play think learn

I’ve recently given up on Zelda for the DS and become immersed in Scribblenauts. This is a fascinating game from both the engagement and learning angles in that the player solves puzzles using objects that are created when written. This means that there are a variety of ways to approach any puzzle, limited only by the game dictionary (around 20,000 words). So you can get an apple from a tree using a LADDER, bounce on a TRAMPOLINE, create a FIRE and burn the tree down, or get a DRILL and shake it down, and so on.

This game is an excellent example of creative problem-solving, where players can explore the system and the interactions between objects, and it has a sense of humour. I love that the game designers have thought of many of the silly options players might type in, so you can call a MONSTER through a PORTAL, fight with a DRAGON, fly on a MAGIC CARPET and deal with pesky cyclones using a SHRINK RAY.

There is also in interface for creating new levels, although these seem to be only of the very basic sort (or I’m suffering from ’stupid user’ syndrome) and the ability to also create and share new sophisticated levels and objects with other players would also take this game to another level by turning players into creators.

I coming to the conclusion that ‘learners as game builders’ is a better model for game-based learning that ‘learners as game consumers’, and a couple of cool game-building tools have recently come to my attention.

The first is Game Maker. It’s a free (or $25 for the Pro version) development kit designed for making all sorts of games. I’ve not had as long as I’d have liked to play with it but it seems pretty intuitive, easy to get starter, and you don’t need a programming background (though I’m sure it helps). I can also recommend Jake Habgood’s The Game Maker’s Apprentice as a good starting point.

The second is the VASSAL Game Engine (thanks to Ian Smith for pointing this out to me), a free game development tool for building online adaptations of board and card games. I haven’t played with it yet (recognising a huge potential time sink when I see one) but I like the look of it.

I was fortunate to be asked to talk at the Open University’s Computers and Learning Research Group conference yesterday. The afternoon was dedicated to the topic of game-based learning and this game me the opportunity to watch some very interesting talks and meet other researchers in the area, most notably Shaaron Ainsworth,  who specialises in investigating the psychological and cognitive effects of games, Richard Joiner, who is doing some interesting work on games and gender, and Jo Iacovides, who is half-way through her doctoral research on engagement and motivation in games.

I presented my first talk since returning from maternity leave, and found it more daunting than I had been expecting. It was lucky that they were a friendly, interested group (even last thing in the afternoon) and what the presentation lacked was compensated for by the lively audience participation at the end. The presentation centred around what I think will be the three biggest challenges facing game-based learning as a discipline in years to come. These are:

1. Perceptions of games, fuelled by media sensationalism, overly emotive language, erroneous causality and unsubstantiated and unquestioned claims regarding games and violence, addiction, etc. This should really be a non-issue since no-one is actually suggesting using violent video games for learning, but somehow the facts that most games aren’t violent (and that if children are playing violent games it says more about the lack of parental control than about the games) don’t fit neatly within the media narrative.
2. The commercial focus on teh development of behaviourist learning games, which highlight repetition of fairly trivial tasks, because they are easy to design and easy to evaluate the immediate learning impact. I’m not saying behaviourism doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t have a place in learning, but simply that if the focus is on behaviourist games then we are missing out on a big opportunity. While many games exist that clearly show higher-level learning (for example, the lateral thinking, problem-solving and strategizing required in the Zelda games) these have not yet been translated into games for formal learning.
3. The barriers to entry into the field for most educators. Except in areas such as computing and engineering, it is almost impossible for a teacher with a good idea to develop a learning game, which means that innovation is limited to commercial developments (where markets for sophisticated constructivist games are unproven), research projects or enthusiastic individuals in technical disciplines (where the outputs are often unsustainable) .

I would suggest that what the field needs is to focus on two areas: rethinking the research methodologies by which we investigate the learning impact of complex games, drawing on the whole range of disciplines that make up the field of game-based learning; and rethinking the development models that exist for involvement the creation of games to become a possibility for more people. I think we also need to create an environment for innovation and be more open to the possibility of failure, including its open discussion and dissemination, if we are to learn from our mistakes and build up a robust body of evidence in a relatively new research field.

Doug Clow’s write-up of the session can be found here.

It’s quite a busy week this week so I haven’t had time to explore any of the following links in detail, but thought I would get them down in one place before they disappear into the ether (i.e. the section of my bookmarks list that goes off the end of the page).

First, a couple of different takes on a game-based learning institution. Quest to Learn is a school based around gaming principles, which describes itself as “a school that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences.” In contrast, the WILL Campus online learning environment provides access to “socially responsible interactive video games” (although from the demo it looks like these are really video-supported decision trees with fairly limited interactivity).

I’ve also recently come across this report from Learning and Teaching Scotland on the use of the Mangahigh maths game in Scottish schools. The research shows that greater use of the game (i.e. greater maths practice) leads to better results. Says more about the importance of control groups to me than about the value of Mangahigh.

Finally, I’m glad that Alan Titchmarsh has taken the time to add his considered and well-researched opinions to the video games and violence debate. Don’t know about video games, but I’m sure that listening to too many ill-informed media pundits could be proven to lead to violence.

New research has just been published (full paper in pdf) showing the results of an experiment carried out by the BBC to investigate whether ‘brain-training’ games make any difference to overall brain power.

The results of this study (n=11,430) seem pretty conclusive: they don’t.

These results have been criticised because the researchers used a sample aged 16-60 when most games of this nature are aimed at the over 60s (the age at which one switches from a sentient being to an absent-minded simpleton) and because the time spent playing the games was relatively short (4 hours on average over 6 weeks). These may be valid criticisms, but the question this research really raises for me is: why did anyone assume that playing this sort of game would improve overall brain power in the first place? The idea that repeatedly playing a series of cognitively low-level and disparate games will in some way enhance overall brain function seems very strange to me. (But, hey, if someone wants to prove it I’ll be the first to be converted)

This research both pleases and troubles me. The former because there is finally some robust research being carried out that opens up the debate about these type of games rather than simply following the hype put forward by those who produce them. The latter because I worry that the media will equate this research with ‘games not good for learning’ and put back the case for games - complex, rich, sophisticated games - for learning back 20 years.

I was sorry to have missed being able to attend GamesBasedLearning 2010 in London last week, but found I was able to follow it surprisingly well via twitter. Alex Moseley has a good write-up of the event.

Paul Hollins presented our joint paper, Ten things educators might learn from the games industry, and from what I hear it went down very well (poor quality Wii-related jokes aside). We now intend to write this up as a full journal paper and were hoping to be able to use the audience criticism on the day to develop the lines of argument further - the only problem is that there wasn’t very much of it. So if anyone would like to read the paper - with as critical an eye as possible, be harsh, please (I may regret saying that) - and give us some feedback (either as comments or to me directly) it would be very much appreciated.

I don’t really need another thing to fill up time in my life, but somehow my DSi turned up at Christmas and slotted right in. My only real complaint with it is that I can’t seem to get hold of the types of game I like (adventure, mystery, puzzles). I played my way through Professor Layton One and Two, and enjoyed them despite the extrinsic puzzles because the story was fun and I liked collecting the hint coins. I had no real enthusiasm for the daily tedium of Professor Kawashima and found myself just getting a bit too much eye strain from Mystery Case Files.

Then along came Zelda and the Phantom Hourglass and made me rethink what I know about the types of games I like. It involves fighting and killing things and doing things in a certain time and I really shouldn’t like it. Oh but I do. Thinking back to the work I’ve been doing on what makes ARGs engaging, it ticks some of the boxes:

• Collection - there are lots of things to collect, coins, ship parts, objects, map pieces…
• Narrative - interesting storyline and loads of characters you can talk to.
• Puzzle-solving - lots of it, and neatly embedded into the game play.
• Creativity - different puzzles can be approached in different ways.

However, there’s more to it than that. This got me thinking about what other aspects of the game I find so compelling:

• Surprises - new things keep appearing, new places to explore, new things to collect, new things to do.
• Tactile play - I love using a stylus, writing, blowing candles out and really interacting with the potential of the device.
• Simple pleasures - there’s something very basely satisfying about smashing a rock with a ‘crash’ or swiping the top of a flower with a ’swish’.

I’m sure that as I keep playing the game will continue to evolve, so I may well be adding to this list on another occasion (or adding a rant about being stuck because it has suddenly got really hard). At the moment however, thank you Zelda for broadening my horizons.

Interesting site here from Randolph Carter. His project, in his own words, involves

“… going about the internet, darkening people’s doors, and inviting them to participate in an email interview with me. I’m then posting the results here for all to see. Game bloggers and podcasters, industry professionals,  journalists, academics, and authors of both fiction and nonfiction are fair game in my book.”

There’s a lot of work gone into this site already, and a lot of interesting stuff here drawing parallels between gaming and writing. Clearly he is very discerning and only asks the best people to be interviewed (mine is here).

Just a quick post to highlight a new alternate reality game meta-site, looking at ARGs in institutions: museums, libraries, schools and beyond. This site contains a whole range of resources on ARGs in different fields, including research, articles, discussion and links to the games themselves. Well worth a peruse if you have a couple of spare hours.

I felt the need to have a little rant. Last night I watched Jo Frost’s Supernanny Extreme Parental Guidance (hoping to pick up some tips, clearly) and managed to get very, very annoyed at one of the features. This centred around whether violent computer games make kids lack empathy, and the experiment was so full of holes it was ridiculous.

To start they quoted some facts about the average child watching a screen for six hours a day, and immediately started talking about violent computer games. The inference is clear; they have just failed to mention that he average child watches television, and uses the computer in a whole range of other ways. Next, we have the controlled trial: 40 teenage boys split into two groups, one playing a violent game for 20 minutes, the other playing a football game. 40 subjects. 20 minutes. The boys’ heart rates were tested during the game play and the rate of those playing the violent game was found to be higher (although no mention of the word significant was made at any point).

At this point Jo Frost looks worried. So they’ve ‘proved’ that twenty boys on one occasion some had a higher average heart rate than another twenty. I can feel her constanation. Clearly we need no more evidence to see how computer games are rotting the minds of our youth. But there is more…

The next part of the experiment involved the researcher ‘randomly’ interviewing participants from each group (how many is not made clear - four? five? nineteen?), which the viewer sees through a hidden camera. During the interview, the researcher accidentally knocks over a jar of pens and in the majority of cases the boys who had played the football game helped pick them up while those that had played the violent game did not. What more proof do you need that violent computer games lead to lack of empathy? Except that the researcher had obviously decided that violent games were the work of Satan before the start of the experiment and had pre-judged the actions of the boys. When he dropped the pens during an interview with a football game player he stopped, looked at the pens and started to pick them up - the boy reluctantly helped; whereas with the violent game players he ignored the pens and so did the boys. They were simply mirroring him.

Now, I’m not going argue that violent games don’t make children lack empathy (to be honest, I don’t know enough about it), and I appreciate that there may be more to the experiments than could be typically shown in a short TV feature. However, I strongly feel that that faux-scientific experiments and Brass-Eye style media frenzy is not the way to take a rigourous and impartial look as something as serious as the potential effects of violent games.