped out of school. I traveled to Europe, ended up in Paris. While the English-speaking Sherry had little confidence that she could take care of herself, the French-speaking Sherry simply had to go on with it. On trips back home, English-speaking Sherry rediscovered old timidities. I cycled through French- and English-speaking Sherrys until the movement seemed natural; I could bend toward one and then the other with increasing flexibility. When English-speaking Sherry finally returned to college in the United States, she was never as brave as French-speaking Sherry. But she could hold her own. (209)

After creating virtual identities, players now have multiple identities, both real and virtual, presumably with some differences. Probably I'll identities could benefit from the best parts of each other, which raises the question of how to integrate them. Sherry Turkle found that frequent cycling between two identities helped her integrate them. Mobile devices could help players cycle more frequently between real and virtual identities. They have more chances throughout the day to experience all identities. Perhaps the confidence boost from slaying a hard monster and gaining a level would translate to taking more social risks minutes later in the real world. This juxtaposition of identities is less likely when the virtual is tied to a PC, but when freed by a mobile device it becomes probable.

My Future Play Presentation: Multiplayer Gaming v. Board of Education

Dan Roy — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:34:04 -0600

I gave my presentation Wednesday at Future Play 2006, as part of the Student Perspectives on Issues in Games panel. I call it, "Multiplayer Gaming v. Board of Education," because it relates to MMOs, school, cross-platform gaming, and what I'm calling positive identity construction. Here's my own summary.

The Education Arcade

I spent the first half of the talk introducing Comparative Media Studies, The Education Arcade, and the Learning Games to Go project.

Comparative Media Studies is what you make of it, and it's different for every student, but for me it's a game design program that encourages me to think historically, culturally, interdisciplinary, and internationally.

The Education Arcade, formerly Games to Teach, is what inspired me to design games for learning, or Serious Games. I got involved with them near the end of 2002, working on Revolution (I won't take any credit for it, as my involvement was minimal). Revolution was a total conversion mod of the fantasy game Neverwinter Nights to teach high school students about the American Revolution. It was a collaboration with colonial Williamsburg , and we replicated that town in the game.

Then I described Making History, the multiplayer PC strategy game I helped design while at Muzzy Lane Software. That game teaches history, international relations, and political science to high school and college students. The gameplay focuses not only on military strategy, but also economic, domestic, and diplomatic. Version 1 came out in 2005 and is being used in high schools and colleges across the country. Version 2 is nearing release this fall.

Our current project at The Education Arcade is a collaboration with Maryland Public Television called Learning Games to Go. It's funded by the Department of Education. The Education Arcade is doing the design work, and we've contracted Fablevision to do the development. The game is best described as a multiplayer, story-based puzzle game to teach math and literacy to middle school students. And, as the name suggests, it will have a mobile component. I'll be writing a lot more about the mobile component and how it connects to the rest of the game in this blog and my thesis.

I also described our research manager Scot Osterweil's past work on the Zoombinis line of games. They are math and logic puzzle games, and have heavily influenced our design for the Learning Games to Go project.

I forgot to mention this in my presentation, but I'd like to call attention now to another project, called Star Logo. It's a visual programming environment for teaching the concepts of coding and especially making them accessible to children.

Finally, I summarized some of the work going on in The Education Arcade and the Teacher Education Program around augmented reality games. We're making augmented reality games for indoor environments which use WiFi connected PDAs to determine where players are inside of preset buildings and rooms. We're also making similar games for outdoor environments which use PDAs with GPS. Both lines of games involve multiple players and learning objectives.

Positive Identity Construction

I spent the second half of the presentation talking about why it's so important that players construct positive identities in games and how that contrasts with my experience in schools.

I want to talk today about the benefits of using persistent, multiplayer, online games for education. I won't say massively multiplayer online games specifically, because I'm open to more limited scale multiplayer games or even massively single player games like Spore. The persistent, multiplayer parts are important because I want my actions as a player to accumulate into an achievement that is notable and visible to my peers. In other words, my accomplishments in the game must take place within a social context, otherwise my investment in them is reduced.

It's important to give players an opportunity to construct an identity for themselves that feels comfortable to inhabit. They must feel comfortable enough in this identity that they enjoy spending time in it. If the identity is studying, and it feels good, they will study more. If studying feels bad, because it reminds them that they're not good at it, it will take much more effort for them to make themselves study. Thus, if we want to produce good students, we must first cultivate a love of learning, or a love of oneself while learning. That's what games can bring to the table.

Contrast that with school, where students are typically expected to supply their own motivation for assignments. Grading is both a carrot and stick. However, what grades get you is too far removed. Yes, grades will help get you into college, but when you're in fifth grade maybe you don't know whether or not you want to go to college. So, what relevancy do grades have in fifth grade? Very little, beyond pleasing and impressing the adults in your life. However, your peers may or may not be impressed by grades. And, as you grow older and become a teenager and perhaps start to distance yourself from traditional authority figures, you may also distance yourself from the goals you used to pursue in order to please those authority figures. Namely, grades. Life may be easier in the long run if you get good grades, but that doesn't mean you're going to enjoy studying to get those grades. If you don't enjoy studying, you won't do it as much. I want to make studying feel as good as playing, so it's easier to succeed and feel good about yourself while doing so.

I'm interested in games going beyond fun (and even engagement). Fun is important, but I also want players to become invested in the game. I want players to see themselves more positively based on accomplishments they accumulate in the game. The game genre that does this best is massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The main qualities of MMORPGs that are important here are 1) the persistent nature of accomplishments -- that what I do now doesn't just go away when I log off -- 2) the social context -- that whatever I do and I'm proud of is easy to share and show off to friends and strangers – and 3) the ability to start fresh -- that, in an MMO, if I grow tired of one identity or feel it's limiting me I can simply start over with another and instantly remake how other players see me. The ability to start fresh, in particular, it is something we don't get enough of in schools (especially middle and high school). We get stuck in ruts, playing out the role of, say, the class clown or the underachiever. We feel social pressure to maintain our past identities. If a nerd tries to become a jock, generally the jocks will do their best to put the nerd back in his place. Games let us start fresh, exploring underdeveloped parts of ourselves and reconciling the differences between who we are and who we'd like to be.

As great as I think MMOs are right now in the ways just explained, we can still improve them. In particular, I'm researching what can happen when we extend MMOs onto cell phones. The problem with MMOs is that you have to be sitting at a PC or sometimes a console in order to play them, and that time is practically limited for most of us. However, if you carry a cell phone, you might like to access that identity and sense of accomplishment you've built up in the MMO from wherever you are. You might like to play the game, or interact with friends, or check on the progress of some event that takes time, or show off some equipment. And, you will probably want to do all of these things both online and by showing your phone to the person sitting next to you. Thus, when I think of mobile games, I think of cell phones, because they are already connected.

Let me further describe the game I'm working on now as a concrete example of these ideas. The game I'm working on with The Education Arcade (Learning Games to Go) is focused on teaching math and literacy to middle school students. It's a puzzle game, a lot like the game Zoombinis. The puzzles teach the math. The literacy component comes both from reading and understanding of the extensive story and from the multiplayer aspect, where players can use a message board within the game to share strategies about the different puzzles. If a player completes a puzzle successfully, the game encourages her to write a strategy about that puzzle to share with her team. Teams will be relatively small, maybe limited to six students. Every member of the team is trying to contribute to the team's success, so students will have incentives to write valid strategies quickly. They will also be rated by their team members similarly to how you rate Amazon reviews (helpful/unhelpful), so if they write more helpful strategies than unhelpful strategies, they will be able to increase their personal scores. This game will be playable online on computers, but will also be accessible from mobile devices. We haven't settled on a platform yet for mobile, but we're looking at cell phones, PDAs, PSP and DS, etc.

I wanted to describe that project now because it connects to the argument I'm trying to make on positive identities. Among other things, this project is a prototype for the idea that by using mobile games to connect to persistent online multiplayer games, players can have a fundamentally improved experience. They can immerse themselves more frequently in their online identities, can stay there for more time, can make more progress, can learn more, can feel better about it, and can show off their accomplishments more easily to friends, family, teammates, and competitors.

In addition to making this game with The Education Arcade, I'm writing my thesis on this concept of extending MMOs to cell phones. I'm researching how this connection affects player and learner identities and senses of accomplishment. If any of you have an interest in this area, please talk to me afterwards so we can share ideas and resources.